Posted on 03/09/2024 4:58:01 AM PST by Republican Wildcat
Fischer: Last year the University of Nebraska at Lincoln campus conducted a first of its kind crash test of an electric pickup truck to study whether current Highway guard rails adequately protect against the growing number of those heavy EVS that are on our roads. At 60 miles per hour the 7,000 lb electric truck tore through the barrier without offering any protection to the traveling public or reduction in speed. I've recently heard from First Responders that are also concerned about responding to electric vehicle fires. 40% of firefighters have never had EV fire safety training and I've heard of instances of more water needed to extinguish vehicle batteries and the increase in those toxic gases from the lithium batteries. What has NTSB found in its investigations on the EV crashes that are unique compared to the internal combustion engines have you have you begun to condense that data so it can it educate us on what's happening here?
NTSB Chair: Yes. Just a few years ago we issued a report on the risks of lithium ion battery fires and electric vehicles to First Responders and to Second responders - and we Define second responders in the report as tow truck operators. We had done a number of investigations where there were significant risk to the First Responders in terms of stranded energy in the vehicle and in the battery and its components itself - the amount of work it took to extinguish the fires and the potential for shock to emergency responders themselves. In fact we did an investigation in Mountain View California where the First Responders had to reach out to the auto manufacturer to ask them to come to the scene of the crash was. They were just they were lucky they were three miles away, but if you think about volunteer firefighters who may be in a rural area that's not something that's readily at their ability to get people on scene. In this particular one we saw reignition several times of the electric vehicle and we have with others not just on the scene but also on the tow truck and up to five days later in the tow yard itself. So they are a significant risk in terms of battery fire.
NTSB Chair: There's significant risk in terms for emergency responders and while we have not done an investigation involving electric vehicles and the weight, I have raised a red flag numerous times to say it is an impact on safety. You mentioned the excellent work that was done by the University of Nebraska - our guard rails crash attenuators they are rated up to 5,000 lbs. Many of these vehicles go up to 10,000 lbs. One vehicle the ion battery alone weighs the same weight as a Honda Civic - 3,000 lbs - so that has an impact on safety not just on infrastructure making sure that people in the vehicles are safe after there is a crash but vehicle to vehicle, to those outside of a vehicle, and as I said vehicle to infrastructure. It's going to have a significant impact on safety.
I sure took the EV tax credit. I hate it because I hate government messing with the market. Also it raising the prices consumers pay (just like subsidies raise the prices of tuition and medical etc). I also take the mortgage tax credit even though I wish we had fair tax or flat tax (no credits). But until I win that argument I’ll take whatever credits and debits I can.
Those are the last people who should get an EV, al least from a cost/benefit perspective. One reason I got an EV is because I live way out in the boonies and drive a lot. We drove it 26K miles with 16K of those miles charged at home. In other words, we saved way more on gas and oil changes than we had increased expenses for having an EV.
“ And what was the “carbon footprint” for something like that?”
I would imagine that it’s considerably larger than my 67 GTO at full throttle.
We do, too (mortgage deduction). I hate government market distortions, but, if they are there, we grab them.
Also, I was uncomfortable having all of our transportation eggs in one basket (gas). Our two cars are now one EV crossover and one gas pickup. If the Dims mess up one energy source, we can still travel with the other car.
Last but not least it's about our family being more energy self-reliant. I can't produce my own gasoline. But we have tons of solar. It provides 80% of all the power we need for our all-electric, 2,300 sq ft home, including charging the EV. From March through October (8 months) I could just about disconnect from the grid entirely. Almost all of my power pull from the grid is in the 4 winter months. If Brandon hadn't monkeyed with natural gas I would have kept my nat gas furnace and nat gas water heater.
As I soon transition into retirement in a few years, energy price inflation won't be something that'll worry me on keeping a budget. I'll have a small power bill + HELOC payment (the loan I took out to do the solar and other home energy improvements). The HELOC payment gets smaller as the balance is paid down. That's better than what I was doing before my energy project when I was paying a high power bill that kept getting higher, plus an ever increasing nat gas bill, plus ever increasing price at the gasoline pump (unless Trump's in office or it's an election year for a Dim incumbent).
And my solar inverters allow me to export data they track in 5-minute candles on exactly when and how much power moves from different points (solar coming in, how much my electrical panels needed at that moment, how much excess solar was used to charge batteries, how much battery power was used to power the electrical panels after the sun went down, and how much power was pulled from the grid). One reason my solar combined with EV is so efficient is because I was able to study how well my first version of solar did so that when I did my additions to solar (as well as buying the EV since it was time to replace my wife's car anyway), I knew exactly which components to add onto and how much. In other words, I knew how much to add (spend) to take advantage of economies of scale, but not add (spend) so much that I'd be fighting the law of diminishing returns.
Now that I've been using the upgraded solar for a year and a half, I know what it'd take to go 100% off-grid if the Dims implement a mark-of-the-best style social credit score, using energy as the weapon to control us. So far that seems to be their weapon of choice.
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