Posted on 07/31/2023 9:39:57 AM PDT by DFG
An “unidentified electric vehicle” — actually a Tesla Model Y — accused of siphoning power from the local electric utility energized the gossip mill in the small eastern Montana town of Ekalaka last week, prompting front page newspaper coverage, a frantic apology and, in the end, much jawboning about the future of transportation in one of the most remote counties in the lower 48 states.
Driver Chad Lauterbach said in an interview after the fact that he and his girlfriend, Allis Markham, had driven up from Los Angeles to volunteer at the county museum’s annual dinosaur festival. Markham, a nationally prominent taxidermist, has helped out at the museum in the past, but drives a 1989 Toyota Land Cruiser that only gets 10 miles per gallon of gas, so they decided to make the trip in Lauterbach’s electric car instead.
As it turns out, though, Ekalaka’s sparsely populated corner of southeast Montana — the town, two hours in any direction from the nearest Walmart, is home to all of 400 residents — is still an uncharted frontier as far as electric vehicle charging networks are concerned. Lauterbach and Markham said the Tesla’s built-in navigation system spent the entire stretch of the drive up from Gillette, Wyoming, telling them they were headed into a charging desert.
“It kept throwing warnings and red banners and stuff,” Lauterbach said. “It was trying to protect me from doing something stupid.”
If push came to shove, Lauterbach said, he figured he’d be able to plug the car into a standard 120-volt outlet in someone’s garage, even though charging that way would have taken days.
(Excerpt) Read more at montanafreepress.org ...
A Telsa walks into a bar.
Bartender says “Hey, no smoking in here!”
“ . “It was trying to protect me from doing something stupid.”
It failed
So now the turd just rips off the utility in broad daylight to make up for his EV stupidity
People should really read the story. It’s pretty funny. I want to live there. In the summer.
He’s no different than crooks that rip off gas stations
Just watch they’ll show us it’s much easier to steal electricity than gasoline
“payed”?.....................
It wasn’t an EV but during a walk through my neighborhood I saw a obvious homeless RV parked near a light pole. They had an extension cord tapped into the power running to the light. it was done by taking off the panel at the bottom and splicing into the wires. It was parked there for several days, then the police chased them away. I noticed the power company put some kind of tamper proof new fasteners on the panel though.
Check out the caption................
You must live in Pensacola!..................
It didn’t seem that the message was sinking into his grey matter, did it. Maybe it was on low battery too?! Sometimes stupid won’t be denied!
He's the sort of guy who would keep a wallet he found on the street with $1,000 in it and say "It was just sitting there so I kept it."
It takes a special kind of stupid to take an EV to that area of the US.
I noticed that, also “could perhaps”. Small-town journalism at its finest. You have to like a front-page story above the fold about cribbage at the senior center. These are the important things.
I’ll bet that Allis is quite the Chalmer.
No one has copy editors any more.
/payed/paid/
The bottom line is the dipshirt bought a battery-only electric car without having adequate provisions in his home to charge it. Which shows a lack of foresight that seems endemic among the Teslateers.
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