The Inconvenient Truth Of Electric Cars

[Meredith Poor + 896]

4 hours ago, Mark Bahner said:

Yes, in 20 years, most people will make the drive from LA to Las Vegas and back by taking a fully autonomous (computer-driven) vehicle operating in transportation-as-a-service mode (think Uber or Lyft without the driver). So even if the batteries in the vehicle couldn't go the full distance, the person would simply step out of one vehicle at a rest stop, and step into the other vehicle to complete the trip to the destination.

P.S. And the vehicle will be traveling well over 100 mph on the freeway, so the 540-mile round-trip travel time will be under 6 hours, not the 8 hours claimed for today's gasoline vehicles.

My first thought in seeing this is that Autobahn speeds in Germany can be 120 Mph (200Kmh) if roads are sufficiently uncongested, so 100 seems conservative. The other is that if some method of recharging the car while it's in motion is available, stopping wouldn't be necessary. What I suspect though, given how toll roads have been popping up in various parts of the country, is that this would be a 'premium' service and would be priced accordingly.

[D Coyne + 305]

3 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

Not exactly true. The first affordable EV with indefinite range was the Chevy Volt, with a "V", not the later "Bolt," with a "B". The Volt never ran out of juice as it had this helper-motor inside which switched on when the battery pack ran low.  I know a fellow who drove one from New England to Florida, 1,100 miles, in one shot.  Worked fine, no recharge stops. 

So what if there is no recharge infrastructure?  You build your own!  Take that Bolt and install two channel rail receivers underneath in the back.  Now build a little trailer with two mating prong rails on the front of the trailer, and you slide the trailer rails into the receiver rails, and lock them together with pins.  On that trailer sits one of those little BUKH three-cylinder diesels, very rugged, coupled to a generator, in turn with a flexible cable to the charge port.  When you go on that long trip, you have your little extender with you singing along, pumping in the watts as you take them out to run the auto drive motors.  You are never without charge.  Pull in to a diesel pump, buy yourself six gallons, and off you go.  That is your four-minute recharge. 

You are never without electric power because you make your own. That little 34 hp motor will do you just fine.  And as the extender-trailer has its own support wheels, you are not loading your car suspension, either .  What's not to like?  Your issues are all solved.

The article was talking about EVs rather than plugin hybrids. Yes the volt works well on long trips, for some the aim is to move away from fossil fuel, EVs, solar, wind, hydro, and perhaps some nuclear power can get us there  (not sure nuclear would be cheaper than widely dispersed wind and solar with a highly interconnected HVAC and HVDC grid, with a smattering of battery, fuel cell and NG/nuclear backup.  At some point, crude oil output will peak, likely before 2030, alternatives will be needed, EVs are likely to be the most viable alternative for personal transportation.  I don't see CNG really taking off the way EVs are, perhaps in the commercial vehicle space CNG will work, but despite what some believe natural gas is likely to also peak by 2040, so this is not a viable long term solution.

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

11 minutes ago, D Coyne said:

The article was talking about EVs rather than plugin hybrids.

Surely you will agree with me that that is really getting into very fine details.  OK, for the total purist, it has to be "all=electric."  In my view, if that infrastructure is not there or not very built out, then taking along you own little generator on the back is a smart move.  Plus, you have this generator to power your house when the lines go down, and your Tesla Powerwall machine runs out of back-up juice. 

I also do not think that batteries will be the "Final Solution."  More likely, a flywheel will eventually be developed for autos.  They can fully re-charge in about 90 seconds, via hefty cables such as used on welding machines, with massive current inrush. And you can do a "jump" on the road if an auto runs out, something not plausible for an EV.   

Lots of ways to skin that cat, as they say.

[D Coyne + 305]

35 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

Not yet, because those guys still have not exploited the model to the full extent.  And I doubt they ever will, mostly because politicians need to be elected, and election candidates rarely put their balls on the line.  Let me give you an example:   Delaware allows you to register your big fancy expensive yacht with no sales tax and no property tax.  To get the Delaware registration you pay a 3% excise tax.  3% on hundreds  of thousands of yachts all over the million-dollar mark is a lot of money.  The registrants are happy to pay it - they then do not expose themselves to a yearly property tax bill, typically around 2% of value, plus the typical 6% sales tax, they would pay is some other jurisdiction.  So Delaware can run with no income tax and no personal property tax, compliments of the ocean of cash coming in from outsiders. 

All government units have something of value to sell, to a willing buyer.  Usually it is a service; sometimes it is a product.  For example, Vermont is an old mining State, with old legacy granite quarries.  The quarries have these vast mountains of boulders strewn around as so much trash, basically old industrial garbage.  The stuff is abandoned, just lying there.  Vermont could sell those boulders to the Feds for a quick billion dollars.  To what end?  To be used to build a massive breakwater and dyke to protect Staten Island from hurricane storm surges, just as Galveston (Texas) did after September 1900.  Galveston was trashed, so they constructed a dike 16 feet high and then pumped in sand from the ocean after jacking up every remaining building, raising the entire town by 16 feet.  Problem solved. 

Now, you can do something similar with Staten Island: build a massive dike around the Southeast part, where it is open to the Lower New York Bay, by placing all that Vermont boulder rubble in there. Vermont sells the boulders to FEMA, which in turn puts it in place, and The Donald, who loves to build Walls, takes all the credit.  Who opposes a Wall to keep the sea surge from wrecking 500,000 homes?  Nobody.  SO you charge FEMA, basically Donald, one billion dollars for your industrial garbage in one invoice.  Nice deal, huh?  Do political entities do these deals?  Nope.  They do not understand the concept of making money.  So they institute taxes instead. 

Now you tell me which is the smart approach.

Jan,

An excise tax is essentially a property tax for property that is not permanently attached to the land.  In Delaware, businesses are taxes on Gross receipts, and there is an income tax in Delaware.

https://revenuefiles.delaware.gov/docs/TY17_taxtable.pdf

On the first 60k the average rate is 4.9%, the marginal rate for income over 60k is 6.6%.

Property taxes are about 0.43% of a property's value on average.

In a state like New Hampshire with no income taxes on Wages and no state sales tax property tax averages 1.86% of a property's fair market value.  The average rate in Vermont is supposedly 1.59%, as you probably know, Essex county has the lowest average rates at 1.39%.

For income tax for a joint return, Delaware and income of 150k income tax is 8883.5, for Vermont same scenario, 8165.5,

I agree that the sales tax is not the best approach as it hits harder for low income people.

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

19 minutes ago, D Coyne said:

An excise tax is essentially a property tax for property that is not permanently attached to the land.  In Delaware, businesses are taxes on Gross receipts, and there is an income tax in Delaware.

Yes, and the excise tax is a little bit different.  It is a one-time "tax," basically a fee.  So the guy with that big yacht or private jet pays the one-time fee, gets his registration certificate, and that yacht takes off for some other jurisdiction, never to be seen again.  He pays a yearly renewal fee but that is typically $150.  By hiding under the Delaware scheme, he is sheltered from other tax jurisdictions that would love to clean him out.  For example, at one time Rhode Island attempted to levy a tax sur-charge on boats valued at over $100,000, I think the sales tax was boosted to 9%, and then nobody was ordering new boats built in RI.  So the tax surcharge was quickly scrapped. In Connecticut, there was an effort to charge 9% sales tax on autos valued at over $50,000, and all the Rolls and Bentley Dealers down in Greenwich took the pain.  The buyers simply bought their wheels in Manhattan and registered in New York.  Ouch.  That tax was also rapidly rescinded. 

As various State governments go broke due to pension underfunding, you will see these efforts at tax grabs on the assets of the rich.  In response, the rich will pack up and leave. Lots of guys move to the Bahamas and renounce US nationality, precisely to get out from underneath those types of taxes, and also inheritance taxes.  All those types of taxes are precisely the wrong approach.  As is tax on gasoline, another really stupid idea that politicians seem to just love. 

Edited June 27, 2019 by Jan van Eck

[D Coyne + 305]

50 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

Surely you will agree with me that that is really getting into very fine details.  OK, for the total purist, it has to be "all=electric."  In my view, if that infrastructure is not there or not very built out, then taking along you own little generator on the back is a smart move.  Plus, you have this generator to power your house when the lines go down, and your Tesla Powerwall machine runs out of back-up juice. 

I also do not think that batteries will be the "Final Solution."  More likely, a flywheel will eventually be developed for autos.  They can fully re-charge in about 90 seconds, via hefty cables such as used on welding machines, with massive current inrush. And you can do a "jump" on the road if an auto runs out, something not plausible for an EV.   

Lots of ways to skin that cat, as they say.

The electric vehicle grand vision may flounder on something most drivers take for granted: a quick pit stop.

The inconvenient truth of electric vehicles is they are terribly inconvenient to own and operate. Most cars need a charge after 200 to 250 miles traveled.

The quote above is from the original piece.  I am sure you understand the distinction between a plugin hybrid like the Chevy Volt and a pure battery electric vehicle like the Bolt, otherwise the article would make no sense.  It would be like talking about a game of soccer and claiming that the other team didn't skate very well, kind of a non sequitur as it were.

Perhaps a flywheel solution will be best, I will believe it when I see it.  For now the Model 3 is pretty nice.  I considered a Bolt, but my wife owned a Chevy Chevette when she was younger, we have never owned a GM vehicle since, got a Toyota in 1984 (used 1980 Tercel with 68k and drove it for 6 years up to 250k), the Tesla is my wife's first American Car since we dumped the Chevette in 1984.

[D Coyne + 305]

9 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

Yes, and the excise tax is a little bit different.  It is a one-time "tax," basically a fee.  So the guy with that big yacht or private jet pays the one-time fee, gets his registration certificate, and that yacht takes off for some other jurisdiction, never to be seen again.  He pays a yearly renewal fee but that is typically $150.  By hiding under the Delaware scheme, he is sheltered from other tax jurisdictions that would love to clean him out.  For example, at one time Rhode Island attempted to levy a tax sur-charge on boats valued at over $100,000, I think the sales tax was boosted to 9%, and then nobody was ordering new boats built in RI.  So the tax surcharge was quickly scrapped. In Connecticut, there was an effort to charge 9% sales tax on autos valued at over $50,000, and all the Rolls and Bentley Dealers down in Greenwich took the pain.  The buyers simply bought their wheels in Manhattan and registered in New York.  Ouch.  That tax was also rapidly rescinded. 

As various State governments go broke due to pension underfunding, you will see these efforts at tax grabs on the assets of the rich.  In response, the rich will pack up and leave. Lots of guys move to the Bahamas and renounce US nationality, precisely to get out from underneath those types of taxes, and also inheritance taxes.  All those types of taxes are precisely the wrong approach.  As is tax on gasoline, another really stupid idea that politicians seem to just love. 

A strange excise tax.  

Is the reason all those yacht owners are not in poverty because they pay so few taxes?

A simple solution maybe for all those poor people is to give them a nice Yacht and suggest they register in Delaware.

And who needs fuel taxes, dirt roads are the best.

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

2 minutes ago, D Coyne said:

A strange excise tax.  

Is the reason all those yacht owners are not in poverty because they pay so few taxes?

A simple solution maybe for all those poor people is to give them a nice Yacht and suggest they register in Delaware.

And who needs fuel taxes, dirt roads are the best.

Hey, I didn't make the world, I just view it with some distance.  It is what it is.  Cheers. 

[D Coyne + 305]

1 hour ago, Jan van Eck said:

Hey, I didn't make the world, I just view it with some distance.  It is what it is.  Cheers. 

You single out gas taxes, how do you propose roads are paid for with no taxes or fees, even dirt roads require maintenance.  Note the fiscal year budget for Vermont in 2019 is about $1.57 billion, so your $1 billion pan would pay for some of the budget for a year, coming up with stuff year after year might be a problem.  And of course one has to get agreement as we live in a representative democracy.

Edited June 27, 2019 by D Coyne

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

5 minutes ago, D Coyne said:

You single out gas taxes, how do you propose roads are paid for with no taxes or fees, even dirt roads require maintenance.

I am at a loss to answer.  The concept is for the entire State budget to be financed by outside contributions.  In that concept, there is no requirement for gasoline taxes.  Plus, in the context of a poor rural State, these should not be, in any event, as it is the rural poor who absolutely have to drive, typically longer distances, to get to work.   So, road building and repair expenses are funded out of other revenue streams, instead of a gasoline tax.  (And there is no assurance that a gasoline tax does not simply flow into the general coffers in any event.)

Just because you don't tax it does not mandate that the product or service is not provided.  Doctor visits and emergency room treatments are also not taxed.  It is all a matter of public policy.  Nobody is suggesting that hospitals should shut down if there is no sales tax on their services, now is there?

[D Coyne + 305]

13 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

I am at a loss to answer.  The concept is for the entire State budget to be financed by outside contributions.  In that concept, there is no requirement for gasoline taxes.  Plus, in the context of a poor rural State, these should not be, in any event, as it is the rural poor who absolutely have to drive, typically longer distances, to get to work.   So, road building and repair expenses are funded out of other revenue streams, instead of a gasoline tax.  (And there is no assurance that a gasoline tax does not simply flow into the general coffers in any event.)

Just because you don't tax it does not mandate that the product or service is not provided.  Doctor visits and emergency room treatments are also not taxed.  It is all a matter of public policy.  Nobody is suggesting that hospitals should shut down if there is no sales tax on their services, now is there?

Jan,

So where do the outside contributions come from, fine no gasoline tax, if that floats your boat, generally gas taxes are used to pay for roads.  The poor pay lower income tax, so there is that, sales taxes could be eliminated, income tax if you wish so that rich people don't leave the state.  Now you just need 1.5 billion each year, so if you think it is a great idea you need to come up with more than 1 billion for one year, don't ya think.

The concept is nice, but your suggestion of selling granite is a long way from a workable solution

Edited June 27, 2019 by D Coyne

[D Coyne + 305]

3 minutes ago, D Coyne said:

Jan,

So where do the outside contributions come from, fine no gasoline tax, if that floats your boat, generally gas taxes are used to pay for roads.  The poor pay lower income tax, so there is that, sales taxes could be eliminated, income tax if you wish so that rich people don't leave the state.  Now you just need 1.5 billion each year, so if you think it is a great idea you need to come up with more than 1 billion for one year, don't ya think.

And of course you might say 1.5 billion is too much, in which case you look at the budget and see what to cut.

Hospitals mostly get their payments from insurance companies and Medicare, the Medicare money comes from where?

Right taxes.

Edited June 27, 2019 by D Coyne

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

2 minutes ago, D Coyne said:

Jan,

So where do the outside contributions come from, fine no gasoline tax, if that floats your boat, generally gas taxes are used to pay for roads.  The poor pay lower income tax, so there is that, sales taxes could be eliminated, income tax if you wish so that rich people don't leave the state.  Now you just need 1.5 billion each year, so if you think it is a great idea you need to come up with more than 1 billion for one year, don't ya think.

And so that is easy enough to do.  

The problem is that politicians get in the way.  Here is but one small example of how a rural State could accomplish funding their budget and eliminating a ton of taxes at the same time.  I submitted it to the State authorities and received no response.  None.  The problem with novel ideas is that there is this psychological dynamic that gets in the way, and has a predisposition to the standard methodology of taxing everything in sight.  But that concept simply perpetuates poverty.  Interesting that the political class does not recognize this fundamental truth:  unless you have capital, you remain poor in perpetuity.  (P.S. that hospital just filed for bankruptcy yesterday.  Bye-bye hospital, it will close.)

How Springfield Hospital can be profitable.pdf

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

3 minutes ago, D Coyne said:

And of course you might say 1.5 billion is too much, in which case you look at the budget and see what to cut.

Hospitals mostly get their payments from insurance companies and Medicare, the Medicare money comes from where?

Right taxes.

You can run a hospital with not one penny from either the patients or a govt subsidy program such as Medicare, if you know what you are doing.  See my pdf attachment in this thread. Indeed, the cash throw-off would likely pay for free medical care for the entire State, if run properly.  And that is a lot of money.   Figure not enough?  I have yet another proposal that would raise 6.5 Billion.  Should be sufficient. 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

11 minutes ago, D Coyne said:

The concept is nice, but your suggestion of selling granite is a long way from a workable solution

All Vermont needs is one person who has inside connections to the Trump Administration.  And that person actually exists.  Pay him a 5% commission and for 50 million you will have a deal.  Easy enough to do. 

[Enthalpic + 1,496]

On 6/24/2019 at 7:16 AM, Jan van Eck said:

Speaking directly to "grocery clerks" and the advent of self-checkout and self-checkout machines at big-box stores, the reason so much very expensive automation is installed instead of simply hiring more clerks at modest pay is perfectly straightforward.  The store managers cannot find the people to staff clerk positions, as the candidates for those jobs all fail the drug test. 

America has become a nation of dopers.  In some States roughly 12% of the adult population consists of drug addicts. You go into a town like Huntington, West Virginia  (on the Upper Ohio River) where the steel mills have all closed, and all you find is a population of addicts.  These folks are unfortunately un-hireable, simply because, in today's health-care setup, they have to steal in order to raise the money to buy their narcotics.  The stealing takes the form of employee theft (what the stores call "inventory shrinkage"),  caused both by outsiders and by store personnel.  Retailers work with a minimum shrinkage of 1%, and where drug addicts are rampant, it goes to 2%. It is one of the major causes of retail shops closing, particularly the smaller ones along Main Street, leading to boarded-up storefronts, the classic sign of a decaying town. 

Nothing changes until the treatment of addicts changes, and (of course) the way society deals with drug salesmen.  You can go build all the Walls you want, but there is so much money involved, just go buy yourself a Border Guard to wave your truck through and another 80,000-lb load of narcotics breezes through the border post.  Who is Washington kidding? 

I wonder how much those numbers change if you remove people who just test positive for marijuana (those horrible druggies).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbjHOBJzhb0

[Okie + 83]

10 hours ago, D Coyne said:

Correct,

I did miss that.

So there are no taxes of any kind in those states, or just no income tax.  So no tax on fuel for roads, no excise tax paid on vehicles, no real estate taxes.  And are the rates of poverty much lower in those states compared to Vermont?

Being a native Okie myself (Okie simply means Oklahoman), I can assure you that Oklahoma, at least when I left, had both sales and income taxes, as well as toll roads (of which there were a lot).  I don't know what Jan is talking about with this anarcho-capitalist vision he has.

[Okie + 83]

11 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

All government units have something of value to sell, to a willing buyer.  Usually it is a service; sometimes it is a product.  For example, Vermont is an old mining State, with old legacy granite quarries.  The quarries have these vast mountains of boulders strewn around as so much trash, basically old industrial garbage.  The stuff is abandoned, just lying there.  Vermont could sell those boulders to the Feds for a quick billion dollars.  

Except that it only solves Vermont's problem for just over two months.

https://ballotpedia.org/Vermont_state_budget_and_finances

Vermont's state budget is 5.5 billion dollars per year.

Then what?

[Okie + 83]

9 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

Lots of guys move to the Bahamas and renounce US nationality, precisely to get out from underneath those types of taxes, and also inheritance taxes. 

Uh, no.  There was a Google executive who tried that by moving to Singapore.  That didn't work out so well for him.

[Enthalpic + 1,496]

10 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

And so that is easy enough to do.  

The problem is that politicians get in the way.  Here is but one small example of how a rural State could accomplish funding their budget and eliminating a ton of taxes at the same time.  I submitted it to the State authorities and received no response.  None.  The problem with novel ideas is that there is this psychological dynamic that gets in the way, and has a predisposition to the standard methodology of taxing everything in sight.  But that concept simply perpetuates poverty.  Interesting that the political class does not recognize this fundamental truth:  unless you have capital, you remain poor in perpetuity.  (P.S. that hospital just filed for bankruptcy yesterday.  Bye-bye hospital, it will close.)

How Springfield Hospital can be profitable.pdf

The coating sales pitch is a bold claim with nothing backing it up.  No evidence of effectiveness against important pathogens (MSRA, influenza) , no safety assessment or FDA approval.

[Rasmus Jorgensen + 1,169]

17 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

But you don't have to do either.  All you have to do is organize society so that it continues to move towards greater opportunity and greater prosperity.  You don't have to ensure that everybody is rich; what you do is make a comfortable prosperity the baseline, and then open opportunity lets those with more gumption go farther up that economic ladder.  Yes, it gets abused, and in the USA the persons highest up that ladder are invariably the greatest thieves, the Angelo Mozilos of the world, but that is the price you pay (at least in the short term). 

It is entirely possible to have a comfortable society and zero taxes.  But you have to make up your mind that you want to go that route.  Today, societies do not go that route, so you end up with deep poverty instead. 

I am not sure that we can out from taxes entirely as has been discussed in this, but I agree that society can be structured a lot smarter. 

My point, however, was something entirely different : We need to accept some sort of wealth re-distribution to minimize the horrible poverty you describe. Your suggestion(s) could probably help some, but they too would be wealth re-distribution as it mean state entities into businesses, taking business from private businesses. 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

5 hours ago, Okie said:

I don't know what Jan is talking about with this anarcho-capitalist vision he has.

And that, dear Okie, is because you don't know what Oklahoma has traditionally done in the self-financing field of selling govt goods and services.  But that's OK, neither do the majority of Oklahomans, I suspect.  Nonetheless, it is not "anarcho-xx," it is strictly a revenue-raising method without direct taxation on the locals.  Ultimately, a movement came underfoot, pushed by that rarest of species in Okie-land, the Leftist, to remove the Service from sale, and who knows, they probably did.  Oklahoma is a seriously strange place. 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

1 hour ago, Rasmus Jorgensen said:

but they too would be wealth re-distribution as it mean state entities into businesses, taking business from private businesses. 

The single largest use of taxes in the US Federal Govt are for wealth-distribution purposes. 

I really have no objection to wealth redistribution, as long as it remains proportionate.  What does happen (especially in parts of Europe) is that the Left gets carried away and the taxes become confiscatory. At that point they become wealth destroying taxes.  Europe is notorious for that, with the result that it distorts societal work. And that is counter-productive.  Then Europeans go hide assets and accumulated wealth into dead money, such as fine art, silver, and farming (which is tax advantaged, due to the pressures of stalwart farm lobbies).  You end up with disinvestment in industry, as demonstrated by the fields of abandoned factories that formerly made auto tires and ship components, indeed entire shipyards, in Northern France. 

Edited June 28, 2019 by Jan van Eck

[Rasmus Jorgensen + 1,169]

4 hours ago, Okie said:

h, no.  There was a Google executive who tried that by moving to Singapore.  That didn't work out so well for him.

panama papers

paradise papers

Tax evasion is big business... 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

1 hour ago, Rasmus Jorgensen said:

as it mean state entities into businesses, taking business from private businesses. 

State entities are in your business all day long.  What do you think incorporation fees and franchise tax are, freebies?