Guest Post by Eric Peters
A few days ago, Virginia – home to this writer – was hammered by a sudden-onslaught blizzard that dumped almost a foot of snow along the I-95 corridor, the name we Virginians use to reference the stretch of Interstate 95 that runs from Richmond up to Northern Va, near DC – before it threads up the east coast to New York and beyond.
The snow was so fierce and heavy it paralyzed traffic on I-95, which became a kind of extended parking lot for much of the distance between Richmond and Northern Virginia, which is more than 100 miles.
Thousands of drivers were stuck inside their cars, for as long as 27 hours – which is more than one full day, if you’re counting. This is extremely inconvenient – as well as uncomfortable, assuming your car isn’t an RV with beds in the back and cable TV.
It could be something else – if your car happens to be electric.
EVs don’t like sudden, unplanned things – because they’re more likely to be not ready for them – since it takes them hours to charge, if not plugged in to a “fast” charger – and none of these are at home. You have to drive to where they are.
This is hard to do if you can’t drive to where they are.
Back-up electricity for EVs is also harder to store – and much less portable. If the power goes out because of a snowstorm and you have a five gallon jug of gas in the garage or shed, you can drive your car – your not-electric car – about 100 miles, easily, even if it’s a “gas guzzler.” Easy to find more gas along the way.
If the the power goes off and your energy hog EV (a Tesla carries around 1,000 pounds of battery pack, necessary to deliver the touted “ludicrous” speed) is empty, it will be harder to find a can of kilowatts.
Or go anywhere.
People who own EVs found out about these limitations during one of the regularly occurring hurricanes that hit Louisiana and the gulf area a few years back; many didn’t have the luxury of time to charge – in time to get away from the hurricane.
But at least they didn’t freeze.
Keep in mind that EVs generate heat by “burning” electricity. It takes a lot of electricity to power an electric heater; ask any homeowner who has a heat pump or baseboard electric heating, the latter being the type of heater most EVs have.
How much “range” on that?
Enough to stay warm – and alive – for 27 hours?
Maybe not. Especially not if you got stuck without a full charge, which you forgot to plan for because you didn’t think you’d be stuck in a blizzard.
And now, you are.
So what now? Jumping jacks?
There’s no way to recharge on the fly, in the midst of a snowstorm – in the middle of a parking lot full of snowed-in cars on Interstate 95.
Most lower-tier EVs like the Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt and VW ID.4 have a best-case range of around 150-250 miles or so. Much of that would be depleted by the time you got half-way to Richmond from DC, depending on how were driving. Also upon how much you’ve been using electrically powered accessories such as the heater. And the defroster. These only work by “burning” electricity, which necessarily means less is available to propel the car.
And the reverse.
The EV’s battery pack must also be kept warm, by the way.
There’s electric heating for that, too.
So whatever the advertised best-case range is, it will be less than advertised if you use electrically-powered accessories. Which means all accessories, in an electric car. Including the heater for the battery pack, which must be kept a certain temperature else it cannot be charged.
Many people are unaware of that, for the same reason a shady used car salesman won’t tell a mark about the chassis rust he covered up with black paint.
Electric batteries also lose charge faster when it’s very cold – doubling down on this problem. Imagine finding yourself stuck in a blizzard – perhaps without the heavy clothes appropriate to survival in a blizzard – watching the charge indicator wilt as the car tries to keep you warm.
Of course, you’d be just as stuck in a not electric car. But less likely to freeze – because you could have filled up to full at the nearest gas station, spur of the moment – after having heard the radio reports about the suddenly-here storm. You might even have put a five gallon jug of extra gas in the trunk, for just in case. You would not be stuck for hours tethered to a cord. 
The gas-powered car is also better-suited for such frigid emergencies for another reason.
A combustion engine car’s heat is a byproduct of combustion. It takes burning gas to generate that heat, of course. But it does not cost as much energy as it does in an electric car – because idling the engine in a gas-engined car doesn’t burn much gas. But it does create plenty of heat.
Driving an electric car in winter is kind of like taking a “vaccine” that doesn’t immunize. There are better – safer – alternatives, in both cases.
And without the costs.
People got a look-see at those costs a few days ago. They might also have a look at the power-rationing occurring in states like California – where it is generally not cold but where you’ll still be stuck if there’s no electricity available to charge up your EV.
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I remember reading about something similar a few years ago during an evacuation in Florida. Thousands of cars backed up the Evacuation Routes create a logjam- then the EV’s start dying and exacerbate the problem by blocking up lanes.
Like the useless, nightmare of ethanol, liberals and activists rarely think things through– just knee jerk virtue signaling.
PS: We got 15.5 inches of snow in just 5 hours here in Southern Maryland on Monday. Looks like a small nuke went off– trees shattered, toppled and broken everywhere as the quick weight of the rapid snow ( and saturated ground from 3 days of prior rain). Got lucky on Thursday night/Friday morning with just 4 powdery inches before rush hour.
Interesting factoid about that Florida evacuation: Elon flipped a switch that allowed Tesla batteries to be further discharged so they would not be as likely to be stranded with a dead battery. Nothing like Big Brother having the capability to quietly modify your behavior in real time.
Any battery expert will tell you that deep discharge of most battery types shortens the life of the battery.
All well and good, but those drivers did not do the wise thing, which would have been not to be there in the first place.
Kinda difficult – if you live there. Easy to say if you don’t.
The area between Richmond north to DC has had much construction and a population boom over the last 20 years. I moved from Warrenton to Annandale to work near Ft. Belvoir in 1996 and left in 2007. I returned one summer after moving a youngster from Augusta, Georgia, to Alexandria.
I barely recognized the place driving the U-Haul to his new apartment. The bad traffic had gotten even worse, so you can imagine what even a couple inches does to high volume traffic areas. I’m not surprised it shut the place down hard.
And yet electric cars and lethal injections are pushed on us to save the World by bill gates, Klaus Schwab, et al.!!!
To save it for who???
The (((chosen))) few???
Every.
Single.
Time.
The purpose of electric cars isn’t to save energy, it’s to get rid of private personal transportation.
First they get rid of the gas powered vehicles then they tell you there isn’t enough electricity for the replacements.
Then you shelter in place.
Bwhahaha
They will all be self driving, which means you will not be driving it anyway. Permission will be required for each destination. Permission will be granted on a variety of basis points, namely, your carbon balance and the trips carbon cost, and your social score and the trips social modifiers.
Perhaps Red States will fight this nonsense, but it appears many Blue States are full throttle.
That is some fine cogent speculation. Scary
Misgenderers will have to walk.
Plus, no matter where you tell it to take you, it can be told by higher authority to bring you to the interrogation center instead.
THE CAMP, where you will be treated to the sauna and other fine features.
Don’t forget vaccination status.
Everyone has the same status,no one will ever be fully vaccinated.
Yeah!! Someone besides me has the plan figured out!! No cars for the proles. Party members only!
The insanity never ceases, to save the environment from itself they are mandating these vehicles. They use more energy manufacturing their batteries than it takes to drive a gasoline vehicle for six months, not to mention the charging times from the coal fired power plants. Our government hates us and is rapidly enabling our demise!
We often have snow covered roads; back around 1988 or so the EPA outlawed the use of sand on snowy/icy roads. The replacement: “engineered anti-skid material”, which are fractured granite chunks in the 1/4″ to 3/8″ size range. Cost: about 3X that of sand. Murder on windshields and paint. One would suspect none of the brain trust at EPA had the foggiest idea how to come up with a cost:benefit ratio for their no questions asked mandate. Plus, more that a few car buffs would buy a beater car to drive to work on snowy days and avoid the granite damage on their garaged vehicle. Saving the environment in oh so many ways.
Someone asked me in another comment section how I did during the storm. No problem for me, I closed down for the day. Thank God I didn’t get caught in that I-95 cluster though. I heard some people were stuck in the vehicles for 27 hours.
I’m in northern VA. I believe we got 5 inches maybe. 2 days later we got another 2. Really wasn’t a problem except for the first snowfall.
It snows even worse in the West and gets a lot colder but then people aren’t as ignorant about the cold. PS: Florida used to get 1,000 new people per day but judging by the empty U-haul trailers clogging the mall parking lots lately, we are getting a lot more than that now! Y’all come visit if you vote liberal but don’t stay; there’s plenty of room in Minnesota, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, etc.
Years ago, my parents took in a cousin of mine. He and his parents lived in Michigan. He would comment on how Marylanders didn’t know how to drive in the snow. One day he came home and told my father he had passed a driver (in the snow) because he was going to slow. He ended up taking out about 20 feet of a neighbors front fence. Bwahahaha.
Colorado? Colorado already has a terminal case load of liberals, but thanks anyway.
Led by Gov. Fudgepacker.
We know.
As F Joe Biden says, “Come on man…”
Colorado isn’t just liberal, it’s run by a bunch of commie assholes who bought their way into power.
If I remember right I think a battery loses about 50% charge for every 10 degree below zero, C, 32 degrees F.
Electric ‘green’ is only political, its not an environmental issue. You will be limited in movement which is what ALL communists try to control. Can’t have peons escaping the farm.
Yeah, in the Winter after all night with the block heater going, and inside an attached garage in North Dakota, and a good spray of ether starter fluid into the carburetor, my truck battery (at 50-25% normal power) could give the engine one good “ugh” turn and the engine either fired up making a steam cloud or went silent as the snow, and the battery needed a boost. I tip my hat to all Y’all up there.
Every article on electric vehicles needs to point out how conversion loss works – and that these things use at least 4x more energy than IC vehicles.
But I heard the sun and the wind are free.
So is the rain but any Farmer will tell you it takes a lot of work and money to turn them into food.
All of our vehicles are diesel now. It’s a damn shame that Badfinger and company are doing everything they can to kill them. A tank of diesel in my fullsize suv lasts 3 weeks, 50% better mileage than the gasoline variety with less pollution. My wife’s car went from Northern GA to PA without needing fuel one time.
EV=not for me.
Why would anyone care about people in Virginia being stuck on I-95 when they were stupid enough to elect Ralph Northam and let him keep his office after all his racist tendencies became public? I suppose we could care a little about them freezing since they didn’t elect another Demoncrat, but it was still close, which means there are a LOT of stupid people in Virginia. They are probably all the ones with electric cars and no food, water, or winter coat available in case of a problem while traveling.
If geography serves me, aren’t a lot of Virginia residents federal bureaucrats?
Northern VA is a hive for the better paid ones, and the lobbyists.
Hive is a kind word. I’d use trough and a sty instead.
Should the government ever default you’d see a serious economic downturn in the area. The real estate market would get hammered and a mass exodus of government titsuckers would occur.
When “pandemic” lockdowns happened it caused an outflow of idiots from NYC to NJ. Talk about going from bad to worse. One of the consequences was watching local property values inflate as people actually fought for already over-valued homes. In my area, residential foreclosures that had been sitting for years got bought up, many of them by former residents of Harlem, Brooklyn, and Queens.
I think some mentally defectives think EVs are perpetual motion machines.
You’d be surprised at human ignorance.
Many people have ZERO understanding of basic physics and electricity generation. Thomas Edison is more of a household name than his former employee Nikola Tesla and that’s a real shame.
There are no plans to sell i/c powered automobiles in the US after the 2025 model year. You pickup truck drivers wh think tat your 3/4 diesel is going to be allowed unless you are really well connected (you aren’t) should plan carefully. No electric truck is going to haul your travel trailer or boat very far very fast. The resale market for boats and trailers is going to get pretty skinny pretty fast.
The phase-out schedule of road-legal i/c powered automobiles has not yet been made 100% apparent. When big oil & gas producers and refiners like Shell and Exxon Mobil brag about getting out of the business (and they do) you can be sure that they have plans for it. You can also be sure that the plans will be made law (or executive order) and broadly obeyed. And no you erstwhile peppers, it is not practical to brew your own, Road Warrior style.
It looks like another big push is coming, maybe already underway. Biden (poor old, abused soul) won’t last too long, and VP Harris is already so thoroughly loathed that her elevation to POTUS could be the perfect time to pull off the switcheroo. All the establishmentarians will protect her position as long as she does their bidding while keeping her in a comfortable box, doing that bidding. I can hear the cackle now. It could be done in a couple of productive weeks, and don’t kid yourself otherwise.
They are not keeping their goals secret. The timing maybe, but not the goal. They control all the apparatus needed to succeed if we surrender. The question is whether we surrender. It’s an all-in game, boys and girls. Remember that. They do. These people will not stop until they have assumed room temperature. Time to help them along.
I don’t have a PhD and a big shot government science position but I know EV don’t work good enough for all that, and I told you so Jan2022. That would be almost as stupid as taking an arm full of Graphene Oxide and mRNA to get immunity to CV-19; or believing CO2 controls Climate, haha! Look folks, building natural gas electric generating plants and then bulldozing the coal fired electric generating plants and dynamiting the coal mines was dumb enough; y’all useless idiots will probably live to see why and regret the hell out of it. If you let TPTB destroy the ICE trucks and gas/diesel business, you will become royally fucked.
another lesson of i95 is the willful ignorance of people criticizing the governor elect instead of the governor. a good baseline for how many hedonistic virtue signaling normies there are; and the implications of this as the reset in a grand solar minimum continues.
Right, the GSM is why the Polar Jet Stream wandered to Texas last year, why the Global Atmosphere has been “bleeding out” causing huge floods and will become bone dry soon, why the Earth is cooling and northern crops are failing, why earthquakes and volcanoes are increasing, why there have been great Auroras, why the Thames River and Lake Okeechobee froze 400 years ago, etc. Useless Idiots believing CO2 is causing the Earth to warm are going to lose their ass.