No one is mandating one must buy an EV. The option will be to buy whatever is for sale with the option of not buying anything. Much like the vaccine mandate, one didn't have to get the jab if you didn't need to keep your job, see a movie or eat at some restaurants. Transportation is not a right, you get what you get, make it work. Or the ultimate prediction of the WEF, you'll own nothing and be happy. Practically speaking, if by 2035 EV's have supplanted ICE and are practical equivalents, then you roll with it. The dynamics of fueling EV's change which is a separate discussion but those are anticipated, learned and accommodated in some way (maybe not YOUR way but this isn't about you). Even with ICE, car owners don't make the parts, refine the fuel and fluids and pave the roads. We're all just operators with our own micro-economy to manage, and what we drive is just a component of that. Make it work in spite of the politics, marketing and revenue. Consider the light bulb. It was a train wreck when compact fluorescents came out but anymore LED lights are every bit as good as incandescent, and overall more economical to run. So it's not like a disruptive technology has to be all bad. I'm guessing that demand for incandescent bulbs will relegate them to niche applications not because of Bush's mandate (er, restriction) but because there's little practical use for them. Time will tell if EV's are the "answer", today it's all just posturing and lining up to be in the right trough as government regulations come down. By the time the mandate date comes around, the world will be a different place than today and any extreme aberration will correct. Frankly I prefer my electric tools to gasoline ones by a long shot. The only thing that needs improvement is the batteries. They're pretty good now, and maybe at some point they'll equal or exceed recovered energy density of gas. One has no more personal control over the flow of gasoline in the market as kWh, so ultimately the fuel type of our vehicles matters little.
Something I think about is looking at past technologies. I used to take pictures with a film camera then go through a fairly arduous chemical and mechanical process to generate a single image. Now the image capturing process is upstream of that in the form of complicated semiconductors and precision optics, but at the end of the day my life is better for it. Farmers used to have to maintain a stable of horses to plow fields and harvest crops. The first mechanized tractors ran on steam. Imagine getting one of those going on a cold fall morning. I think about a generation or two ahead of us that may see gas cars in old movies and how foreign it would seem to put stinky liquid into your car and burn it in real time to move down the road. Even in my lifetime, working on carburetors and adjusting timing was something you had to do, but not something I've done in literally decades now. My life is better with advancing technology. I gave away my record collection and even my CD's now are gathering dust. My entire music collection fits on a micro SD card the size of my pinky nail. I get that you don't want to be told what you're going to get or get nothing, but in the grand scheme if my car was electric I would make it work (and I did for the 10 years I drove one).
I think the rare earth elements in lithium batteries will limit acceptance/deployment of EV's short term, and there will need to be a carbon fuel alternative at least until a more sustainable battery is figured out. Maybe it won't be gasoline anymore but some other refined fuel that's "cleaner". Imagine a fuel where the carbon can be sequestered at the refinery and the exhaust is relatively inert (hydrogen fits this bill but has storage, distribution and generation issues). The good news is there's over a century of combustion engine development to draw from so once it's figured out what the roadmap is, the solution will end up in the consumer space fairly quickly.
Mark B.
Albuquerque, NM
getjerry.com
