If EVs are your thing, then by all means, just not with my money, and you need to be honest about how not that green they are. The same applies to wind and solar. I’m not against them, though you might get that impression from the hundreds of pieces I’ve written reporting on how bad an idea they are. You pay for it, you do not sell it to the grid above the lowest wholesale rate, and you pay for a disposal plan because neither is green, especially at the end of life, so no one should feel obligated to nod or smile at cocktail parties over your virtue signal.
Hybrids were, until recently, the one thing about the battery-powered vehicle transition that I was ever able to tolerate. The ability to use the physics of your gas-powered vehicle to recharge the battery made sense. If you felt compelled to buy in at all, this might be the best way to go. I’m still not interested in helping you pay for it or for the end-of-life disposal costs, specifically the lithium power pack. That ought to be built into the price upfront, thereby ending it as anything but a lawn ornament for the rich, which is what EVs ought to be for the same reasons. The sort of people posturing over their EV buy are the same ones who whine the loudest about asbestos, PFOAs, or anything else that was genius in the moment but turned out to be harmful, leaving us with the cost of remediation.
Socialism comes to mind, as an aside, which explains a few things. The people ignoring how bad that is are ignoring this. We know Lithium battery manufacturing is bad for the environment. We know that battery fires are exponentially worse for public air quality and health than just about any other sort, and that includes the battery farms popping up to store energy from intermittent wind and solar. We know there are no good ways, yet, to decommission them when they die a lot sooner than advertised. No one is addressing the environmental or public health costs now. They are kicking that toxic, pricey can down the road.
So what the heck, Steve, the headline says Hybrids. So let’s get on with it. I was always willing to accept hybrids as the one idea with engineering potential, even though their actual value remained in question, maybe a bit less after seeing this. “Road safety experts were calling for an inquiry on Saturday night as it was revealed motorists are three times more likely to die in hybrids than in petrol cars.”
Experts believe the higher death rates could be explained by hybrids’ combination of petrol engines and batteries and electric motors, which can be harder to control and more prone to fires.
The RAC Foundation, a transport research organisation, called for a ‘dedicated investigation branch’ to look into the trend. ‘It’s high time we had a specialist resource to address road safety risk’, director Steve Gooding said.
The cars’ batteries may also be to blame. They can be damaged by the heat of the engine, which burns at extremely hot temperatures, making them more liable to set ablaze.
These all strike me as things the engineers ought to have recognized and addressed. For those keen on private or public safety experts, the ones who test cars to determine any risks consumers ought to be aware of, why are we just learning about this now?
Too much safe and effective, perhaps. Gosh, we’re so excited about this thing and how it fulfills some fantasy we have about transportation and the environment, let’s overlook any potential downsides we can write off as low risk. Like toxic rare earth mineral mining, the poisoning and displacement of indigenous peoples, because look, we’ve got this thing we can add to our liberal privilege social credit score.
So what if a few more people died? Think of all the lives we’re pretending we’ll save!
Hybrids were found by a leading insurer of company cars, Tusker, to burst into flames at higher rates than others. Among their fleet of 30,000 cars, hybrid vehicles had an almost three times’ higher risk with 3,475 fires per 100,000.
As I read the reporting, and it’s the UK Daily Mail, so we must take it with a grain of salt (I hear Celtic Sea Salt has the most natural minerals if you care), it looks a bit like a sales pitch for EVs. All Battery, no hybrid, no combustion engine.
The figures show that diesel cars are slightly safer, with electric vehicles (EVs) found to be safest – causing just 23 fatalities last year despite making up nearly 2million of the cars on British roads.
Fancy that. You should all be buying those. You can’t afford them. You won’t be able to afford to charge them if there’s any juice on the grid to do it. And they are anything but green front end or back, as noted above. They create more tire and brake particulate matter, no one has a battery disposal plan, and lord help us if one pops off on the ferry.
Would the Daily Mail count the 500 people killed by that fire in their figures, or are those unrelated maritime fatalities, even though a ferry is technically “transportation”
Everything about the lie that we’re greening personal transportation is littered with lies, so I’m surprised the Mail could be bothered to take a cheap shot at Hybrids unless it’s to pimp the full monty, and maybe that’s all it is. Public safety isn’t a serious concern.
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