Hi there!
I’ve just had one of my extended — and unplanned — blogging breaks. Usually that means s**t is hitting the fan on the home front (work, family, etc.). Well everything’s ok over here, roughly speaking, but it’s been super-busy and emotionally overwhelming at times. So even when I identified stories I could have written, I really couldn’t write them, if you know what I mean.
In particular, my last EV diary was in March, when I gathered all my residual mental energies to put out my annual Top 10 EV Countries list. Please do read that excellent diary! (my own objective recommendation, of course)
What brings me back from the cold? A new term now knocking on mainstream discourse’s door: Range Fuel Anxiety (h/t Zach Shahan of Cleantechnica for the term).
Millions Suffering From Fuel Anxiety In UK — If Only They Could Charge Up At Home
...As the issue arose, starting with BP announcing that it was temporarily closing some stations, the British government wisely told the population to not panic buy and to just go about their business as usual. Of course, they all listened… Brits went on a panic-buying spree and made the situation that much worse. Some of the results have been waiting for hours in line for some petrol, people leaving their cars in line ... and knife fights, of course.
Around 30% of BP petrol stations were out of fuel on Sunday. The British government is now rolling in British soldiers to help drive the fuel trucks — for the time being.
BBC reports that after a frantic week in which at some point 2/3 of stations ran out, they’re now back to a blissful 27%. So is it over? Well, The Guardian citing other media warns that “EFFing crisis could last for months.” Say what you will about the annoying Brits, at least they have a linguistic flair for not sugar-coating things.
EFF is acronym for Energy (for heating gas), Fuel (for internal combustion — ICE— vehicles), and Food (that one is for everyone, I fear).
What’s missing from most media coverage of the crisis? The obvious of course. There is a growing community of UK drivers who, as long as they still have the lights on in their neighborhood, couldn’t care less about the tanker lorry driver crisis.
Because for fuel, they just plug in.
Funny how the mainstream media never misses a chance to take a swipe at EVs, say after hurricanes (where the evidence is actually mixed as to which is more resilient, ICE or EVs). But with the EFFing crisis, no “man on the street” sampling of the many 100,000s of relaxed EV drivers in England has popped up on my mainstream news feed. If you veer slightly off-mainstream, though, you may find stories like this:
Electric car sales and leases have soared in the last month amid the chaos of the current petrol shortage crisis.
LeaseElectricCar.co.uk, who lease out electric vehicles, have seen huge increases in enquiries and thousands of drivers have turned to Google to research electric cars.
In the month of September, the company has seen a 228.57 per cent rise in electric car orders compared to September last year.
Mind you, that’s a sharp rise over a far better baseline than the US: UK’s annual 2020 plug-in sales were already close to 10% of the market, vs. barely 2% here. And speaking of here, I do recall that some major US states had similar gas shortages this year.
And then, there’s the Cost.
Even as BBC et al. try to calm drivers that the crisis is over, average gas prices have crossed 1.35 pounds/litre (almost $7/gallon) — and many stations go above and beyond, happily gouging the eyes out of customers because hey, there’s demand (story from today):
The increase in demand has led some petrol stations to increase prices, with a Gulf station in south Kensington charging drivers £2.93 per litre for unleaded to dissuade people from hoarding.
But naturally, the gouging is only for the edification of the public.
Ages ago, near the dawn of the current EV revolution, Swedish Tesla drivers posted this hilarious story.
...So we sat in the car and pressed the START button. The car’s gasoline engine coughed to life and started to operate. One could hear the engine’s sound and the car’s whole body vibrated as if something was broken, but the seller assured us that everything was as it should…. When we came to a stop the engine continued to run and the car vibrate – even though the car was standing still! The engine continued to burn gasoline without moving the car forward. Can it really be true?
So we drove to the gas station... there were two counters on the pump: one that showed the number of liters we have fueled and one that showed how much it would cost us. And that counter was spinning so fast that we could hardly keep up with its pace! Sure we filled the tank full in two minutes, but it did cost us an unbelievable €30! A full charge would thus cost us double that – a whopping €60!
...With this in mind we ended up in a traffic jam and were horrified that the gasoline engine continued to burn these expensive gasoline drops even when the car was standing still or moving very little. With gasoline vehicles it is easy to run into cost anxiety– the feeling that the car literally burns up your money!
Depending on local gas and electricity prices and the individual vehicles compared, EV fuel cost is typically 4x-10x cheaper than ICE. What’s more, it doesn’t fluctuate nearly as much as oil does (unless you live in effin’ Texas of course):
So, now that there are more and more mainstream EVs to choose from, even setting aside for a moment the global-warming and air-quality angles (and we really should never set these aside)— even setting those aside hypothetically, I’d rather live with some EV range anxiety (which can be usually planned ahead for; in 9 years we’ve never gotten stuck) and possibly put up a little more $$ in upfront costs (often easily offset by government incentives) — than to suffer ongoing fuel and cost anxieties at the hands of these bastards.
How about you?