Episode 154: Electric Vehicles

I'm just gonna

start this.

It can happen at any time.

Now we're podcasts, and you will like it.

You motherfuckers, hang on.

We just wait until you take the largest possible bicep of food and then we just go.

I was in the middle of eating a leftover corned beef sandwich.

It was delicious.

A leftover corn beef.

Can you make better choices, please, for me?

Go fuck yourself.

Nova,

I need both of you to stay

so that I can continue to pay rent.

Go fuck yourself, Nova.

I'm going to eat this sandwich.

Yeah.

I hadn't gotten takeout in several weeks, so I decided like two days ago to get a pizza.

And now I'm just eating rats a leftover pizza.

And yeah, it is from Fiance.

Oh, you're a moron.

Yeah, that was dumb.

That was dumb.

I shouldn't have done that.

I would have been better off making food at home and it would have tasted better and I would feel better and my refrigerator would be less crowded.

R.I.P.

to a real one.

What you going to do?

New style.

New style no longer exists.

Yeah.

That's why I said R.I.P.

to a real one.

Oh my God, their Instagram is still there.

They killed it with its eyes open.

Hi, Red.

Hi.

Thank you for my forehead.

Yes.

You're welcome.

We're in the middle of recording.

New style?

That place was terrible.

That place was very good.

The cheesesteaks were delicious.

They They were so valid.

They were good.

Really good.

Really solid cheesesteak for $6.

Really good cheesesteaks, yeah.

No.

Okay.

Welcome to Will There's Your Problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters and the disaster shows that are our respective apartments with slides.

I'm Justin Rosnick, the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I am November Kelly.

I am the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her.

I have like three fucking uni essays due this week because I'm nominally a full-time student as well as doing three podcasts.

I feel like I'm drowning.

I feel like I'm in hell.

That's why the podcast is so late.

I'm so sorry.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

I don't even feel like saying yay, Liam.

I'm just sad.

Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson.

My pronouns are he and him.

And yeah, we'll get a bonus out.

Sorry.

There's been a lot of shit going on behind the scenes.

I feel like I'm dying.

Like, what do you want from me?

Also, to do my job, to do the thing you pay me $2 a month to do?

Impossible.

The podcast is not that late.

It's just it suppressed our, the algorithm suppressed our last episode because we talked about important news items that needed to be talked about.

This is true.

This is true.

We have a guest.

Guest.

Returning champion.

Please introduce yourself.

Hello, my name is Victoria Scott.

My pronouns are she and her.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, we got Victoria back.

You know, am I winning now?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

You don't win it.

Well, there's your problem.

Just lose a little less.

It's like Bellatro in that respect.

I'm never going to stop talking about that video game.

Fucking, this is possibly related to the fact that I have a time crisis of

work to do, is also the fact that I started playing a video game that famously takes up a lot of your time.

I have like possibly attention deficit disorder.

That's what's called a pro-gamer move.

So what you see on the screen in front of you is an advertisement for an electric car.

That's beautiful.

Baker Electric Vehicles.

The aristocracy

that meets every need of the society woman.

You may notice that this is distinctively not a modern electric vehicle such as a Tesla.

I mean, I don't know.

Oh, look, Roz, you can learn to run the Baker in 20 minutes.

See, that's something you can't do because you don't know how to drive because you leave us stranded at a goddamn fucking Tim Hortons for no apparent reason.

Very, very, very few things.

Was it Tim Horton?

What was it?

Was it a Duncan?

It was a Tim Hortons.

No, it was a couch tard.

I missed you.

No, it was a Tim Hortons.

It's definitely the couch tard.

Okay.

Very few things in our society claim these days to meet every need of the society woman.

It's basically, it is me

and like some beauty product.

And the Hitachi magic wand.

Well, yeah, very similar operating principles there.

What is a Hitachi magic wand if not an electric vehicle?

Yeah,

sure.

Well, Hitachi makes many electric vehicles, actually, but most of them are trains.

So.

No, most of them are vibrators, buddy.

Right for our handsome booklet.

Well, Hitachi doesn't make the magic wand anymore.

I thought they spun that off.

Well, they keep trying to, but it really embarrasses them that they made something so good at giving people orgasms.

So like anytime

they keep trying to take their name off of it and they keep trying to spin it off, and then it always seems to come back to them, is my understanding.

Well, you know, I mean, that's that's what happens when you're

imagining being the guy who invented it and just like, yeah, I paid for this beach house entirely of vibrator sales.

I mean, how many people get to say that they paid for their beach house in like appreciably making people's lives better?

Like, fucking doctors barely get to do that.

Yeah, true.

Yeah, manufacturing.

It's like Mikhail Kalashnikov.

I wanted to make agricultural equipment, but I had to make the vibrator instead.

I was too good at making rifles.

I'm looking at history.

It doesn't claim a single inventor.

No, I was.

Kitachi is a big conglomerate.

It's probably made by committee.

Surprisingly old.

It was patented in 1968.

The guys who made it, they probably were like working on that one day.

And then the next day they were working on like a giant drag line excavator.

And then another week they were working on like,

I don't know, some kind of steel fabrication, like rolling plant or something.

You know, it actually does everything.

1968, fucking Ladybird Johnson could have.

How does it compare with Jumbo?

I'm sorry, you are getting a two trans woman podcast.

No, what we're here to talk about are electric vehicles, the history thereof,

some of the problems, a whole bunch.

It's a Victoria's episode.

Victoria, you explain what we're talking about.

Yeah, I just like to electric vehicles.

Electric vehicles do not have to be an engineering disaster, but they largely have been.

And I've been doing a lot of stories recently about how electric vehicles work and the entire history of them.

And what I have found is that basically everything that is happening today has already happened through two distinct periods in American history.

We are repeating the exact same mistakes.

Would you say that time is a flat circle?

Time is a flat circle and all the problems are caused by capitalism.

So I'm here sort of as like a, here's an interesting breakdown of this.

I think actually Roz probably has more disasters per se.

The disaster parts at the end.

Yeah, but I think that like, I think that some background might be helpful to understand why everything sucks so much.

Are we fucking going to Droit's Mill again?

Because if we are.

I'm not not going back there.

We do go by way of there.

But the other thing is going to what?

Drake's Well,

where they discovered oil.

Discovered.

Discovered.

Yeah.

Recurring Justin inserted slide.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So villain.

Look, but before we do that, we should do the goddamn news.

Everyone fucking fucking told you that you can't airdrop aid into Gaza.

It will not work.

It's not enough.

And you did it anyway.

Yeah, so this is one of those things.

Okay, so over the past couple of weeks at this point now,

the United States, the Jordanian Air Force, a few other people have been,

since trucks can't get into Gaza anymore because there's idiots protesting outside the gates.

You know,

we've been airdropping minuscule amounts of aid into Gaza.

And of course.

There's a couple of C-routes now, ostensibly.

We'll see how those do.

The

thing about airdrops are they're not very precise and they're not very accurate.

Yeah, I saw

almost immediately after this airdrop started,

a parachute failed and a pilot dropped on like five people, killed five people and injured 10 people.

So this airdrop is not going very well.

No, and people compare it to like the Berlin airlift.

And it's like the Berlin airlift had 10 times the amount of resources and the planes could land.

Planes could land.

They had this thing called Tempelhof Airport.

Yeah.

That's the key thing.

Yeah.

The only thing to do is to fucking

reopen the airport in Gaza, I guess.

No, the only thing to do is to successfully bully Israel into opening the land crossings.

Yeah, because the airport has like...

has like olive trees on it now.

You know, so essentially,

yeah, so we started these airdrops.

Um, we're using this is according to Twitter user captain underscore hat.

These are LCAT, LCADS parachutes.

That's uh low-cost aerial delivery system.

They call it a lot of the low-cost is already in the name.

Yeah, well, low-cost is about a thousand dollars each, but these are the high-velocity versions.

We could build that for cheaper, which means even when they're descending with the parachute open, they're going at 60 miles per hour.

I simply think

that instead of trying to fucking hell divers

five sandwiches into Gaza, you could have a difficult conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Maybe.

Just an idea.

Might be easier.

Punch him in the face repeatedly.

So since this incident, which is at this point a couple of weeks ago, we seem to have revised the procedure.

They're trying to land these sort of on the beach or in the ocean just off the beach, which means they sink.

The Jordanian army is having trouble actually landing the aid inside of Gaza.

A lot of them have like blown over the wall.

This thing is going pretty poorly.

It's just, it's a cluster fuck.

And like by this point, most of the population of the Gaza strip is concentrated in Rafah, where they've been forced to the south up against the border.

Yes, that's another factor is a lot of this aid is going into Gaza City and points just north of Gaza City because, you know, again, there's

it, it, it's weird.

There's no, there's, yeah, there's no resources going in there, and there's still, like, some people in there left.

Uh, it's, I mean,

it's just another sort of like piece of the fucking cavalcade of horrific crimes and clown incompetence.

Um, and I, I genuinely don't know what to say about it once again.

Um,

you know, uh, other than the fact that the C

logistics may be slightly more promising.

Well, so

this is the thing that's apparently going on now: we're sending something that's not the CBs in in order to build a pier in Gaza.

So they can't be able to buy a ship.

They can bring ships full of aid, which, okay,

that's actually an adequate amount, right?

A ship is a good amount of aid.

I think shiploads will work, right?

There's two things going on.

There's one, there's an NGO called the World Food Kitchen.

They're building a pier and then they're going to try and ship to that.

And then the U.S.

thing is using a really weird sort of artifact of the Global War on Terror, which is a sort of arm's length CIA State Department cutout company called Fogbow

who are going to be

using,

they're going to be doing the like over-the-beach logistics for this, where you have like a kind of floating dock that the aid comes to, and then it gets like taken from that onshore.

They're also sending in the 7th army transportation corps uh which is en route at the moment they're probably they're probably like 15 days away from arriving at this point going to take them another 30 days to build the pier these guys are the tattered remnants of the seabes because apparently um uh we decided at some point during the global war on terror that needing uh a a a military unit which can rapidly build a pier would never be relevant anymore.

That's gay shit.

That's gay shit.

Pretty gay.

Yeah.

We did a lot of that.

We didn't even abolish the Marine Corps.

Yeah.

You have the wet troops and then nothing to supply them with.

Yeah, the wet troops, they have to.

They're wet troops.

They're not underwater troops.

They need a pier to at least.

They can only get a little wet.

Yeah, the damn thing.

A Marine happily running into combat, but only up to his knees.

Yeah, after that, it hits the GTA Vice City kind of instant death thing.

It starts floating.

So in the meantime, all we're doing in order to, you know, assuage the Michigan voters that Biden is actually

compassionate about Gaza is, you know, dumping a bunch of,

not a bunch, a very small amount of aid into the ocean near Gaza.

So

doing great.

Enjoy watching a bunch of MREs sink.

And Biden kind of, it's maybe getting through that he's fucking up at this point.

There was a story in, I think, NBC News saying that when

he was shown the kind of like polls of his favorability rating, how it's been impacted by this, He started shouting and swearing.

And it's like.

All right, old man, pull it up or shut up, jackass.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you want to claw this back, the road to that leads through some tough phone calls to Tel Aviv.

Like, fuck it.

Not even tough.

Hey, jackass, stop doing that, or we're going to yank your aid.

There, I've done it.

I've done it.

Where is my Nobel Peace Prize?

It floors me because, like, from even from a real politic perspective, he's fucking up.

This isn't, I don't even understand like what what he seeks to gain from this it like it's making him unpopular it's making america look worse on the international stage it's really appeasing solely like what netanyahu and the six lunatics behind him john fetterman weirdly john fetterman yeah i'm going through fettermanization um

but just like what the hell why it's uh yeah not that's all i have it does it doesn't make sense uh you know but biden could you know definitely like start mitigating this anytime he wants to, but he's not going to do that because I don't know.

Maybe

when he was going to school.

Well, he went to school in Scranton.

Never mind.

I was thinking like in Willington.

Maybe they have Willmington and Cheltenham Township are not too far off from each other.

He grew up in Scranton.

He went to, yeah, but like, is he into piss?

Is he into some weird shit?

Because like, if there's a P-tape, that kind of, that makes a bit more sense to me, you know?

I mean, he's still like a sort of perfect moral coward for not like sacrificing his own piss kink to like stop a genocide, but Biden could get away with having a piss tape, I think.

I think you're probably right about that.

I think he's why would you say those words in that order?

No, no, no, no, no, no, he's right.

It wouldn't, it wouldn't tie him in the same way that

it would most other politicians.

It's been around,

oh, yeah, dude's a freak.

Yeah,

there's a piss tape in black and white.

It was, it was, it was shot with the same hammer we used to kill the moon.

Label Bird Johnson's in the back with the magic wands.

Yeah.

What is is Straw Thurman?

What are you doing here?

Oh, wow.

All our favorite characters from history.

They say the Biden story is going, but he's like

perfectly able to recall to the moment and the day where he was when he got pissed on by like Jack Kennedy.

Well, I want to throw up in my mouth.

All right.

Yep, that rusty last chin before we finish the news.

Now they're asking me.

I don't know.

A lot of people have been throwing around conspiracies that this pier that they're building is going to be ultimately for stealing Gaza's natural gas reserves, which are offshore.

It doesn't seem like a very good way of doing that.

Here's the thing with offshore natural gas drilling.

It's really expensive.

There's a reason those resources are not exploited, and that's because they're not very good.

Also, even if you wanted to do it, I feel like you would do it after you had completed the genocide.

Yes.

So that just in case nobody with like an RPG puts a a red triangle over your offshore gas drilling platform.

It is very American to try to extract resources in the middle of a genocide.

That is a lot of people.

You don't love oil so much you're like going into like heavy fire to try and like suck it up with a straw.

And you don't use a pier for that.

You use an offshore drilling platform and then you just ship the natural gas to a terminal that already exists.

Yeah.

Which I think Israel has anyway.

Yeah, you probably do it in like Haifa or somewhere like that.

Yeah.

Well, who knows?

Maybe the Houthis will like get lucky with one of those long-range missiles.

Yeah, yeah, you get the supersonic, ultrasonic, whatever the hypersonic, that's the word, missile.

Hypersonic's the new shit, yeah.

Yeah, um, so that's the current situation in Gaza.

We're dropping blocks of food on people's heads.

Continue to protest, yeah.

Um, in other news,

uh, Bowie killed a guy.

Yeah, I knocked this shit out in like five seconds in Photoshop, and I genuinely think we could do it as a shirt.

It's bova.

It's fucking bover.

It's bover.

It's bover.

You're not going to make it.

You are going to die.

You're going to get McDonald and Douglas.

That just sounds like I'm going to get fisted.

Yeah.

Like OBJ.

No, I was thinking like Donald and Douglas from...

from

Thompson Tank Engine.

You remember he crushes the brake fan, just murders him on screen?

I'm not going to get fisted.

All right.

But yeah, so

the thing is, right, mental health can happen to anybody at any time.

And sometimes what you do is you like blow the whistle on Boeing and you go to testify to a grand jury.

And before you go to testify, you say, if anything happens to me, it's not an accident.

And then something happens to you because you've been struck by mental health.

Yeah.

And then you, and then you, and then it's like your third day of testimony.

Boeing's lawyers ask you to stay an extra day.

You go back to your hotel.

You think, I want to get some Taco Bell.

And then you go get the Taco Bell.

You come back and you're parked in the hotel parking lot.

And then you shoot yourself before you eat the Taco Bell.

Yeah, that doesn't seem like extremely logical.

I don't know.

I've

like opened some Taco Bell bags before and I've had that reaction.

I have never had that reaction with Taco Bell.

I always

have a Taco Bell.

I'm like, I want to have the fucking Taco Bell.

I kind of want Taco Bell now, but like, yeah, no, but you just open the, you're like in a situation where you're on like the mental health equivalent of one hit point and you're like, I, if any single thing inconveniences me, it's fucking bova.

Um, and you look in the bag and the like the fries are everywhere.

They've got the kind of like

Taco Bell.

Yeah, they're like Taco Bell fries.

Taco Bell fries, yes.

Yeah, they're like, they've got the like fucking covering all over everything.

Uh, you're going to have to like get it on your hands.

And in that moment, you just decide to fucking

over.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You like bow off and you fucking, yeah.

So, part of my understanding is that these, um, this particular uh whistleblower, like this, the case he was in, I think had something more to do with like compensation he was supposed to receive from Boeing as a result of his whistleblowing

being illegally retaliated.

Something like that.

I got to do some research on this at some point.

And actually, refuge in audacity to like really retaliate.

Yeah, I mean, this is.

Um, yeah, I'm, I was like, at first, I was like, well, this seems like a weird coincidence.

Now I'm definitely on team, Boeing killed this guy.

Um, yeah, like, because like you're like, Karen Silkwood was in the 70s, and Boeing's like such a major company, it's going to be all over the news anyway.

It kind of doesn't make sense.

There should be a plausible explanation, and then you read about it and you go, Oh, they fucking killed that guy.

He

broke the like Beau Murta, and they fucking killed him.

Jesus.

It's probably not good that like companies can just...

You had to write a death poem.

Boeing hires like a corporate assassin, like an agent 47 guy to come shoot him.

And he like goes into the car and he shoots him and the slide flies off the pistol and one of the doors falls off his truck.

Revenge.

I still maintain that this would be the funniest way to

of all time.

Like what better way to get back at the company that you worked for for 30?

Like I can imagine being this angry, right?

Like that's the thing.

It's like I'm like 67 years old.

Sorry to say the algorithm's not going to like this episode either.

We'll bleep practically.

But yeah, I think it's thematic at least.

I mean, you can't say they depressurized the fuck out of that guy's skull is the thing.

Yes.

I'm just saying that, like, I can imagine being this angry where you're like, this is going to, like,

they didn't think they could get away with screwing me over.

Well, I will show them.

Go get your Taco Bell, realize they forgot one of your tacos.

Just be like, fine, now it works.

Who gives a shit?

The guy's lawyer said he was in good spirits, looking forward to day three or day four of deposition or whatever it was.

You know, he's like, really had that Taco Bell.

Had a lot to live for, you know, everything.

yeah i i've never experienced taco bell that bad other than the wait for the taco bell and he'd already got it all over with if he was if the taco bell was gonna really be what did it he would have done it the day after when he was in the restroom sure

the the taco bell that kills you instantly or flies off the bathroom door

I feel like if Boeing is a decompression, if you will.

Yes.

I feel like if Boeing's going to assassinate somebody, they have to play to their strengths.

You know, if I'm a sort of Boeing whistleblower, I'm never leaning on any railing that's like bolted in place ever again.

Right.

Because I know they've been through, they've loosened that shit.

I like how I am now, we've discussed Hitachi Magic Wands, and we will get content warnings, just like the last episode I was on.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm doing my job.

All right.

Before we do anything else that gets us, gets the algorithm angry at us.

let's uh say that was the goddamn news

okay

uh this looks like some kind of

well this looks like some kind of electricated vehicle wow

you would be correct uh this is i i have it i have it phrased in raw's format what is an electric vehicle um and the answer is

are these

we can just replace this with a picture of a train you know?

That's fair.

I mean, that would be

that's a different episode.

I don't know enough about trains.

I like trains.

I build little models of them, but I know I actually talk about cars for a living, so that's what I'm here to discuss.

Um, this is a diagram of an e-golf.

This is Volkswagen's electric compliance car.

Um, that was kind of like a

this is the only car you'll be allowed to drive in the future, Liam.

But we're really sorry about the whole diesel car thing.

Um, but uh, the whole point of his.

no, no, these things were bad.

Uh, we get to compliance cars, or I'm gonna get to compliance cars.

I'm gonna go off about it, don't worry.

Um, the point of the episode is to explain what all this is, so let's just go straight to the next slide.

That one's prettier anyway.

I shot this picture, so it's cool.

Oh, actually, I drove this car.

I was gonna say, I was wondering why the photo is so good, and I was like, oh, because Victoria's okay, okay.

Yeah, I drove this car.

Um, so electric cars have been around for literally over a century at this point.

The car that's pictured here is a 1908 Columbia Electric Victoria Phaeton,

which I drove.

It was a expensive luxury car from

the early 1900s.

The first rechargeable electric car came out in 1887 and it had 50 miles of range.

Since then, no change.

Yeah.

Range anxiety, but worse.

And so the thing that's kind of worth noting here is that in the early days of automobiles, electric cars were absolutely so much better than everything else else in the market.

In 1900, there were about 4,000-something cars in total registered on American roads.

1,500 of them were EVs.

1,000 were gas.

The rest were steam.

So this was like a,

it was, it was, it seemed for a while like electric cars are going to run away with everything because steam cars, I think you've done a few episodes about the perils of steam, but they require a boiler.

They, they take forever to warm up.

They can explode and kill you.

You have to be doing all kinds of like throwing like giant levers and shit.

Yeah, the worst part was they only figured out the steam car properly at the very end.

The biggest issue with steam cars, aside from the maintenance, is that none of them were free steaming, right?

So you were limited not by fuel, not by water.

Your speed, you were limited by the amount of steam you could generate.

So, you know, if you wanted to drive at 40 miles an hour, you were good for that for like, I don't know, two or three miles or something.

You ran out of steam.

you had to stop and let the fire build up pressure in the boil again to keep going.

Um, so you know, this is this, uh, you know, the steam car, they didn't figure out a free steaming steam car until like the very end, like the late 20s.

And by that time, the writing was on the wall.

Time to bring it back, time to reinvestigate.

Give me the advanced steam concept car.

Come on,

Mercedes doesn't have anything better to do.

Lots of torque.

No, Mercedes prefers gas-powered cars, if you know what I mean.

I can't speak about that because I want to still get their press cars.

It's fine.

No one's going to hear it anyway because we demonetized it in the first half hour by talking about it.

We're already dealing with the guy fucking bowing himself.

The other thing that's worth noting is that early gas cars also sucked.

The electric starter was not invented until 1912, which meant that every car before then, you had to crank with your arm.

Yes.

Which sucked, first of of all.

Like, it's very, it's extremely hard because you have to overcome the actual compression force of the motor.

Yeah, you might break your arm very easily.

Yeah.

If it backfires, it just snaps your arm in half, a thing that famously would never hurt you or kill you, especially before modern medicine.

So, like, cars were kind of, you know, they were also contraptions, not like maybe quite to the same extent as steam, but they sucked.

And then you have electric cars, which are quiet.

They basically, you plug them into a wall and they charge.

The first electric car had 50 miles of range, I think the one that I was driving, it was on updated batteries, but in theory, you could get probably 70 or 80 miles of range out of that carriage on screen right now.

Wow.

You would be doing maybe 15 or 20 miles an hour because

let's go to the next slide.

This is your motor.

That is the actual motor inside the Columbia that I drove.

Oh, hell yeah.

Three horsepower.

It's a bike chain.

Yep.

Yeah.

It's, it's.

You put this on an e-bike.

You're going, you're flying.

Oh, oh, well, so here's the thing.

So driving this was incredibly fun because it was steered with a tiller.

It didn't have a steering wheel yet.

So it's just a carriage.

It's literally just a horseless carriage.

No windshield.

It's got a fold-up like leather rooflet thingy.

Everything is made out of this gorgeous wood.

There's only one gauge.

It is just a giant cluster.

It's just like a giant steel blob that shows you remaining voltage and like current amp draw or something.

I forget exactly what it was.

But it's like, it is just a carriage that they strapped an electric motor to.

So you do 15 miles an hour in this thing and you are flying.

I cannot emphasize how scary this thing was to do 15 miles an hour in because it's also worth like a hundred grand.

And the owner is sitting next to me as I like crank the tiller driving that through like the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles.

It was terrifying.

But so EVs initially were ahead of the game on like top speed runs.

They were ahead of the game on like distance runs like pre, I don't know if you've heard of the cannonball run, but that's the New York City to Los Angeles like top speed blitz.

Uh, they had a bunch of versions of these, they didn't really do at New York to LA because there were no roads that could take you there.

Yeah, but they would do like New York to Cleveland or something, or New York to Detroit.

And those, those would be like, you know, it took three days or whatever.

And most of the reason that EVs were good for it is like, you're not worrying about, you know, I need to do 100 miles an hour.

It's, I need a vehicle that like I can refuel somewhere along the way.

It's, it's hard to break, which these are because they have few moving parts.

The U.S.

didn't have like

gasoline infrastructure to support them, which is a fascinating inversion of the like EV thing now.

It's being like, well, it's fine, but where are you going to like stop to refuel it?

That was like petrol, you know?

Yeah, it's a cool idea, but like, come on, you have to build some kind of network of like gas stations all over the place, you know?

It's crazy.

Yeah, so Columbia actually completed a bunch of these top speed runs and they've had a couple of early records in the early 1900s.

Columbia, for what it's worth, just to give you an idea of of what the automobile industry was like at this time, it was founded by Albert Pope, who was some like Union Civil War general-ish kind of guy.

I don't remember his rank.

I don't, I'm not that kind of girl.

But how dare you?

He built bicycles after the war, and then he was like, oh, these motorized carriages are going to be where it's at next, and switched into like building cars in the late 1890s.

He was a brave lieutenant colonel, which

grow up, make general, idiot.

But so, this company, this Columbia Motor Company, which nobody has ever heard of except for me, because I drove one,

was the first car manufacturer to ever sell 1,000 cars.

Wow.

It just barely beat out Oldsmobile, which you may know from previous Victoria Scott episodes of, Well, There's Your Problem.

So back then it was called back then it was called Newsmobile.

God, why did I laugh at that?

We sort of operate in a Stockholm syndrome basis.

Sure, do, Nova.

Yeah, so you know, this is like a huge

give us your wallet while we're here.

I will.

Give us your lunch.

You need the three numbers on the back, too.

I can read off my credit card.

Okay, cool.

But so the net effect of this is electric cars are quiet.

They're fast.

They're reliable because there's not much to break on them they've they're high they're they're high status um teddy roosevelt's first motorcade had a columbia in it it was the first motorcade ever to happen in america and he was sitting in a columbia for it uh queen victoria purchased a phaeton carriage for like i don't know uh what is in the notes daughter-in-law alexandra of denmark whoever the hell that is um because they were like alexandra of denmark

To the, like, if you remember the original slide, that advertising for Baker Electric Automobiles, it it was for the Society Woman because these cars could be operated by women.

It doesn't sort of like belch smog directly into your face.

Yeah, it's like it's like proper.

Like you can

literally tear your entire leg off.

It is a vehicle for usage with petticoats.

No engine knocking yet.

Because, well, they haven't, you know, the gasoline cars are all exploding themselves because we haven't invented tetrahedral ethyl lead yet.

The world waits with based breath for Thomas Midgley Jr.

So yeah, to your point.

Doing like instead of Anthropocene, there's a Midgley scene in the middle.

Listen,

for all its faults, it did increase compression ratios.

You do not have to hand it to Netro.

The Midgley scene

zero had some great cars is the thing.

Yeah, so to your point, like Clara Ford cocked Henry and drove a Detroit Electric for like the first several years of the Model T's existence because she thought his cars were too loud and shitty.

It's like fucking Grimes driving a Rivian, you know?

Yes.

Actually, no, it's not.

It's like Grimes driving a fucking like a gasoline, like a petrol engine car.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Audi, BMW.

Geo Metro.

Mitsushi Mirage.

It's like the funniest car to imagine Grimes in a Geo Metro.

No, I think a Mirage is where it's at.

I have one of those.

They suck terrible.

They don't even have the charm of a Geometro.

No, they're not.

They just say, I'm for it.

Elon Musk crying because Grimes is driving away from him with the kids and her Renault Espasse.

I love it.

But I actually want one of those.

Yeah, they actually look for the middle.

Yeah.

Yeah, we can't get the same thing.

They did a racing espasse back in the day.

Excuse me.

I have

thought many

times about it.

I was going to make some sort of masturbation joke, but I decided not to.

Anyway, they're very cool.

They, yeah, they put like a mid-engined F1 motor in it and they put it on top gear when I was like 12.

It was a part of my childhood.

Anyway, so the summary of this is: these are rich people cars.

They're status symbols.

They don't require any labor.

They're silent.

You can act better than everybody else.

Next slide, please.

How much has changed?

Well,

I love this thing.

Yeah,

this one was just one that I found out when I was doing research for this

it was built this is this is the the first car to break 60 miles an hour look at on on that lack of suspension yeah it's it was called leg la jemaille content which is apparently french for the never satisfied it's got leaf springs it's fine

it's made of fucking bricks and wrought iron what the fuck

yeah no it's it was just a big streamliner.

It had a 200-volt drivetrain for 67 horsepower.

Wow.

This thing was absolutely just a Mitsubishi Mirage, then.

Yeah, basically.

Mitsubishi Mirage, but make it phallic is basically the design dock.

It's so dangerous.

I mean, yeah.

It's got a tiller.

I mean,

it looks like you operate it entirely by hand.

This is like a streetcar operating thing.

Yeah, he's a fan of the story.

He's like a motor man.

He's like, his, his one ass cheek is on the sill of the cockpit.

Yeah, I guess.

He's bisexual.

He's piloted by Camille Genazzi, who is a Belgian man who went by Le Diable Rouge because he was ginger and had a red beard.

Yeah, I mean, the funniest thing I found during this is completely unrelated to electric vehicles.

But he died in 1913 when he hid behind a bush while on a hunting party and made animal noises.

And one of his friends shot him thinking he was kind of

actually in a drink.

Sometimes your animal noise impression can be like too good.

They then rushed him to the hospital in a Mercedes and he bled out and died, fulfilling his prophecy that he would die behind the wheel of a Mercedes-Benz.

That is not related to anything else.

I just thought it was funny as hell.

That's charming.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Other famous things.

McKinley's ambulance that took him him to the hospital when he was shot was also electric.

Um, I know this because uh, my roommate won't stop singing Sondheim's Assassins.

Shogos, angry man.

Fuck, it's the it's the best musical is the thing.

She's gonna really love this episode because she tells me the same thing three times a week.

It's the best one.

They should stop.

They should have stopped making musicals after Assassins because it was the best one.

I haven't ever, I've listened to like three musicals.

My parents wouldn't let me listen to musicals as a child because they were afraid it would make me gay.

And apparently, you know.

I did.

I did listen to like one musical and then I did become gay.

So you may have been correct.

I listen to a lot of musicals and I'm straight.

I mean, that's what underexposure does to you.

The man does love a musical.

I mean, maybe you became like habituated, or maybe it's like a sort of like odd-even thing with a switch.

You've seen like a perfectly even number of musicals.

Yeah, exactly.

I think it may have been the part where I was an altar boy.

Oh,

I managed to skip that particular form of animals.

And you're straight.

See?

There you go.

That's proof.

You heard it here first, folks.

Being an altar boy makes you gay.

They really did some science to Big Bill McKinley, though.

Like, they

went to hospital in an electric ambulance, tried to get the bullet out with an x-ray and a fucking metal detector and shit.

None of it worked.

And then he died and became the only U.S.

president.

to date successfully assassinated by anarchists.

Hey, we did a thing.

Yeah, to impress a girl.

Winner number one.

My favorite thing about that whole story is Leon, I don't know how to pronounce his last name.

Ko Gosh.

Thank you.

Was apparently suspected of being a fed the entire time he hung out with anarchists until he shot the president because he was just like, hey guys, you want to go do some anarchy?

You want to go do some federal crimes?

And Emma Goldman is like, ew, gross.

Why are you following me from city to city?

He's like, I know how to win her love.

Shoot the president.

What did McKinley know?

What was he going to do?

Was he going to to normalize relations with the Cubans?

We have no idea.

Some real like deep state shit at work.

Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, that was all for this slide.

Next slide, please.

So we have to discuss.

I know.

This is from the GE historical archives of their electric chargers that they built back in like the teens and 20s.

And, you know, my whole shtick is dressing like it's, you know.

Roughly 1895.

So I was like, this is cool.

This is me.

Good period for a dress.

It was great.

Like, you know, I dress like that half the time in Seattle and like, no one has any drip in the city.

I love it to death, but like, nobody has to dress here.

But I do get a lot of compliments.

So, you know, it counts for something.

I love these chargers, though.

I mean, fucking, I can't even identify half the shit on them, but I love them.

Yeah, they're doohickeys.

So unfortunately, the chargers are kind of what killed them.

So remember how earlier you said we didn't have the gasoline infrastructure and it was an inversion of the modern day thing where we don't have chargers?

Yeah.

Well, so they never like, they built a bunch of gas stations because

they found, they found oil in Texas.

Standards.

Standard oil, Drike's,

Drake's wells.

Yeah.

Okay.

Texas relatively easy to refine, and electrical infrastructure is a disaster show for like a long time.

Yeah, yeah.

You're still like decades out from having like a stable national grid, I'm pretty sure, in like 1915 or whatever.

1915, you have multiple competing electrical companies who have have all built their own wires on their own poles with different, like,

they'll run on like, one will be DC, one will be AC at 25 hertz, one will be AC at 60 hertz, one will be three-phased, and then it's like transformed down.

They're all, there's like a rat's nest of wires on every street.

You have to buy different appliances and different electrical bulbs and systems based on what electrical company you're hooked up to.

And these things are are appearing and disappearing like every year.

So one day your electrical company goes bust.

If you want to get a hookup with a new one, guess what?

You're going to have to buy all of your fucking appliances brand new again.

I hate when I have to get my like Westinghouse gaming computer.

Yes.

Yeah.

So and this is this is added to the fact that there's absolutely no saturation outside of the cities.

So what happened was if you lived in a big coastal city and you had a house that you owned and could have all these hookups, you could charge your car at home.

Or

in certain areas, like GE put these things called electrants.

They were electricity hydrants.

I like that.

We should go back to that name.

They would mount them on the street.

You could pull your EV up and park next to it and you could charge it, like in the modern day.

The problem is that, you know, as soon as you leave the city, you're basically screwed.

You can't recharge this thing.

And, you know, nobody's got power to fill it back up.

And so you've got a 900-pound horseless carriage that you

have to push 40 miles back to New York City or whatever.

So that sucks.

That's number one.

The other thing is, if you don't have a hookup, the way that they were solving this for people was, here, put a gasoline engine in your garage.

Generator technology in 1902 was not fantastic.

I don't know if you know that.

For a second, I thought you were going to say put it in the car.

And I was like, how early was a hybrid invented?

That is a, it was earlier than I think it is, but I don't know the answer off the top of my head.

I'm ashamed of myself.

See, I I just brought you on to shame you.

Well, you should do that.

That's my thing.

You had hit and miss engines as early as the 1880s, I want to say.

The Loner Porsche Mixt, yeah.

First hybrid.

That was like, what year is this Department of Energy?

It was 18 something.

I wasn't expecting it to start with an 18 is the main thing.

Yeah, you got the big, the big, really, the big old-fashioned gasoline engines that took up like a room, had a massive flywheel, generated like two horsepower and an infinite amount of torque.

Yeah, the Department of Energy says 1899, Porsche themselves says 1900.

And Ferdinand Porsche did actually design the first electric or first hybrid car.

So.

Still in hell, though.

Oh,

undoubtedly.

Yeah, so you know, this stuff is all way earlier than we think it is, is the, is kind of the crucial takeaway.

So the other, the other, and here's, and all of the problems are the exact same.

In 1900, they debuted the Electron at the Madison Square Garden auto show.

This is like a huge deal because cars are new and exciting.

It could only charge about half the EVs at the show because the connectors were all different.

It's nice to know that it's still the same fucking problems.

Yeah,

we have the Chetemo, we have

the CCS charger, which are different between Europe and America for the record.

Of course.

We have NAX.

We have what is the other one I'm thinking of?

There's one more.

Tesla charges.

100 years.

No, NAX is the Tesla charger.

Oh, I see.

100 fucking years.

And we still have not surmounted one infrastructural problem here.

No.

No, no.

You need one standard that's good for everything.

Then you just have one more standard.

To paraphrase XKCD.

The only answer here, electric vehicle Stalin.

I volunteer for that role.

I could do it.

Secretary Butajej, if you want to fucking take the energy that you use to like kill dogs in secret and channel that into rationalizing America's electrical infrastructure, now would be the fucking time.

He needs to take a cool name to be Electric Vehicle Stalin.

He needs to be like, what are they making in South Africa?

Showy Electron or something.

I mean, fucking Master's Theses, mostly.

Yeah, I was about to say.

He can't be man of steel because that's.

Yeah, you have to be man of electricity.

Maybe he could like bring back an ancient name, the name of Westinghouse.

He could, uh, oh, you could still buy a shitty licensed microwave with Westinghouse on it.

Really?

Fucking America never lets anything die, does it?

Nope.

Westinghouse doesn't meaningfully exist anymore.

No, it's all that's just licensed out.

Yeah, another company that committed much like Boink.

I get seated on the Westinghouse electric chair and the fucking arms fall off

outside a whistleblower.

Well, we know for one he didn't use the electric chair.

Yeah, no, that that so that's all the same.

Uh, the other thing that happened, too, that and this is crucial because this is very different than the modern day, obviously.

Um, batteries never got cheaper, and gasoline cars did.

So, in in 1908, that that doohickey carriage I drove for the review cost about $50,000 in today's money.

Um, a Model T, when it debuted in 1908, cost about $27,000 and it had a windshield, which had a steering wheel.

So this is like, it's already more advanced.

By 1923, the Model T was in its own case.

So the windshield has a steering wheel.

It comes with a free anti-Semitic pamphlet.

With way too much wait time in like 1908, you want your anti-Semitic pamphlet.

Doesn't it have like two speeds?

Like you, you can go slow or you can go 40 miles an hour and there's nothing in between.

I can't remember if it had two or three.

I've driven one once, but it was a really long time ago.

And you like shift with your clutch is on your hand or something.

It's really weird driving one.

It's not at all.

It's like they hadn't figured out.

They hadn't really figured out where to put all the pedals and stuff yet.

So it's just kind of, I don't remember how many speeds it had because the main emotion I remember is terror.

As a driver with terrible clutch control, the hand clutch is kind of selling me, to be honest.

I just wanted to

keep Nova.

I just noticed.

I was trying.

Both of these machines have faces.

The eyes.

It's true.

So happy to see you.

Eyes.

Pareidolia.

Yeah.

Did you plug the thing into his little mouth?

No, the oh, hello, Bert.

Speaking of little guys.

Sorry, my cat is here.

Oh, hi, Bert.

Guest star, Bert pronouns he, him.

Bert, do you want to meow into the microphone?

Nope, he's quiet.

All right.

You had your chance.

You could have been famous.

Yeah, but in any case, like, but by the 20s, like, it's Model T.

You can buy for an inflation-adjusted $5,400.

That is how that is how cheap these things were.

And EVs still cost $60,000.

Yeah, because they're still like hand-building all of these things, and like

they're hand-building, and they're also, you know, like lead-asset battery tech didn't come down as cheap as they wanted it to, as fast as they wanted it to, um, etc.

But yeah, like Ford's assembly line did help with a lot of this.

So, um, anyway, hopefully, none of this sounds familiar at all.

Um, and and and and then and then the the oil.

The oil.

Oh, yeah.

So, next slide, please.

So, this pathetic I'm commuter car.

I save energy.

I'm electric.

I reduce pollution.

I love this.

I love this.

I swear I have seen this thing compete on Robot Wars.

Yeah, so this pathetic thing was the best-selling electric car from 1945 until 2013.

Jesus.

They sold 4,444 of these across two different brands because one of the companies gave up midway through.

And the half of those were like USPS delivery vans.

They did a limited experiment.

And this is in the 70s when the fuel crisis, the oil crisis happened, and everybody was kind of like, well, we need to do something.

And nobody could think of what to do.

And then you get the Olds Diesel episode.

This is what the other people were trying at the same time.

GM also tried doing a thing called the

Elekvet or Electrovet at the same time, which was an electric converted Chevette.

They built like one and were like, this sucks and gave up.

We're going home.

Yeah.

They were like, let's build a diesel motor that explodes every 20 miles instead.

We just didn't have like good battery technology until like a few years from now.

Yeah, I mean, that was the like GM had the, what was it, the EV1?

Have I got some thoughts on that?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So

no one tries actually making money off of EVs again until about 2007.

But next slide, please.

This is, I guess, the closest we get to like a true, godforsaken, environmental disaster.

So in cars.

Yeah, someone was selling one of these on cars and bids the other day, the Gen 1 RAV4 with the

RAV4.

This is the RAV4 EV, the Honda EV Plus, and the GM EV1.

I love the EV1.

This looks like a kind of like squirt of ketchup.

Everyone likes the EV1.

I think that it's a cool looking car.

It looks like the future in 1990.

Yeah.

The same kind of like contours as like Oakley sunglasses.

Well, and it was also like, it had like magnesium wheels on it and magnesium seat frames.

It had a coefficient of drag of 0.19.

Like this thing was so goddamn advanced for the era in terms of like every aspect of its design.

And they're adorable.

I've seen one in person.

They're also much smaller than you think they are.

Like imagine Miata.

Huh.

Like, first-gen Miata.

So, pop-ups.

Um, but yeah, so all of these cars exist because in 1990, the California Air Resources Board decided that they would, that 10% of new cars sold in the state of California had to be EVs by 2003.

Um, and auto manufacturers were like,

okay, that technology does not exist yet.

Yeah, they're doing the they're doing the like bottom fingers pointing together emoji where they're kind of like,

maybe, maybe, we can try.

Is that is that that the noise that bossoms make?

Generally speaking, for me, yes.

The problem here is that like, nobody really wants to invest a ton of money into this because they're instead going to just lobby the California government to give up.

It's cool how like regulation without enforcement drives innovation, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, so like the

company mandate for you.

Most companies do the easy way out.

They take like the Ford Ranger EV.

If you've ever been to like a

mid-tier Midwestern school, you've probably seen one.

They had a ton of them as work trucks at Kent State where I went to school.

They're just like lead-acid battery rangers that get like 12 miles of range, and they sold them entirely as fleet trucks.

They made like a hundred.

They made a couple thousand or something.

Then you had like the RAV4 EV, which was an existing car, it was a higher effort attempt.

And you had like the EV Plus and the Nissan Ultra that were Japanese spec cars brought to the US and then converted to electric specifically just to meet these carb requirements.

The interesting part about all of these is that they all used,

most of the important ones used nickel-metal hydride batteries,

which was not as powerful.

It's not as powerful as modern lithium-ion, but it is.

It's safe, sort of.

It charges slowly.

It discharges slow.

Everybody loves it apart from when you need to use it for an application like cars.

Well, and they're, they're not, yeah, they're non-toxic.

They're pretty easy to manufacture.

They, they're heavy, but you know, you know, the RAV4 EV got somewhere around like 104, it was upgraded for 140 miles of range.

Um, the EV1 initially used lead-acid batteries, which was part of why it got really bad initial reviews.

But the second gen, they used, um, they used nickel metal hydride, and those were well over 100 miles of range in like this tiny little coop.

Introduce you to the chemical element lithium.

And the thing thing about the element lithium in a battery is it wants to kill you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So like nobody's really doing much with that.

There was a way to make this work if we were moving towards lighter cars, which obviously we didn't do.

Well, it gets better.

Yeah.

Well, they made us more sick.

All right.

So this is a bunch of crushed EV1s because GM destroyed virtually all of them.

These beautiful, ugly bumpers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think they rated these as like $35,000 a pop, and they still would have lost money if they actually sold them.

But they didn't sell any of them.

They leased them to people, took them back at the end.

Somehow, Francis Ford Coppola still has his.

He showed this off in an Instagram thing or something like a couple of years ago.

And everybody was like, what the fuck, man?

Yeah, you had to hide it in a barn or something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You had to like, you had to evade the GM police.

And they have, they, they, they are scared.

GM has shooters.

Yeah.

GM's as bad as Boeing.

Well, worse than Boeing because like when they decompress you, they do it on purpose.

So, so the story with the EV-1 is, you know, GM had bought a really leading nickel-metal hydride battery developer, used them to build the EV-1,

lobbied the California government.

They were like, nobody's going to buy these.

They did a bunch of internal research that was like, we'd have to give people $7,000 to take these, which every other study that was conducted disagreed with.

Consumer demand was totally there.

There were like actual waiting lists for this car.

But they were like, all right, we're done.

So in 2003, they wipe their hands of it.

They crush all these cars.

Incidentally, around this time, they sell the company that owns the patent for nickel metal hydride-powered cars to Texaco.

That's bought by Chevron.

That's really, that's what a huge coincidence.

At this time, Toyota is still making RAV4s, the RAV4 EV, with nickel metal hydride batteries.

People still love them.

I've actually seen them driving, like on the streets of LA.

People just drive them around.

There's not a ton of them in existence, but like they don't don't degrade very much when they're in a really good climate.

So they're still out there running around.

Not too many parts to break down, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, if you're driving like 70 miles a day or less, they're completely fine.

You know, they, they, they charge overnight.

You have got a usable car.

Um, anyway, Chevron sues them to stop building these.

Yeah,

they do the stone custards thing.

They try to kill the electric car.

Yeah.

So this is, there's a documentary about this.

It's called like who killed the electric car.

It's a little like, it's partially that I think automakers didn't want to build it.

California kind of gave up on this at the same time.

I will say it's worth noting that nobody ever figured out a way to build nickel metal hydride battery cars without infringing on the patent.

So no one ever did.

Toyota still used nickel metal hydride batteries in hybrids, which weren't covered by the patent until 2022.

So the Prius used those without problem for basically its entire existence until the most recent generation.

So the tech is clearly usable,

but no one could figure out how to do it without getting sued.

Yeah, no, Chevron.

There's one patent to it, which is owned by an oil company.

Cool.

Chevron did renew the patent twice until 2019.

So they did actually find it worthwhile to pay the fees to keep the patent live until 2019 and then they let it lapse because at that point, you know, lithium exists.

So, yeah, I mean, did they do anything untoward?

Legally, I can't say.

However, Chevron earned $21.3 billion last year.

It's just a series of interesting coincidences.

Exactly.

On a warming planet.

Just happened to be an oil company and we just happened to own the battery patent.

But rest assured,

we put $450,000 into green energy initiatives last year.

Their CEOs even sometimes fly as commercial.

commercial.

Wow.

You should fly in a Boeing.

No, no, no.

The problem is most of the Boeings in the air right now are still good.

Yeah, so that's kind of, you know, that's...

Nickel metal hydride would have been replaced anyway in short order by next slide, please.

The element that wants to kill you.

Oh, the IMEV, right?

Yep, this is the first mass-market lithium-ion battery car.

So cute.

So happy to see you.

I want to pet it.

It is a little guy.

It's a little guy full of the chemical that wants to kill you and also helps stabilize your mood disorder.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's actually a K-car from Japan.

They just put batteries in it.

They had already, there's actually, there's like a different version in Japan that's like, you know, not electric.

And they were just like, oh, we got this thing.

Cool.

So it's adorable.

These had...

not much range in them.

But they were a mass market lithium-ion battery car.

This was like a huge moment where you were like, oh, you could sell these people and they won't immediately like self-immolate in somebody's garage.

Yeah.

And people like them because lithium batteries charge fast, discharge fast, and are

sort of safe.

Yeah.

So these are good lithium-ion batteries, like the highest performance ones we've got on the market, are roughly four to five times more power dense than nickel metal hydride.

So you can fit a lot more power per kilogram into these.

And, you know, you can, they are, they're easier to put together into high voltage setups.

So you can get more efficiency when you're charging.

So you get faster charging speeds.

You get less, there's less resistance.

It's less dangerous than

the other thing that people were looking at was hydrogen.

Do not

do not do this.

But all the same.

Hydrogen has a lot more problems than just being dangerous.

So we already will still sell you a new hydrogen car, too.

No shit.

You can go buy a Mirai.

what you don't want to do is you don't want to um

overcharge puncture or set on fire your lithium battery because if if you do do those things then you have uh fire which is very difficult to impossible to put out yeah so speaking of which next slide please yeah

one of these things killed a billionaire recently yes

well it had it had the it had the sort of like it had the inverse bowing problem where the the door wouldn't fall off.

The door would not fall off.

Door fall off, Mr.

Bob.

The doors on Teslas are notoriously difficult to open if there's some kind of power failure.

In fact, there's some where you straight up cannot open the doors if there is a power failure.

Yeah, the guidance says you've got to like rip out some panels and like fucking pull some wires by yourself.

And then some of them are just like, well, die.

Yeah.

I think hers was a Model X.

It means she had to pull off a speaker grille and reach for an unmarked cable.

One of them is like that in case of power failure, but also like you're it's it was like midnight in a bog in Texas.

Googling this in bog water, just like

yeah, have you ever watched the Mythbusters episode where they submerge a car with Adam Savage inside of it?

Yeah,

it's the most terrifying thing I've ever seen in my life.

Holy shit.

It's like up there with that and they have buried Adam Savage alive in a coffin.

I think I would rather be buried alive than what the fuck did Adam Savage do to get like fucking seer school happening to him

on TV?

He volunteered.

He's friends with Jamie.

Yeah.

Not even friends, just co-workers.

You achieve a grudging respect from Jamie Heineman.

He's going to try and bury you alive.

So just keep it fresh, you know.

Yeah, that seems terrifying.

So yeah, can you imagine doing that in a car whose door handles don't work if the power goes out?

I don't work.

Frantically, you have to be Zen for like two minutes until the car hits the bottom and the water pressure equalizes inside the cabin.

And then the door doesn't open anyway.

And then after that, you have to go on your phone brackets underwater, find which speaker grille to pull off and which unmarked

wire to pull.

Yeah.

And the whole reason it happened for what it's worth is because these things are driven by a touch screen.

And so she shifted into, I think it was drive instead of reverse and drove into the pond because she tapped the wrong thing on the screen that dictates which direction the car goes.

Why is that on the screen?

I'm not good at gear changes with

a stick yet, but I would rather wrestle with that than suck up with an iPad and die in a bog.

I would never set foot in a Tesla.

I never have and I never will.

I rode in the back of a Model X once and it was kind of, I don't know.

I've been in the Ubers before and I've been like,

I don't want I'm always terrified.

I'll be drunk and someone will like call an Uber for me and it'll show up and it'll be in Tesla.

And I would be like, I'm being

belligerent, but for a different reason than you think.

Yeah, so this is already a good intro to Tesla tech.

So the other thing too about, you know, remember how you said that you can't puncture those batteries because they'll kill you?

Yeah.

The original, so

the Roadster, the first car the Tesla built was the Roadster in 2008.

It was a, basically a nice Lotus-based kit car.

It was fairly high performance.

It was fairly expensive.

It was a toy for rich people, and it sold pretty well as a toy for rich people.

That was before Elon Musk was involved with the company.

No, he was involved at that point.

Oh, okay.

It was, I don't know if he was, I don't know if he had sued to be successfully called a co-founder yet, but he did sue and was considered one of the.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, so yeah.

So he they built the Roadster.

They turned that funding into the S, which is the car you see here.

It is a luxury sedan.

Um the thing is, like, Nitsa ended up investigating these because they didn't really have enough battery shielding on them, which they had later had to fix.

Um, as of the most recent count, and it is very difficult to find exact counts, uh, somewhere between 40 and 60 people appear to have died in fires related to Teslas.

Neat.

Uh, if you're curious, this is over,

you know, roughly the same number of Ford Pintos sold, which killed 27 people.

We've, we, as a society, have become much more tolerant of people dying in fires, I guess.

Yeah, well, because, like, you know, the car is cool.

It's a status symbol for rich people.

And, like, that is that means it's good.

Just so long as it doesn't take me in the back seat with them when I'm drunk and getting an Uber.

Like,

the deeply, the deeply frustrating part about Teslas is that, like, the batteries are actually pretty good.

Like, the battery tech is Panasonic built a lot of them.

Their newest ones are like 300 watt-hours a kilogram, which is absolutely insane.

They don't release like their exact spending, but it appears that they spend about 20% less on them than most other car companies.

So they've just figured out like the infinite money glitch with these things.

They're really good.

It's just that the rest of the car around it is generally low quality.

Overseen by a racist child.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean,

and probably a pet.

We should just throw that in there.

Yeah.

Yeah, by all means.

We're already demonetized.

He's wow.

Take a Boeing flight, seek Canadian healthcare.

What do you want me to tell you?

Oh, my God.

Jesus.

I work for an automotive.

Canadian healthcare suggests you take another Boeing flight.

If my boss listens to this, I'm not saying any of this.

I hope to God my boss doesn't listen to this.

Yeah, so, you know, it's that's that that's that the thing is, is that like, you know, the Nissan Leaf was the best-selling EV up until about 2018, at which point then like the Model 3 came out and just obliterated every electric car sales record in history.

It's worth noting.

Next slide, please.

Tesla took a very long time to.

I see a note here.

Yeah, yeah.

The thing is, I've only had one gin and tonic.

So

I'm not, I can't ruin my career yet.

You're a coward.

Oh my God.

No, I worked pretty hard for this career.

I like it.

So

it took them a long time to actually make money building electric cars.

Their valuation has always been insane because they're a tech company that happens to build cars as a product.

But a lot of how they did well in the early survival stages was very intelligent use of loopholes.

Put it like that.

That shouldn't get me sued and should allow me to keep my job.

Lots of subsidies.

Yeah.

So, for example, this diagram here here is of a hypothetical model s battery swap station so there is this they've been trying this for a bunch of different manufacturers right free vehicles and stuff you don't have to waste time charging you just take the whole battery pack off replace it with a charged one as a system as a system this makes a lot of sense to me this seems like the way you should do it yeah yeah right so and tesla was going to build these i think they built one of like a car wash in fremont uh in california it was supposed to be like a battery quick swap station where they would basically they'd take your old battery they'd give you a new new fully charged one for the price of you know like a full tank of premium gas basically and then you'd be off on your merry way you had the chance to go get your original battery pack back later um they ran this as a pilot program and they like never happened to do this i mean there's there's very little evidence that any owners actually wanted it and there's very there's even less evidence that uh

they really tried to publicize it they basically had it was harris ranch that's where it was at it was just a demo station and it was open for um

a little little over a year.

The thing that happens to be the case with this is Carb had recently announced that you would get almost double the carbon tax credits if you had an EV that could go to a full state of charge in some absurdly low amount of time, like 20 minutes or something.

Driving innovation again.

Yeah, which the superchargers could not do at this point, but the battery swaps could.

So all they had to do was demonstrate that they had the capability to do this.

And then all of a sudden, they basically are making, you know, thousands of dollars more in carbon credits,

which it happens is very lucrative.

They made $1.8 billion in carbon credit sales last year.

Jesus.

They have so far made $9 billion off of that.

And what they do is basically it's just how the EPA decided to,

it's basically like,

what is the word for those things that Catholics do?

An indulgence.

Indulgence.

Thank you.

Yes.

Thank you.

It's basically like, you know.

I almost said child abuse.

We've already discussed that.

Yeah.

So

basically

they take these carbon credits they get for selling zero emissions vehicles and they sell them on the open market at, you know, whatever value as offsets for.

companies that don't make enough EVs.

So like, you know, Stellantis, Dodge specifically

has been largely allergic to EVs its whole life because what they have to do is build like Dodge challengers for

they have to build the challenge

you have to build a Ram with like huge stacks no Ram got spun off man oh it's fun now really no Ram is still Solantis though right yeah yeah yeah

they have to build the like chud vehicle yes yeah yeah and the chud vehicle does not get carbon tax yeah

have you considered that i want a durango hellcat it's it's it's legal to enjoy chud things i want to take that position i want a durango hellcat

I mean, while we're asking for cameras, I want a Fujika GW690.

Please and thank you.

The Texas Leica, because it's big.

I think a Leica.

What do we call it?

Seriously.

I was thinking about that.

It's a medium format rangefinder and it just looks like a Leica, but it's just like 60% bigger in every dimension.

They're gorgeous.

I have, I have, because I have insane friends, I have like seven pro packs worth of fridge-stored like 90s Kodak film, like Vericolor 3, sitting in my fridge right now that is calling to me to be put into an actually nice camera.

Uh,

later, we can do that later.

Yeah, we'll saw this, okay.

All right, if you insist.

Uh,

anywho,

I'm doing some like Caucasian-style bride kidnapping.

We're supposed to do that.

Can I get this Gen 1 Viper, or am I not going to get it?

Because I need to know.

Ask the patrons, yeah, they're actually not that expensive.

You can get one for like 30 grand.

I know what I can do, Victoria.

The problem is I'm married to my sweet and wonderful wife who doesn't want me to.

She keeps track of your increments of 30 grand and therefore

is going to notice if 30 grand is missing.

First of all, that you have 30 grand.

Second of all, that it is now missing from your account.

Suddenly a Gen 1 Viper has appeared.

Yeah, and also outside you making the loudest noise heard by anyone in that lot.

Presumably she also loves Liam and doesn't want him to buy a $30,000 euthanasia pod and side pipes.

Give me the pod.

Give me the euthanasia pod.

You have bought.

I am an American and I have the right to kill off of a Gen 1 Viper.

Yeah, you have bought four wheels and a Canadian palliative care doctor clinging to each one.

If you want to do that, you may as well buy a motorcycle, you know?

Not allowed to buy one of those, so Gen 1 Viper it is.

Why?

What?

Why aren't you allowed to buy a motor?

Is Is this like a Corinne thing or is this like...

This is a Corinne thing.

Okay, I thought it might be like you had like a felony or something.

Oh, no.

Don't worry about that.

Do you think they stop you from getting a motorcycle in America if you have a felony?

They give you one.

Join this outlaw biker gang.

There's a conditional percentage to two wheels.

What if you have like, what if you join a biker gang, an outlaw biker gang, but you have like a middling like felony, like littering or something, you know

he's getting the like one percent patch sewn on your like leather vest for

an 1100 horsepower dodge viper oh

how much hey liam i like you don't do that even if you had the money just like don't do you know what's fun about those cars do you know what's fun about those cars there is only like one company that makes the rear tires for it because they're like this weird fuck off size for those tri-spoke wheels.

And they're like $2,000 a pair.

So what happens is no one ever replaces the tires.

Yeah.

No one ever replaces the tires.

They get dry rotted and old because they're putting so few miles on their like pride and joy.

And then they stab the gas once and they drive themselves into a palm tree and ignite.

Don't worry.

I won't do that.

Patrons, please.

I need this gentleman viper.

It's actually Ched 2, I think.

Who gives a shit?

All right.

Hang on.

I'm clicking this link really fast.

Sorry to get off topic.

This is the about the opposite of an EVs.

Oh my fucking God, that's hot.

Right.

Yeah.

Look at it.

Jesus.

Oh, I know a guy in Houston who has a like track prepped 99 Viper, just like this white stripes on it.

And it is one of the hottest things I have ever sat in.

Just like, I like, oh, cars don't really attract women.

But this car would attract this woman.

I will tell you that.

Just the closer you get to a kind of Hot Wheels car, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, and you know, I'm easily swayed by things that look like phalluses.

So

anyway, you should actually get that, Liam.

I endorse it.

Thank you.

Yeah.

The official auto-journalist opinion is Buy That Viper.

Not right now.

We have a podcast to record, please.

Anyway, you're typing.

If you're putting money into like fucking escrow or something,

worry about yourself.

He's selling a bunch of dogecoin.

Honey, we have to liquidate the dogecoin.

I found a Viper GTS.

A sentence that has probably been actually said.

Oh, I'm certain.

Quite possibly like one day before the person who said it died.

This is one near me.

This is a music.

85k is too much for a first shit.

I know.

I know.

This is 3,000 miles.

You're going to have to replace every seal.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm scared.

This could and probably should be a stream at some point.

I'm so sorry.

I'm so sorry.

I was showing a Dodge Viper.

I'm very sorry.

Yes.

Very straightforward.

Stimulus reaction.

Hi, it's Justin.

So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point.

We have this thing called Patreon, right?

The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month.

Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks.

You get what you pay for.

It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them.

The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two two bucks to spare each month.

Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod.

Do it if you want.

Or don't.

It's your decision and we respect that.

Back to the show.

Anyway, Tesla, the complete opposite of a Dodge Viper.

In that it sucks.

It will still kill you.

No, it sure will, but the whole thing is not in a fun way.

Yeah, I mean, you know, no, it's

an embarrassing way.

Put it on your tombstone.

Like, oh, I did a burnout and my car exploded.

And, you know,

a bunch of school children said it and were started cheering versus I backed into a pond.

The virgin pond billionaire versus the Chad Hoon.

Yeah.

So, I mean, the bigger thing about Tesla is to understand is that, like, the whole reason, and I think this is like, people need to just realize this is like the cars themselves do have some redeeming qualities.

The big problem is that, like, so much of the hype around Tesla is what makes them insane.

Like, I think it was Goldman Sachs or something valued full self-driving, which is a technology that does not exist and is a beta and should not be on public roads.

It's just not real.

It's like worth $75 billion.

And it's like, well, yeah, I mean, sure.

Like, if you could invent a car that self-drove and it could be an automatic taxi cab and it could rent itself out to people, I'm sure it would be worth a lot of money.

But like, it doesn't exist.

And self-driving cars are their own whole problem.

And the fact that those have become linked with EVs is upsetting because what we're doing is we're setting up a similar set of problems that we had a hundred years ago.

Next slide, please.

I am assuming you're familiar with Big Bill Hell's.

Shove it up, your ugly ass.

That's right.

Shove it up your ugly ass.

Bring your trade, bring your wife.

Will fuck her.

That's right.

Will fuck your wife.

Foundational to my sense of humor.

The problem, the one thing that Tesla did get right is that they do direct sales.

Because the thing is, is that it turns out that like car dealerships do not want

car dealerships don't want to sell you EVs like at all.

They have zero interest.

Car dealers are the scum on the bog in which all of us are like watching a billionaire pilot their EV.

Yes.

Car dealers are the base of the Republican Party.

Car dealers are America's petty bourgeois.

Yep, yep.

Listen to Trash Shutshu about that with Pat Wyman.

Car dealers are like, you know, a lot of these people are.

multi-millionaires like small multi-millionaires but multi-millionaires and you know they they basically control like the whole town they live in.

They own free dealerships.

Every person who owns a car dealership was at January 6th and is Hitler.

Every single car dealer is Hitler.

If they had just done like a sort of drone strike double tap on the Capitol, to like, if Nancy Pelosi had like called in an airstrike on her own position, you would not be able to buy a car in America for like a week afterwards.

More than a week?

I mean, no no one left.

You would have killed the car dealers and their children.

You would have killed the tractor dealers, too.

And then, you know what would happen?

People would be able to repair their John Deere tractors on their own.

This is a classic win-win.

You know, going back in the time machine to the like Capitol tunnels on January 6th to be like, Speaker Pelosi, you can change the course of history for the better.

Call the air strike.

Call the F-35s.

We need to launch the nuclear missiles.

Today is the day we nuke Washington, D.C.

for the good of the nation.

Make it a small one, no, just a little one, so we don't get like the

places where people live.

Yeah.

Washington, D.C.

looks like Fallout 3.

Rest of the country is fine.

Listen, if

every if if you have lived in Washington, D.C., you know that everyone in Washington, D.C.

who actually lives there, if the actual capital district were vaporized one day, everyone would feel much better the following day.

Yep.

It's just at that point, Washington, D.C.

is just a nice mid-sized city.

Yes.

Maybe Georgetown, too.

Georgetown's part of D.C.

Wipe it off the face of the planet.

You're going to get a metro station in my America, motherfuckers.

I'm just thinking like.

Can we nominate liam for for climate stalin

i think so oh i think you do step one doing a job at it he'll get drunk with power he'll be doing like sick burnouts in the viper but

do as i say not as i say viper in every driveway step one airstrikes on the national mall

listen a viper in every driveway if biden wants to win

two steps end the genocide viper in every driveway

yeah you got my fucking vote man yeah i'll fucking fundraise for you if i get the viper in every driveway

well they've got the the dodge just came out with the the ev charger yes i saw um it makes it makes uh

weird noises to simulate having a rumble and a v8

because it's essentially a large toy car cool for for men who are still 13 mentally hey

but it does kind of look cool which is the thing that i really hate to admit about it like i was looking at it i was like i really really want to hate this but it's kind of it's got like a little front wing thing.

Anyway, I like that.

One of the, one of the smartest things American cops ever did, one of the few smart things, was corner the market and dodge chargers to be like, this is the cop car now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It looks like

Seattle Peel East Drive Explorers that look like they were like ripped from a fascist video game.

They have like genuinely the most fascist ass

cop livery design of all time.

The cop SUV moment has been a real decline for me.

Bring back the sedans.

Yeah, you can carry more stuff.

Yeah, you need to carry more stuff.

But like, the aesthetics, come on.

I like the.

I also live like, I also, oh, sorry.

I like the Challenger better.

I mean, that's objectively.

It is the fascist car, but I just think it looks better.

American cops drive Crown Victorias.

Never should have stopped.

Yeah, Crown Vics are like, they were cool.

I mean,

Caprice PPV.

Oh, Caprices.

Oh, moi.

Delicious.

You know, they brought those back in like 2013, right?

Yeah, yeah.

No one bought them.

But like my uh they didn't sell them to civilians.

Yeah, they didn't sell them to civilians in the stage.

They were rematched like Commodores or something.

But like the Ford you can buy now if you were a cop is like a Taurus, which or like

Explorer.

And it just.

You can also get a cop Ford Mustang mock-e if you would like your

if you would like your fascists to be environmentally friendly.

New York has like a bajillion of them.

Make me in charge of the cops when you're climate style and I will unify their aesthetic into something interesting.

Oh, we can have Italian cops everywhere.

That concerns me, Nova.

Don't worry about it.

And also don't worry about why all the cops have to be women and why they have to be like minimum six foot.

This is normal.

Doing a little Italian futurism, are we?

Just a little bit, yeah.

Bringing the curry boneri to America.

Whatever you're doing.

Yeah, yeah.

It's just being a a cop in like Seattle, and you have to wear like a dress cape and a sword.

Well, the thing is, I live like very close to the police station that got overrun during the

protests in 2020.

It was like right.

I live near the Chaz, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, if you remember that.

Oh, one of the few times I've been owned on Twitter.

Yeah, I recall.

So, like, I remember

like there was, there's like footage of it wherever I moved here.

I was like, oh, yeah, I recognize that place.

But there's like always 58 of these explorers parked outside, and I never see a cop standing outside at all.

They always are in their cars or driving into the garage.

I think they're literally afraid that they will catch gay

from us.

Social alienation is so sad.

Yeah.

Anyway, EVs.

The problem is car dealerships.

They're fascist.

They can't sell extended warranties.

They can't sell catalytic converter etching.

Although I have actually seen some very funny images of window stickers for like Ford F-150 Lightnings.

which are fully electric and do not have catalytic converters with like an option for $500 in the window for catalytic converter etching, uh, where they put a serial number in it.

So if somebody steals it, theoretically, you could, I don't know, track down the thief that did it and go Liam Neeson taken on his ass.

I don't know.

It's a kind of like mime car part thief.

This is this is a big issue with electric cars when you're your entire business model is based on, you know, both selling the car and then doing long-term maintenance on it.

Is that the electric motor is so simple and so reliable that you know you can't you know do all of this maintenance, which is associated from having an engine that has 4,000 explosions a minute in it.

You know, we might have, we might lose the ability to sustain this kind of American do-nothing gentry and replace them with like, I don't know, podcasters or something.

Yeah.

That's us.

Yeah.

But so that the other problem also here is that they are not selling great at the moment.

All of us and all of our children will be at like future left-wing equivalent January 6th.

This is why we store the car dealerships and see how they like it it and take our genuine viper that we are entitled to that are our birthrights.

That's when we all we all storm Langley.

It was when we storm the Capitol after Trump wins and we go start the steal.

Anyway, so like right now, so the other picture here next to shove it up your ugly ass

is the Blazer EV, which is GM's very important first like Ultium platform.

It's their new.

This is supposed to define the future of EVs.

Raising hand, raising hand.

Why does it have the fat ass

that it has?

Very fat.

Because it is, because in every meaningful metric, it is larger than every other mid-sized electric SUV.

Gotcha.

So they just, they were like, hmm, on paper, this is three inches wider.

It's, we're getting to the point where like these things are big enough that we're close to needing marker lights on them because they're

overwide.

This is

a nice banner on every single car.

You got to have a pickup truck following you with lights on it.

That's the niche the Lightning is positioned for.

But so, you know, these were a very important launch.

They have like an all-new infotainment system.

Several reviewers, including myself, have gotten these and had

the entire car crash.

Not in terms of into a wall, but all of the software dies.

The first reviewer vehicle I had for this on the first drive to test it for my job, the entire operating system crashed and got stuck in a boot loop and they had to give me a different SUV.

This happened to Edmonds and also one of my coworkers at my current job.

While he was on a road trip, notably, he was like stuck in rural Virginia without a car because it just died on him when it was trying to charge.

So

this is not helping sales.

This is not, there are, there are kind of, it's not just Tesla that is having like teething pains, so to speak.

This is kind of, there's a lot of pretty big products that are, this is happening to right now.

And people are also tired of paying, they've sold everything that they can to people who have $60,000 to spend on SUVs.

And so, right now, at the end of 2023, rather,

there was like a 114-day supply of EVs across the industry, which is a ton.

That is months of supply just sitting up, sitting on dealership parking lots, taking up space, not earning commission for people.

You know, this is, it's catastrophic as far as like actually making these a feasible strategy.

And next slide, please.

So, this is

this is the engineering disaster that is capitalism, um, which I know this is a new twist for the show.

I apologize for bringing that in now.

Yeah, we're about to radicalize everybody into like Antifa Gen sect, yeah, yeah,

yeah.

So, so the graph here that I have, which starts at around $800

and is kind of leveled out around $140,

is price in $2023 dollars per kilowatt hour for lithium-ion batteries.

The thing is, is that batteries were supposed to break below this magical price of $100 per kilowatt hour, and they have not.

They have been steadily leveling off and barring like some incredible improvement in battery technology or solid state batteries, this is not getting cheaper.

That one fucking like Russian girl who claimed to have invented the like room temperature superconductor fucked us on this one.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know if you're familiar with Russia, speaking of which, do you know what they have a lot of there?

Rare earths.

Yes.

Which you need to build batteries.

Yes.

I will speak on that a bit later in the podcast.

That's fair.

But yeah, so like all of the materials that are required to build batteries are hard to get.

Hard and often unethical to get.

Oh, extremely.

I didn't even, I literally was like, okay,

we're at slide 16.

I probably should talk about a limited number of things.

And I stuck to the space I know the best.

But there are serious environmental issues with EVs.

And there has been research done that shows.

Slash up the Elon Musk.

We will coup whoever we want tweet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not just lithium, mind you.

Like all of these rare earths.

Fucking niobium and like coal tan and shit.

Cobalt.

Yeah.

There's a huge amount of like exploitation behind all of these.

It's super cool that the internet is now broken and I cannot find the stories that my coworkers wrote.

Ideal.

Yeah, that I remember reading that I was going to cite from.

In any case, we're running into the problem of, you know, these are the economies of scale we were hoping for have not worked out.

And we keep building these enormous, enormous EVs that are very expensive, such as the Hummer EV.

which weighs 9,000 pounds.

It's going to collapse every parking garage.

The battery pack in the Hummer EV weighs more than my last car did.

It is 2,800 pounds.

I had a 1989 Camry that weighed like 2,700 pounds.

So, you know, it's, you know, so we're building these massive things.

So you're consuming more lithium to get them going.

And so, like,

was the like electric Hummer built for anyone in the world other than Arnold Schwarzenegger?

Uh,

we've been able to get a lot of people.

People who like really admire the great corpse.

I'm not sure.

So, so yeah, so that there's economic problems.

So, what we're what we're running into, you know, the innovation that's been happening in the market is at this incredibly high end.

Uh, the pictures here of the Aspark Owl, which, as far as I can tell, actually hasn't been built, which is a pretty common theme with a lot of these like startup companies.

Uh, but it was going to sell for $3.1 million and have a zero to 60 time of like 1.6 seconds or something.

I don't know.

It's a number is really high.

Car goes very fast.

Uh, the car below it is the Lowest Lotus Avisia.

That's 2.3 million.

It does exist.

Some of my co-workers have driven it.

It's apparently very cool.

It goes very, very fast.

Again, it has some Hot Wheels effect.

Yeah, this is the problem with.

I'm sure those wheels get pretty hot.

I mean,

this is the problem with EVs as

an individual consumption product, right?

A lot of the EVs that were built up until very recently were loss leaders.

They were required.

You know, that e-golf that I showed the diagram of when we first started this presentation was not a car that looks like it built to make money.

Yeah, like, you know, the Fiat 500 EV that used to be sold in California to meet emissions requirements.

Like Sergio Marchion famously, who was president of Chrysler at the time, famously hated them because he was like, we lose so much money on all of these.

I can't stand the fact that we have to make them.

And so the thing is, is no one's ever actually solved this problem all that well.

And so we have, like, you look at the companies that have broken into the space successfully, like like Rivian

or Polestar.

And what they do is they build largely expensive EVs.

They build, they build, you know, Rivians are 70 or 80 grand.

Polestars, I think their cheapest one starts at like 45 or something, which is kind of average nowadays, but it's still a lot of money for most people.

And all of this breakthrough to like, oh, if we just build the expensive ones, they'll eventually come down in price has not happened.

And so what we have done is with a lack of any charging infrastructure, the requirement basically to own a home to be able to charge your EV,

and the really high purchase price, what we've got is like a bunch of rich people playthings and then like upper middle class guilt aswagers.

They're not actually solving any structural problems because unfortunately, you can't really solve structural problems by buying things.

Fuck.

That's what I've been trying to do.

Yeah.

And so like.

you know the the only thing that might fix this is like solid state batteries might come through uh which toyota has been working on and they've been like 15 years away from for the past 30 years.

They say they're getting close.

Who the hell knows?

That would change things drastically because then you could have a thousand mile range EVs that weigh like a tenth as much.

You know, like it's it changes all of your scale so drastically.

They're supposed to fix all of these problems, use fewer resources.

But you know, that's that's not something we have.

So what people need to do is like buy plug-in hybrids or whatever,

but nobody wants to do that because they're not status symbols then.

And Americans, of course, you know, need like a big engine to feel like they're sufficient as people.

Need a big V8 because it's smooth.

V10.

V10.

Oh, even better.

Well, I mean,

to Ram's credit, they just swapped out the V8 and the Ram for an inline six.

It gets the exact same mileage as the V8 did, but they did at least get rid of two cylinders.

Basically, a BMW now.

Gonna buy an SD45.

I got a V24.

Big diesel prime mover.

Yeah, so I mean, the disaster is society.

Again?

Unfortunately.

Fuck.

Appears to be the issue.

Yeah.

I just listen.

I got on this podcast to talk about wings falling off planes.

To stick to engineering.

Yeah, exactly.

And now all of a sudden, this woke shit.

You tell me that, like, it's society or whatever.

Hold on.

I got some engineering engineering for you, but first, I got to use the restroom.

When you said, but first, it primes me to go to the drops.

I'm like, do I have a, like, Justin goes to the restroom drop?

Do I have one?

I don't, I really don't think I do.

Um, but yeah, no, I mean, not my hands.

So I'm doing driving lessons at the moment.

Uh, my test is on May 1st.

Um, and

my name gets legally changed, like, right after that.

Oh, hell yeah.

Two big accomplishments.

Yeah.

Well, if I pass.

Uh,

if if not, then one big accomplishment.

This is also famously a requirement to get your name changed.

I hope we both pass.

And yeah, but

I guess if I do, I'm going to have to think about getting a car.

Oh, my God.

We could devote a whole

lot about kind of what the Nova Mobile is going to be.

Because

it's difficult to import a like Woz Bahanka into the fucking UK.

There's very few people.

There was a GAZ 21 for sale near me.

And I was like, what if I did this?

Yeah, what if you did?

It would be fucking sick.

Is the thing

to be a little hammer?

But yeah, no, I mean, fuck, I'm probably going to end up with like a golf or something.

I mean, the problem that I have ultimately is that, like, I know all of these things about structural issues, right?

I know that, like, in general, you cannot consume your weight of a problem.

But for me, a car would fix me.

a lot of other people a car could fix it so i've been learning to drive in a golf and the thing about driving a golf is that it is idiot proof uh at least the new ones because what year uh i like last like 2023.

um there's there's nothing you can do to this it tells you when to change gears it

yeah a lot of the cars do that is is this common people people brag about being good drivers this shit is easy you just haven't seen me drive

well hope to all right let's look at some engineering problems.

Now, we've talked a lot about largely, you know, we're talking about electric vehicles in terms of vehicles for consumers, right?

That's something that, you know, spends 99% of its life in a parking spot or in a garage.

Let's talk about commercial vehicles.

Let's talk about electric vehicles.

Electric vehicles.

Fuck yeah.

This is the thing, right?

This thing sucks.

I hate it.

I hate the way it looks, but it is cab over engine, and therefore I have to respect it because cab over engines, the U.S.

market has been deprived of these for too long i think they're cool oh yeah cab overs look great i love like an old-fashioned cab over but the other thing is like that barely even means anything on a tesla semi such as what you're seeing here um this sort of looks like uh Fucking, what am I looking at?

I'm looking at Voldemort without the nose slits, you know?

Not to bring Harry Potter into this, but, you know.

I also like how it broke down towing a truck full of lays, which are 90% air by volume anyway.

You notice it also has Frito-Lay decals on the truck.

Well, there's a reason for that.

Yeah, I paid an extra $4.99 for the American Truck Simulator Frito-Lay Pack DLC.

So we've been talking about electric semi trucks for, you know, probably a decade now.

They barely exist, right?

I think there's like

Freightliner does some kind of like E-Cascadia model.

And there's the Tesla semi, which still has not really launched i think a couple prototypes exist and that's basically all there is

um

you know and and so electric semis are not taking off the way electric cars are and electric cars aren't taking off that much at all um you know there's some reasons for this it comes down to like energy density range charging time These big commercial vehicles need to be run constantly to be economically viable, right?

Right now, these electric trucks, they don't go very far.

The batteries are very heavy.

You have weight limits, so you don't want to go over 80,000 pounds.

You don't want to spend all that weight limit on the batteries, right?

They take longer to charge at the very few commercial charging stations that exist, right?

So

if you are, let's say you're hauling chips from the Frito-Lays factory to the Frito-Lays warehouse, then maybe it makes sense to get an electric semi because you can charge that at the factory.

You can charge it at the warehouse.

If you're someone like a common carrier, like

a trucking company that moves anything from anywhere to anywhere else, or if you're a private operator, you own your rig and you are taking on contracts right now.

You're screwed.

You can't buy an electric truck.

It just will not work.

Because Because A,

there's no way to charge it.

Yeah.

And to that point, like the only places I've seen that have had success with electric

vehicles like this are like school buses where they have like a five-mile route that they stop and roll a bunch.

And then they come back to a central place every day at 3 p.m.

and they can plug them all back in.

The postal service.

Postal service is another good candidate.

If you have like a fleet vehicle, like maintenance vehicles for like a city or something, that makes a lot of sense.

But if you're trying to go from anywhere to anywhere else, especially over long distances, this is a big problem because there's no charging infrastructure and because the range isn't great and because of just the sheer energy consumption of a big rig,

which is where I sort of want to talk about

relative energy density of batteries.

As the dream of cab over engine recedes once again from the American roadscape.

So this is the most up-to-date chart I could find on short notice.

Energy density of lithium-ion battery packs 2008 to 2020.

We can see, hey, there's a nice exponential curve here, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, effective accelerationism.

Thing getting

exactly.

How many watt hours can you fit into a liter of space?

We're at 450.

And I will note that 450 is like...

really cutting edge.

Really cutting edge.

Yeah, there are cars on the market right now that are 160 to 200 because they can't get enough nickel, and so they had to go to a worse lithium-ion chemistry.

Now, if we compare this to gasoline, that is

9,500.

Um, this is a big issue with fossil fuels: is that they're really good

in some of these metrics.

Diesel is even more, diesel is uh 10,722 watt hours per liter.

Jesus.

You know, and per unit of mass, it's worse.

Victoria mentioned 300 watt hours per kilogram for

lithium-ion versus 12,666 for diesel, 12,888 for cat.

These are 50-fold increases through using fossil fuels.

We have a lot of way to go with batteries.

Please, please, Russian transgender women, invent the superconductor.

I was about to say,

someone's got to figure that one out.

This is important.

It's not so important to consumer vehicles because, you know, unless you're doing a road trip, this is not normally a problem.

But again, if you're on a semi-truck, if you're on anything that needs to do, like needs a high-duty cycle, something that works all day, like say a garbage truck,

this is a problem.

If you listener are sitting around thinking, I might invent the semiconductor today, but I'm probably not going to.

Oh, they invented the semiconductor.

You're thinking of a superconductor.

If you're going to invent the semiconductor, just do it again for fun.

Yeah.

Maybe this time you'll do it in a way that, like, I don't know.

That's gallium.

Yeah, yeah.

I think gallium is just a transition metal.

It's not a semicolon.

I don't know my periodic table anymore.

That's way padded.

I don't know anything anymore.

I'm fully gone off of like a pack of custard creams and one and a half bottles of water.

Well done.

Thank you.

So if you have a length limit to the trailer, you have a weight lip to the truck and trailer, you have a weight limit as well.

You don't have a lot of room to spare.

to have a huge battery pack.

And again, I'm not super on the up and up with current battery technology.

the best of my knowledge to really start to keep these exponential improvements going at this point you need new battery chemistries and of course the years of development associated with that like these exponential improvements are still gears off just to match the sheer raw energy density of gasoline or diesel get on it nuds yeah you know there's lots of weird stuff now like uh reversible rusting and stuff like that which i don't fully understand the current state of lithium-ion battery packs, though, it's kind of how are you going to put this in the truck, let alone a train, which is the other thing.

If you, this is an old episode of ours, go look up our battery-electric locomotives episode.

But

you know, this is yeah,

I sort of come back to the thing that we said in the geoengineering episode, it's a cope, which is like that's gonna be fine, they'll invent something.

Just fucking hurry up with it, please.

So, what we are, what I'm what I look this up really quick.

So, solid-state battery is the miracle tech that I told you would need to, you know, needs to basically come along to make EV cars a reasonable proposition for people,

is around 1,000 watt hours a liter, which still makes it 12 times less efficient than gasoline.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not.

Or 10 times.

Sorry.

Eight times.

It's not, it's not a

still order of magnitude.

Yeah, this is, this is kind of,

ooh,

you know, there's other technologies we could use here.

Another small.

Have you has anybody heard of trains?

Yes.

Small nuclear reactor is my vote.

Okay.

Here's another fun one.

So over here is the city of Roanoke, Virginia, right?

It has a population.

It's wonderful.

The Star City.

It has,

you know, it's where my aunt Linda lives.

They've not figured out grids when they built this one, I see.

Well, you know, it's the mountains are all around it.

It's kind of confined in there.

Very nice place.

I recommend visiting the Star City, Roanoke, Virginia.

it has a population of about 100 000 people the city uses 1 million four hundred fifty thousand megawatt hours per year according to a website i found this is hard information to find and i had limited time um

megawatt hours are the worst unit imaginable like watt hours i hate them that's just a way of expressing energy through power.

It should be like joules.

It would make everything easier for us.

Doing dimensional analysis on this to find the constant power draw or the average power draw, we got to divide it by the number of hours in a year to get the constant power draw.

This is too much engineering.

Can we go back to the society, please?

24 hours times 365 and a quarter days to account for leap years.

That's 8,760.

The city has a constant power draw of 165 megawatts, right?

If I did that math wrong, I apologize.

I had a beer while I was doing it.

Don't apologize.

Fuck.

First time I did this, I came up with a number that was about four times higher.

I don't know if I fucked up.

Four Roanoke.

Yeah.

So

now, down here is the Safe Harbor Dam on the Susquehanna River.

It has a total installed capacity of 470 watts.

417 megawatts, including two turbines, which are rated at 33 megawatts each.

That provides about a third of the power for the MTRAC Northeast corridor, at least between Washington, D.C.

and New York City, because the phase changes beyond that.

It's 25 hertz south of New York City.

It's 60 hertz north of New York City.

The peak loading on the corridor is about 210 megawatts.

But this entire dam dedicated to the corridor is making, I believe, 66 megawatts from the turbines.

And then they have a rotary inverter there that bumps it up to 81 megawatts.

And that's where I want to compare this to the unincorporated community of Raphine, Virginia.

Oh, she's not beautiful.

Well, there's a little town up Raphine Road.

And so

this is about.

Someone listens to this podcast in this town.

Sooner or later, we're going to

gonna

zoom in and we're gonna be like, This is one guy's house.

Your

shitty house and we'll read their full address.

Yeah.

So, Ray Fiend, Virginia has several large truck stops.

I will note that

it has a restaurant called uh Quaker Steak and Lube.

Oh, it's really

steak and lube actually goes insanely hard.

Yeah, like I like Buffalo Wings.

What the fuck?

And it's not like what kind of American activation phrase have I said to make all three of you.

Their website is thelube.com.

Is it water or silicone-based?

All of their restaurants are like Americana-themed.

They've got like Corvettes hanging from the ceiling and stuff.

Oh, it's slack.

When I used to go drifting, we would always stop at a Quaker Steak and Lube on the way home and pull up with all of our shitty ass 240SXs and stuff.

Cool.

And like hard park in the parking lot and eat chicken wings.

It was so, it was, it's amazing.

American institution.

I will not allow you to shit talk it.

Explain to me.

Blue boils.

How they get into the fucking steak.

It's because it looks like it.

So I think what they originally did, I don't know.

Why am I talking about this?

They make steak burgers.

They make steak burgers and also like every single one of them looks like an old timey garage.

Oh, it fucking rolls.

I love it.

I think it's supposed to be like they serve steak and they supposed to look, they have this like whole Americana Route 66 like aesthetic going on.

So it's like an old lube shop like they used to like you know jiffy lube or something an oil change place it's a garage you go into and you you come out

you can order the kids lube cruisers don't oh god

all right there's three separate truck stops here there are

there's white's travel center here This says

they have an Irish car bomb on the menu.

They call the Irish drop shot.

That is a car bomb, and it's just on the menu.

There's the pilot travel center up here.

Fuck you.

That has 12 pumps.

And there's over here, there's Smiley's, which if you've ever been down I-81, you'll see many signs for the best-staying BBQ in Virginia.

It was pretty good.

It's okay.

It was pretty good.

Should have gone to the staking loop.

Did we go to Smiley's?

Yeah, we've been to Smiley's, but.

Who did we go to Smiley's?

We went to Smiley's on the way back from your aunt's house.

All right, we did.

You guys just engage in these fucking odysseys, you know.

No, the thing about Smiley's is when you have a sports bar inside Smiley's, and when you order the barbecue, what they do is they don't make the barbecue fresh, they go down to the gas station side, and then they take one of the pre-wrapped sandwiches and plate it nicely for you.

You wanted to go, yeah, I did want to go.

I wanted to finally see what it was like.

You wanted to try the best dang BBQ in Virginia.

It's fine.

It was pretty good, I thought.

i liked it this one has six pumps um

so

rafine is actually an exceptionally large truck stop i will admit this but i'm proving a point here um right now it takes about 15 to 20 minutes to fill up a big semi-truck with diesel because they got really big tanks there's a limit to the amount of diesel you can shove in there at once right the newest plugs out there which are called the megawatt charging system the mcs they're starting to implement it in europe in a few demonstrator points They still take about 30 minutes to fill up a truck with juice at 3.75 megawatts,

3.25 megawatts.

It's a beefy connection.

Yes.

Like,

do not be fucking with those cables.

Yeah,

I wouldn't want to be within a mile of that thing.

The more conventional systems that exist right now take about 90 minutes.

So conservatively, if you wanted to electrify this truck stop, we need more pumps.

I just figured like a third more, right?

So about 12 more, make the whole complex 48 pumps total.

And you multiply 48 by 3 and 3 quarters megawatts.

That's 180 megawatts.

So at busy hours, the sleepy, unincorporated community of Raffine, Virginia in Rockbridge County would draw more power.

than the big city of Roanoke and nearly as much power as Rush Hour on the entire Amtrak Northeast Corridor.

Large nuclear reactor, like a lot of cheap, too cheap to meter.

I mean, that's sort of where you have to go.

And even then, I mean, big nuclear reactor is still only 500 megawatts.

You need to build one for every couple truck stops.

I mean, all right, let's do it.

I woke up

by in the shade of the cooling tower.

Yeah.

With a quicker steak and loop.

Yeah.

Going to Bucky's, and they have an entire nuclear power plant just for the gas station.

Nova, are you familiar with Bucky's?

Oh, I'm aware.

Well, I used to think it was called Buseys.

Very Bucy's.

Bust that Bucie open, boy.

Hold on, I have something for this.

Blue boils.

All right.

Well, this has been lovely.

Yeah.

So, you know, this is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night when you talk about electrifying like trucking or cars or anything like that.

You know, where does this energy come from?

We use about 4,000 terawatt hours of electricity in the United States just to electrify trucking.

We need to find about 500 more terawatt hours in the couch somewhere.

And that has nothing, that's to say nothing about building all the transmission wires, all the stuff like that.

You know, this is where you maybe want to look and say, should we think about other systems, right?

Yeah, so that the town of Rafine, Virginia doesn't have American Chernobyl number 596 in it.

Not Raphine, it's Raphine.

Rafine is rapine.

I gave up my ability to pronounce words in other languages so I know what they are in Appalachia.

And also, sometimes I can get Al Guancon right in the first try.

The unincorporated 116th Cherokee on my mama's side, what I thought on my daddy side.

The unincorporated Virginia community of Rayfines

will operate a large nuclear reactor.

Yeah, I can't wait to take you to Appalachia.

They'll love me.

They will absolutely love me.

They will love you.

And if they don't, what?

I don't give a fuck.

It's bad to say.

I will absolutely dump anybody's body of the new River Gordon.

Worked on mutual respect.

This is the Appalachia tour sort of t-shirt is you'll love us.

And if we don't, we'll kill you.

Just a note.

So there was a story that I wrote like today that is going out on Friday.

So probably by the time this podcast is live.

That's funny.

Just about like electricity use in cars.

The computing power for self-driving vehicles, just if you were curious,

if you made every single one of the 1.47 billion cars on Earth self-driving, which people want to do with these trucks for the record, it would require more electricity to run the computing systems for it than the entire country of Argentina uses.

So throw that in on top of all the electrification just to get the truck to go.

Yes.

There's a fun thing about buses that's similar to that, which we'll get to.

Some people have suggested, and in fact, in Germany, they have implemented as a demonstrator project.

What if the truck got electricity from overhead wires?

Which is a fucking normal truck.

You're getting closer and closer to inventing a train from first principles.

You have a lower average power draw, although

you're still drawing the same amount of power,

you know, and you have electricity transmission over the road, which is nice, right?

So that solves some of the problems.

Overhead wire power has an energy density of infinity, which is much better than gasoline.

It's more than 12,000.

Yes.

But apparently these things don't work as well as they're supposed to.

The idea here is that you have the truck.

The truck has the pair of panographs because railroads can get away with one panograph because the rails carry the return current.

On a truck, you have to have one for the current, one for the return current.

These trucks travel a long distance at constant speed.

You can put up wires.

They either charge in motion, they use the energy to assist a diesel engine, or they can rely entirely on this overhead power.

The panographs on the top of the truck are supposed to be completely automatic.

They can detect when the truck is in the right lane.

They

automatically raise and lower.

When the truck needs to change lanes,

you can just do that.

Right.

And the issue is there's a lot of room here to fuck up.

Why don't just build a train?

Oh, my God.

I'm going to go to the bathroom.

Twice as much room just on the wiring side.

Yeah, because if

it's bad for you, you have to swerve randomly and you swerve back in the lane.

Maybe you take the wires down.

You electrocute everyone on the road.

You know, the panograph may or may not work reliably all the time.

This is still very new technology.

You know, the idea of raising and lowering the panograph on a train is still like very controversial.

Discontinuous catenary is a very contentious issue just because of the engineering difficulties.

Here, they propose to solve it entirely with sensors, which is not a great idea.

I have discontinuous pantographs on the streetcars in Seattle and I can outwalk them.

Well, yeah, I mean, just give everything the kind of like

class 395 thing of like having to switch from pantograph to like

third rail at Favisham or whatever.

Cool.

Yeah, here it would be like, okay, it's automatically raising and lowering if I have to pass on another lane.

I just assume the computer will get it right every single time, right?

And if it doesn't, then really bad things will happen.

Hey, a failure mode of everyone dies is acceptable for other industries.

Yep.

And yet.

And yet we turn up our nose at the humble, massive municipal nuclear reactor.

So, you know, trains don't have this problem because trains do not usually make unplanned lane shifts.

And you got a lot more wear and tear on this catenary than railroad catenary

because of the sheer volume of trucks going by in order to move a given amount of stuff.

You got exponentially more points of failure.

I don't see this working very well in the long run.

This is just not a great, we'll get the modal shift in a bit, but this may be better than batteries in that it sort of works right now.

But, you know,

it worked long enough for you to take like a publicity photo of it.

Well, they have like a dozen or so miles in Germany right now.

They just installed some at the Port of Los Angeles as a demonstrator, like a one-mile demonstrator.

Wow.

Now, one thing that people may point out here is that, okay, we do have, in fact, overhead power wired buses, right?

Haven't we had?

Picture is so cool.

Trolley bus.

Yeah.

Yeah, we have trolley parts.

Alive with pleasure, I believe is what that ad says.

Yeah.

Yes.

Need to get into smoking, Victoria.

Back.

I used to.

I've smoked for six years.

Yeah, I remember when you quit because you used to message me every 20 minutes being like, I want a cigarette real bad.

And I would be like, don't smoke a cigarette.

Yeah, you helped me significantly with that.

So, yes, I did my time.

What about dip?

We could start dipping.

You're a horrible influence.

Thank you.

This is on Route 79 in South Philly.

So we've had electric vehicles on overhead wire for a long time in the form of trolley buses.

In this case, they call it a trackless trolley.

The big advantage here is that instead of having the panograph, you have the two trolley poles and they are linked to the wire so that you can change lanes and still be connected.

The disadvantage here is that if there's another vehicle on the trolley wire, you can't pass it.

And if

you dewire, like the trolley poles fall off the wire, which is They're a lot more reliable than they used to be.

It's still a problem.

You have to manually put the poles back on the wires.

You got to get out of the bus.

You got to go to the back.

There's a cable that's attached to them.

You got to put them back on manually.

These sort of also tend to be low-speed systems.

So I think some of the modern European systems are like 50 miles an hour or more.

And I'm sure whatever SEPTA is doing in the northeast right now, those drivers are gunning it.

They love going fast.

Yeah, they do.

They really fucking do.

Flat out, like foot down.

So these are a lot more, these are a lot more practical for public transit than like long-haul travel.

I i don't think you could rig up trolley poles uh trolley wires over like the entire interstate um i don't think you could do like the old super mario brothers movie where everything ran on trolley poles

so you think okay we we solved it right we have an electric vehicle that works pretty reliably um that can be scaled arbitrarily These buses can be quite large because they have an infinite amount of energy they can pull from the wires.

So what did we actually do?

Are we expanding them?

No.

It looks as if you put them into a tunnel.

Yes.

So this is one of the underground stations on the MBTA, the Metropolitan Boston Transit Authority.

They decided in 2021 their trolley buses had had it.

It was time to move to Battery Electric Future.

As such, the Cambridge bus barn.

was going to be converted for battery buses, which I mean, okay, at least the bus barn has the electric service in this case, which is going to be a problem for converting a lot of other bus

systems.

Since major road work was happening on several roads where the trolley buses ran and they weren't intending on renewing the trolley buses or the trolleybus infrastructure, the MBTA just got rid of them.

The wires came down in 2022, I want to say.

Right, cool.

Lost technology.

Yeah, yeah.

MBTA's excuse for this is that, okay,

you know, a lot of advocates came forward and they said, well, big cities like San Francisco or Seattle, they were able to keep and maintain their trolley systems.

And they said, we're not a big city like San Francisco or Seattle.

Other advocates came by and said, well, you know, a city like Dayton, Ohio has kept their trolley bus system in order and they're expanding it.

And they said, well, we're not a small city like

we're a medium-sized city, I guess, which means we can't do shit.

So Routes 71 and 73 are now operating with diesel buses with the promise of battery buses in the future, including segments in unventilated tunnels.

Oh, we went back to the like London Underground back in the day.

Yes.

And also...

Just die.

Just get in the bus and die.

Since these trolley bus lines were converted streetcar lines, all the trolley buses they had had a special door for left-hand boarding.

The buses they're currently running do not have left-hand boarding.

Oh my god.

So everyone has to crowd around the front of the bus and squeeze against the wall to get in.

Oh, good.

That's beautiful.

I would also like it noted that I live in the big city of Seattle.

And we are also currently buying a bunch of battery electric buses instead of building more trolley lines because they don't want to, because the problem is that here they're like, well, we have trolley buses and we do have a lot of trolley buses.

We run run fully hybrids otherwise.

But the thing is, is they're like, well, every time we put up a trolley line, we have to fight through 12 billion small Hitler landowners who are mad about a wire in front of their house.

Yes.

And the silent buses that run on the line.

And so instead, we've decided to capitulate and do battery electric buses.

Now, I love the King County Metro because they get me places.

Again, autojournalist who does not own a car, but it's worth noting that this is a solved problem.

Yeah, this is for public transit, this has been like very easy to fix for a very long time.

You put up the wires, you put down the rails if it's enough like

density of traffic.

You know, this is this is not difficult.

This is a solved problem.

This is technology with like nearly a century and a half of development on it at this point.

We are as perfected with trolley buses as we ever will be.

And we're just barely, you know, we're assuming there's going to be a lot of development on batteries that we don't know about yet.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like carbon capture again.

It's like, well, we'll come up with something.

Oh, carbon capture is a violation of thermo thermodynamics.

I mean, that has no future whatsoever.

Come on.

I mean, the other thing, too, is like they're building these giant charging stations for the battery buses in Seattle.

And like, that is its own logistical problem because, as you pointed out, it it takes as much energy as a small town to run.

Whereas, you know, you could just, I don't know how trolley line electrification goes, but I assume that it is slightly easier.

You have a more constant power draw.

You don't have these surges.

The other thing is when SEPTA redid one of their bus barns for electric buses, we'll get to on the next slide.

What they wound up having to do was reactivating a bunch of trolley infrastructure to supply the power.

So they just shove the trolley infrastructure.

They just don't use it.

We should go back to the Milwaukee Road method, which is to build a bunch of beautiful Art Deco brick power stations.

Yes.

Right next to your lines.

And then we should just make it like an art installation.

So this is not confined to Boston.

We did it in Philly, too.

This is Route 79 on Snyder Avenue.

This is the same route as that bus I showed earlier.

It looks beautiful.

Back in 2003, they converted it to diesel with an express promise to the neighborhoods that we will replace the diesel buses with electric buses as soon as possible.

So, this happened in 2003.

And 14 years later,

they were delivered some of these nice new Proterra battery buses, right?

Yep.

And they ran for a few months, and the frames cracked because they're made of fiberglass, and the batteries are heavy.

What?

Oh, my God.

Yep.

And there's lots of potholes in Philly.

This particular one caught fire after being stored for a long time.

It just decided one day I'm going to catch fire.

Fuck yourself.

I love lithium.

Yeah.

Route 79 is still run with diesel hybrid buses.

A lot of these battery buses have been plagued for problems like basically everywhere.

I understand they're doing a little better in Europe.

I understand that the new flyer buses sort of work, but they don't run well in the cold.

The range is not as well as expected, especially with a vehicle that has has a high-duty cycle because you still got to supply all that electricity.

You're still building a lot of fixed infrastructure.

Battery buses also have compounded problems because the largest energy draw on the bus isn't necessarily the motors.

It's the massive HVAC system that's needed to keep the thing warm when the doors open every block.

Huh.

Yep.

Yeah.

The only place that's, you know, managed to square this circle, to my knowledge, is Moscow.

So the insane mayor of Moscow decided sometime back in like 2012, we're getting rid of the world's largest trolleybus network and replacing with battery buses.

The first battery buses they got couldn't maintain traction and the heating system simultaneously.

So now in Moscow, which has one of the first all-electric bus fleets, the electricity supplies the motors and there's a big diesel burner in the back that runs the heating system.

Fuck yes.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Coal furnace in the back.

This is Russian excellent.

We're almost back to the days of the atmospheric railway where it also runs a grill, you know.

Yeah.

This is this is the new fryer.

So I don't know.

Just put up wires.

I mean,

you gotta train.

Just gotta try.

Well,

you know, a lot of this is always, you know, the argument for this is the climate.

You know, I think there's a lot of stuff that's a lot harder to decarbonize that people give it credit for.

But I will say, if you're really worried about the climate, the big thing should be modal shift.

Just move people onto trains, onto buses, get people on bicycles.

Just move freight onto trains.

If you try and drive a car in an unjustifiable way, climate Stalin Liam comes up in the Viper and executes you.

Yes.

The one car that is allowed to drive.

A nice thing about about trains is they run on steel wheels with steel rails.

There's very little energy loss when you're coasting.

If you have an electric system, the energy you expend going up the hill, you can almost always recover going down the hill.

It's ridiculous how energy-efficient trains are.

You know,

it's not.

Rubber tires have a lot of friction.

That's why cars can accelerate fast.

That's also why they require a lot of an energy.

They also dump a shitload of like microplastics and like

sort of like other really horrible things into the air.

Three-quarters of your blood is tire rubber at this point.

I mean, that's how I stopped worrying about more if you're riding the Viper.

I had microplastics paranoia for a bit, and then I found out, oh, that's not from like plastic food containers.

That's from tires.

It's all tires.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Car tires are the kind of lead paint of our time.

Yes.

Lead paint, lead gasoline.

And now a plastic rubber combination.

Yeah.

So, you know, it'd be nice if we could just do modal shift as opposed to, I don't know, dancing around.

We're going to electrify cars.

We're going to electrify the cars.

Every car on steel wheels and turn all the roads into rails.

I'm not saying that we're not going to have cars or trucks.

I am.

We should do that.

Yeah.

Well, no, I need a job.

Please.

You can review the new rail cars.

Yeah.

There you go.

I have wanted to do a car review for a train for so long.

Come to Britain.

We have trains.

You can review them.

We have trains here.

Yeah.

The Baltimore Trolley Museum will let you drive a trolley, I believe.

Oh, my God.

That would be a fun car review.

Could talk about the pickup on my, you know, 12,000 horsepower diesel electric train.

Yeah, train and drive them.

Oh, no, it's a trolley.

You can drive a PCC.

It has foot pedals.

It's weird.

Okay.

I don't know what horsepower went on there.

It's probably like 100.

Road and track.

Instead of road and track, it's track.

Oh, my God.

It's very funny.

Thank you, Doug.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm very tired.

Yeah, let's try and move this along.

Yeah.

Sorry.

No.

No, it's my fault, too.

What did we learn?

Banned cars.

Give Liam the Viper.

Give me the Viper.

Give me the Fuji XE4.

And then when you are driving your car and you're like, I know this is an unjustifiable journey, I should just walk, but I think I can get away with it.

And you see the like black on black murdered out viper coming up on you,

you will know that you are about to die.

It will be just.

And also, I will get a really high-resolution photo of you being murdered.

Well, there's your problem, climate style, and one billion years.

Oh, thank you.

You know, one day we'll get an episode where I can expound all my weird opinions about fossil fuels.

Do you want to just do a fossil fuels bonus?

Oh, that would be fun.

Do you want to just write that and just we just do it this month?

Yeah, well, they're actually really good, is the problem.

The problem is they're really good.

Well, do you want to write that up in the form of a podcast with slides and then we do it in the next few days?

Yes, please.

The problem is also they're really bad.

Do you want to condense that into a podcast with slides?

Oh my god.

We can invite me on that one too, just for the hell of it.

Sure, sure, fucking

Vicki back to back.

Yeah.

So once again, the solution is trains or barges or anything that's more efficient than fucking grinding rubber tires against asphalt.

Concept

of sale.

Yeah.

There have been some interesting developments in commercial sale, but I'll save that for the fossil fuels episode because we have to go to bed.

Yes.

All of us in the big bed that we share.

We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands with danger.

Greetings, November.

Liam Roz and Devon.

Spelled.

Devon with this high here.

Spelled wrong.

Yeah.

No, no.

Delta Echo Victor Oscar, November.

Yes, I said November twice.

Yes, it's confusing.

That's okay.

Everyone thinks you're named after the month, but we know that you're named after the NATO

calls

phrase.

No, it's the Chevy Nova.

She's named after the Chevy Nova.

All right, fucking bad.

Let's go, Roz.

Let's go, Roz.

I used to work at an ethanol plant where we turned hundreds of thousands of tons of corn into 100 million gallons of ethanol each year.

I worked at the American Keynesianism Factory.

The process to do so is stupid, complicated, and involves high pressures and caustic chemicals.

Only Americans could make the Keynesianism factory deadly, yes.

The plant is held together by the most sleep-deprived people you could think of.

Same.

And accidents happen.

Same.

This is about the time I got turned into a projectile, But many such incidents occurred, such as the time I got gassed by hydrogen sulfide, the time I got gassed by chromaline, which is not mustard gas as we originally thought, and the time I got gassed by yeast, or the time I briefly became part of a 480-volt circuit.

What kind of nouvelle offensive late First World War shit were they doing to you out there?

To understand how I became a steam-powered projectile, I will do my best to explain this part of the process.

Highly distilled ethanol at around 199 proof that's more than ever clear has to be cleaned i know that tastes good as hell oh hell yeah has to be cleaned of all the remaining gunk and to do this it is blasted through thick cotton socks about four feet tall and over 120 psi these socks like to clog Sometimes they don't clog for weeks, but sometimes they clog several times an hour.

I personally blame gremlins for this.

Yeah, I mean, fluid dynamics or whatever, basically the same thing.

Sometimes stuff doesn't work as consistently as you like it to.

One such night, the sock decided to clog halfway through my nice short 12-hour shift, and I dutifully headed out to change it.

The filter bank has two filters, so you can keep one closed until it's needed.

And I opened up the feed line, letting 120 psi of 200-degree Fahrenheit ethanol into the cleaned filter bank.

And then I was staring upwards at the starry night sky.

My head was ringing, and I was soaked soaked in now very cold ethanol.

Excuse me, very, very cold ethanol.

What happened as best as I could tell was whoever previously changed the filter, they fucked up.

They didn't put the gasket between the metal lid and the filter body.

And even if they had, they didn't tighten the damn thing.

I didn't know Boeing made ethanol.

There's no ethanol in kerosene.

They need that energy density.

So when I opened the feed tube, the top of the filter cleverly blasted off into who knows where, but not before.

It's in space now.

Yeah.

But not before directing a powerful stream right into my chest, sending all 250 pounds of corn-fed trans woman roughly 20 feet back into a ball.

Back up, back up a bit, back up a bit.

Hello.

Ladies.

Are you allowed to forward her email address to guests of the show?

so it's a it's a violation of like uh podcast submit of confidentiality

podcast hipa has to be invented because of this episode

november you have access to the email

i i literally do don't i okay 20 feet back into a wall probably giving me a concussion when i came to enough to make to make out sounds i realized my co-worker was yelling at me over the radio that we'd lost pressure pressure.

Well, no shit.

Another co-worker helped me unscramble myself, pick me up off the ground, and shut down the open filter.

Danica called maintenance to get a new lid because fuck if we were going to find it in a place that now had three inches of standing pure ethanol.

That was the day I learned that ethanol, even under pressure and superheated, isn't actually very good at keeping a hold of a lot of heat.

In the two feet between my chest and the filter, it cooled enough to not turn me into a lobster entirely.

Oh, God.

Incredible.

For once, the person who had fucked up got yelled at, and absolutely nothing else about the process changed.

Absolutely.

Thanks for all the videos.

You guys have helped kept me sane in my new safer job of professional pretty blue light staring.

What job?

Don't stare at that.

Welding.

Oh,

we're just allowed to do it.

Thank you for putting that together.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Don't look at the pretty blue light.

250 pounds transform.

She welds.

Okay.

Yeah.

With love, Ember.

Wait, that's part of my name.

God, that's a cool name.

One of us is going to have to change.

P.S.

Ethanol is a goddamn scam.

Don't fall for it.

Yeah, but I want to run my ma'am.

I enjoy drinking it.

I think it's better than tetraethyl lead as an anti-nock agent.

I

though I can't believe it's a fossil fuels episode.

Fossil fuels fuels episode.

Yeah.

Coming soon.

Let's do it.

All right.

I have a question really quick.

Fuck you.

Is it about her email?

No,

it's about, are we done or no?

We're done.

Yeah.

Can I pump my book, please?

We have to get to the next slide first.

Okay.

That was safety third.

Okay, we're just going very quiet.

Our next episode will be about Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

I think we do.

Sorry, I have one thing.

I have been working on it for two years, so I'm really excited to just get it off my chest.

I wrote and shot a trans femme fashion lookbook with an automotive theme over the course of the past two and almost coming up on a half years.

And it's finally available for pre-order.

It will launch in April.

You can buy it at my publisher, Career Books.

It is a little bit more expensive than I was hoping, but it turns out printing nice pictures costs money.

We will put a link in the description.

called We Deserve This.

It's by Victoria Scott.

It's fucking great.

It features cars from Friends of the Pod.

That's true.

Yes.

It features Friends of the Pod.

There's Friends of the Pod.

There's car companies.

It's great.

It's genuinely like one of the most talented photographers I know.

Thank you.

I am genuinely like so goddamn excited.

Sorry.

That is all for me.

Also, I have a job where I write about cars.

I write at motor1.com.

If you're ever curious, I write a lot about electric cars.

I do an engineering series, so I do those about once every two weeks.

We're not allowed to do that.

Only we're allowed to do that.

She releases stuff consistently.

I don't know if I'd go that far.

I'm a writer.

Come on.

That proves you've gone commercial.

You're not authentic if you release stuff consistently.

Sure, it's true.

The people.

All right, wrap this shit.

Wrap it.

Wrap it.

Let's go.