In the push to get people to buy electric cars, one reason given is because “electric vehicles are fun to drive.” Bulldozers and drag line excavators are fun to drive, too. But is anything as fun as riding a bike?
Electric vehicles are are insanely inefficient, though perhaps less insanely inefficient than other invented forms of transportation. The best-selling EVs on the market today weigh about 4,500 pounds. What nutcase would drag around 4,500 pounds of metal and stuff with them when they want to go buy a gallon of oatmilk? Even if they wanted to use the car to carry a lot of weight, the vehicle can only carry about one-quarter of its own weight.
A bicycle, on the other hand, can weigh 30 pounds and be able to carry 300 pounds. That’s efficient! And, a bike or ebike or electric scooter, or shared bus, occupies only a fraction of the space of a gazillion private e-cars. Occupying less space means less pavement, so that homes, schools, workplaces, and stores can be closer together, thus making it more feasible to walk, bike, wheelchair, etc.
People like that electricity for e-cars can come from a variety of sources — coal, solar, wind, hydro. But for real fuel versatility, fuel for biking or walking can be found in gardens, growing on trees, in stores, free piles, in the hands of kind, good-cooking friends, even readily available in dumpsters.
Oh, how we love to think technology will save us. Faced with tens of billions of dollars of advertising images telling us that cars are “efficient,” how else are we supposed to think?
But when Americans finish taking The Congo’s cobalt, Indonesia’s nickel, and Bolivia’s lithium, you can be sure there will be another desperate grab by the auto industry to sell the next “green” thing. Battery-guzzling cars or gas-guzzling cars, they’re all the same in terms of running over children, demanding paving over of the land, and ruining soil, water, and lives in mines around the world. Something less horrible is still horrible.
Ruthy Woodring
Florence