Electric Vehicles Galore -222

 The Midwest Renewable Energy Fair, near Stevens Point, WI has been a perennial peek into the future for 30 years. It continues to be the crystal ball foreseeing clean energy, transportation, and holistic paths to a brighter future. This year the foretold arrived.   

Electric and Hybrid Vehicles were thick as fleas on a dog’s back. Their owners were smiling little smiles of, “We told you so.” Putin’s War Tax on gas has proven the drivers of these vehicles are money wise as well as responsible environmental stewards. EV owners are planting green backs in their bank accounts while owners of gas guzzlers are experiencing, “Range Anxiety.” This range anxiety is “How far can I go before my credit card hits it limit or the bank account runs dry.”

Recently, a friend drove a pickup with a trailer in tow from the western UP of Michigan to eastern Montana. It cost him 600 dollars one way. Ka-Ching! That is range anxiety.  What if we paid the real cost of oil extraction and taxpayers didn’t subsidize the fossil fuel industry? I was just in Europe where they pay twice what we do, close to 10 dollars a gallon. My friend would have had a $1,200 one-way fuel bill.

Ten dollars a gallon of gas has an influence on rational people. Europeans buy more electric vehicles, ride more electric bicycles, walk, and use far more public transportation. 

My trip to the Energy Fair was in a Subaru and even in the little SUV I experienced gas pump panic.

The trip left me a little chagrined. We tent camped at the fair. As we set up our tent the best-looking pickup truck I’ve ever seen, a Rivian, parked next to us. A few years ago, I was tempted to put some money down on a Rivian but instead put money down on a Tesla Cyber Truck. Unfortunately, Elon Musk’s priorities lean to space travel and Twitter. This has left me waiting for my truck and swearing at the oil companies for price gouging.

My angst with Tesla accentuated my interest in the Rivian so at the break of dawn I left my tent and strolled over to investigate. Brent, the owner, was also up and graciously offered me an early morning look at his modern pickup. It is a practical pickup with new innovations you’ll only find on modern electric vehicles.

On the practical side of finding more useful space, the engineers designed a large crosswise storage compartment low behind the cab. Since there is no engine under the hood, the engineers also created a front trunk or “frunk” with lots of useful protected space.

But my favorite innovation, and if you are a morning coffee drinker you might agree, was the entry door to the cross-space. The door to the cross-space folds down into a small table. Just inside the door/table is a 110 AC outlet where Brent plugged in a Black and Decker coffee maker and started to brew a pot of java.

Wow, here is a truck which lets you pass up the gas bandits, requires less maintenance, puts far fewer greenhouse gasses in the air, and brews you a cup of coffee! The birds were literally singing in the woods as the coffee readied.

Lets face it, if we want to be energy independent, which in the modern world means independent period, we must pursue a fossil free lifestyle. Most of the world’s easy oil lies under the feet of ruthless dictators like Putin, the Saudi Crown Prince, and the Venezuelan President. North American oil, in large part, depends on fracking and tar sands extraction. These are expensive ways to extract oil and are environmental nightmares. Our large refineries are along the Gulf of Mexico which make them vulnerable to hurricanes. If we remain dependent on oil we are at the mercy of bad actors, environmentally destructive extraction practices, and weather guaranteed to become more destructive and threatening.

I am hoping Mr. Musk gets over his Twitter and space fixations and quickly gets my Cyber truck done before the next disaster strikes.

Until then, I’ll hang onto my bicycles.