March 5, 2022 • 35 mins
Ron talks with Mark Mills of The Manhattan Institute regarding electric cars and his recent testimony in front of Congress.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Ron Andanian. I could get the plug out of two,
I couldn't get the plug to budge on one. And
I leaned on it as hard as I wanted to
with the with the smaller than increasingly growing larger breaker bars,
trying to get a fuel for it. It was just
brammed in there. It's why that baby's in there. Good
to kiss to the radio in the Car Doctor. One
(00:24):
of the shop people were placed the ETM relay. I
fill it out with you. They were barking up the
wrong tree. They were closed. Welcome to the radio home
of Ron and Nanian the Car Doctor. Since this is
where car owners the world overturned to for their definitive
opinion on automotive repair. If your mechanics giving you a
(00:46):
busy signal, pick up the phone and call in. The
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your calls at eight five, five six and now running.
You know, there's an awful lot of conversation of late
about the e V, the electric vehicle, and there's a
(01:06):
lot of things flying around and being discussed, and uh,
you know, we're very fortunate today in that um. You know,
the quote comes to mind about if I've if I've
seen far in this particular industry and on paraphrases, because
I've stood on the shoulder of the giants. We've got
one of the We've got a gentleman that I consider
one of the giants in the in the development of
the ev and where this is gonna go and some
(01:27):
just very plain and honest and straightforward facts. And we're
glad to have him back with us once again. Mark Mills.
He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and we're
gonna talk about his testimony in front of the U. S.
House Committee on Agriculture today. Mark, I'm probably embarrassing you,
but that's okay, man, you deserve it. If we're in
the same room, you wouldn't call me a giant. But
that's okay. Take it, take it, take it. So how
(01:50):
are you today? I'm doing great. Fact, you'll be back here.
Here you go. Right, You're standing up in front of
the U. S. House Committee on Agriculture talking about evs
and I'm reading your testimony, which my spies have gotten
for me, and I'm um, I'm gonna ask you if
I can post this up on Facebook and put this
out to the public, a public information. Right, it's not
(02:10):
like I've got uh, that's the whole point. Yeah, it's
it's right, it's it's you know, you talk about, you know,
the the obvious. You you explain in your in your
opening paragraphs, um, uh that you want to talk about
the needed infrastructure and possible impediments to electric vehicle adoption
(02:31):
in rural America. And you want to talk about some
of the infrastructure realities. And I'm paraphrasing here, I should
begin by pointing out the obvious. You say, um, we
will see a lot more evs on the road, and
you explain that in detail, and then you make a
stunning announcement. As the Committee knows, while in recent years
we've seen rapid growth and consumer purchases of evs, the
total number of electric vehicles and used today remains overall
(02:54):
at about six tenths of a percent of all light
duty vehicles on America's roads. Well, you know, it's rapid
growth from a very from a very small number. Sounds
like a lot, but it's kind of like if you're
gambling and I told you made a ten dollar bet.
(03:16):
It sounds great, it's not. It doesn't very meaningful. So
there there haven't been many evis around for a long time.
There there there are more. Now. Look, let's stipulate something
that I've said many many times, and I'll have written
and I will say it again that Elon Musk's uh
capacity to make a vehicle that is a good vehicle
(03:38):
to make a successful automobile company cannot be explained away
by subsidies. No one, no one that can afford a
ninety thousand dollar vehicle is going to buy a lousy
vehicle even with a fifteen thousand dollar discounts. It's not
gonna happen. It's an amazing vehicle. He has. His engineers
have made the best electric vehicle batteries in the world
(04:01):
so far. It really is remarkable engineering. There are, and
every automaker is now chasing this bogey in the high
end of the market. It's a great option to have.
There will be lots of evs in the world. But
what I was testifying about was the question about whether
or not it made sense because this was this is
the Agricultural Committee two subsidize and accelerate the penetration of
(04:27):
electric vehicles in rural America. And I didn't oppose that.
I would just play it out some of the obvious
facts and the engineering and realities of charging and running
and you know, using e vs, and also the supply
chain which had become aware of what what does it
take to make lots more e V It's not I mean,
(04:48):
it's not like everything else in the world. You have
to build things from something. Non electric vehicles, you know,
internal combustion engine cars are made mainly from steel and copper, plastic,
some aluminum, rubber things. But d vs use about three
more critical minerals of copper, obviously lithium, cobalt, nicol. You
(05:12):
have to think about where that's going to come from
if you try to increase by force the number of
those cars in the road. Yeah, and and and where
does that all come from? And not here? Not here? Right? Problem?
And you know, you make a statement in your testimony.
(05:34):
It's well known and obvious that rural residents and this
is so simplistic and it's genius. I gotta tell you
that rural residents drive drive more miles on average, about
more per person per year than urban drivers. Right, because
if you're out in the country, you have to drive
to get somewhere because you're going to get stuff which
(05:55):
is you know, twenty miles away or maybe farther. Um,
you're gonna be driving more and if you're in an
e V vehicle, that sort of presents a problem. Right, Yeah,
And here's here's the key. The problem is not range,
as I pointed out on my testimony, the idea that
e vs don't have the range of internal combustion engines
(06:17):
for most cars for most purposes, most gasoline tanks. I'm
not talking about the big tank and the stressed you know,
a a crew cabin F one fifty with a big tank,
but a regular vehicles you have about three h range
to eighty three fifty three hundred mile average range in
most cars, and the e vs you can buy today
(06:37):
have about a three hundred mile range. So it's not
a range issue. It's a refueling issue. It's a practical matter.
If you recharge your car, refuel at night at home,
that's that's fine. So the F one fifty Lightning, which
I talked about because I think it's a pretty cool truck,
it's pretty amazing piece of engineering. Chevy's chasing with their
(06:58):
own silver Rado version, but they sell it with an
overnight charger so you can refuel it overnight eight to
ten hours. Okay, that's kind of a long time. So
if you have to make a long trip, you stop
at a refueling station and a supercharger. A supercharger which
is what you can't have in your home because they
(07:19):
cost as much as the vehicle. Uh, takes forty minutes
to refuel the vehicle. Pretty good, much better than much
better than eight hours, except feel like up an FTK
takes gastly and takes all five minutes. That's the fueling
time five minutes versus ten times longer. Once you think
(07:41):
through the logistics on what that means, set aside whether
or not you as a consumer are willing on average
to spend forty minutes to refuel your vehicle rather than
five minutes or six minutes. Set aside whether that there's
a lot of people that would put up with that.
Think about the logistic of the fueling station where it's
(08:02):
just this is a this is sort of like a
you know, kids play Catris the game. You think about
how many fuel pumps do I need if I operate
a fueling station. If each car that pulls up takes
five minutes to fill up at peak time, say you
need six or eight pumps right now peak time, each
person is going to take forty minutes to fill up.
(08:24):
How many pumps do you need? Well, this is not
rocket science. Ten times the number and each pump plus
twice as much as a regular fuel pump. So I
need ten times the number of pumps, each cost twice
as much. So the building station has increased its capital
(08:45):
costs by what he folds to duplicate the gasoline. So
do you if that efficacy here at util? This this
is just you know, as I said to the the committee,
I said, you can do that. It's not like it's impossible.
(09:05):
It's just not a good idea. It's very inconvenient, very expensive.
It's a very bad idea. The market is not going
to accept that, and people are being naive about this.
This is not an anti ev position. This is just
the engineering and what the systems allow. You mean common sense, Well, yeah,
we could call it common sense, but I wouldn't like
insult Congress. I'm sorry, come on, take me next time.
(09:28):
Come on, take take me next time. I want to
go so very old Mark Plane and Will Roger's lines
about common sense and Congress, But I won't go there right, yeah, please, Um,
you know, we're we're on in Washington. We've got a
couple of Washington affiliates, so we might hear from somebody,
you never know, Um, you know, And I'm listening to
(09:48):
you explain this about how you'll need so many more
charging stations, and all I'm thinking about is the amount
of real estate, you know, the physical plant, so to speak,
the size. You know, in Texas, we can probably come
up with the space. But Rhode Island's going to lose out. Um,
you know, it's not gonna work out. Urban areas they
(10:09):
have the space. Look, the truth is in rural America,
there's a lot of space around a lot of filling stations.
You could probably do that. It's not but it's it's
going to be a visual blight. That's one thing. Maybe
nobody cares. I kind of care. But it'll be very expensive.
People are being naive about the scale of these things.
This administration has a lot of money in the infrastructure
(10:31):
build to spend billions of dollars building more charging stations.
But again, if you do the arithmetic, this is not mathematics,
this is arithmetic. If you do the arithmetic, the billions
of dollars that the administration is going to spend on
subsidizing and building charging stations won't be enough to build
enough charging stations for the electric vehicles that the administration
(10:55):
would like to have in the federal fleet, which is
point all one percent of the total fleet of vehicles
in America. It won't be enough to keep those vehicles
charged on a normal refueling basis. So it's it's a
very there's people forget they're sort of scaled. There's a
couple hundred million vehicles in America. There are more licensed
(11:18):
or more vehicles, and there are licensed drivers. It's a
lot of vehicles. So if you put a few million
electric vehicles on the road, that's a lot. You know,
it's a practicing, it's it's it's not it's not nothing.
But it doesn't change everything. And if you want to
change everything, you have to spend extraordinary amounts of money,
a lot of hardware, a lot of time. It's not
(11:41):
like we can we can't do it? Is that should
we do it? Do you want to spend that much money?
And for what purpose? I mean, any other thing I
pointed out is manufacturing electric vehicles means that you're essentially
importing the key materials to make the batteries because we
don't expand mining in America. So it's the equivalent of
(12:01):
manufacturing conventional vehicles in America and importing all the gasoline
and minerals are imported, and it's coming from and it's
coming from other places from us. Right, hey, Mark, tell
you what sit tight? Let me pull over and take
this pause. Hold that thought. I'm Ron Anading of the
car Doctor here with the one and only Mark Mills.
Will both be back right after this. Don't go away
(12:29):
for the best in car advice. Give Ron a call
eight by five five zero nine nine zero zero. Now
back Torn And we're joined this hour by Mark Mills,
who is talking to us about EVS and some of
his recent testimony in front of the U. S. House
Committee on Agriculture. Mark, you know when we took the pause,
we were talking about charge rates and and and the
(12:50):
abilities of of different size stations. I was doing some
math and and talking about it and thinking about it.
So if it's forty minutes to charge an average are
and you had a twenty pump, a twenty station recharging facility,
I think you can do like six cars in a
twenty four hour period if my math was right. Um,
(13:13):
well if you cantbsequently, But the way to look at
this is it's a very old industry, near or nearly
a century into figuring out the logistics on how to
refuel vehicles for the average citizen. So just go to
the average you know, showy station. How many how many
pumps do you see and whatever? Whatever you see. That's
(13:34):
if each of those you had to spend forty minutes at,
that wouldn't be enough. It's just it's obvious complicated because
they figured out they figured out the mechanics for their
peak loading quite quite uh quite a long time ago.
So if you were you know, if it's forty minutes,
and then your face with the problem. I think that
(13:54):
if you're in the rural part of the country. You know,
this is a rural part of the country. E V
electric theory conversation we're having, right, Um, you have to
get that electricity there to actually be able to charge
the e V vehicle just because you have the supercharger,
you don't necessarily have enough infrastructure to support that. Well,
you put your finger on the hidden costs in this.
(14:18):
Never mind the cost of the these are ken Hunter
Killawatt class even Megalock class chargers. These are really uh
significant industrial class electrical infrastructures. The distribution grid in the
in the rural area cannot support that kind of power loading.
Put differently, I mean charging a car. I'm being very simplistic,
(14:44):
but there's roughly the electric load of a whole house
that's there. They're but co equal in terms of what
you need for the transformers, the power systems, control systems.
So you need to add to the math if you had,
you know, a gas station with the pumps that pop
gasing are very low energy, so you're not you're not
(15:04):
putting worth neighborhood's worth of houses worth electric demand in
a single fueling station, So you have to upgrade the
entire distribution system electric the local electric grid to handle them.
That will cost a lot of money. Again, one can
do it, but the system is not designed for that.
It's not built for that. Now, somebody will have to
(15:26):
pay for that, presumably rate payer as well. I mean
it's not you want to put people to pay for anything, ultimately,
our consumers and taxpayers, but that that factor alone is
probably the single biggest cost and impediment kind of things
we're talking about, especially in world distribution looks which are
(15:46):
not designed to handle that kind of additional load. Do
you hear the stories regarding you know, when I talk
about this, when I get comments from listeners, and I'll
have I'll see articles in the news as well reference
over the air charging ability. At some point I made
him to look at that. Well, So here this is
(16:10):
the the long time dream with electricity is to be
able to deliver electric power without wires. And we can
do that. It can be done. It's m magnetic coupling,
inductive TRUMPI, inductive charging, it's magnetic fields, you can broadcast microwaves.
All these things are aren't doable. But let's this is
(16:31):
and I apologize, this is like a physics one on
one lesson, and I apologize. I was trained as a physicist,
but I don't practice physics anymore. Really, But let's just
do this. The two different aspects of this one is
whether you plug the car in with a cord or
drive it over a wireless charger. And inductive like you
(16:52):
know everybody's phone now can charge by just putting on
a magnetic pads. It's a magnetic coupling. Doesn't change the
power requirement's the fact they go up. They go up
somewhat because the coupling efficiency of doing over the air
charging is lower than this direct coupling, as you might imagine.
It just is so you have to have actually more
(17:13):
power to do that, but doesn't change the power level
significantly in any direction. It's a little higher, but whatever.
So that doesn't solve the problem. Then the bigger, the
bigger issue is whether or not you can do that
cost effective organdistance. Does it really matter to you if
you pulled up to a gas station and you parked
(17:34):
over a pad to charge you, or you had to
get out and plug something into your car, practical matter.
You're still going to be there forty minutes and it
makes no difference. And then then you have the theory
that I can just charge you car while you're driving it.
So the French actually built a highway with a magnetic
charging system buried in the highways, kind of like a rail.
(17:56):
I'll tell you what Mark called that foot. I don't
mean to interrupt you, storry. Hold that when we come back,
we gotta take a hard break here. Hold that thought.
When we come back, we'll finish up. We'll pick up
right where you left off. I want to hear the
end result of this. I'm running any of the Car
Doctor here with Mark Mills. We're talking to Evis. Don't
go away. There's more to come right after this. Welcome back,
(18:49):
Running the Car Doctor here with Mark Mills, Senior Fellow
at the Manhattan Institute. Mark. When we took the break, um,
we were talking about, well, I guess PM pure magic,
the idea of charging a car, you know, wirelessly. You're
driving down a road and you were telling us about
how the French had built a road that would charge
an electric feedle. I think is where you were going. Yeah, No,
(19:11):
it's it's engineers to do magic. You know, you know this.
I mean I'm a physicist, but the magic of engineers,
as they always find a workaround. The issue isn't whether
you can do something. That's what it costs, whether it
makes sense, right, I mean, that's always what it comes
down to for consumers and any practical product. You can
lay in magnetic charging cables in the road and continuously
(19:33):
recharge the battery in the car, It's it's possible, it's
just extremely expensive. So it's just a bad idea with
all the kinds of complications in terms of efficiencies and
energy use and interference, and then how and how would
the weather affect that right, and you know, the snow
loadings and moving it's all kinds of reasons of the
(19:54):
internal combustion engine. It's gonna be around for a long time.
You know, I want to put in a plug for
my book because I talked about I felt like I'm
a pessimist here. My new book, as you know, The
Cloud Revolution, talks about where technology is going. And what
I point out in my book is that you know,
there will be lots of more electric vehicles, and the
(20:15):
lithium battery is a magical thing. The three guys that
really made it possible got Nobel Price a few years ago.
They deserved it changed the world. But changing how a
car is fueled in terms of an economic revolution is
roughly comfortable with changing what we fed horses before the
dawn of the age of the automobile. It's still a car.
(20:38):
If the car itself was the economic and social revolution,
how what it eats as the impact. It's relevant, but
it doesn't change the world any more than changing what
the food was for a horse would have The real
revolutions and transportation are you know, are right in front
of us there. They've been sort of pilloried over the years,
(20:58):
like you know, where's my flying car? Are these kinds
of things? We know that drones, never mind flying cars
are possible cargo carrying drones. They're starting to be used
all over the world for critical cargo and packages, including
food delivery. In in Australia, you know, a rural areas
expurban areas, and the idea of a flying cars no
(21:21):
longer but it's an air taxi. It's no longer crazy.
The materials, the energy, energetics, the control systems for safety
are now clearly possible. We now have to deal with
the engineering challenge of making it affordable and making it
quiet enough, and all the mechanics logistics around the infrastructure.
(21:44):
They're not trivial. But we're well past the era of
thinking could it happen? So that will be a revolution,
that would be a big deal, and that's clearly coming.
Not tomorrow, but it's it's it's coming. So I wrote
a lot about technology revolutions in my book, in part
because I think people are focused on the wrong things,
or you're all excited about Tesla's great car, great company
(22:08):
happened personally, like SpaceX is his business much more than
his card business. That's my my bias as an old
space nerd. But good for him, he really accomplished something remarkable.
But it's not going to change the world. Cheap space travel,
good drones will, robots will. In fact, Elon Musk, if
(22:31):
your listeners haven't paid attention to this thing, you could
use the magic Google machine to just take a look
at what Elon Musk has been saying recently about anthropomorphic robots,
I mean robots that can walk around do useful things.
He initially sort of looked like he was joking, teasing
about building a robot. He made it, Claire, He's not teasing,
He's not joking. Uh we we you know it's and again,
(22:54):
I have a couple of chapters in my book about robots.
Robots have been the subject of science fiction, well for
him or two years. But we can now build those things.
You can see them again on YouTube. Are there practical
ones that are horrible today? No, But when the derail
wagon came out and I think it was eighteen nine six,
(23:14):
I got the late eighteen nineties. Uh, it was the
first American electernal combustion first car in America. They sold thousands,
didn't change the world, but you know, it took a
couple of decades, and Ford came along with the Model
t changed the world. I think maybe Elon Musk is
(23:36):
the Henry Ford of our time. But it won't be
around the electric car. It's gonna be around a robot.
I think anyway cars but no, but robots are like cars.
They're autonomous things that increase the mobility and utility of
our economy. What a wonderful thing. Well, you know, no,
you're not. You're not wrong, because there is going to
(23:57):
be that next great thing. But the problem with the
ev is, you know, one little thing upsets the apple cart.
Was the first year material costs went up for that
electric car, and now in twenty two they're talking like
lithium battery costs are supposed to rise again this year. Well,
(24:18):
so this is this is the great fiction that everybody
is ignored. You put your finger on it. See, we've
been told that batteries are going to get cheaper, cheaper fast,
and make electric cars cheaper than internal combustion inches currently
on average, depending on the car and how they're made
is five to ten dollars per card more expensive entirely
(24:39):
because of the battery and the additional electronics that are
in the electric vehicle. But we've been told monum and
iacally that they're going to get cheaper and fast. But
here's the single fact that you need to know, and
this is verifiable fact. We're now so good at making
batteries courtesy Belond Musk that between sixties and seven percent
(25:00):
of the cost of making a battery electric car is
tied up in the commodity materials the minerals needed to
build it. Once you know that, you then have to
know a second fact. But to think about this, that
means that even if the manufacturing process cost nothing, it's
basically all about the materials cost all the materials copper, lithium, callbalt, manganese, nickel,
(25:26):
these are commodities and the commodities for decades, about centuries
to shift the world's vehicle fleet from internal combustion to
electric were required an increase in the mining of these
minerals from four four tho percent. This would be the
biggest increase in mineral mining essentially in history and no
(25:49):
time in history, as an increase in demand for commodity.
Cause the commodity go down in price, it goes up
and that's already happened. So you're absolutely right last year
that the battery prices gone up, they're going up this year.
It also means, by the way the solar panel prices
have gone up there in two years, when turbine prices
(26:10):
are up for all the same reasons, by the way
the mineral inputs and critically, and then again, this is
not me saying this, This is the International Energy Agency,
which is an advocate of the expanded use of electric vehicles.
They pointed out that the world is not planning to
mind enough minerals to produce quantity of electric vehicles that
(26:33):
all the world's governments want to have happened. What's not happening. Yeah,
it's just it's just uh well, it's back to that
PM that pure magic statement. Right, it's just going to
be it's just gonna fall out of this guy. Hey, Mark,
sit tight, let me pull over and when we come back,
we'll wrap this conversation up. We're here with the Great
Mark Mills and Rondinating the car Doctor. I'll both be
(26:54):
back right after this. Don't go away. Welcome back. We're
here with Mark Mills. I'm running any in the car,
doctor Mark. You know, I think we should close here.
In your closing comments to the testimony you gave to
(27:18):
the US House on February twelfth of this year, you said,
for the record, a world going from today's ten million
to having five million vs on the roads would eliminate
only about pent of world oil use. And bringing the
realities back to rural America, if half of all rural
homeowners can be induced to replace their second vehicle with
an electric pickup truck, that would reduce US oil consumption
(27:39):
by barely three percent and the world consumption by half percent.
It would have even less impact, perhaps not on global
carbon dioxide emissions. How did they react to that? How
did they react to any of this that? Did? It
didn't make any did it did it make any penetration
or was it talking to the wall? I guess no
kind of ration. I'm talking about wall. Look, but I
(28:02):
think in that setting what they were focused on is
how to distribute the large s courtesy to taxpayers in
the bipartisan Infrastructure bill, to give money out to people
to build stuff like charging stations, so that everybody's pretty
giddy about all the billions of dollars I can now
give out and spend it, and that that was sort
of the sense of it. And to be fair, Uh,
(28:28):
you know, everybody's respectful, but no one really probes the questions,
partly because and I and as you know, you can
read my testimony and is public information. I do try
to be diplomatic. I don't try to be flipped. The
truth is, the facts are not in favor of this
idea of this grand transition away from of combustion engines.
(28:48):
It's just not going to happen. It's not like I
don't want it to happen, or I oppose it some
for moral reasons, or there's nothing to do with that.
It's just the engineering and mining. It's not happening. It's
not going to happen. But in the attempt to do it,
we're going to spend lots of money, a lot of
people get enriched, so you end up with this bizarre
(29:10):
kabookie dance. So they don't they really don't ask a
lot of questions. Um something. The questions are not directed
towards the veracity of the assertions I'm making because again
I'm using data from the u N International Energy Agency
from geological surveys. These are not disputable facts. You could
(29:31):
have a different opinion on whether you like the facts,
but they're not disputable. You don't get into that. So
it's a it's a little bit surreal. I mean, I
work in the venture world as well. You know, we
have a fund that we invest in software for energy companies,
and I work in the I used to work in
real real world and made things and battens. In the
(29:53):
political policy world, a little bit of I guess what
you're called intellectual whiplash is a very different dynamic. You
could be a cynic, but I'm not. I'm pretty realistic
about these things. They have a they have a timeline
to them. It's all different, and I think reality is
starting to bite. The trouble Europe is in right now
(30:15):
with respect to energy dependencies on Russia are directly a
consequence of being naive about what alternative energy can do.
The oil and gas dependencies, it's the directly related It's
not hyperbole to say that, and it's very serious. The seriousness,
seriousness of this with respect to geopolitics and the readibly
(30:38):
high costs of Europeans are paying for their energy now
because of their policies starting to come home, and it's
those things will have political impact. So I I'm optimistic
that will will rebound back to reality. Doesn't mean we
will have lots of electric cars and windmills and stuff,
but we're gonna also have lots of oil and gas
(30:59):
being used. That's sort of lots of lots of cars,
a lot more internal combustion engines because they just worked well.
We have great machines. We've just we've just got to
sort of learn our lesson, and it's going to be
a hard lesson to learn. Mark Mills. The name of
the book again once again, let's give it a let's
give it a plug here in our last minute. Where
can the listeners go get it? And what's the name
(31:19):
of it? It's The Cloud Revolution by Mark Females that
all the usual great booksellers, and the subtitle it includes
the phrase the Roaring twenties because I've remained stubbornly optimistic
that we will emerge from the chaosa today and have
a great, a great center, a great decade, and then
a century after that. Wonderful Mark, always a pleasure, sir.
(31:41):
We appreciate your time. You're very generous with it. You
be well and we'll talk again soon. Thanks for having
me on. You're very welcome talk again always always. Um. Yeah,
you know, and I've got to tell you, guys, we
could we could have gone on. I would need a
ten hour show to to finish with this because the
testimony is so eye open, and we're gonna figure out
(32:01):
a way. Maybe we'll put it up on the Car
Doctor show dot com website and make it a downloadable PDF.
I'll talk to Tom about the technical aspects of that
once involved in that. But we'll figure out a way
to get it to you. Um. But I'm sure it's
if you search for it. It's Mark P. Mills, Senior Fellow,
Manhattan Institute, Testimony given before the U. S. House Committee
on Agriculture on February twelve two. I'm Rondady in the
(32:23):
Car Doctor. We're gonna pull over and take a pause.
I'll be back right after this. Welcome back, ran name
the Car Doctor. Thanks for joining us this our you
know a little bit different format. Uh, it's you know,
when we get Mark, when we find when he finds
the time to carve us out sometimes so we can
(32:45):
talk to him. We try to, you know, get as
much information out of him as we can. And today
we were talking about his testimony in front of the U. S.
House Committee on Agriculture. Uh, so many things we didn't
touch on that, you know, we could have gone on
and on and on. Like I said, I'll try and
get his testimony up. Either we'll make it downloadable or
we'll get it up on Facebook or our website or something.
In the next couple of weeks. We'll figure out how
(33:06):
to do that. More technology. Um, one of the things
that he talked about in front of the U. S.
House was in the event of grid outage, with an
F one fifty lightning that's say, only half charged, one
would need to have on site a Jenerac or Tesla
power wall with enough stored power to fill up to
pick up his battery. A power wall with that much
(33:26):
storage half a tank he has in quotation marks cost
over thirty thou dollars. The other alternative for the rural
homeowner would be to keep a small tank of fuel
on hand and a five thousand dollar generated to charge
the truck. And then he goes on to say, finally,
none of this isn't anything about the practical utility of
a truck with a fuel system the battery that weighs
one ton instead of a hundred and fifty pounds. The
ladder is the weight of a full gas a lean
(33:47):
tank for a conventional truck with the same range. Of course,
for rural homeowners with two vehicles, it is possible many
people would choose to own the second vehicle with limited
emergency fuel capability and more limited cargo capacity if there
are no penalties because of subsidies. You know, it's not
that I'm anti e V. I'm just trying to plan
out the practical ability of it. You know, two and
(34:10):
two always has to make four right. It's numbers don't lie,
Math doesn't lie. Um As Mark says, it's got to
be arithmetic. It's got to make sense. And you know,
it's funny. I listened to him, and I get these
visions of that those professors I had in college, that
they knew the answers before I asked the question, and
they knew what the question was gonna be because they're
(34:30):
not sure of themselves. And there's just something I don't
want to say. It's unsettling, but there's something interesting about
his position on this. He's just telling us the numbers
don't work, and yet we're barreling along into this head first,
so you don't listen. I like he said, he's right.
Tesla built the heck of a car, and the engineering
(34:52):
of that battery is second to none. And he's the
guy that everybody's chasing that all the other car companies
are trying to create and become. And you know, and
they will. Will the electric vehicle, make the internal combustion
and go to the internal combustion engine, go the way
of the Dodo. I don't think so. I you know,
because again, unless there's a lot of PM pure magic
(35:13):
out there, it's just not gonna happen. It's gotta make sense.
Thanks for sticking with us as sour. I hope you
got something out of it. I know I do. And
there's always it's been a pleasure to be here with you.
Until next week, I'm running any of the car doctor,
reminding you who mechanics aren't expensive, they're priceless. Let's see
you
Ron Andanian. I could get the plug out of two,
I couldn't get the plug to budge on one. And
I leaned on it as hard as I wanted to
with the with the smaller than increasingly growing larger breaker bars,
trying to get a fuel for it. It was just
brammed in there. It's why that baby's in there. Good
to kiss to the radio in the Car Doctor. One
(00:24):
of the shop people were placed the ETM relay. I
fill it out with you. They were barking up the
wrong tree. They were closed. Welcome to the radio home
of Ron and Nanian the Car Doctor. Since this is
where car owners the world overturned to for their definitive
opinion on automotive repair. If your mechanics giving you a
(00:46):
busy signal, pick up the phone and call in. The
garage doors are open, but I am here to take
your calls at eight five, five six and now running.
You know, there's an awful lot of conversation of late
about the e V, the electric vehicle, and there's a
(01:06):
lot of things flying around and being discussed, and uh,
you know, we're very fortunate today in that um. You know,
the quote comes to mind about if I've if I've
seen far in this particular industry and on paraphrases, because
I've stood on the shoulder of the giants. We've got
one of the We've got a gentleman that I consider
one of the giants in the in the development of
the ev and where this is gonna go and some
(01:27):
just very plain and honest and straightforward facts. And we're
glad to have him back with us once again. Mark Mills.
He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and we're
gonna talk about his testimony in front of the U. S.
House Committee on Agriculture today. Mark, I'm probably embarrassing you,
but that's okay, man, you deserve it. If we're in
the same room, you wouldn't call me a giant. But
that's okay. Take it, take it, take it. So how
(01:50):
are you today? I'm doing great. Fact, you'll be back here.
Here you go. Right, You're standing up in front of
the U. S. House Committee on Agriculture talking about evs
and I'm reading your testimony, which my spies have gotten
for me, and I'm um, I'm gonna ask you if
I can post this up on Facebook and put this
out to the public, a public information. Right, it's not
(02:10):
like I've got uh, that's the whole point. Yeah, it's
it's right, it's it's you know, you talk about, you know,
the the obvious. You you explain in your in your
opening paragraphs, um, uh that you want to talk about
the needed infrastructure and possible impediments to electric vehicle adoption
(02:31):
in rural America. And you want to talk about some
of the infrastructure realities. And I'm paraphrasing here, I should
begin by pointing out the obvious. You say, um, we
will see a lot more evs on the road, and
you explain that in detail, and then you make a
stunning announcement. As the Committee knows, while in recent years
we've seen rapid growth and consumer purchases of evs, the
total number of electric vehicles and used today remains overall
(02:54):
at about six tenths of a percent of all light
duty vehicles on America's roads. Well, you know, it's rapid
growth from a very from a very small number. Sounds
like a lot, but it's kind of like if you're
gambling and I told you made a ten dollar bet.
(03:16):
It sounds great, it's not. It doesn't very meaningful. So
there there haven't been many evis around for a long time.
There there there are more. Now. Look, let's stipulate something
that I've said many many times, and I'll have written
and I will say it again that Elon Musk's uh
capacity to make a vehicle that is a good vehicle
(03:38):
to make a successful automobile company cannot be explained away
by subsidies. No one, no one that can afford a
ninety thousand dollar vehicle is going to buy a lousy
vehicle even with a fifteen thousand dollar discounts. It's not
gonna happen. It's an amazing vehicle. He has. His engineers
have made the best electric vehicle batteries in the world
(04:01):
so far. It really is remarkable engineering. There are, and
every automaker is now chasing this bogey in the high
end of the market. It's a great option to have.
There will be lots of evs in the world. But
what I was testifying about was the question about whether
or not it made sense because this was this is
the Agricultural Committee two subsidize and accelerate the penetration of
(04:27):
electric vehicles in rural America. And I didn't oppose that.
I would just play it out some of the obvious
facts and the engineering and realities of charging and running
and you know, using e vs, and also the supply
chain which had become aware of what what does it
take to make lots more e V It's not I mean,
(04:48):
it's not like everything else in the world. You have
to build things from something. Non electric vehicles, you know,
internal combustion engine cars are made mainly from steel and copper, plastic,
some aluminum, rubber things. But d vs use about three
more critical minerals of copper, obviously lithium, cobalt, nicol. You
(05:12):
have to think about where that's going to come from
if you try to increase by force the number of
those cars in the road. Yeah, and and and where
does that all come from? And not here? Not here? Right? Problem?
And you know, you make a statement in your testimony.
(05:34):
It's well known and obvious that rural residents and this
is so simplistic and it's genius. I gotta tell you
that rural residents drive drive more miles on average, about
more per person per year than urban drivers. Right, because
if you're out in the country, you have to drive
to get somewhere because you're going to get stuff which
(05:55):
is you know, twenty miles away or maybe farther. Um,
you're gonna be driving more and if you're in an
e V vehicle, that sort of presents a problem. Right, Yeah,
And here's here's the key. The problem is not range,
as I pointed out on my testimony, the idea that
e vs don't have the range of internal combustion engines
(06:17):
for most cars for most purposes, most gasoline tanks. I'm
not talking about the big tank and the stressed you know,
a a crew cabin F one fifty with a big tank,
but a regular vehicles you have about three h range
to eighty three fifty three hundred mile average range in
most cars, and the e vs you can buy today
(06:37):
have about a three hundred mile range. So it's not
a range issue. It's a refueling issue. It's a practical matter.
If you recharge your car, refuel at night at home,
that's that's fine. So the F one fifty Lightning, which
I talked about because I think it's a pretty cool truck,
it's pretty amazing piece of engineering. Chevy's chasing with their
(06:58):
own silver Rado version, but they sell it with an
overnight charger so you can refuel it overnight eight to
ten hours. Okay, that's kind of a long time. So
if you have to make a long trip, you stop
at a refueling station and a supercharger. A supercharger which
is what you can't have in your home because they
(07:19):
cost as much as the vehicle. Uh, takes forty minutes
to refuel the vehicle. Pretty good, much better than much
better than eight hours, except feel like up an FTK
takes gastly and takes all five minutes. That's the fueling
time five minutes versus ten times longer. Once you think
(07:41):
through the logistics on what that means, set aside whether
or not you as a consumer are willing on average
to spend forty minutes to refuel your vehicle rather than
five minutes or six minutes. Set aside whether that there's
a lot of people that would put up with that.
Think about the logistic of the fueling station where it's
(08:02):
just this is a this is sort of like a
you know, kids play Catris the game. You think about
how many fuel pumps do I need if I operate
a fueling station. If each car that pulls up takes
five minutes to fill up at peak time, say you
need six or eight pumps right now peak time, each
person is going to take forty minutes to fill up.
(08:24):
How many pumps do you need? Well, this is not
rocket science. Ten times the number and each pump plus
twice as much as a regular fuel pump. So I
need ten times the number of pumps, each cost twice
as much. So the building station has increased its capital
(08:45):
costs by what he folds to duplicate the gasoline. So
do you if that efficacy here at util? This this
is just you know, as I said to the the committee,
I said, you can do that. It's not like it's impossible.
(09:05):
It's just not a good idea. It's very inconvenient, very expensive.
It's a very bad idea. The market is not going
to accept that, and people are being naive about this.
This is not an anti ev position. This is just
the engineering and what the systems allow. You mean common sense, Well, yeah,
we could call it common sense, but I wouldn't like
insult Congress. I'm sorry, come on, take me next time.
(09:28):
Come on, take take me next time. I want to
go so very old Mark Plane and Will Roger's lines
about common sense and Congress, But I won't go there right, yeah, please, Um,
you know, we're we're on in Washington. We've got a
couple of Washington affiliates, so we might hear from somebody,
you never know, Um, you know, And I'm listening to
(09:48):
you explain this about how you'll need so many more
charging stations, and all I'm thinking about is the amount
of real estate, you know, the physical plant, so to speak,
the size. You know, in Texas, we can probably come
up with the space. But Rhode Island's going to lose out. Um,
you know, it's not gonna work out. Urban areas they
(10:09):
have the space. Look, the truth is in rural America,
there's a lot of space around a lot of filling stations.
You could probably do that. It's not but it's it's
going to be a visual blight. That's one thing. Maybe
nobody cares. I kind of care. But it'll be very expensive.
People are being naive about the scale of these things.
This administration has a lot of money in the infrastructure
(10:31):
build to spend billions of dollars building more charging stations.
But again, if you do the arithmetic, this is not mathematics,
this is arithmetic. If you do the arithmetic, the billions
of dollars that the administration is going to spend on
subsidizing and building charging stations won't be enough to build
enough charging stations for the electric vehicles that the administration
(10:55):
would like to have in the federal fleet, which is
point all one percent of the total fleet of vehicles
in America. It won't be enough to keep those vehicles
charged on a normal refueling basis. So it's it's a
very there's people forget they're sort of scaled. There's a
couple hundred million vehicles in America. There are more licensed
(11:18):
or more vehicles, and there are licensed drivers. It's a
lot of vehicles. So if you put a few million
electric vehicles on the road, that's a lot. You know,
it's a practicing, it's it's it's not it's not nothing.
But it doesn't change everything. And if you want to
change everything, you have to spend extraordinary amounts of money,
a lot of hardware, a lot of time. It's not
(11:41):
like we can we can't do it? Is that should
we do it? Do you want to spend that much money?
And for what purpose? I mean, any other thing I
pointed out is manufacturing electric vehicles means that you're essentially
importing the key materials to make the batteries because we
don't expand mining in America. So it's the equivalent of
(12:01):
manufacturing conventional vehicles in America and importing all the gasoline
and minerals are imported, and it's coming from and it's
coming from other places from us. Right, hey, Mark, tell
you what sit tight? Let me pull over and take
this pause. Hold that thought. I'm Ron Anading of the
car Doctor here with the one and only Mark Mills.
Will both be back right after this. Don't go away
(12:29):
for the best in car advice. Give Ron a call
eight by five five zero nine nine zero zero. Now
back Torn And we're joined this hour by Mark Mills,
who is talking to us about EVS and some of
his recent testimony in front of the U. S. House
Committee on Agriculture. Mark, you know when we took the pause,
we were talking about charge rates and and and the
(12:50):
abilities of of different size stations. I was doing some
math and and talking about it and thinking about it.
So if it's forty minutes to charge an average are
and you had a twenty pump, a twenty station recharging facility,
I think you can do like six cars in a
twenty four hour period if my math was right. Um,
(13:13):
well if you cantbsequently, But the way to look at
this is it's a very old industry, near or nearly
a century into figuring out the logistics on how to
refuel vehicles for the average citizen. So just go to
the average you know, showy station. How many how many
pumps do you see and whatever? Whatever you see. That's
(13:34):
if each of those you had to spend forty minutes at,
that wouldn't be enough. It's just it's obvious complicated because
they figured out they figured out the mechanics for their
peak loading quite quite uh quite a long time ago.
So if you were you know, if it's forty minutes,
and then your face with the problem. I think that
(13:54):
if you're in the rural part of the country. You know,
this is a rural part of the country. E V
electric theory conversation we're having, right, Um, you have to
get that electricity there to actually be able to charge
the e V vehicle just because you have the supercharger,
you don't necessarily have enough infrastructure to support that. Well,
you put your finger on the hidden costs in this.
(14:18):
Never mind the cost of the these are ken Hunter
Killawatt class even Megalock class chargers. These are really uh
significant industrial class electrical infrastructures. The distribution grid in the
in the rural area cannot support that kind of power loading.
Put differently, I mean charging a car. I'm being very simplistic,
(14:44):
but there's roughly the electric load of a whole house
that's there. They're but co equal in terms of what
you need for the transformers, the power systems, control systems.
So you need to add to the math if you had,
you know, a gas station with the pumps that pop
gasing are very low energy, so you're not you're not
(15:04):
putting worth neighborhood's worth of houses worth electric demand in
a single fueling station, So you have to upgrade the
entire distribution system electric the local electric grid to handle them.
That will cost a lot of money. Again, one can
do it, but the system is not designed for that.
It's not built for that. Now, somebody will have to
(15:26):
pay for that, presumably rate payer as well. I mean
it's not you want to put people to pay for anything, ultimately,
our consumers and taxpayers, but that that factor alone is
probably the single biggest cost and impediment kind of things
we're talking about, especially in world distribution looks which are
(15:46):
not designed to handle that kind of additional load. Do
you hear the stories regarding you know, when I talk
about this, when I get comments from listeners, and I'll
have I'll see articles in the news as well reference
over the air charging ability. At some point I made
him to look at that. Well, So here this is
(16:10):
the the long time dream with electricity is to be
able to deliver electric power without wires. And we can
do that. It can be done. It's m magnetic coupling,
inductive TRUMPI, inductive charging, it's magnetic fields, you can broadcast microwaves.
All these things are aren't doable. But let's this is
(16:31):
and I apologize, this is like a physics one on
one lesson, and I apologize. I was trained as a physicist,
but I don't practice physics anymore. Really, But let's just
do this. The two different aspects of this one is
whether you plug the car in with a cord or
drive it over a wireless charger. And inductive like you
(16:52):
know everybody's phone now can charge by just putting on
a magnetic pads. It's a magnetic coupling. Doesn't change the
power requirement's the fact they go up. They go up
somewhat because the coupling efficiency of doing over the air
charging is lower than this direct coupling, as you might imagine.
It just is so you have to have actually more
(17:13):
power to do that, but doesn't change the power level
significantly in any direction. It's a little higher, but whatever.
So that doesn't solve the problem. Then the bigger, the
bigger issue is whether or not you can do that
cost effective organdistance. Does it really matter to you if
you pulled up to a gas station and you parked
(17:34):
over a pad to charge you, or you had to
get out and plug something into your car, practical matter.
You're still going to be there forty minutes and it
makes no difference. And then then you have the theory
that I can just charge you car while you're driving it.
So the French actually built a highway with a magnetic
charging system buried in the highways, kind of like a rail.
(17:56):
I'll tell you what Mark called that foot. I don't
mean to interrupt you, storry. Hold that when we come back,
we gotta take a hard break here. Hold that thought.
When we come back, we'll finish up. We'll pick up
right where you left off. I want to hear the
end result of this. I'm running any of the Car
Doctor here with Mark Mills. We're talking to Evis. Don't
go away. There's more to come right after this. Welcome back,
(18:49):
Running the Car Doctor here with Mark Mills, Senior Fellow
at the Manhattan Institute. Mark. When we took the break, um,
we were talking about, well, I guess PM pure magic,
the idea of charging a car, you know, wirelessly. You're
driving down a road and you were telling us about
how the French had built a road that would charge
an electric feedle. I think is where you were going. Yeah, No,
(19:11):
it's it's engineers to do magic. You know, you know this.
I mean I'm a physicist, but the magic of engineers,
as they always find a workaround. The issue isn't whether
you can do something. That's what it costs, whether it
makes sense, right, I mean, that's always what it comes
down to for consumers and any practical product. You can
lay in magnetic charging cables in the road and continuously
(19:33):
recharge the battery in the car, It's it's possible, it's
just extremely expensive. So it's just a bad idea with
all the kinds of complications in terms of efficiencies and
energy use and interference, and then how and how would
the weather affect that right, and you know, the snow
loadings and moving it's all kinds of reasons of the
(19:54):
internal combustion engine. It's gonna be around for a long time.
You know, I want to put in a plug for
my book because I talked about I felt like I'm
a pessimist here. My new book, as you know, The
Cloud Revolution, talks about where technology is going. And what
I point out in my book is that you know,
there will be lots of more electric vehicles, and the
(20:15):
lithium battery is a magical thing. The three guys that
really made it possible got Nobel Price a few years ago.
They deserved it changed the world. But changing how a
car is fueled in terms of an economic revolution is
roughly comfortable with changing what we fed horses before the
dawn of the age of the automobile. It's still a car.
(20:38):
If the car itself was the economic and social revolution,
how what it eats as the impact. It's relevant, but
it doesn't change the world any more than changing what
the food was for a horse would have The real
revolutions and transportation are you know, are right in front
of us there. They've been sort of pilloried over the years,
(20:58):
like you know, where's my flying car? Are these kinds
of things? We know that drones, never mind flying cars
are possible cargo carrying drones. They're starting to be used
all over the world for critical cargo and packages, including
food delivery. In in Australia, you know, a rural areas
expurban areas, and the idea of a flying cars no
(21:21):
longer but it's an air taxi. It's no longer crazy.
The materials, the energy, energetics, the control systems for safety
are now clearly possible. We now have to deal with
the engineering challenge of making it affordable and making it
quiet enough, and all the mechanics logistics around the infrastructure.
(21:44):
They're not trivial. But we're well past the era of
thinking could it happen? So that will be a revolution,
that would be a big deal, and that's clearly coming.
Not tomorrow, but it's it's it's coming. So I wrote
a lot about technology revolutions in my book, in part
because I think people are focused on the wrong things,
or you're all excited about Tesla's great car, great company
(22:08):
happened personally, like SpaceX is his business much more than
his card business. That's my my bias as an old
space nerd. But good for him, he really accomplished something remarkable.
But it's not going to change the world. Cheap space travel,
good drones will, robots will. In fact, Elon Musk, if
(22:31):
your listeners haven't paid attention to this thing, you could
use the magic Google machine to just take a look
at what Elon Musk has been saying recently about anthropomorphic robots,
I mean robots that can walk around do useful things.
He initially sort of looked like he was joking, teasing
about building a robot. He made it, Claire, He's not teasing,
He's not joking. Uh we we you know it's and again,
(22:54):
I have a couple of chapters in my book about robots.
Robots have been the subject of science fiction, well for
him or two years. But we can now build those things.
You can see them again on YouTube. Are there practical
ones that are horrible today? No, But when the derail
wagon came out and I think it was eighteen nine six,
(23:14):
I got the late eighteen nineties. Uh, it was the
first American electernal combustion first car in America. They sold thousands,
didn't change the world, but you know, it took a
couple of decades, and Ford came along with the Model
t changed the world. I think maybe Elon Musk is
(23:36):
the Henry Ford of our time. But it won't be
around the electric car. It's gonna be around a robot.
I think anyway cars but no, but robots are like cars.
They're autonomous things that increase the mobility and utility of
our economy. What a wonderful thing. Well, you know, no,
you're not. You're not wrong, because there is going to
(23:57):
be that next great thing. But the problem with the
ev is, you know, one little thing upsets the apple cart.
Was the first year material costs went up for that
electric car, and now in twenty two they're talking like
lithium battery costs are supposed to rise again this year. Well,
(24:18):
so this is this is the great fiction that everybody
is ignored. You put your finger on it. See, we've
been told that batteries are going to get cheaper, cheaper fast,
and make electric cars cheaper than internal combustion inches currently
on average, depending on the car and how they're made
is five to ten dollars per card more expensive entirely
(24:39):
because of the battery and the additional electronics that are
in the electric vehicle. But we've been told monum and
iacally that they're going to get cheaper and fast. But
here's the single fact that you need to know, and
this is verifiable fact. We're now so good at making
batteries courtesy Belond Musk that between sixties and seven percent
(25:00):
of the cost of making a battery electric car is
tied up in the commodity materials the minerals needed to
build it. Once you know that, you then have to
know a second fact. But to think about this, that
means that even if the manufacturing process cost nothing, it's
basically all about the materials cost all the materials copper, lithium, callbalt, manganese, nickel,
(25:26):
these are commodities and the commodities for decades, about centuries
to shift the world's vehicle fleet from internal combustion to
electric were required an increase in the mining of these
minerals from four four tho percent. This would be the
biggest increase in mineral mining essentially in history and no
(25:49):
time in history, as an increase in demand for commodity.
Cause the commodity go down in price, it goes up
and that's already happened. So you're absolutely right last year
that the battery prices gone up, they're going up this year.
It also means, by the way the solar panel prices
have gone up there in two years, when turbine prices
(26:10):
are up for all the same reasons, by the way
the mineral inputs and critically, and then again, this is
not me saying this, This is the International Energy Agency,
which is an advocate of the expanded use of electric vehicles.
They pointed out that the world is not planning to
mind enough minerals to produce quantity of electric vehicles that
(26:33):
all the world's governments want to have happened. What's not happening. Yeah,
it's just it's just uh well, it's back to that
PM that pure magic statement. Right, it's just going to
be it's just gonna fall out of this guy. Hey, Mark,
sit tight, let me pull over and when we come back,
we'll wrap this conversation up. We're here with the Great
Mark Mills and Rondinating the car Doctor. I'll both be
(26:54):
back right after this. Don't go away. Welcome back. We're
here with Mark Mills. I'm running any in the car,
doctor Mark. You know, I think we should close here.
In your closing comments to the testimony you gave to
(27:18):
the US House on February twelfth of this year, you said,
for the record, a world going from today's ten million
to having five million vs on the roads would eliminate
only about pent of world oil use. And bringing the
realities back to rural America, if half of all rural
homeowners can be induced to replace their second vehicle with
an electric pickup truck, that would reduce US oil consumption
(27:39):
by barely three percent and the world consumption by half percent.
It would have even less impact, perhaps not on global
carbon dioxide emissions. How did they react to that? How
did they react to any of this that? Did? It
didn't make any did it did it make any penetration
or was it talking to the wall? I guess no
kind of ration. I'm talking about wall. Look, but I
(28:02):
think in that setting what they were focused on is
how to distribute the large s courtesy to taxpayers in
the bipartisan Infrastructure bill, to give money out to people
to build stuff like charging stations, so that everybody's pretty
giddy about all the billions of dollars I can now
give out and spend it, and that that was sort
of the sense of it. And to be fair, Uh,
(28:28):
you know, everybody's respectful, but no one really probes the questions,
partly because and I and as you know, you can
read my testimony and is public information. I do try
to be diplomatic. I don't try to be flipped. The
truth is, the facts are not in favor of this
idea of this grand transition away from of combustion engines.
(28:48):
It's just not going to happen. It's not like I
don't want it to happen, or I oppose it some
for moral reasons, or there's nothing to do with that.
It's just the engineering and mining. It's not happening. It's
not going to happen. But in the attempt to do it,
we're going to spend lots of money, a lot of
people get enriched, so you end up with this bizarre
(29:10):
kabookie dance. So they don't they really don't ask a
lot of questions. Um something. The questions are not directed
towards the veracity of the assertions I'm making because again
I'm using data from the u N International Energy Agency
from geological surveys. These are not disputable facts. You could
(29:31):
have a different opinion on whether you like the facts,
but they're not disputable. You don't get into that. So
it's a it's a little bit surreal. I mean, I
work in the venture world as well. You know, we
have a fund that we invest in software for energy companies,
and I work in the I used to work in
real real world and made things and battens. In the
(29:53):
political policy world, a little bit of I guess what
you're called intellectual whiplash is a very different dynamic. You
could be a cynic, but I'm not. I'm pretty realistic
about these things. They have a they have a timeline
to them. It's all different, and I think reality is
starting to bite. The trouble Europe is in right now
(30:15):
with respect to energy dependencies on Russia are directly a
consequence of being naive about what alternative energy can do.
The oil and gas dependencies, it's the directly related It's
not hyperbole to say that, and it's very serious. The seriousness,
seriousness of this with respect to geopolitics and the readibly
(30:38):
high costs of Europeans are paying for their energy now
because of their policies starting to come home, and it's
those things will have political impact. So I I'm optimistic
that will will rebound back to reality. Doesn't mean we
will have lots of electric cars and windmills and stuff,
but we're gonna also have lots of oil and gas
(30:59):
being used. That's sort of lots of lots of cars,
a lot more internal combustion engines because they just worked well.
We have great machines. We've just we've just got to
sort of learn our lesson, and it's going to be
a hard lesson to learn. Mark Mills. The name of
the book again once again, let's give it a let's
give it a plug here in our last minute. Where
can the listeners go get it? And what's the name
(31:19):
of it? It's The Cloud Revolution by Mark Females that
all the usual great booksellers, and the subtitle it includes
the phrase the Roaring twenties because I've remained stubbornly optimistic
that we will emerge from the chaosa today and have
a great, a great center, a great decade, and then
a century after that. Wonderful Mark, always a pleasure, sir.
(31:41):
We appreciate your time. You're very generous with it. You
be well and we'll talk again soon. Thanks for having
me on. You're very welcome talk again always always. Um. Yeah,
you know, and I've got to tell you, guys, we
could we could have gone on. I would need a
ten hour show to to finish with this because the
testimony is so eye open, and we're gonna figure out
(32:01):
a way. Maybe we'll put it up on the Car
Doctor show dot com website and make it a downloadable PDF.
I'll talk to Tom about the technical aspects of that
once involved in that. But we'll figure out a way
to get it to you. Um. But I'm sure it's
if you search for it. It's Mark P. Mills, Senior Fellow,
Manhattan Institute, Testimony given before the U. S. House Committee
on Agriculture on February twelve two. I'm Rondady in the
(32:23):
Car Doctor. We're gonna pull over and take a pause.
I'll be back right after this. Welcome back, ran name
the Car Doctor. Thanks for joining us this our you
know a little bit different format. Uh, it's you know,
when we get Mark, when we find when he finds
the time to carve us out sometimes so we can
(32:45):
talk to him. We try to, you know, get as
much information out of him as we can. And today
we were talking about his testimony in front of the U. S.
House Committee on Agriculture. Uh, so many things we didn't
touch on that, you know, we could have gone on
and on and on. Like I said, I'll try and
get his testimony up. Either we'll make it downloadable or
we'll get it up on Facebook or our website or something.
In the next couple of weeks. We'll figure out how
(33:06):
to do that. More technology. Um, one of the things
that he talked about in front of the U. S.
House was in the event of grid outage, with an
F one fifty lightning that's say, only half charged, one
would need to have on site a Jenerac or Tesla
power wall with enough stored power to fill up to
pick up his battery. A power wall with that much
(33:26):
storage half a tank he has in quotation marks cost
over thirty thou dollars. The other alternative for the rural
homeowner would be to keep a small tank of fuel
on hand and a five thousand dollar generated to charge
the truck. And then he goes on to say, finally,
none of this isn't anything about the practical utility of
a truck with a fuel system the battery that weighs
one ton instead of a hundred and fifty pounds. The
ladder is the weight of a full gas a lean
(33:47):
tank for a conventional truck with the same range. Of course,
for rural homeowners with two vehicles, it is possible many
people would choose to own the second vehicle with limited
emergency fuel capability and more limited cargo capacity if there
are no penalties because of subsidies. You know, it's not
that I'm anti e V. I'm just trying to plan
out the practical ability of it. You know, two and
(34:10):
two always has to make four right. It's numbers don't lie,
Math doesn't lie. Um As Mark says, it's got to
be arithmetic. It's got to make sense. And you know,
it's funny. I listened to him, and I get these
visions of that those professors I had in college, that
they knew the answers before I asked the question, and
they knew what the question was gonna be because they're
(34:30):
not sure of themselves. And there's just something I don't
want to say. It's unsettling, but there's something interesting about
his position on this. He's just telling us the numbers
don't work, and yet we're barreling along into this head first,
so you don't listen. I like he said, he's right.
Tesla built the heck of a car, and the engineering
(34:52):
of that battery is second to none. And he's the
guy that everybody's chasing that all the other car companies
are trying to create and become. And you know, and
they will. Will the electric vehicle, make the internal combustion
and go to the internal combustion engine, go the way
of the Dodo. I don't think so. I you know,
because again, unless there's a lot of PM pure magic
(35:13):
out there, it's just not gonna happen. It's gotta make sense.
Thanks for sticking with us as sour. I hope you
got something out of it. I know I do. And
there's always it's been a pleasure to be here with you.
Until next week, I'm running any of the car doctor,
reminding you who mechanics aren't expensive, they're priceless. Let's see
you
Host
Ron Ananian
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