Brass Tack #1 and EV Adoption – Response from a Friend

Readers may be interested in the comments of my friend and client Serafino Carri, posted earlier.  Sonny, as he is popularly known, being the good guy he is, wrote me a private email with his response, cautious about offending me with the candor of his remarks.  I responded:

Sonny:  Thanks so much for the excellent comments, and for notifying me about the typos, which I have fixed. 

I truly appreciate your taking the time, and I don’t have a problem with your posting it to the blog; I value your ideas even though some (most?) are not in accord with my own.  I’m sure other readers will appreciate your positions as well, and I see no reason not to publish them unedited.

You make some excellent points, the most interesting of which, to me, surrounds market demand, with your point about the $5 socks, i.e., most people won’t buy $5 socks made of organically grown wool when they can get perfectly good socks for $2.50.  Yet, as I wrote just yesterday in the blog, all this thought — yours and mine — is mere speculation.  Personally, I think my mink coat analogy is very powerful, i.e., that most people actually DO have sensibilities concerning other living creatures that can have powerful effects on their purchasing behavior. But I guess we’ll see shortly the level of demand for the Nissan LEAF, the Mitsubishi i-miEV, the BMW Mini E (which, at 200 hp, is a really cool car), etc. I’ll be very surprised if they don’t sell extremely well. 

Please be aware that, even though I still support my mink analogy, I consider altruism a very small portion of the equation — especially in today’s financial climate.  But I’m not sure how much we actually NEED altuism. A range of 100 miles will cause very little inconvience to the drivers of the vast majority of the 251 million cars on our roads right now. If a decent-quality BEV is available in the $25K price range, I’ll be stunned if they don’t sell like hotcakes.  But again, we’ll have to wait and see. 

And in terms of politics and political philosophy, you raise an excellent point about the “pollution tax.” The real problem that we EV advocates face is that, in the course of making a decision on how to move themselves around the planet, people are not paying the true costs.  They buy gas, supplied by an oil company, and that oil company simply passes the cost of cleaning up the mess on to future generations. 

If I were king of the world, I’d close that loophole this very minute.  Immediately after donning my crown, the effective price of a gallon of gasoline would rise to include the cost of the healthcare to deal with the lung disease that is caused by burning it, and it would also include the cost of pulling the CO2 and other garbage out of the atmosphere.  We’d have a level playing field on which EVs and renewable energy would be rightly perceived as the bargain of the millennium. And that, in very short order, would be the end of ICEs and the oil companies.