I never, ever understood the hydrogen car crowd. The fantasy of building a giant sprawling hydrogen generation and supply infrastructure, another horribly centralized yet unstable model of high risk energy, seemed totally nuts. Here are a couple of my old blog posts, if you see what I mean.
September 2006: The Danger of a Fuel Cell Infrastructure
Shell to permanently close all of its hydrogen refuelling stations for cars in California … Shell had last September told Hydrogen Insight that it had “discontinued its plan to build and operate additional light-duty vehicle fueling stations in California”, effectively scrapping the 48 new sites it had previously announced it would build.
Picture this: Shell accepting $40.6 million in grant money from California, only to close operations shortly thereafter. It seems like Shell accepted the funds as a gesture to politicians who expect now to be receiving that money back from Shell for upcoming elections.
“Just a quick signature boys to rob the taxpayers and then I’m off to cheat on my wife”. The California Governor “loved” hydrogen in 2004.
The flow reflects hydrogen serving mainly as a politically corrupt system. Climate attention and energy resources are unjustly diverted by wealthy incumbents into scams (e.g. toxic hydrogen, broken hyperloop, dead Tesla-tunnels) in order to deny practical and secure initiatives.
“GAS STATIONS SUCK: AMERICANS CRAVE RANGE TO AVOID THEM“.
It’s true. American car drivers travel less than 50 miles a whopping 98% of the time, yet that somehow is falsely interpreted by pundits as a worry about having long range.
The fixation on mileage may be misplaced, however, given Americans don’t actually tend to go all that far when they get behind the wheel. A 2022 study from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics showed more than half of all daily trips – by any mode of transportation – were fewer than 3 miles (4.8km). In fact, only 2% were longer than 50 miles (80.4km).
Internet service providers ranked second-lowest on a list of 43 consumer industries, outperforming only gas stations.
The misery of pumping gas, due to private yet centrally planned and controlled fuel distribution spots, has created an expectation of “range” to stay away from dealing with the gas service providers more than any actual need for travel distance.
I’ll say it again, American “range” anxiety is entirely because gas stations suck. It has almost nothing to do with driving far, or even dreaming about some long range destination, it’s “how long before I’m back in gas station hell”.
Meanwhile, quality of life actually improves if the act of stopping at places people like to spend time also means their car is refueled, such as having nice lunch, visiting with others, taking a view or a nap. It’s like a horse being fed and watered when the rider dismounts at any destination. Natural, sensible.
The EV should have been able to target the gas station anxiety (capitalize on the inversion of models) to promote distributed, decentralized charging (refuel anywhere, anytime, from anything) as true freedom. Alas, Tesla stepped in and ruined the conversation with dumb “range” propaganda that falsely promoted itself instead.
The simple fact that Americans travel such short distances in their car ironically is the reason why grossly deceptiveTesla range fraud wasn’t exposed and discussed more widely early in its existence.
Tesla is facing a class-action lawsuit filed by customers who say they were misled by the company’s exaggerated range claims. The lawsuit was filed yesterday, days after a report revealed that Tesla exaggerated its electric vehicles’ range so much that many drivers thought their cars were broken.
Falsely advertising 300 mile range fantasies while delivering half that or less in reality, hasn’t hit Americans hard because so rarely did they actually drive far distances. They did complain however about their Tesla dashboard software, designed to lie, engineered for zero integrity.
Tesla employees had been instructed to thwart any customers complaining about poor driving range from bringing their vehicles in for service. Last summer, the company quietly created a “Diversion Team” in Las Vegas to cancel as many range-related appointments as possible.
The disaster was self-inflicted, as a Lance Armstrong level of carefully created evil, where fake victories were celebrated as a “net” improvement. Elon Musk arrogantly gambled that nobody ever would hold Tesla accountable for cheating.
The directive to present the optimistic range estimates came from Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, this person said. “Elon wanted to show good range numbers when fully charged,” the person said, adding: “When you buy a car off the lot seeing 350-mile, 400-mile range, it makes you feel good.” […] Driving range is among the most important factors in consumer decisions on which electric car to buy, or whether to buy one at all. So-called range anxiety – the fear of running out of power before reaching a charger – has been a primary obstacle to boosting electric-vehicle sales.
There you have it. Elon Musk inflamed unfounded anxiety and false fears in order to aggressively proclaim he was the only one who could save people from short range when that was NOT the actual anxiety.
This bait and switch certainly impacted better engineered cars like the Nissan LEAF, which had been the best selling battery electric vehicle into 2019 with an honest range about the same as the actual Tesla range… again, about half of the fake range Elon Musk advertised.
It’s a notorious fascist strategy to artificially corner people using fear into becoming radical “believers”, a tactic very harmful to any market. Not only is Tesla undermining fair commerce with their overt swindles (stealing real business to replace it with fraud), more generally they completely disrespect law and order with highly planned deception.
The founder of an electric truck start-up that was popular in the US has been sentenced to four years in prison.
Trevor Milton, who led Nikola Corporation, was convicted of fraud last year after a jury found he had lied persistently about the company.
[…]
“Over the course of many months, you used your considerable social media skills to tout your company in ways that were materially false,” said Judge Edgardo Ramos.
“What you said over and over on different media outlets was wrong,” the judge added.
It is hard to believe Elon Musk wasn’t thrown in jail for the exact same fraud by 2019. Hundreds of people are dead unnecessarily, the blood on his hands far worse than any other car company. Why are the egregious crimes of Musk so slow to be prosecuted, leaving so many dead, yet his philosophical peers like Milton, Holmes, and Bankman-Fried already are being locked up?
Not very surprising, but very late. This should have happened years ago.
Gerber, who held some 420,000 shares of Tesla stock as recently as this spring and is the CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, said his clients are “pissed off.”
“Getting a flood of messages from clients wanting out of Tesla and anything to do with Elon Musk,” he wrote on X. “Many saying they are selling their cars as well.”
Turns out that all the lies and fraud that built Tesla’s grossly inflated valuation were related to a CEO who … wait for it … grossly spreads lies and fraud.
Swastika (formerly known as Twitter) is turning out exactly as I warned here back in April 2022.
Getting “pissed off” at Bernie Madoff or Lance Armstrong is a natural reaction, so it’s no surprise with this fraud either. But those guys at least didn’t spread such dangerous hate speech along with their scams.
The Tesla brand now is basically promoting harm as a hate symbol. That increasingly was the case ever since Elon Musk cruelly stole it from the founders. Now it is obvious.
People are starting to finally come to terms with their own role in supporting a hate platform.
For anyone who really wants to understand the American businessman to lunatic trajectory, please read the 1958 analysis of Henry Ford.
…can a genius be obtuse and even stupid? Can he be a man of uniformly limited ability, talent, and judgment? There is a mass of evidence, most if it uncontroverted, to show that Ford was all of these things. […] Nor would any man of political wisdom or even of ordinary political shrewdness have had truck with the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, a known forgery, or the rest of the racial rubbish that month after month appeared in the Dearborn Independent along with Ford’s own page and which blamed the Jews for virtually every misfortune ever experienced by man. When, in the end, the objection to this farrago became overpowering, Ford set a new standard for audacious falsehood by explaining that someone had put it all in the paper when he wasn’t looking. (Previously he had defended it as “eminently fair, temperate, and judicial.”)
Ford’s much-touted economic and social philosophy was a fraud.
Every Ford sold had a copy of the CEO’s unhinged anti-Semitic hate speech on the front seat packaged as “news”.
Adolf Hitler loved and admired Ford for such hate propaganda, in a similar way to the politicians who love and admire Musk today.
American autoworkers and their children in 1941 protest Ford’s relationship with Hitler. Source: Wayne State
In other words if someone still says Ford or Musk deserve any respect they are either woefully ignorant of basic history, or a probable threat to democracy.
Once again I find Volvo quietly shipping quality BEV vehicles around the world, fulfilling real orders for real drivers.
Volvo FH Electric Semi Truck has been delivering real results in real world tests. All the quality engineering expected, while being quiet and professional.
Meanwhile… somewhere in the cocaine and cigar-filled elite boudoirs of Texan “big future thinker” events Tesla still shows up as the worst kind of corrupt political clown show.
Tesla announced to Wall Street in 2017, for alleged purposes of juicing stocks and soaking up big government handouts from California suckers, that 200,000 Semi trucks would be delivered and on the road in 2022.
Here we are in 2023 and, hopefully to nobody’s surprise, Tesla lies are again coming in to roost.
Fewer than 100 Tesla Semi trucks are alleged to exist. Such a woefully late vehicle also has a failure rate rate so high that even contrived tests need at least three available to complete. The real world means 100 of them delivered is equal to having an actual fleet of 33.
The stupidity of Tesla, a complete inability to engineer anything, couldn’t be more obvious.
Why did they put the seat in the middle? Because they are lazy. Surely they thought it looked more like a train seat, and didn’t care to think about the real world. It’s not a train.
Why did they use weak car parts and copy car designs for a truck meant to undergo heavy loads? Because they are lazy and greedy. Surely they thought it would save them money and didn’t care to think about the real world. It’s not a car.
I could go on but the point is that Tesla is not capable of real engineering. They assemble bad ideas and then stoke investments using completely irresponsible fiction.
Tesla is always cooking and cooked. Anyone buying into their vision is either too uninformed to see such basic fraud, or participating in that fraud.
My guess is Pepsi is the latter, somehow conspiring with Tesla to defraud the public through government corruption (e.g. creating a “tunnel company” simply to divert taxpayer money and prevent proper public transit from being built).
For simple comparison, the Volvo BEV Semi just set a distance record across Australia. It works. It is operating safely and to normal specs.
To complete the [760 mile] trip, the Volvo FH Electric had to be charged 8 times at an average of 1.5 hours of charging time. Basically, the trip was broken into 2 hours driving and then 1.5 hours of charging. To make sure the trip was compliant with legislated driving hours, Volvo used two drivers to complete the journey. To ensure the trip was as “green” as possible, the Volvo team used the Evie charging network, which runs solely on renewables.
The total time was reported at just 8 hours longer than a diesel truck would have taken to cover nearly 800 miles. Known improvements in charging stations is expected to bring the time delta down significantly.
PepsiCo did a 500-mile trip with the Tesla Semi from California to Phoenix, but it was just for PR purposes. The batteries completely burned out, which is why on PR trips like this, they bring three Tesla Semis, with two being towed on a diesel Semi truck, only to be swapped out when the battery dies the other two Semis on the 500-mile drive…
The only way a Tesla Semi works, despite being years late, is to hide a diesel Semi doing the actual work for it. Pretty sure this is the definition of fraud.
Tesla Semi is unquestionably another disaster from a man stuck in fantasy and known to disappoint. It’s really a metaphor for the privileged white man of South Africa who fraudulently claims everything is his work, even while suckling government handouts, stealing ideas and depending on others for actual work without sharing any credit or attention with them.
