Europe EV sales rose 70.3% in September, 32.6% of market share (reuters.com)

Got kids? The way things are going, they’ll live in a barely habitable world. If they’re lucky; otherwise they’ll just die in it.

I’m baffled that anyone is _not_ concerned about it. I suppose if you’re pretty confident that you’re going to die in the next decade or so and don’t care about other people at all, sure, whatever, carry on, but everyone else should be concerned.

I am pretty sure a solar panel is just a solar panel, a frame and some wires?

The inverters and all that sure whatever just buy local. Those have not been the bottleneck - the panels have been what has been enabling the boom.

A panel is just a dumb slate of crystals that shoots out electrons, the wires and inverters and rest-of-system are up to us to design if we're indulging our China-panic. But we're basically being paid to take as many dumb panels as we can warehouse. Whether you believe that oversupply is a weapon, a mistake, or just normal industrial strategy is basically irrelevant.

China also manufactures and exports ICE vehicle parts and fossil fuel extraction equipment. No one thinks that's a dangerous dependency.

Also, really? You think that Internet-facing software in inverters is a big deal?

And this hasn't been a problem in an EV for years. That's a single charge for almost all EVs now. And with fast chargers being almost everywhere, especially along highways, I doubt the actual time taken is very different.

If you don't take a single ~20 minute break in a 5 hour drive, you can beat it. I'm not sure that's healthy or safe though. If you have children this isn't even an option IMHO.

> Will this take me and my family where we need to go is a more important consideration than the daily commute

Totally your decision obviously. It's also why you see so many trucks and all terrain vehicles drive around for the 1 time a year that might be useful. The rest of the year you just pay for that in gas/maintenance/parking ease etc. Again, your decision and I'm not saying you should change, just playing Devils advocate

Towing things long distances is one of the few EV weak points I can think of, but REV trucks should mostly fix that too.

It's really not much (if any) inconvenience. If in a gas car you assume you are going to stop to take a piss and grab a drink or a snack or something anyway during the course of a long 300+ mile drive (very likely I'd say, unless you and your passengers are urinating into bottles), you'd still need to stop for gas at some point too when with an EV you are actually spending less time since it's "filling up" while you are in the line waiting for your skinny latte. You don't have to do all that then also stop to grab gas too, because your car filled up without you.

Which highlights the other American failure: dismal rail transportation

Our EV is great for normal use, but my wife had to do a 200 mile round trip once a week for a couple months(not anticipated when we bought it). She quickly went from loving her fancy new car to wanting to sell that annoying POS. A faster charger plus extended range battery would have helped some(Chevy Bolt is weak on both) but it is honestly a pain point for the kind of trip many americans do somewhat regularly.

No need to worry about cam belts or oil changes or spark plugs or mice eating your air filter or petrol going stale in the tank or replacing fuel filters or 12v batteries going flat if you don't drive them for at least 20 mins once every 10 days etc.

Same for me. Also, I live in rental apartment, I don't live in a house with residential charging, which would make me dependent on public chagrin spots which suck and have massive energy prices compared to residential ones, so I'm in no way better off/cheaper with an EV than my gasoline car.

EVs where I live massively benefit the wealthy who own their homes and have charging at home, making EV ownership a slam dunk. Even cheaper for them if they have solar panels. But not for the poor, where TC ICE ownership is so much cheaper overall.

The government can fix this by putting cheap subsidized charging spots across all existing street parking to lead the way, but they aren't, so then we're at the mercy of the "free market" who will just gouge us, and so nothing will change.

for now, but maybe in a few years it will

I just came from my short Euro vacation and majority of EVs I saw at the tourist spots had license plates from countries with above average wealthy people: CH, NL, DK, etc. Germans, Italians, eastern Europeans, etc mostly had ICEs.

You can't mandated all switch to EVs unless you can somehow mandate they all have the same wealth too, which isn't the case.

I'm an EV fan but this is apples to oranges comparison. EV vehicles are substantially heavier than their ICE counterparts. Their instant torque also wears tread quicker. That's just facts and there's nothing wrong with that. The world is not black and white.

Pickup trucks are heavier than EVs so their tires should wear into dust even faster. No one says jack about that.

People that kvetch about how windmills kill birds and whales don't give a shit about birds or whales. It's a bad faith argument. EV tire dust is in the same category.

Not sure about that one. The major alternative for footwear, leather, is such a dirty industry that starting new production in developed countries is now essentially impossible, and the existing production sites will become expensive chemical hazard cleanup sites in the future.

According to some of the most optimistic doomsayers of the Interwebs, the warming levels we are enjoying as of today are due to the CO2 levels of 30 years ago.