Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 154: Electric Vehicles

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

electric cars: still cars as it turns out follow victoria on twitter: https://twitter.com/mikurubaeahina buy victoria's book: https://www.carrarabooks.com/store/we-deserve-this   buy the shirt: https://www.grimgrimgrim.com/products/well-theres-your-problem-x-grimgrimgrim-diy-disastercore Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this.

I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this.

I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna start this. I'm just gonna just go. I was in the middle of eating a leftover corned beef sandwich.

It was delicious. A leftover corned beef... Can you make better choices, please? For me? Go fuck yourself, Nova! Go fuck yourself, Nova! Go fuck yourself, Nova! I'm gonna eat this sandwich, yeah! so that I can continue to pay rent. I hadn't gotten takeout in several weeks, so I decided, like, two days ago to get a

pizza, and now I'm just eating Razzoletto for pizza. Yeah, it is from Fiesta. Oh, you're a moron. Yeah, that was dumb. That was dumb, I shouldn't have done that. I would have been better off making food at home, and it would have tasted better, and I would feel better, and my refrigerator would be less crowded. SEAN RIPPEDORR, real one.

You know, whatcha gonna do? SEAN RIPPEDORR, new style. New style no longer exists, yeah. That's why I said RIP to a real one. Oh my god, their Instagram is still there! They killed it with its eyes open! Hi, Rin. Hi. Thank you for my forehead kiss.

You will. We're in the middle of recording. New style? That place was terrible. That what? That place was very good. The cheese steaks were delicious. They were delicious. I'm gonna go get some more. I'm gonna go get some more.

I'm gonna go get some more. I'm gonna go get some more. I'm gonna go get some more. I'm gonna go get some more. I'm gonna go get some more. Thank you for my forehead kiss you were in the middle of recording new style What that place was very good the cheese steaks were delicious They were good really really solid cheesesteak for six dollars really good cheese steaks. Yeah, no, okay Welcome to well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters And the disaster shows that are our respective apartments with slides. I'm Justin Rosnick, the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him, okay, go. I am November Kelly, I am the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her. I have like three fucking uni essays due this week, because I'm nominally a full time student as well as doing three podcasts. I feel like I'm drowning. I feel like I'm in hell. That's why the podcast is so late. I'm so sorry. Yay Liam. LIAM I don't even feel like saying yay Liam, now I'm just sad. Uh, hi. I'm Liam McAnderson. My pronouns are he and him. And yeah, we'll get a bonus out, sorry. There's been a lot of shit going on behind the scenes.

ALICE I mean, I feel like I'm dying. Like what do you want from me? To do my job? To do the thing you pay me two dollars a month to do? Impossible. JUSTIN The podcast is not that late, it's just the algorithm suppressed our last episode, because we talked about important news items that needed to be talked about. ALICE This is true. This is true. We have a guest.

VICTOR We have a guest. ALICE Returning champion, please, introduce yourself. VICTOR Hello, my name is Victoria Scott, and my pronouns are she and her, thank you for having me. ALICE Yeah, we got Victoria back, you know it's gonna be a good episode. VICTOR Am I winning now? ALICE Yes. LIAM Yes. VICTOR Yes.

LIAM You don't win, well there's your problem, just lose a little less. ALICE Fuck, Bellatra in that respect. I'm never gonna stop talking about that video game, I'm fucking... this is possibly related to the fact that I have a time crisis of, like, work to do, is also the fact that I started playing a video game that famously takes up a lot of your time. I have, like, possibly like attention deficit disorder. That's what's called a pro-gamer move. So, what you see on the screen in front of you is an advertisement for an electric car.

That's beautiful. Baker Electric Vehicles. The aristocrats of motordom. The electrics have met every need of the society woman. JUSTIN You may notice that this is distinctively not a modern electric vehicle, such as a Tesla. ALICE Oh, look, Roz, you can learn to run the Baker in twenty minutes, see, that's something you can't do because you don't know how to drive, because you leave us stranded at a goddamn fucking Tim Hortons for no apparent reason. JUSTIN Very few things.

JUSTIN It's not a Tim Hortons. ALICE Wasn't a Tim Hortons. Wasn't it a Dunkin'? It was a Tim Hortons! JUSTIN No, it was a Couch Tard. ALICE I missed you guys. ALICE No, it was a Tim Hortons. JUSTIN Definitely the Couch Tard. ALICE Very few things in our society claim these days to meet every need of the society

woman, it's basically, it's me, and like, some beauty product. ZACH And the Hitachi Magic Wand. ALICE Well, yeah, very similar operating principles there. What is a Hitachi magic wand if not an electric vehicle? Thank you. Sure, yeah. Well, Hitachi makes many electric vehicles, actually, but most of them are trains, so... No, most of them are vibrators, buddy.

Right for our handsome booklet. Well, Hitachi doesn't make the magic wand anymore, I thought they spun that off. Well, they keep trying to, but it really embarrasses them that they made something so good at giving people orgasms, so like, anytime they keep trying to take their name off of it, and they keep trying to spin it off, and then it always seems to come back to them, is my understanding. Well, y'know, I mean, that's what happens when you're... Can you imagine being the guy who invented it, and just like, yeah, I paid for this beach house entirely in vibrator sales?

I mean, how many people get to say that they paid for their beach house in appreciably making people's lives better? Like fucking doctors barely get to do that. JUSTIN Yeah. Manifact... It's, uh, you know, it's like Mikhail Kalashnikov, you know, I wanted to make agricultural equipment but I had to make the vibrator instead. ALICE That was too good at making rifles.

ALICE I'm looking at history, it doesn't claim a single inventor. No, I was... The Katachi's a big conglomerate, it's probably made by committee. Surprisingly old, it was patented in 1968. The guys who made it, they probably were working on that one day, and then the next day they were working on a giant dragline excavator, and then another week they were working on like a giant dragline excavator, and then another week they were working on like, I don't know, some kind of steel fabrication rolling plant or something. It actually does everything.

1968, fucking Lady Bird Johnson could've... How does it compare with Jumbo? I'm sorry, you are getting a too trans woman podcast. No, what we're here to talk about are electric vehicles. The history thereof, some of the problems, the whole bunch. It's a Victoria's episode. Victoria, you explain what we're talking about. Yeah, I just.

Yes, lecture. Electric vehicles, electric vehicles do not have to be an engineering disaster, but they largely have been. And I've been doing a lot of stories recently about how electric vehicles work, and the entire history of them. And what I have found is that basically everything that is happening today has already happened through two distinct periods in American history. We are repeating the exact same mistakes. Would you say that time is a flat circle?

ZEKE Time is a flat circle and all the problems are caused by capitalism. So I'm here sort of as like a, here's an interesting breakdown of this, I think actually, Roz probably has more disasters, per se. ALICE The disaster parts at the end. ZEKE Yeah, but I think that some background might be helpful to understand why everything sucks so much. Are we fucking going to Drake's Mel again? Because if we are...

I'm not going back there. We do go by way of there. Going to what? Drake's Wells, where they discovered oil. Discovered. Discovered. Yeah. Recurring Justin inserted slide.

Recurring villain an inserted slide, yeah. Recurring villain. Yeah, so. Villain. Look, but before we do that we should do the goddamn news. Everyone fucking told you that you can't airdrop aid into Gaza. It will not work, it's not enough... And then you did it anyway.

Yeah, so this is one of those things... Okay, so, over the past couple weeks at this point now, the United States, the Jordanian Air Force, a few other people have been... Since trucks can't get into Gaza anymore because there's idiots protesting outside the gates, um, you know, we've been air dropping minuscule amounts of aid into Gaza, and of course... Yeah, there's a couple of sea routes now, ostensibly, we'll see how those do. The thing about, think about air drops are, they're not very precise, and they're not

very accurate. Um, so... Yeah, after's 101st. JUSTIN Almost immediately after this airdrop started, a parachute failed, and a pallet dropped on, like, five people, killed five people, and injured ten people. So this airdrop is not going very well. ALICE No, and people compare it to, like, the Berlin airlift, and it's like, the Berlin airlift had ten times the amount of resources and the planes could land. JUSTIN Plains could land, they had this thing called Tempelhof Airport, yeah.

ALICE It's the key thing, yeah. The only thing to do is to fucking re-open the airport in Gaza, I guess? No. The only thing to do is to successfully bully Israel into opening the land crossings. JUSTIN Yeah, cause the airport has, like, olive trees on it now. ALICE Oh my god. JUSTIN So, essentially, yeah, so we started these air drops, we're using, this is according to Twitter user Captain Underscore Hat, these are LCAD's parachutes, that's a low-cost aerial

delivery system. ALICE What a low-cost, it system. They cost a lot of confidence, doesn't it? Well, low-cost is about a thousand dollars each. But these are the high-velocity version. We could build that for cheaper. Which means, even when they're descending with the parachute open, they're going at sixty miles per hour. I simply think that instead of trying to fucking Helldivers five sandwiches into Gaza, you

could have a difficult conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu. Maybe. Just an idea. Might be easier. Punch him in the face, repeatedly. So since this incident, which is at this point a couple weeks ago, we seem to have revised the procedure, they're trying to land these sort of on the beach, or in the ocean, just off the beach, which means they sink. The Jordanian army is having trouble actually landing the aid inside of Gaza, a lot of them

have blown over the wall. This thing is going pretty poorly. ALICE It's just, it's a clusterfuck. And, like, by this point, most of the population of the Gaza Strip is concentrated in Ra'afa, where they have been forced to the south, up against the border. Yes. That's another fact, there is a lot of this aid going into Gaza City, and points just

north of Gaza City, because, you know, again, there's... it's weird. There's no, yeah, there's no resources going in there, and there's still, like, some people in there left. It's, I mean, it's just another piece of the fucking cavalcade of horrific crimes and clown incompetence. And I genuinely don't know what to say about it once again. You know? Other than the fact that the sea logistics may be slightly more promising, but... Well, this is the thing that's apparently going on now, is we're sending something that's not the CBs in, in order to build a pier in Gaza, so they can load...

You're doing, like... They can bring a ship full of aid. Which, okay, that's actually an adequate amount, right? A ship is a good amount of aid, I think shiploads will work, right? ALICE There's two things going on, there's an NGO called the World Food Kitchen, they're building a pier, and then they're gonna try and ship to that, and then the US thing is using a really weird sort

of artifact of the global war on terror, which is a sort of arms-length CIA State Department cutout company called Fogbo. ALICE What? ALICE Who are gonna be using, they're gonna be doing the over-the-beach logistics for this, where you have a kind of floating dock that the aid comes to and then it gets taken from that onshore. Yeah, they're also sending in the 7th Army Transportation Corps, which is en route at the moment, they're probably like 15 days away from arriving at this point, gonna take

them another 30 days to build the pier. These guys are the tattered remnants of the CBs, because apparently we decided at some point during the global war on terror that needing a military unit which can rapidly build a pier would never be relevant anymore. That's gay shit. That's gay shit. That's pretty gay, yeah. We did all of that, we didn't even abolish the Marine Corps.

Yeah. You have the wet troops and then nothing to supply them with. Yeah, the wet troops, they have to... What's the wet troops and then nothing to supply them with. JUSTIN Yeah, the wet troops, they have to, uh... ALICE The wet troops. JUSTIN They're wet troops, they're not underwater troops, they need a pier to at least... they can only get a little wet. ALICE Hmm. Yeah, the damp troops, the moist troops.

LIAM Oh, the idea of a marine happily running into combat but only up to his knees. ALICE Yeah, after that it hits the GTA Vice City kind of instant death thing. Starts floating. So in the meantime, all we're doing in order to assuage the Michigan voters that Biden is actually compassionate about Gaza, is dumping a bunch of, not a bunch, a very small amount of aid into the ocean near Gaza. So, um.

Doing great. Enjoy watching a bunch of MREs sink. And Biden, kind of, it's maybe getting through that he's fucking up at this point. There was a story in, I think, NBC News, saying that when he was shown the kind of, like, polls of his favorability rating and how it's been impacted by this, he started shouting and swearing, and it's like... ALICE Alright, old man, put up or shut up, jackass. ALICE Yeah, yeah, if you wanna claw this back, the

road to that leads through some tough phone calls to Tel Aviv, like fucking... ALICE Not even tough! Hey, jackass, stop doing that, or we're gonna yank your aid! There, I've done it, I've done it, where is my Nobel Peace Prize? ZACH It just... it floors me It floors me because like even from a real politic perspective, he's fucking up. This isn't I don't I don't even understand like what what he seeks to gain from this. Like it's making him unpopular.

It's making America look worse on the international stage. It's really appeasing solely like what Netanyahu and six lunatics behind him. John Fetterman weirdly. John Fetterman. Yeah, he him. John Fetterman, weirdly. John Fetterman. Yeah. He's gone through Fettermanization. But just like, what the hell? Why?

It's, ugh. Yeah. Not, not- That's all I have, sorry. It doesn't, it doesn't make sense. Uh, you know, Biden could, you know, definitely like start mitigating this anytime he wants to, but he's not going to do that because, uh, I don't know. Maybe, maybe, uh, maybe when he was going to to school... well he went to school in Scranton,

nevermind, I was thinking like in Wilmington. ALICE Maybe they have like a pee tape on them. JUSTIN Willington and Sheldon Ham township are not too far off from each other. ALICE He went to... he grew up in Scranton, he went to New Delf. ALICE Yeah, but like, is he into piss? Is he into some weird shit? Because if there's a pee tape, that kind of, that makes a bit more sense to me, you know? I mean he's still like a sort of perfect moral coward for not sacrificing his own piss

kink to stop a genocide, but like... JUSTIN Biden could get away with having a piss tape, I think. ALICE What? ALICE I think you're probably right about that, I think he... JUSTIN Why would you say those words in that order? ALICE No, no, no, no, no, no, he's right. It wouldn't take him in the same way that it would most other politicians. SEAN It's been around a long time. ALICE Cause it's just like, oh yeah, he's right. It wouldn't take him in the same way that it would most other politicians. It's been around a long time.

SEAN Oh yeah, dude's a freak. JUSTIN Oh yeah. There's a piss tape, and black and white, it was shot with the same camera when you were filming on the moon. ALICE Lady Bird Johnson's in the back with the magic wand. SEAN What is Straub Thurman, what are you doing here? Oh wow, it's all our favorite characters from history. They say that Biden's memory is going, but he's like perfectly able to recall to the moment and the day where he was when he got pissed on by like Jack Kennedy. Well, I want to throw up in my mouth, alright.

That's the word I should have before we in my mouth. All right. Yep. Before we finish the news. Another aspect of this. We will never finish the news. I don't know. A lot of people have been thrown around conspiracies that this pair that they're building is going to be ultimately for stealing Gaza's natural gas reserves, which are offshore.

That doesn't seem like a very good way of doing that. Here's the thing with offshore natural gas drilling. It's really expensive. There's a reason those resources are not exploited, and that's because they're not very good. ALICE Also, even if you wanted to do it, I feel like you would do it after you had completed the genocide. So that, just in case nobody with an RPG puts a red triangle over your offshore gas drilling room.

LIAM That is very American to try to extract resources in the middle of a genocide. That is something we could definitely do. ALICE And you don't love oil so much, you're going into heavy fire to try and suck it up with a straw. JUSTIN And you don't use a pier for that, you use an offshore drilling platform, and then you just ship the natural gas to a terminal that already exists. ALICE Mm.

JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE Which I think Israel has, anyway. JUSTIN You probably do it in, like, Haifa or somewhere like that, yeah. ALICE Well, who knows. Maybe the Houthis'll get lucky with all those long-range missiles. JUSTIN Yeah, you get the supersonic, ultrasonic, whatever the... hypersonic, that's the word, missiles. ALICE Hypersonic's the new shit, yeah.

JUSTIN Yeah. So that's the current situation in Gaza, where you're dropping blocks of food on people's heads. ALICE And continue to protest. JUSTIN Yeah. In other news... Uh, Boeing killed a guy. ALICE Yeah, I knocked this shit out in my five seconds

in Photoshop and I genuinely think we could do it as a shirt. It's Bover. It's fucking Bover. LIAM Bover, it's Bover. It's fucking Bover. It's Bover. It's Bover. You're not bowing to make it, you are bowing to die. You're gonna get McDonald and Douglas'd. That just sounds like I'm gonna get fisted. Yeah. Like OVJ.

No, I was thinking like, Donald and Douglas'd from Thompson Tank Engine, you remember, he crushes the brake fan, just murders him on screen. I'm not going to get fisted, alright! Doing good! But yeah, so, the thing is, right, mental health can happen to anybody at any time. And sometimes, what you do is you blow the whistle on Boeing, and you go to testify to a grand jury, and before you go to testify, you say, if anything happens to me, it's not an accident, and then something happens to you, because you've been struck by mental

health. Yeah, and then it's like your third day of testimony, Boeing's lawyers ask you to stay an extra day, you go back to your hotel, you think, I wanna get some Taco Bell, and then you go get the Taco Bell, you come back and you're parked in the hotel parking lot, and then you shoot yourself before you eat the Taco Bell. ALICE Yeah, that doesn't seem like an extremely logical... SEAN I don't know, I've opened some Taco Bell bags before and I've had that reaction. JUSTIN I have never had that reaction with Taco Bell.

I always... Because every time we get it, you're hammered. I'm like, I wanna have the fuckin' Taco Bell. I kinda want Taco Bell now, but like, yeah, no, you're in a situation where you're on the mental health equivalent of one hit point, and you're like, any single thing inconveniences me, it's fucking Bova. And you look in the bag, and the fries are everywhere, they've got the kind of like Taco Bell...

Yeah, they're like Taco Bell fries. TACO FRIES, yes. Yeah, they've got the fucking covering all over everything, you're gonna have to get it on your hands, and in that moment you just decide to fucking... It's bova, yeah. Yeah, you bow off, and you fucking... Yeah. So, part of my understanding is that this particular whistleblower, like, the case he

was in, I think had something more to do with, like, compensation he was supposed to receive from bowing, as a result of his whistleblowing being illegally retaliated, or something like that. I gotta do some research on this, it's something I have to do. An actual thing. ALICE I mean, the real sort of refuge and audacity to like, really retaliate. JUSTIN Yeah, I mean, this is...

Yeah, I was like, at first I was like, well, this seems like a weird coincidence. Now I'm definitely on team Boeing killed this guy. ALICE Yeah, like, cause like, Karen Silkwood was in the 70s, and Boeing's such a major company, it's gonna be all over the news anyway. It kind of doesn't make sense, there should be a plausible explanation. And then you read about it and you go, oh, they fucking killed that guy. He broke the, like, bow-murder, and they fucking killed him.

Jesus. It's probably not good that companies can just, uh... Had to write a death poem. Boeing hires, like, a corporate assassin, like, an Agent 47 guy to come shoot him, and he, like, goes into the car and he shoots him and the slide flies off the pistol and one of the doors falls off his truck. Revenge! I still maintain that this would be the funniest way to get the **** off of all time. Like, what better way to get back at the company that you worked for for thirty...

Like, I can imagine being this angry, right? Like, that's the thing. I'm like sixty-seven years old. ALICE So we're gonna have to bleep a lot of this, sorry. LIAM I was about to say, the Alcarilla's not gonna like this episode either. ALICE We'll bleep tactically. But yeah, I think it's thematic at least. I mean, you can't say...

They depressurized the fuck out of that guy's skull, is the thing. LIAM Yes. I'm just saying, I can imagine being this angry, where you're like, this is going to... Like, they didn't think they could get away with screwing me over? Well, I will show them. Go get your taco bell, realize they forgot one of your tacos, just be like, fine, now works, who gives a shit. Alright, see ya. The guy's lawyer said he was in good spirits, looking forward to day three or day four of

deposition or whatever it was, you know, he's like... ALICE Really bad Taco Bell. JUSTIN Had a lot to live for, you know, everything. Yeah, I've never experienced Taco Bell that bad. Other than the wait for the Taco Bell, and he'd already gotten it over with. RILEY Also, if the Taco Bell was gonna really be what did it, he would have done it the day after when he was in the restroom. ALICE Mmm, true.

The Taco Bell that kills you instantly. TROY Or flies off the bathroom door. ALICE & TROY Explosive decompression, if you will. ALICE I feel like if Boeing's gonna, like, assassinate somebody they have to play to their strengths, you know? If I'm a sort of Boeing whistleblower, I'm never leaning on any railing that's bolted in place ever again. Right?

Because I know, they've been through, they've loosened that shit. I like how I am now, we've discussed Hitachi Magic Ones, and we will get content warnings just like the last episode I was on. I'm doing my job. Alright. Before we do anything else that gets the algorithm angry at us, let's say that was the goddamn news. Okay. This looks like some kind of... Well, this looks like some kind of electricated vehicle.

Wow. Where'd the horse go? You would be correct. This is, I have it phrased in Ra's format, what is an electric vehicle. And the answer is, are these... Slave boys. We can just replace this with a picture of a train, you know? That's fair. I mean, that would be... that's a different episode.

I don't know enough about trains. I like trains, I build little models of them, but I know I actually talk about cars for a living, so that's what I'm here to discuss. This is a diagram of an e-Golf. This is Volkswagen's electric compliance car. That was kind of like a... This is the only car you'll be allowed to drive in the future, Liam. We're really sorry about the whole diesel car thing.

But the whole point of this episode... We thought you were GTE. Eh? Eh? No. No, these things were bad. We get to compliance cars. Or I'm gonna get to compliance cars.

I'm gonna go off about it, don't worry. The point of the episode is to explain what all this is, so let's just go straight to the next slide. That one's prettier anyway. I shot this picture, so it's cool. I actually drove this thing. I was going to say, I was wondering why the photo is so good and I was like, oh, cause it's Victoria's. Okay. Yeah, I drove this car. So electric cars have been around for literally over a century at

this point. The car that's pictured here is a 1908 Columbia electric Victoria Faitan, which I drove. It is, it was a expensive luxury car from the, from the early 1900s. The first rechargeable electric car came out in 1887 and it had 50 miles of range. Since then, no change. Yeah. Range anxiety, but worse.

And so the thing that's, the thing that's kind of worth noting here is that in the early days of automobiles, electric cars were absolutely so much better than everything else in the market. In 1900, there were about 4,000 something cars in total registered on American roads. 1,500 of them were EVs, 1,000 were gas,

the rest were steam. So this was like a, it seemed for a while like electric cars were going to run away with everything, because steam cars, I think you've done a few episodes about the perils of steam, but they require a boiler, they take forever to warm up, they can explode and kill you... ALICE You have to be doing all kinds of like, throwing giant levers and shit and... JUSTIN The worst part was was they only figured out the steam car properly at the very end.

The biggest issue with steam cars, aside from the maintenance, is that none of them were free steaming, right? So you were limited not by fuel, not by water. You were limited by the amount of steam you could generate. So if you wanted to drive it 40 miles an hour, you were good for that for like, I don't know, two or three miles or something. You ran out of steam, you had to stop and let the fire build up pressure in the boil

again to keep going. So this is, the steam car, they didn't figure out a free steaming steam car until like, the very end, like the late 20s, and by that time, the writing was on the wall. Yeah. ALICE It's time to bring it back, time to reinvestigate, give me the advanced steam concept car. Come on, Mercedes doesn't have anything better to do.

JUSTIN Lots of torque. SEAN Yeah, no, Mercedes prefers gas-powered cars, if you know what I mean. JUSTIN Mmm. JUSTIN I can't speak about that, because I want to still get their press cars. It's fine. No one's going to hear it anyway because we demonetized it in the first half hour by talking about the guy fucking bowing himself.

The other thing that's worth noting is that early gas cars also sucked. The electric starter was not invented until 1912, which meant that every car before then you had to crank with your arm. Which sucked, first of all, it's extremely hard because you have to overcome the actual compression force of the motor. Yeah, you might break your arm very easily. Yeah, if it backfires, it just snaps your arm in half.

A thing that famously would never hurt you or kill you, especially before modern medicine. So like, cars were kind of, you know, they were also contraptions that not like maybe quite to the same extent as steam, but they sucked. And then you have electric cars which are quiet. They basically you plug them into a wall and they charge they first electric car at 50 miles of range, I think the one that I was driving, it was an updated batteries. But in theory, you could get probably 70 or 80 miles

of range out of that carriage on screen right now. Wow. You would be doing maybe 15 or 20 miles an hour because, let's go to the next slide. This is your motor. That is the actual motor inside the Columbia that I drove. Oh, hell yeah. It's like three horsepower.

It's a- The bike chain. Yep. Yeah, it's just- You put this on an a- The bike chain. Yep. Yeah. It's just- You put this on an e-bike, you're flying. Oh, oh, well, so here's the thing. So driving this was incredibly fun

because it was steered with a tiller. It didn't have a steering wheel yet. Oh, hell yeah. So it's just a carriage. It's literally just a horseless carriage. No windshield. It's got a fold up like leather, rooflet thingy. Everything is made out of this

gorgeous wood. It is only one gauge. It is just a giant plus, it's just like a giant steel blob that shows you remaining voltage and like current amp draw or something. I forget exactly what it was. But it's like, it is just a carriage that they strapped an electric motor to. So you do 15 miles an hour in this thing and you are flying. I cannot emphasize how scary this thing was to do 15 miles an hour. And because it's also worth like 100 grand and the owner is sitting next to me as I like crank the tiller driving that through like the Hollywood hills in Los Angeles. It was terrifying. But it's a EVs.

Initially, we're ahead of the game on like top speed runs. They were ahead of the game on like distance runs like pre, I don't know if you've heard of the cannonball run, but that's the New York City to Los Angeles, like top speed blitz. They had a bunch of versions of these. They didn't really do at New York to LA because there were no roads that could take you there.

But they would do like New York to Cleveland or something, or New York to Detroit. And those would be like, you know, it took three days or whatever. And most of the reason that EVs were good for it is like, you're not worrying about, you know, I need to do a hundred miles an hour, it's, I need a vehicle that like, I can refuel somewhere along the way. It's hard to break, which these are, because they have few moving parts.

ALICE The US didn't have like, uh, like gasoline infrastructure to support them, which is a fascinating inversion of the like, EV infrastructure to support them, which is a fascinating inversion of the like, EV thing now. It's being like, well it's fine, but where are you gonna like, stop to refuel it? That with like, petrol. You know? Yeah, it's a cool idea, but like, come on, you have to build some kind of network of like, gas stations all over the place, you know?

Crazy. Yeah. So Columbia actually completed a bunch of these top speed runs and they had a couple of early records in the early 1900s. Columbia, for what it's worth, just to give you an idea of what the automobile industry was like at this time, it was founded by Albert Pope, who was some Union Civil War general-ish kind of guy. I don't remember his rank.

I'm not that kind of girl. How dare you! He built bicycles after the war, and then he was like, oh, these motorized carriages are gonna be where it's at next. And switched into building cars in the late 1890s. He was a Brevet lieutenant colonel, which... grow up. Make general. Idiot. Aw. But, so this company, this Columbia Motor Company, which nobody has ever heard of except for me because I drove one, um, was the first car manufacturer to ever sell 1,000 cars.

Wow. It just barely beat out Oldsmobile, which you may know from previous Victoria Scott episodes of Well There's Your Problem. So, Oldsmobile. Back then it was called News Mobile. God, why did I laugh at that? We sort of operate in a Stockholm Syndrome basis here. We sure do, Nova.

Yeah, so, you know, this is like a huge deal. Give us your wallet while we're here. I will. Give us your lunchbox. Do you need the three numbers on the back too? I can read up. Yes, please. Thank you. OK, cool.

So the net effect of this is electric cars are quiet. They're fast. They're reliable because there's not much to break on them. They're high status. Teddy Roosevelt's first motorcade had a Columbia in it. It was the first motorcade ever to happen in America and he was sitting in a Columbia for it. Uh Queen Victoria purchased a Faitan carriage for like I don't know uh what is in the

notes. Daughter-in-law Alexandra of Denmark whoever the hell that is. Um because they were like Denmark they're the gender of Denmark. Hmm. To the, like, if you remember the original slide, that advertising for Baker Electric Automobiles, it was for the Society Woman, because these cars could be operated by women, because they weren't... It doesn't sort of, like, belch smog directly into your face. Yeah, it's like proper. Like, you can literally...

It doesn't, like, sheer your entire leg off. It is a vehicle for usage with petticoats. No engine knocking yet, because, well, they haven't, uh, you know, the gasoline cars are all exploding themselves, because we haven't invented tetraethyl lead yet. The world waits with bated breath for Thomas Mijlie Jr. Yeah, to your point. Just doing, like, instead of Anthropocene there's a Mijely scene in the middle? Listen.

For all its faults, it did increase compression ratios. You do not have to hand it to Tetralon. The Mijely scene era had some great cars, is the thing. Yeah, so to your point, Clara Ford cocked Henry and drove a Detroit electric for like the first several years of the Model T's existence, because she thought his cars were too loud and shitty. It's like fucking Grimes driving a Rivian, you know? Yes. Actually, no, it's not, it's like Grimes driving a fucking, like, gas... like a petrol engine

car. Yeah. Yeah. Audi, BMW... Geo Metro. Mitsubishi Mirage, like... So this is the funniest car to imagine Grimes in a Geo Metro. No, I think a Mirage is where it's at.

I have one of those. They suck terrible. They don't even have the charm of a Geo Metro. No, they're real shit. Elon Musk crying because Grimes is driving away from him with the kids in her Renault They don't even have the charm of a Geo Metro. They just say I'm bored. ALICE- They're real shit. ALICE- Elon Musk crying because Grimes is driving away from him with the kids in her Renault Espace. ALICE- Okay, but I actually want one of those.

Yeah, they actually look pretty good. Yeah, we can't get them here still. ALICE- They did a racing Espace back in the day. It's nice, I have thought many times about it. I was gonna make some sort of masturbation joke, but I decided not to. Anyway, they're very cool. Yeah, they put like a mid-engined F1 motor in it, and they put it on top gear when I was like 12.

It was a formative part of my childhood. Anyway, so the summary of this is, these are rich people cars. They're status symbols, they don't require any labour, they're silent, you can act better than everybody else. Next slide, please. ALICE Hmm. How much has changed? ZACH Well, we'll... ALICE I love this thing. JUSTIN Yeah, this is cool.

ZACH This one was just one that I found out when I was doing research for this. ALICE Turbo-fellas! ZACH It was built... this is the first car to break 60 miles an hour. Look at, on that lack of suspension. Yeah, it was called La Jamai Content. It's apparently French for the never satisfied. It's got leaf springs, it's fine. It's made of fucking bricks and wrought iron, it's fine. ALICE This is made of fucking bricks!

And raw iron! What the fuck? ZACH Yeah, no, it was just a big stream layer. It had two, it had a 200 volt drivetrain for 67 horsepower. ALICE Wow. ZACH This thing was absolutely fast as hell. ALICE So it's just a Mitsubishi Mirage, then? ZACH Yeah, basically.

Mitsubishi Mirage, but make it phallic. It's basically the design doc. This looks SO dangerous. I mean, it's got a tiller. I mean, it looks like you operate it entirely by hand, this is like a streetcar operating thing. Like, a motorman's, like, stand. He's half out of the thing, his one arse cheek is on the sill of the cockpit, I guess?

He's bisexual. He's piloted by Camille Genazzi, who was a Belgian man who went by Le Diable Rouge, because he was ginger and had a red beard. Yeah, I mean, the funniest thing I found during this is completely unrelated to electric vehicles, but he died in 1913 when he hid behind a bush while on a hunting party and made animal noises and one of his friends shot him thinking he was actually an animal. Sometimes your animal noise impression can be too good. They then rushed him to the hospital in a Mercedes and he bled out and died, fulfilling his prophecy that he would die behind the wheel of a Mercedes Benz.

That is not related to anything else, I just thought it was funny as hell. That's charming, yeah. Yeah, other famous things. McKinley's ambulance that took him to the hospital when he was shot was also electric. I know this because my roommate won't stop singing Sondheim's Assassins. Shogosh, angry man. Fuck, it's the best musical is the thing. She's gonna really love this episode because she tells me the same thing three times a

week. It's the best one. They should have stopped making musicals after Assassins because it was the best one. I haven't ever... I've listened to like three musicals. My parents wouldn't let me listen to musicals as a child because they're afraid it would make me gay. And apparently, you know. I did, I did listen to like one musical and then I did become gay. So you may have been correct. I listened to a lot of musicals and I'm straight. I mean, that's what under exposure does to you. I mean, maybe you became like habituated or maybe it's like a sort of like odd even thing with a switch. You man does love a musical. Yeah, I mean, maybe you became, like, habituated, or maybe it's like a sort of odd even thing

with a switch, you've seen a perfectly even number of musicals. Yeah, exactly. I think it might have been the part where I was an altar boy. Oh. I managed to skip that particular form of indoctrination. And you're straight, see? There you go. That's proof.

You heard it here first, folks. Being an altar boy makes you go. That's proof. You heard it here first, folks. Being an altar boy makes you gay. LARRIE. They really did some science to Big Bill McKinley, though. Like, they, uh, went to hospital in an electric ambulance, tried to get the bullet out with an x-ray and a fucking metal detector and shit, and none of it worked, and then he died and became the only US president to date successfully assassinated by anarchists. ALICE Hey, we did a thing!

ALICE Yeah, to impress a girl... ALICE My favorite thing about that whole story is, Leon... I don't know how to pronounce his last name. ALICE Oh gosh. RILEY Thank you. Um, was apparently suspected of being a fed the entire time he hung out with anarchists, until he shot the president, because he was just like, hey guys, you wanna go do some anarchy? You wanna go do some federal crimes?

And Emma Goldman is like, ew, gross, why are you following me from city to city? He's like, I know how to win her love, shoot the president. What did McKinley know? What was he gonna do? Was he gonna normalize relations with the Cubans? We have no idea. Some real, like, deep state shit at work. Anyway, that was all for this slide. Next slide please.

How close are these women? I know, this is from the GE Historical Archives of their electric chargers that they built back in like the teens and twenties. And you know my whole schtick is dressing like it's roughly 1895. So I was like, this is cool. This is me. It was great. Like, you know, I dress like that half the time in Seattle and like, no one has any drip in the city. I love it to death, but like, nobody knows how to dress here. But I do get a lot of compliments, so you know, counts for something. ALICE I love these charges though. I mean,

fucking, I can't even identify half the shit on them, but I love them. Yeah, they're doohickeys. So unfortunately the chargers are kind of what killed them, so remember how earlier you said we didn't have the gasoline infrastructure and it was an inversion of the modern day thing where we don't have chargers? Yeah. Well so they never, like, they built a bunch of gas stations because they found oil in Texas. Standard oil, Drake's Well.

Drake's Well, yeah. Okay, so they found oil. Gasoline is relatively easy to refine. And electrical infrastructure is a disaster show for a long time. Yeah, yeah. You're still decades out from having a stable national grid. I'm pretty sure in like 1915 or whatever 1915 You have multiple competing electrical companies who have all built their own wires on their own poles With different like they'll run on like one will be DC one will be AC at

25 Hertz one will be AC at 60 Hertz one three-phase, and then it's like transformed down. They're all, there's like a rat's nest of wires on every street. You have to buy different appliances and different electrical bulbs and systems based on what electrical company you're hooked up to. And these things are appearing and disappearing like every year. So one day your electrical company goes bust. If you want to get a hookup with a new one, guess what? You're going to have to buy all of your fucking appliances brand new again. I hate when I have to get my, like, Westinghouse gaming computer.

Yes. Yes. Yeah, so, and this is added to the fact that there's absolutely no saturation outside of the cities. So, what happened was, if you lived in a big coastal city and you had a house that you owned and had all these hookups, you could charge your car at home. Or in certain areas, like GE put these things called electrons. They were electricity hydrants.

I like that. We should go back to that name. Yeah. They would mount them on the street. You could pull your EV up and park next to it and you could charge it like in the modern day. The problem is that, you know, as soon as you leave the city, you're basically screwed. You can't recharge this thing. And, you know, nobody's got power to fill it back up. And so you've got a 900 pound horseless carriage that you know, you know, have to push 40 miles back to New York

City or whatever. So that sucks. That's number one. The other thing is, if you don't have a hookup, the way that they were solving this for people was, here, put a gasoline engine in your garage. Generator technology in 1902 was not fantastic. I don't know if you know this or not. For a second I thought you were going to say put it in the car, and I was like, how early was a hybrid invented? It was earlier than I think it is, but I don't know the answer off the top of my head. I'm ashamed of myself.

I... I just brought you on to like, shame you. Yeah. Well, you should do that. That's my thing. You had hidden miss engines as early as like the 1880s, I'm gonna say. The Loner Porsche Mixtia. First hybrid.

That was like, what year is this Department of Energy? 18... it was 18... something? I was also expected to start with an 18, is the main thing. Yeah, you got the big, really, the big old-fashioned gasoline engines that took up like a room, had a massive flywheel, generated like, two horsepower and an infinite amount of torque. Yeah, the Department of Energy says 1899, Porsche themselves says 1900 and Ferdinand Porsche did actually design the first electric or first hybrid car. Still on hell though. Oh, undoubtedly. Yeah, so, you know, this stuff is all way earlier than we think it is,

is the kind of the crucial takeaway. So the other, and all of the problems are the exact same. In 1900 they debuted The Electrant at the Madison Square Garden auto show. This is like a huge deal, because cars are new and exciting. It could only charge about half the EVs at the show, because the connectors were all different. It's nice to know that it's still the same fucking problems.

ZACH Yeah, we have the Chedemo, we have the CCS charger, which are different between Europe and America, for the record. We have Nax, we have... what is the other one I'm thinking of? There's one more. ALICE The Tesla charger? ZACH Hundred years. ZACH No, Nax is the Tesla charger. ALICE Oh, I see.

One hundred fucking years, and we still have not surmounted one, like, infrastructural problem here. No. No, you need one standard that's good for everything, and then you just have one more standard. To paraphrase XKCD. The only answer here, electric vehicle Stalin. I volunteer for that role. I could do it.

Secretary Buttigieg, if you wanna fucking take the energy that you use to kill dogs in secret, and channel that into rationalizing America's electrical infrastructure, now would be the fucking time. He needs to take a cool name to be electric vehicle Stalin. He needs to be like, what do they make in Southland? ALICE Like Joey Electron or something. I mean, fucking in Master's Theses, mostly. JUSTIN Yeah, I was about to say, um, he can't be

man of steel. Because that's... ALICE Yeah, you have to be man of electricity. Maybe he could like, bring back an ancient name, the name of Westinghouse. JUSTIN Oh, you could still buy a shitty licensed microwave with Westinghouse on it. Really? Fucking America never lets anything die, does it? Nope.

Westinghouse doesn't meaningfully exist anymore. No, it's all just licensed out, yeah. Another company that committed s*** much like Boeing. I get seated on the Westinghouse electric chair and the fucking arms fall off. Outside a whistleblower c***. Well, we know for one he didn't use the electric chair. Yeah, no, that's all the same. The other thing that happened too, and this is crucial because this is very different

than the modern day obviously Batteries never got cheaper and gasoline cars did so in in 1908 that that do hickey carriage I drove for the review cost about fifty thousand dollars in today's money a model t when it debuted in 1908 cost about twenty seven thousand dollars and it had a windshield Which is a steering wheel. Yeah, So this is like, it's already more advanced. By 1923, the Model T was in inflation- ALICE And the windshield has a steering wheel that comes with a free anti-semitic pamphlet, which if you're buying a car in like 1908, you want your anti-semitic pamphlet.

LIAM Aww. ALICE Doesn't it have like, two speeds, like you can go slow slow or you can go 40mph and there's nothing in between? I can't remember if it had two or... I've driven one once, but it was a really long time ago. And you shift with your... The clutch is on your hand or something. It's really weird driving one. It's not at all...

Hand clutches are actually a good idea. They hadn't really figured out where to put all the pedals and stuff yet, so it's just kinda... I don't remember how many speeds it had, because the main emotion I remember is terror. ALICE As a driver with terrible clutch control, the hand clutch is kind of selling me, to be honest. NICHOLAS I just want to point out... I'm trying!

SEAN I just noticed, both of these machines have faces. The eyes... ALICE It's true! SEAN I'm so happy to see you! NICHOLAS The eyes... ALICE Haridolia, sadly. But yeah. SEAN I don't know. But yeah.

Did you plug the thing into its mouth? Little guys! No, like, oh hello, Bert. Speaking of little guys. Sorry, my cat is here. Aw, hi Bert. Guest star Bert pronouns he him. Bert, do you want to meow into the microphone?

Nope, he's quiet. Alright, you had your chance. You could've been famous. Um, yeah, but in any case, like, by the 20s 20s, it's Model T, we can buy for an inflation adjusted $5,400. That is how cheap these things were. And EVs still cost $50,000. ALICE We love Fordism. Yeah, because they're still hand-building all these things.

And like, fucking... ZACH They're hand-building and they're also, you know, like, lead acid battery tech didn't come down as cheap as they wanted it to, as fast They're hand-building, and they're also, y'know, like, lead acid battery tech didn't come down as cheap as they wanted it to, as fast as they wanted it to, et cetera. But yeah, like, Ford's assembly line did help with a lot of this. So anyway, hopefully none of this sounds familiar, at all. And then, the oil. The oil.

Oh yeah. So, next slide, please. So, this pathetic attempt... I yeah. Urr. Urr. So, next slide please. So, this pathetic attempt... I'm commuter car! I save energy! I'm electric!

I reduce pollution! Please kill me. I love this. I swear I have seen this thing compete on Robot Wars. Yeah, so this pathetic thing was the best selling electric car from 1945 until 2013. Jesus. They sold 4,444 of these across two different brands because one of the companies gave up midway through. And half of those were like USPS delivery vans. They did like a limited

experiment. And this was in the 70s when the fuel crisis, the oil crisis happened and everybody was kind of like, well, we need to do something and nobody could think of what to do. And then you get the old diesel episode. This is what the other people were trying at the same time. GM also tried doing a thing called the, the elect, elect vet or electro vet at the same time, which was an electric converted cheabbat They built like one and were like this sucks and gave up this we're going home Yeah, they were like let's build a diesel motor that explodes every 20 miles. Anyway instead We just didn't have like good battery technology until like a few years from now Yeah, I mean that was the like a gym had the what was it the EV one have I got some thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, that was the, like, GM had the, what was it, the EV1? ZACH Have I got some thoughts on that.

ALICE Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, please. ZACH So, no one tries actually making money off of EVs again until about 2007. But, next slide please. This is, I guess, the closest we get to a true, godforsaken environmental disaster. So in... ALICE Oh, I remember this, yeah, so we'll sell you one of these on Cars and Bids the other

day, the Gen 1, RAV4, with the... Yeah. Yeah, yeah yeah yeah. RAV4, this is the RAV4 EV, the Honda EV Plus, and the GM EV1. So what happened? I love the EV1, this looks like a kind of squirt of ketchup, in red. Everyone likes the EV1, I think that, it's a cool looking car, it looks like the future in 1990.

Yeah. Yeah. ALICE Yeah, the same kind of contours as Oakley sunglasses. ZACH Well, and it was also like, it had magnesium wheels on it, and magnesium seat frames, it had a coefficient of drag of.19. This thing was so goddamn advanced for the era, in terms of every aspect of its design. And they're adorable. I've seen one in person, they're also much smaller than you think they are.

Like imagine Miata. Like first gen Miata, so pop ups. But yeah, so all of these cars exist because in 1990, the California Air Resources Board decided that 10% of new cars sold in the state of California had to be EVs by 2003. Um, and auto manufacturers were like, okay. That, that, that technology does not exist yet. Yeah, they're doing the, they're doing the like bottom fingers pointing together emoji

where they're kind of like, maybe maybe we can try. Is that the noise that bottoms make? Generally speaking. Generally speaking for me, yes. The problem here is that like, nobody really wants to invest a ton of money into this, because they're instead going to just lobby the California government to give up. So- It's cool how like, regulation without enforcement drives innovation, right? Yeah. Yeah.

So like, the most companies- Nice unspotted mandate for you. Most companies do the easy way out. They take like the Ford Ranger EV. If you've ever been to like a mid-tier Midwestern school, you've probably seen one. They had a ton of them as work trucks at Kent State where I went to school. They're just like lead acid battery Rangers that get like 12 miles of range and they sold them entirely as fleet trucks. They made like a hundred, they made a couple thousand or something. Then you had like the Rev4 EV, which was an existing car was a higher effort attempt.

They had like the EV Plus and the Nissan Ultra that were Japanese spec cars brought to the US and then converted to electric specifically just to meet these car requirements. The interesting part about all of these is that they all used, most of the important ones used nickel metal hydride batteries. Which was not as powerful, it's not as powerful as modern lithium ion, but it is... It's safe, sort of. It charges slow, it discharges slow, everybody loves it apart from when you need to use it for an application like cars.

Well, and they're non-toxic, they're pretty easy to manufacture, they're heavy, but the RAV4 EV got somewhere around like 140 miles of range. The EV1 initially used lead acid batteries, which was part of why it got really bad initial reviews, but the second gen, they used nickel metal hydride, and those were well over a hundred miles of range, in like this tiny little coop. ALICE Introduce you to the chemical element lithium. And the thing about the element lithium in a battery is it wants to kill you. ZACH Yeah.

Yeah. So like, nobody's really doing much with that. There was a way to make this work if we were moving towards lighter cars, which obviously we didn't do. Well, it gets better. Yeah. Well, they can make a slide. We're a bunch of Nazis. All right. So this is a bunch of crushed EV ones because GM destroyed virtually all of them. They were beautiful, ugly bumpers.

Yeah. Yeah. These, these, these 30, I think they rated these as like $35,000 a pop and they still would have lost money if they actually sold them. But they didn't sell any of them. They leased them to people, took them back at the end. Somehow Francis Ford Coppola still has his. He like, he like showed this off in like an Instagram thing or or something a couple of years ago and everybody was like, what the fuck, man? You had to hide it in a barn or something. Yeah, you had to evade the GM police and they are scary. GM has shooters.

GM is as bad as Boeing. Well, worse than Boeing because when they decompress you, they do it on purpose. So the story with the EV1 is, GM had bought a really leading nickel metal hydride battery developer, used them to build the EV1, lobbied the California government. They were like, nobody's going to buy these. They did a bunch of internal research that was like, we'd have to give people $7,000 to take these, which every other study that was conducted disagreed with. Consumer demand was totally there.

There were actual waiting lists for this car. But they were like, alright, we're done. So in 2003 they wiped their hands of it, they crushed all these cars. Incidentally, around this time, they sell the company that owns the patent for nickel metal hydride powered cars to Texaco. And bought by Chevron. ALICE That's weird. That's really, what a huge coincidence.

ZACH At this time, Toyota's still making the RAV4 EV, with nickel metal hydride batteries. People still love them, I've actually seen them driving on the streets of LA, people just drive them around. There's not a ton of them in existence, but they don't degrade very much when they're in a really good climate, so they're still out there running around. ALICE Not too many parts to break down, you know? ZACH Yeah, yeah. And if you're driving like 70 miles a day or less, they're completely fine.

They charge overnight, you've got a usable car. Anyway, Chevron sues them to stop building these. ALICE Fucking, yeah. They do the stone car thing, they try to kill the electric car. Yeah, so, there's a documentary about this, it's called, like, Who Killed the Electric Car? Chevrolet, apparently. It's a little, like, it's partially that I think automakers didn't want to build it,

California kind of gave up on this at the same time. I will say it's worth noting that nobody ever figured out a way to build nickel metal hydride battery cars without infringing on the patent. So no one ever did. Toyota still used nickel metal hydride batteries in hybrids, which weren't covered by the patent until 2022. So the Prius used those without problem for basically its entire existence until the most recent generation.

So the tech is clearly usable, but no one could figure out how to do it without getting sued. There's one patent to it which is owned by an oil company. Chevron did renew the patent twice until 2019. They did actually find it worthwhile to pay the fees to keep the patent live until 2019 and then they let it lapse. Because at that point, lithium exists. So yeah, did they do anything untoward? Legally, I can't say. However, Chevron earned 21.3 billion dollars last year. ALICE It's just a series of interesting coincidences...

ZEKE Exactly! ALICE...on a warming planet. LIAM Exactly. It just happened to be an oil company, and we just happened to own the battery patent. But rest assured, we put $450,000 into green energy initiatives last year. Yeah. Their CEO's even sometimes fly as commercial. Wow. You should fly in a Boeing.

Wow. No, no, the problem is most of the Boeings in the air right now are still good. RILEY Yeah, so, that's kind of, you know, that's... Nickel metal hydride would have been replaced anyway, in short order by next slide, please. ALICE The element that wants to kill you. LIAM Aww, the iMav, right? RILEY Yep, this is the first mass-market lithium-ion battery car. ALICE So cute! RILEY I'm so wants to kill you. ALICE Aww, the iMav, right? ZACH Yep, this is the first mass market lithium ion battery car.

ALICE So cute! ZACH I'm so happy to see you! ALICE I wanna pet it, y'know? ZACH It is a little guy. It's just a little guy. ALICE It's a little guy full of the chemical that wants to kill you and also helps stabilize your mood disorder. ZACH Yeah, yeah, it's actually a K-car from Japan,

they just put batteries in it. They had already, there's actually, there's like a different version in Japan that's like, you know, not electric. And they were just like, oh, we got this thing, cool. So it's adorable. These had not much range in them, but they were a mass market lithium ion battery car. This was like a huge moment where you were like,

oh, you could sell these people and they won't immediately like self-immolate in somebody's garage. Yeah, and people like them because lithium batteries charge fast, discharge fast, and are sort of safe. Yeah, so these are... good lithium-ion batteries, like the highest performance ones we've got on the market, are roughly four to five times more power dense than nickel metal hydride. So you can fit a lot more power per kilogram into these. And you know, they're easier to put together into high voltage setups, so you can get more

efficiency when you're charging, so you get faster charging speeds, you get less resistance. It's less dangerous than the other thing that people were looking at was hydrogen. Do not... Fuel cell cars, baby. Do not do this. But, all the same... Hydrogen has a lot more problems than just being dangerous. Oh.

Boy, I would still sell you a new hydrogen car, too. No shit. You can go buy a Mirai. What you don't want to do is you don't want wanna overcharge, puncture, or set on fire your lithium battery. Because if you do do those things, then you have fire which is very difficult to impossible to put out. ZACH Yeah, so, speaking of which, next slide please. ALICE Yeah, mhm.

One of these things killed a billionaire recently. Yes. Well, it had the inverse bowing problem, where the door wouldn't fall off. The door would not fall off. The doors on Teslas are notoriously difficult to open if there's some kind of power failure. In fact, there's somewhere you straight up cannot open the doors if there is a power failure. ALICE Yeah, someone in the guidance says you gotta

rip out some panels and like, fuckin' pull some wires by yourself, and then some of them is just like, well, die. Uh. JUSTIN I think hers was a Model X, especially if you had to pull off a speaker grill and reach for an unmarked cable. One of them is like that in case of power failure. But also, it was like midnight in a bog in Texas, so y'know. ALICE Googling this in bog water, just like...

Yeah, have you ever watched the Mythbusters episode where they submerge a car with Adam Savage inside of it? Yeah, he died doing that. It's the most terrifying thing I've ever seen in my life. Holy shit. It's like up there with that and they buried Adam Savage alive in a coffin. I think I would rather be buried alive than... What the fuck did Adam Savage do to get, like, fucking Sears school happening to him? On TV.

I... he volunteered for it. I'm gonna be friends with Jamie, yeah. Not even friends, just co-workers. You achieve a grudging respect from Jamie Heinemann, he's gonna try and bury you alive. So just keep it fresh, you know? Yeah, that seems terrifying. So yeah, can you imagine doing that in a car whose door handles don't work if the power goes out? I don't wanna do that.

Stratically. You have to be zen for like two minutes until the car hits the bottom and the water prep sure equalizes inside the cabin, and then the door doesn't open anyway. And then after that you have to like go on your phone, brackets underwater, find which like speaker grill to pull off, and which unmarked wire to pull. Yeah. And the whole reason it happened, for what it's worth, is because these things are driven by a touchscreen.

And so she shifted into, I think it was drive instead of reverse, and drove into the pond, because she tapped the wrong thing on the screen that dictates which direction the car goes. Why is that on the screen? I'm not good at gear changes with a stick yet, but I would rather wrestle with that than fuck up with an iPad and die in a bog. RILEY This is a... I would never set foot in a Tesla. I never have, and I never will.

RILEY I wrote in the back of a Model X once, and it was kind of... I don't know. I... ALICE I've been in them in Ubers before, and I've been like, I don't want to. RILEY I'm always terrified I'll be drunk and someone will like, call an Uber for me, and it'll show up, and it'll be in a Tesla, and I would

be like... I'm I would be like, I'm being belligerent, but for a different reason than you think. Yeah, so this is already a good intro to Tesla tech. So the other thing too about, you know, remember how you said that you can't puncture those batteries because they'll kill you? Yeah. They'll kill you real bad. Yeah, the original... So so the first car the Tesla built was the Roadster in 2008. It was basically a nice Lotus-based kit car.

It was like fairly high performance. It was fairly expensive. It was a toy for rich people, and it sold pretty well as a toy for rich people. That was before Elon Musk was involved with the company. No, he was involved at that point. Oh, okay. I don't know if he had sued to be successfully called a co-founder yet,

but he did sue and is considered one of them. What a cunt that might have been. Yeah. So yeah, so they built the Roadster, they turned that funding into the S, which is the car you see here. It is a luxury sedan. The thing is, NTSA ended up investigating these because they didn't really have enough

battery shielding on them which they had later had to fix. As of the most recent count and it is very difficult to find exact counts. Somewhere between 40 and 60 people appear to have died in fires related to Teslas. If you're curious, this is over, eh, you know, roughly the same number of Ford Pintos sold, which killed 27 people. Fires. We as a society have become much more tolerant of people dying in fires, I guess. Yeah, well because, like, you know, the car is cool. It's a status symbol for rich people.

And like, that is... That means it's good. Just so long as it doesn't take me in the backseat with them when I'm drunk and getting an Uber. The deeply frustrating part about Tesla's is that the batteries are actually pretty good. The battery tech is... Panasonic built a lot of them...

Their newest ones are like 300 watt hours a kilogram, which is absolutely insane. They don't release their exact spending, but it appears that they spend about 20% less on them than most other car companies. So they've just figured out the infinite money glitch with these things. They're really good. It's just that the rest of the car around it is generally low quality. ALICE Overseen by a racist child. LIAM Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, and like... SEAN And probably a p***y child. We should just throw that in there. Yeah, by all means. We're already demonetized, he's f***ing loud, I don't give a f***. Take a Boeing flight, seek Canadian healthcare, what do you want me to tell you? Oh my god. Jesus.

I work for an automotive outlet, please. Canadian healthcare suggests you take another Boeing flight. If my boss listens to this, I'm not saying any of this. I hope to God my boss doesn't listen to this. The pet. Yeah, so, you know, it's that's that's that. The thing is, is that like, you know, the Nissan Leaf was the best selling EV up until about 2018, at which point then like the Model 3 came out and just obliterated every electric car sales record in history.

It's worth noting, next slide please. Tesla took a very long time to... I see a note here. Yeah, the thing is I've only had one Gin and Tonic, so I'm not, I can't ruin my career yet. Do it coward. Oh my god. No, I worked pretty hard for this career. I like it. Um, so they,

it took them a long time to actually make money building electric cars. Um, their valuation has always been insane because they're a tech company that make happens to build cars as a product. Uh, but a lot of how they did well in the early survival stages was very intelligent use of loopholes. Put it like that, that shouldn't get me sued and should allow me to keep my job. Lots, lots of subsidies. Yeah. So for example, this diagram here is of a hypothetical Model S battery swap station.

Oh yeah, they've been trying this for a bunch of different manufacturers, right? Yeah. Fleet vehicles and stuff. You don't have to waste time charging, you just take the whole battery pack off, replace it with a charged one. As a system, this makes a lot of sense to me. This seems like the way you should do it.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, and Tesla was going to build these, I think they built one out of like a car wash in Fremont in California. It was supposed to be like a battery quick swap station where they would basically they'd take your old battery, they'd give you a new fully charged one for the price of you know, like a full tank of premium gas basically. And then you'd be off on your merry way, you had the chance

to get your original battery pack back later. They ran this as a pilot program and they like never happened to do this. I mean, there's very little evidence that any owners actually wanted it. And there's even less evidence that they really tried to publicize it. They basically had, it was Harris Ranch, that's where it was at. It was just a demo station and it was open

for a little over a year. The thing that happens to be the case with this is CARB had recently announced that you would get almost double the carbon tax credits if you had an EV that could go to a full state of charge in some absurdly low amount of time, like 20 minutes or something. Driving innovation again. Yeah, which the superchargers could not do at this point, but the battery swaps could. So all they had to do was demonstrate that they had the capability to do this and then all of a sudden they basically are making thousands

of dollars more in carbon credits, which it happens is very lucrative. They made $1.8 billion dollars in carbon credit sales last year. They have so far made nine billion dollars off of that. And what they do is basically it's just how the EPA decided to, it's like, it's basically like, what is the word for those things that Catholics do? An indulgence. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. It's basically like, you know, I almost said child abuse. We've already discussed that. Yeah. So basically they take these carbon credits they get for selling zero emissions vehicles and they sell them on the open market at whatever value as offsets for companies that don't

make enough EVs. So like Stellantis, Dodge specifically, has been largely allergic to EVs its whole life, because what they have to do is build Dodge Challengers for... ALICE They have to build the Chud vehicles. LIAM The new-come-trials, right? ALICE You have to build a Ram with huge stacks. LIAM No, Ram got spun off, man.

It's fine now. ALICE Really? ZACH No, Ram is still Stellantis, though. LIAM Right, yeah yeah yeah. I just have the Dodge. ALICE They have to build the Chud vehicle. ZACH Yeah. Yeah. ALICE And the Chud vehicle to build the, like, chud vehicle.

And the chud vehicle does not get carbon tax credits. ALICE Have you considered that I want a Durango Hellcat? JUSTIN It's legal to enjoy chud things. I want to take that position. ALICE I want a Durango Hellcat. ZACH I mean, while we're asking for cameras, I want a Fujica GF690. Please and thank you.

The Texas Leica, because it's big. I think a Leica, I was just- That's what they call it, seriously. I was thinking about the dog. It's a medium format rangefinder and it just looks like a Leica, but it's just like 60% bigger in every dimension. They're gorgeous.

I have, because I have insane friends, I have like seven pro packs worth of fridge stored like 90s Kodak film, like varicolor three, sitting in my fridge right now that is calling to me to be put into an actually nice camera. Oh my god, marry me. Later. We can do that later. Yeah, we'll sort this. Okay. All right. If you insist. Anywho, I'm doing some like Caucasian style bride kidnapping. We're supposed to do that.

Should I get this Gen 1 Viper or am I not going to get it because I need to know? I asked ask the patrons. They're actually not that expensive. You can get one for like 30 grand. I know what I can do, Victoria. The problem is I married to my sweet and wonderful wife, who doesn't want me to... Keep track of your increments of 30 grand, and therefore it's gonna notice if 30 grand is missing. First of all, you have 30 grand, second of all, it is now missing from your account.

Suddenly a jet one viper has appeared, yes. Yeah, and also outside, you making the loudest noise heard by anyone in the lobby. Presumably she also loves Liam and doesn't want him to buy a thirty thousand dollar euthanasia pod, pod, side pipes. Give me the pod! Give me the euthanasia pod! You have bought fucking- I am American and I have the right to kill a bitch off in a gen 1 viper!

Yeah, you have bought four wheels and a Canadian palliative care doctor clinging to each one. If you want to do that you may as well buy a motorcycle, you know? Not allowed to buy one of those, so Gen 1 Viper it is. Why? What? Why aren't you allowed to buy a mot- is this like a Corinne thing or is this like... This is a Corinne thing. Okay, I thought it might be like he had a felony or something.

No, oh, don't worry about that. Do you think they stop you from getting a motorcycle in America if you have a felony? They give you one. Join this outlaw biker gang. This is my outfit. You've been banished to two wheels. That's a condition of your parole, yeah. What if you have, like, what if you join an outlaw biker gang, but you have like a middling felony

like littering or something, you know? ALICE Just getting the like 1% patch sewn on your leather vest for embezzlement. JUSTIN Someone's selling an 1100 horsepower Dodge Viper. Oh ho ho ho ho ho. JUSTIN How much? Hey, Liam, I like you. Don't do that. Even if you had the money.

Just like, don't. Do you know what's fun about those cars? Do you know what's fun about those cars? There is only like one company that makes the rear tires for it because they're like this weird fuck off size for those tri-spoke wheels. And they're like $2,000 a pair.

So what happens is no one ever replaces the tires. No one ever replaces the tires. They get dry-rotted and old because they're putting so few miles on their like pride and joy. And then they stab the gas once and they drive themselves into a palm tree and ignite. Don't worry.

I won't do that. Patrons, please. I need this gentleman Vapor. It's actually Ted too, I think. Who gives a shit? All right, hang on. I'm clicking this link really fast. Sorry to do it. Who gives a shit? All right. Hang on. I'm clicking this link really fast. Sorry to get off topic.

This is about as opposite of an easy. Oh, my fucking God. That's hot. Right. Yeah. Look at it. Jesus. Oh, I know a guy in Houston who has a like track prepped 99 Viper just like this white stripes on it, and it is one of the hottest things I have ever sat in. Just like, ugh.

Cars don't really attract women, but this car would attract this woman, I will tell you that. ALICE Just the closer you get to a kind of Hot Wheels car, you know? ZACH Yeah, yeah. Well, and you know, I'm easily swayed by things that look like phalluses, so. Jesus. Anyway, you should actually get that, Liam.

I endorse it. Thank you. Yeah. The official autojournalist opinion is by that viper. Not right now, we have a podcast to record, please. I hear you typing. If you're putting money into like fucking escrow or something right now. Worry about yourself.

He's selling a bunch of dogecoin. Honey, we have to liquidate the dogecoin, I found a viper gts. A sentence that has probably been actually said. Oh, I'm certain. Quite possibly like one day before the person who said it died. This is one near me. 85k is too much for a first gen. I know, I know.

This is 3000 miles, you're gonna have to replace every seal. I beg of you. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. This could and probably should be a stream, at some point. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I was shown a Dodge Viper. I'm very, very straightforward. Stimulus reaction.

Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these. So let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is, you give us two bucks a month, and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks, you get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes, so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them.

The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want. Or don't. It's your decision, and we respect that. Back to the show. the complete opposite of a Dodge Viper. In that it sucks.

It will still kill you. Sure. I hope it will, but the whole thing- I'm in a fun way. Yeah, I mean, you know, no, it's- In an embarrassing way. Put it on your tombstone, like,

oh, I did a burnout and my car exploded and a bunch of school children sat in and started cheering, versus I backed into a pond. ALICE and JUSTIN Yeah. The virgin pond billionaire versus the chad hoon. ZACH Yeah. So, I mean, the big thing about Tesla is to understand, is that, like, the whole reason, and I think this is, like, people need to just realize this is like the cars themselves do have some redeeming

qualities. The big problem is that like so much of the hype around Tesla is what makes them insane. Like I think it was Goldman Sachs or something valued full self-driving, which is a technology that does not exist and is a beta and should not be on public roads. It's just not real. It's like worth $75 billion. It's like, well, yeah, I mean, sure. Like if you could invent a car that self drove

and it could be an automatic taxi cab and it could rent itself out to people, I'm sure it would be worth a lot of money. But like, it doesn't exist. And self-driving cars are their own whole problem. And the fact that those have become linked with EVs is upsetting because what we're doing is we're setting up a similar set of problems that we had a hundred years ago.

Next slide, please. I am assuming you're familiar with Big Bill Hells. Shove it up your ugly ass. That's right, shove it up your ugly ass. Bring your trade, bring your wife. Will fucker. That's right, shove it up your ugly ass. Bring your trade, bring your wife. Will fucker, that's right, will fuck your wife. Foundational to my sense of humor. The problem, the one thing that Tesla did get right is that they do direct sales.

Because the thing is, is that it turns out that like car dealerships do direct sales. Because the thing is, is that, it turns out that, like, car dealerships do not want to sell you EVs. Like, at all. They have zero interest. ALICE. Car dealers are the scum on the bog in which all of us are watching a billionaire pilot their EV. JUSTIN. Yes. Car dealers are the base of the Republican Party. Car dealers are America's petty bourgeois. ALICE Yep, yep, yep. Listen to Trash Yutcher about that, with Pat Wyman.

JUSTIN Car dealers are like, you know, a lot of these people are multimillionaires, like small multimillionaires, but multimillionaires, and you know, they basically control the whole town they live in. They own three dealerships. ALICE Every person who owns a car dealership was at January 6th, and is Hitler. JUSTIN Every single car dealer is Hitler. ALICE If they had just done, like, a sort of drone strike double tap on the capital, to like... if Nancy Pelosi had called in an airstrike

on her own position, you would not be able to buy a car in America for like a week afterwards. SEAN And more than a week, I mean, you would've killed the car dealers and their children. You would've killed the tractor dealers too. And then you know what would happen? People would be able to repair their John Deere tractors on their own, motherfuckers. ALICE This is a classic win-win, you know. Going back in the time machine, to the like, capital tunnels, on January 6th, to be like,

Speaker Pelosi, you can change the course of history for the better. LIAM Follow the air strike. ALICE Call the F-35s. JUSTIN We need to launch the nuclear missiles. Today is the day we nuke Washington DC for the good of the nation. Make it a small one, no, just a little one, so we don't get like, the places where people live, yeah. Washington DC looks like Fallout 3, rest of the country's fine. Listen, if... if you have lived in Washington DC, you know that everyone in Washington DC

who actually lives there, if the actual capital district were vaporized one day, everyone would feel much better the following day. Yep. At that point Washington DC is just a nice mid-sized city. Yes. Maybe Georgetown too. Georgetown's part of DC, wipe it off the face of the planet. You're gonna get a metro station in my America motherfuckers.

I'm just thinking like- Can we nominate Liam for climate Stalin? Mmm, I think so. I think you do. Step one. You're doing a good job at it. He'll get drunk with power, he'll be doing sick burnouts in the Viper, but, you know. Do as I say, not as I do. A Viper in every driveway.

Step one, airstrikes on the National Mall. Listen, a Viper in every driveway, if Biden wants to win, fuckin'... two steps, end the genocide Viper in every driveway. Oh, yeah, you got my fuckin' vote, man. I'll fuckin' fundraise for you if I get the genocide viper in every driveway. ZACH Well, they've got the... Dodd just came up with the EV charger. ALICE Yes, I saw.

ZACH It makes weird noises to simulate having a rumble and a V8. Because it's essentially a large toy car. For men who are still 13, mentally. But it does kinda look cool, which is the thing that I really hate to admit about it. Like, I was looking at it, I was like, I really, really wanna hate this, but it's kinda, it's got like a little front wing thing, anyway, I digress. ALICE One of the smartest things American cops ever did, one of the few smart things, was corner the market and dodge charges.

To be like, this is the cop car now. ALICE Yeah. I'm not gonna give it to him. Seattle Police Drive explorers, that look like they were ripped from a fascist video game, they have genuinely the most fascist-ass cop livery design of all time. ALICE The cop SUV moment has been a real decline for me, bring back the sedans. Yeah you can carry more stuff, yeah you need to carry more stuff, but like, the aesthetics, come on.

JUSTIN I like the... I also live like, I also... Oh, sorry. JUSTIN I like the Challenger better, I mean that's objectively, it is the fascist car, but I just think it looks better. ALICE American cops drive Crown Victorias, never should have stopped. JUSTIN Yeah, Crown Vicks are like, they were cool.

I mean, by the way... ALICE Caprice PPV, yeah. JUSTIN Caprice's, ah, mwah. Delicious. I don't know if I... RILEY You know they brought those back in like 2013, right? ALICE Yeah, yeah, no one bought them. But like, my...

ALICE They didn't sell them to civilians. Yeah, they didn't sell them to civilians in the states. RILEY They were rebadged like, Commodores or something. But like, the Ford you can buy now, if you were a cop, is like a Taurus, which, or like, an Explorer, and it just... UGH. You'd also get a cop Ford Mustang Mach-E. If you would like your fascists to be environmentally friendly.

New York has like a bajillion of them. Ugh. Oh. Listen, make me in charge of the cops when you're climate Stalin, I will unify their aesthetic into something interesting. Oh, we can have Italian cops everywhere. That concerns me, Nova. Don't worry about it. And also don't worry about why all the cops have to be women, and why they have to be

like minimum six foot. This is normal. Doing a little Italian futurism, are we? Just a little bit, yeah. Bringing the curry binari to America, whatever you call it. It's just, being a cop in like, Seattle, and you have to wear like a dress cape and a sword. Well the thing is, I live like, very close to the police station that got overrun during the protests in 2020. I live near the Chaz, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, if you remember that.

Oh, one of the few times I've been owned on Twitter, yeah, I recall. So I remember there was footage of it wherever I moved here, I was like, oh yeah, I recognize that place. But there's always 58 of these explorers parked outside, and I never see a cop standing outside at all. They always are in their cars or driving into the garage. I think they're literally afraid that they will catch gay from us. ALICE Social alienation is so sad. ZACH Yeah.

Anyway. EVs. The problem is car dealerships, they're fascist. They can't sell extended warranties, they can't sell catalytic converter etching, although I have actually seen some very funny images of window stickers for Ford F-150 Lightnings, which are fully electric and do not have catalytic converters with an option for $500 in the window for catalytic converter etching, where they put a serial number in it so if somebody steals it theoretically, you could, I don't know, track down the thief that did it and go,

Liam Neeson taken on his ass? I don't know. Like a mime car part thief. This is a big issue with electric cars, where your entire business model is based on both selling the car and then doing long term maintenance on it, is that the electric motor is so simple and so reliable that you can't do all of this maintenance which is associated from having an engine that has 4,000 explosions a minute in it.

You know? Yeah. We might lose the ability to sustain this kind of American do nothing gentry and replace them with like, I don't know, podcasters or something. Yeah. That's us. Yeah. But so the other problem also here is that they are not selling great at the moment. All of us and all of our children will be at like, future left wing equivalent January

6th. This is when I always storm the car dealerships and see how they like it, and take our general diapers that we are entitled to that are our birthrights. That's when we all storm Langley. ALICE So it's when we storm the Capitol after Trump wins and we go start the steal. ZACH Anyway, so like, right now, the other picture here, next to shove it up your ugly ass, is the Blazer EV, which is GM's very important first, like, ultium platform. It's their new... This is supposed to define the future of EVs. It is very expensive.

Raising hand, raising hand. Why does it have the fat ass that it has? Very fat ass. Because it is... Because in every meaningful metric it is larger than every other mid-sized electric SUV. Gotcha. So they just, they were like, hmm, on paper, this is three inches wider. We're getting to the point where these things are big enough that we're close to needing marker lights on them. Because they're over-wide. This thing is enormous.

You gotta throw an oversized load banner on every single car. You gotta have a pickup truck following you, with lights on it. That's the niche the lightning is positioned for. But so, you know, these were a very important launch. They, they have like an all new infotainment system. Several reviewers, including myself, have gotten these and had the, uh, the entire car crash, not in terms of into a wall, but all of the software dies. The first reviewer vehicle I had for this

on the first drive to test it for my job, the entire operating system crashed and got stuck in a boot loop, and they had to give me a different SUV. This happened to Edmunds and also one of my coworkers at my current job. While he was on a road trip notably, he was like stuck in rural Virginia without a car

because it just died on him when it was trying to charge. This is not helping sales. It's not just Tesla that is having teething pains, so to speak. There's a lot of pretty big products that this is happening to right now. People are also tired of paying. They've sold everything that they can to people who have $60,000 to spend on SUVs. And so right now, at the end of 2023, rather, there was like a 114 day supply of EVs across the industry, which is a ton. That is that is months of supply just sitting up, sitting on dealership parking lots, taking up space, not earning commission for people. You know, this is, it's catastrophic, as far as like, actually making these a feasible strategy.

And next slide please. So this is, this is the engineering disaster that is capitalism. Which I know this is a new twist for the show, I apologize for bringing that in now. ALICE Yeah, we're about to radicalize everybody into like, Antifa Gen 6. Yeah. Yeah. Off of their shit. Yeah, so the graph here that I have, which starts at around $800, and is kind of leveled

out around $140, is price in $2023 per kilowatt hour for lithium ion batteries. The thing is, batteries are supposed to break below this magical price of $100 per kilowatt hour, and they have not. They have been steadily leveling off, and barring some incredible improvement in battery technology or solid state batteries, this is not getting cheaper. ALICE That one fucking Russian like, Russian girl who claimed to have invented the room temperature superconductor fucked us on this one. ZACH Yeah, yeah. I don't know if you're familiar with Russia, speaking of which, do you know what they have

a lot of there? ALICE Uh, rare earths. ZACH Yes. Which you need to build batteries. ALICE Electric vehicles, too. I will speak on that a bit later in the podcast. ZACH That's fair. But yeah, so like all of the materials that are required to build batteries are hard to

get. Hard and often unethical to get. Oh, extremely. I didn't even, I literally was like, okay, we're at slide 16, I probably should talk about a limited number of things and I stuck to the space I know the best, but there are serious environmental issues with EVs, and there has been research done that shows that- We flash up the Elon Musk, we will coup whoever we want tweet. Yeah.

Yeah. Not just lithium mind you, like all of these rare earths. Like a niobium and like coal town and shit. Coal bolt. Yeah. Mmhmm. There's a huge amount of like, exploitation behind all of these. It's super cool that the internet is now broken and I cannot find stories that my co-workers wrote. Ideal. Yeah.

That I remember reading that I was going to cite from. In any case, we're running into the problem of, you know, these are the economies of scale we were hoping for have not worked out. And we keep building these enormous, enormous EVs that are very expensive, such as the Hummer EV, which weighs $9,000. It's going to collapse every parking garage. The battery pack, the battery pack in the Hummer EV weighs more than my last car did. It is 2,800 pounds, I had a 1989 Camry that weighed like 2,700 pounds. So you know, so we're building these massive things, so we're consuming more lithium to

get them going, and so like... Was the electric Hummer built for anyone in the world other than Arnold Schwarzenegger? Uh... I don't know. People who really admire the Frey Corps, I'm not sure. So yeah, so there's economic problems. So what we're running into, the innovation that's been happening in the market

is that this is incredibly high end. The pictures here of the Asparc Owl, which as far as I can tell actually hasn't been built, which is a pretty common theme with a lot of these startup companies. But it was going to sell for $3.1 million and have a 0-60 time of like 1.6 seconds or something. I don't know.

It's a... Number is really high, car goes very fast. The car below it is the Lotus Evisia, that's 2.3 million, it does exist. Some of my coworkers have driven it. It's apparently very cool. It goes very very fast. Again, it has to do with my hot wheels effect. But... Yeah, this is the problem with...

I'm sure those wheels get pretty hot. I mean... This is the problem with EVs as an individual consumption product, right? A lot of the EVs that were built up until very recently were loss leaders. They were required. That e-Golf that I showed the diagram of when we first started this presentation was not a car that folks like to make money. Yeah, like the Fiat 500 EV that used to be sold in California to meet emissions requirements, like Sergio Marchione famously, who was president of Chrysler at the time, famously hated them because he was like, we lose so much money on all of these. I can't stand the fact that we have to

make them. The thing is, is no one's ever actually solved this problem all that well. You look at the companies that have broken into this space successfully like Rivian or Polestar, and what they do is they build largely expensive EVs. They build, Rivians are 70 or 80 grand, Polestar's, I think their cheapest one starts at like 45 or something, which is kind of average nowadays, but it's still a lot of money for most people. And all of this breakthrough to like,

oh, if we just build the expensive ones, they'll eventually come down in price has not happened. And so what we have done is with a lack of any charging infrastructure, the requirement basically to own a home to be able to charge your EV and the really high purchase price, what we've got is like a bunch of rich people play things and then like upper middle class guilt aswasher's. They're not actually solving any structural problems. Because unfortunately, you can't really solve structural problems by buying things.

Fuck. That's what I've been trying to do. Yeah. Yeah. And so like, you know, the only thing that might fix this is like solid state batteries might come through, which Toyota has been working on. And they've been like 15 years away from for the past 30 years. They say they're getting close, who the hell knows that would that would change things drastically, because then you could have 1000 mile range EVs that weigh like a 10th as much you know, like it's, it changes all of your scale so drastically, they're supposed to fix all of these problems use

fewer resources. But you know, that's, that's not something we have. So what people need to do is like buy plug in hybrids or whatever. But nobody wants to do that because they're not status symbols then. And Americans of course, you know, need like a big engine to feel like they're sufficient as people. Big V8 because it's smooth. V10.

V10, oh even better. Well, I mean, to Ram's credit, they just swapped out the V8 in the Ram for an inline six. It gets the exact same mileage as the V8 did, but they did at least get rid of two cylinders. Basically BMW now. Gonna buy an SD45, I got a V24. Big diesel prime mover. Yeah, so, I mean, the disaster is society. Again? Unfortunately.

Fuck! Appears to be the issue. I just, listen, I got on this podcast to talk about wings falling off planes. To stick to engineering. And now all of a sudden, this woke shit, you you tell me that like, it's society, or whatever. Hold on, I got some engineering for you, but first I gotta use the restroom. Please. When you said but first it primes me to go to the drop, so I'm like, do I have a, like,

Justin goes to the restroom drop? Do I have one? I really don't think I do. But yeah, no, I mean, I'm... Shitting on my hands, shitting on my hands. So I'm doing driving lessons at the moment. My test is on May 1st. Oh.

My name gets legally changed, like right after that. Oh, how I am. Two big accomplishments. Yeah. Well, if I pass. If not, then one big accomplishment. This is also famously a requirement to get your name changed. I hope we both pass. And yeah, but I guess if I do I'm gonna have to think about getting a car.

Oh my god. We could devote a whole... Nova! We could do an entire episode. We could do an entire episode about this. What the Nova Mobile's gonna be. One Viper. Difficult to import, like, was Bohanka into the fuckin' UK, and there's very few...

There was a Gaz 21 for sale near me, and I was like, what if I did this? Yeah, what if you did? It would be fucking sick, is the thing. It would be so cool. You can fix it with a hammer. But yeah, no, I mean, fuck, I'm probably gonna end up with like a Golf or something, but... I mean, the problem that I have, ultimately, is that like, I know all of these things about structural issues, right?

I know that, like, in general, you cannot consume your weight of a problem, but for me, a car would fix me. And I think a lot of other people, a car could fix them. I've been learning to drive in a Golf, and the thing about driving a Golf is that it is fucking idiot proof. At least the new ones, because you can't... What year? Uh, like, last... like, 2023.

Oh, okay. There is nothing you can do to this, it tells you when to change gears, it fucking... Yeah, a lot of cars do that. Is this common? People brag about being good drivers, this shit, it's easy! You just haven't seen me drive. Mmm. Well.

Hope to. Alright, let's look at some engineering problems. Now, we've talked a lot about, largely, you know, we're talking about electric vehicles in terms of vehicles for consumers, right? That's something that, you know, spends 99% of its life in a parking spot or in a garage. Let's talk about commercial vehicles. let's talk about electric trucks. ALICE FLEETs fleet vehicles. Fuck yeah.

This is the thing, right? This thing sucks, I hate it, I hate the way it looks, but it is cabover engine and therefore I have to respect it, because cabover engines, the US market has been deprived of these for too long, and I think they're cool. JUSTIN Oh, yeah, cabovers look great, I love like an old fashioned cab over. But the other thing is like that barely even means anything on a Tesla semi, such as what you're seeing here. This sort of looks like a fucking, what am I looking at? I'm looking at Voldemort without the nose slits. Not to bring Harry Potter into this, but, you know. I also like how it broke down towing a truck full of lays, which are 90% air by volume

anyway. You notice it also has Frito-Lay decals on the truck. That's how you know it's good. Well, there's a reason for that. Yeah, I paid an extra $4.99 for the American truck simulator Frito-Lay Pack DLC. So we've been talking about electric semi-t, y'know, probably a decade now, they barely exist, right? I think there's like, Freightliner does some kind of like, e-Cascadia model, and there's

the Tesla Semi, which still has not really launched, I think a couple prototypes exist and that's basically all there is. You know, and so electric semis are not taking off the way electric cars are and electric cars aren't taking off that much at all. You know, there's some reasons for this. It comes down to like energy density, range, charging time. These big commercial vehicles need to be run constantly to be economically viable. Right now, these electric trucks, they don't go very far. The batteries are very heavy. You have weight limits, so you don't want to go over 80,000 pounds. You don't want to spend all that weight

limit on the batteries. They take longer to charge at the very few commercial charging stations that exist, right? So, if you are, let's say you're hauling ships from the Frito-Lay's factory to the Frito-Lay's warehouse, then maybe it makes sense to get an electric semi because you can charge that at the factory, you can charge it at the warehouse. If you're someone like a common carrier, like a trucking company that moves anything from anywhere to anywhere else, or if you're a private operator, you own your rig and you are taking on contracts right now,

you're screwed. You can't buy an electric truck. It just will not work. Cause A, there's no way to charge it. Yeah. And to that point, like the only places I've seen that have had success with electric like vehicles like this are like school buses where they have like a five mile route that they stop

and wheel a bunch. And then they come back to a central place every day at 3pm and they can plug them all back in. Or the postal service, once again. Postal service is another good candidate. If you have like a fleet vehicle, like maintenance vehicles for like a city or something, that makes a lot of sense. But if you're trying to go from anywhere to anywhere else, especially over long distances, this is a big problem, because there's no charging infrastructure, and because the range isn't great, and because of just the sheer energy consumption of a big rig.

Which is where I sort of want to talk about relative energy density of batteries. ALICE As the dream of Cabover Engine recedes, once again, in the American road scape. JUSTIN So, this is the most up-to-date chart I could find, on short notice. Energy density of lithium-ion battery packs, 2008 to 2020. We can see, hey, there's a nice exponential curve here, right? ALICE Yeah. You know, effective accelerationism.

Thing getting better. You know, effective acceleration is a thing going, thing getting exactly, exactly. How many watt hours can you fit into a liter of space? We're at 450. And I will note that 450 is like really cutting edge, really cutting. Yeah. There are, there are cars on the market right now that are 160 to 200 because they can't get enough nickel. And so they had to go to a worse lithium ion chemistry. Now if we compare this to gasoline, that is 9,500.

This is a big issue with fossil fuels is that they're really good in some of these metrics. Diesel is even more. Diesel is 10,722 watt hours per liter. Jesus. You know, and per unit of mass, it's worse. Victoria mentioned 300 watt hours per kilogram for lithium ion versus 12,666 for diesel, 12,888 for get, these are fifty fold increases through using fossil fuels. We have a lot of way to go with batteries. ALICE Please, please, Russian transgender women, invent the superconductor.

I was about to say, someone's gotta figure that one out. This is important... It's not so important to be consumer vehicles, because, unless you're doing a road trip, this is not normally a problem. But again, if you're on a semi-truck, if you're on anything that needs to do, like, needs a high duty cycle, something that works all day, like say a garbage truck, this is a big problem. If you listener are sitting around thinking, I might invent the semiconductor today, but

I'm probably not going to. No, they invented the semiconductor, you're thinking I'm a superconductor. If you're gonna invent the semiconductor, just do it again for fun. Maybe this time you'll do it in a way that, like, I don't know... That's some gallium. Yeah. Yeah. I think gallium's just a transition metal.

I don't know my periodic table anymore, that's way, way better. I don't know anything anymore. I'm fully gone off of, like, a pack of custard creams and one and a half bottles of water. Well done. Thank you. So if you have a length limit to the trailer, you have a weight limit to the truck and trailer, you have a weight limit as well, you don't have a lot of room to spare to have a huge battery pack.

Again, I'm not super on the up and up with current battery technology. The best of my knowledge to really start to keep these exponential improvements going, at this point you need new battery chemistries and of course the years of development associated with that. These exponential improvements are still gears off just to match the sheer raw energy density of gasoline or diesel. ALICE Get on it, Nuds. JUSTIN Yeah.

You know, there's lots of weird stuff now, like reversible rusting and stuff like that, which I don't fully understand. The current state of lithium-ion battery packs, though, it's kind of... How are you gonna put this in the truck? Let alone a train, which is the other thing, if you... This is an old episode of ours, go look up our battery electric locomotives episode. But you know, this is... Yeah.

I sort of, I come back to the thing we said in the geoengineering episode, which is like, that's gonna be fine, they'll invent something. Just fucking hurry up with it, please. So what we're... I'll look this up really quick, so solid state batteries, the miracle tech that I told you would need to, you know, needs to basically come along to make EV cars a reasonable proposition for people, is around 1000 watt hours a liter. Which still makes it 12 times less efficient than gasoline.

Yeah. Yeah, it's not... Or 10 times, sorry. 10 times. It's not a... It's still an order of magnitude. Yeah, this is kind of a... Ooh. You know, there's other technologies we can use here. Another...

Small nuclear reactor. Has anybody heard of trains? Yeah, small nuclear reactor is my vote. Okay. Here's another fun one. LAUGHS Yes, small nuclear reactor is my vote. Okay. Here's another fun one. So over here is the city of Roanoke, Virginia, right? As a population.

Beautiful. It's wonderful. The Star City has, you know, it's where my aunt Linda lives. They have not figured out grids when they built this one, I see. Well, you know, it's, it's the mountains are all around it. It's kind of confined in there. Very nice place. I recommend visiting the star city, Roanoke, Virginia.

It has a population of about 100,000 people. The city uses 1,450,000 megawatt hours per year, according to a website I found. This is hard information to find, and I had limited time. Megawatt hours are the worst unit imaginable. Like watt hours, I hate them. That's just a way of expressing energy through power. It should be like joules. It would make everything easier for us. Doing dimensional analysis on this to find the constant power draw or

the average power draw, we got to divide it by the number of hours in a year to find the constant power draw, or the average power draw, we gotta divide it by the number of hours in a year to get the constant power draw. This is too much engineering, can we go back to the society, please? 24 hours times 365 and a quarter days, to a count for leap years, that's 8760, the city has a constant power draw of 165 megawatts. If I did that math wrong, I apologize, I had a beer while I was doing it. Don't apologize. Fuck em.

First time I did this I came up with a number that was about four times higher, I don't know if I fucked up. for Roanoke's. Yeah. So now down here is the Safe Harbor dam on the Susquehanna River. As a total installed capacity of four hundred and seventy one four hundred and seventeen megawatts, including two turbines, which are rated at 33 megawatts each. That provides about a third of the power for the M-Track Northeast Corridor, at least between Washington, D.C. and New York City, because the phase change is beyond that is 25 hertz south of New York City.

It's 60 hertz north of New York City. The peak loading on the corridor is about 210 megawatts. But, you know, this entire dam dedicated to the corridor is about 210 megawatts, but this entire dam dedicated the corridor is making, I believe, 66 megawatts from the turbines and then they have a rotary inverter there that bumps it up to 81 megawatts. And that's where I want to compare this to, the unincorporated community of Rayfene, Virginia. Oh, she's not beautiful. JUSTIN Yeah, there's a little town up Rayfene Road.

And so, this is about... ALICE Someone listens to this podcast in this town. Sooner or later, we're gonna zoom in and we're gonna be like, this is one guy's house out of line. SE. Your shitty house. And read their full address, yeah. So, Ray Fiend, Virginia, has several large truck stops. I will note that it has a restaurant called Quaker Steak and Lube. Oh, it's real good.

Quaker Steak and Lube actually goes insanely hard. It slaps, yeah. I like buffalo wings, and it's not like... What the fuck kind of American activation phrase have I said to make all three of you? I've never been to Quaker Steak and Lube. The website is the lube dot com! Is it water or silicone based? All of their restaurants are Americana themed, they've got Corvettes hanging from

the ceiling and stuff. ALICE, oh it's slapped, I fucking love it. JUSTIN, when I used to go drifting, we would always stop at a Quaker Steak & Lube on the way home and pull up with all of our shitty ass 240SXs and stuff. ALICE, fuck, you're so cool. JUSTIN, and like, hard park in the parking lot and eat chicken wings. It was so, it's amazing. It's an American institution, I will not allow you to shit talk it.

ALICE Explain to me... LIAM Bluebulls. ALICE How'd they get into the fuckin' steak? ZACH It's, cause it looks like it, so I think what they originally did, I don't know. Why am I talking about this? LIAM They make steak burgers. ZACH They make steak burgers.

ZACH They make steak burgers, and also like, every single one of them looks like an old timey garage. LIAM Oh, it fuckin' rolls. I love fucking steak and lube. ZACH So I think it's supposed to be like, they serve steak and they have to look they have this like whole Americana Route 66 like aesthetic going on. It's like an old lube shop like they used to like, you know, Jiffy Lube or something

an oil change place. The garage you go into and you come out. You can order the kids lube cruisers. Oh God. All right. There's three separate truck stops here. There are. There's White's Travel Center here.

This is one more thing. They have an Irish Car Bomb on the menu. They call it the Irish Drop Shot. That is a that is a car bomb and it's just on the menu. There's the Pilot travel center up here. Fuck you. That has 12 pumps. And there's over here, there's Smiley's, which if you've ever been down I-81, you'll see

many signs for the best stang BBQ in Virginia. It was pretty good. It's okay. It was pretty good. Should have gone to the Steaken Loop. Did we go to Smiley's? Yeah, we've been to Smiley's. When did we go to Smiley's? We went to been to Smiley's. When did we go to Smiley's?

We went to Smiley's on the way back from your aunt's house. Oh right we did. You guys just engage in these fuckin' odysseys, you know? No the thing about Smiley's is when you, they have a sports bar inside Smiley's, and when you order the barbecue what they do is they don't make the barbecue fresh, they go down to the gas station side, and then they take one of the pre-wrapped sandwiches and plate it nicely for you. ALICE You wanted to go. JUSTIN Yeah, I did want to go. I wanted to finally see what it was like.

SEAN You wanted to try the best dang BBQ in Virginia. JUSTIN It's fine. ALICE It was pretty good, I thought. I liked it. JUSTIN This one has six pumps. So, Rayfeed is actually an exceptionally large truck stop. I will admit this, but I'm proving a point here. Right now, it takes about 15 to 20 minutes to fill up a big semi truck with diesel because they got really big tanks. There's a limit to the amount of diesel you can shove in there at once.

Right. The newest plugs out there, which are called the megawatt charging system,, the MCS, they're starting to implement it in Europe in a few demonstrator points, they still take about thirty minutes to fill up a truck with juice at 3.75 Megawatts. Three and three quarters Megawatts. ALICE This is a beefy connection. Like, do not be fucking with those cables. Yeah. I wouldn't want to be within a mile of that thing. The more conventional systems that exist right now take about 90 minutes. So conservatively, if you wanted to electrify this truck stop, we'd need more pumps.

I just figured like a third more, right, so about 12 more, make the whole complex 48 pumps total, and you multiply 48 by three and three quarters megawatts, that's 180 megawatts. So at busy hours, the sleepy unincorporated community of Ray Fene, Virginia in Rockbridge County would draw more power than the big city of Roanoke, and nearly as much power as rush hour on the entire Amtrak northeast corridor. LARGE nuclear reactor.

Like, a lot of them. Too cheap to meter. I mean, that's sort of where you have to go. And even then, I mean, big nuclear reactor's still only 500 megawatts, you need to build one for every couple truck stops, Sammy. ALICE Alright, let's do it. I work in American...

SEAN I'm working my semi in the shade of the cooling tower. ALICE With a quaker steak and lube! SEAN Going to Bucky's and they have an entire nuclear power plant just for the gas station. Nova, are you familiar with Bucky's? Oh, I'm aware. Well, I used to think it was called Bucys.

Like, Derry Bucys. Bust that Bucy open, boy! Hold on, I have something for this... Blue Bulls. Hang on. Very cool. Well, this has been lovely. Yeah. Blue bulls. Hang on. Very good. Well, this has been lovely.

Yeah. So, you know, this is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night when you talk about electrifying like trucking or cars or anything like that, you know, where does this energy come from? We use about 4,000 terawatt hours of electricity in the United States just to electrify trucking. We need to find about 500 more terawatt hours in the couch somewhere. And that has nothing, that's to say nothing about building all the transmission wires, all the stuff like that, y'know, this is where you maybe want to look and say, should we

think about other systems, right? ALICE Yeah, so that the town of Raffine, Virginia doesn't have American Chernobyl number 596 in it. SEAN It's not Raphine, it's Ra-fine. ALICE Ra-fine, excuse me. SEAN Ra-fine is very... I gave up my ability to pronounce words in other languages, so I know what they are, in Appalachia, and also sometimes I can get Algonquin right in the first try. ALICE The unincorporated Virginia community...

LIAM The 1-16th Cherokee on my momma's side, 1-8 on my daddy's side. The unincorporated Virginia community of Rafe Fiennes. Oh, stop it! ...will operate a large nuclear reactor. I can't wait to take you to Appalachia. They'll love me. They will absolutely love me. They will love you, and if they don't, we're c***.

I don't give a f***. I was about to say... I will absolutely dump anybody's body in the New River Gorge. Society built on mutual respect. ALICE This is the Appalachia Tour sort of t-shirt, is, you'll love us and if we don't we'll kill you. ZACH Just a note, so there was a story that I wrote today, that is going out on Friday, so probably by the time this podcast is live.

ALICE That's funny. ZACH Just about electricity use in cars, the computing power for self-driving vehicles, just if you are curious, if you made every single one of the 1.47 billion cars on Earth self-driving, which people want to do with these trucks, for the record, it would require more electricity to run the computing systems for it

than the entire country of Argentina uses. So throw that in on top of all the electrification just to get the truck to go. Yes. There's a fun thing about buses that's similar to that, which we'll get to. Some people have suggested, and in fact in Germany they have implemented as a demonstrator project, what if the truck got electricity from overhead wires? What a fucking noble concept. demonstrated project, what if the truck got electricity from overhead wires? Which is... What a fucking noble concept.

A train?! That's a... You're getting closer and closer to inventing a train from first principles. You have a lower average power draw, although you're still drawing the same amount of power. You know, and you have electricity transmission over the road, which is nice, right, so that solves some of the problems. Overhead wire power has an energy density of infinity, which is much better than gasoline. ALICE It's more than 12,000.

JUSTIN Yes. But apparently these things don't work as well as they're supposed to. The idea here is that you have the truck. The truck has the pair of pantographs because railroads can get away with one pantograph because the rails carry the return current. On a truck you have to have one for the current, one for the return current. These trucks travel a long distance at constant speed. You can put up wires. They either charge in motion, they use the energy to assist the diesel engine, or they can rely entirely on this overhead power. The pantographs on the top of the truck are supposed to be

completely automatic. They can detect when the truck is in the right lane. They automatically raise and lower when the truck needs to change lanes, you can just do that, right? And the issue is, there's a lot of room here to fuck up. Why don't you just build a train? Oh my god. Twice as much room just on the wiring side. Yeah, because if you have to swerve randomly, and you swerve back in the lane, maybe you take the wires down,

you electrocute everyone on the road. You know, the pantograph may or may not work reliably all the time, it's still very new technology. You know, the idea of raising and lowering the pantograph on a train is still like very controversial. Discontinuous catenary is a very contentious issue, just because of the engineering difficulties. Here they propose to solve it entirely with sensors, which is not a great idea. They have discontinuous pantographs on the streetcars in Seattle and I can out-walk them. ALICE Yeah, I mean, just give everything the kind of like, class 395 thing, of having to switch from Pantograph to like, third rail, at Favisham,

or whatever. Cool. No one loves that. JUSTIN Yeah, here it'd be like, okay, it's automatically raising and lowering if I have to pass on another lane, I just assume the computer will get it right every single time, right? And if it doesn't, then really bad things will happen. RILEY Hey, a failure motive everyone dies is acceptable

for other industries. JUSTIN Yep. ALICE And yet, and yet we turn up our nose at the humble, massive municipal nuclear reactor. So, you know, trains don't have this problem because trains do not usually make unplanned lane shifts. And you got a lot more wear and tear on this catenary than railroad catenary, because of the sheer volume of trucks going by in order to move a given amount of stuff, you got exponentially more points of failure.

I don't see this working very well in the long run. This is just not a great... We'll get the modal shift in a bit, but this may be better than batteries in that it sort of works right now, but y'know. ALICE It worked long enough for you to take like a publicity photo of it. This may be better than batteries in that it sort of works right now, but, you know. ALICE It worked long enough for you to take like a publicity photo of it. JUSTIN Well, they have like a dozen or so miles in

Germany right now. They just installed some at the Port of Los Angeles as a demonstrator, like a one mile demonstrator. Now one thing that people may point out here is that, okay, we do have, in fact, overhead power wired buses. Right? Have we had- And that picture's so cool.

Trolley bus, yeah. Yeah, we have trolley buses. New port alive with pleasure, I believe is what that ad says? Yeah. You need to get into smoking, Victoria. Back. And we got... I used to...

I smoked for six years. Yeah, I remember when you quit, cause you used to message me every twenty minutes, being like, I want a cigarette real bad, and I'd be like, don't smoke a cigarette. ZACH Yeah, you helped me significantly with that. So yes, I did my time. LIAM What about dip? We could start dipping. ALICE You're a horrible influence.

LIAM Thank you. JUSTIN This is on route 79 in South Philly. So we've had electric vehicles on overhead wire for a long time in the form of trolley buses. In this case they call it a trackless trolley. The big advantage here is that instead of having the pantograph you have the two trolley poles and they are linked to the wire so that you can change lanes and still be connected. The disadvantage here is that if there's another vehicle on the trolley wire, you can't pass it.

And if you dewire, like the trolley poles fall off the wire, which is, they're a lot more reliable than they used to be, it's still a problem. You have to manually put the poles back on the wires. You gotta get out of the bus, you gotta go to the back, there's this cable that's attached to them. You gotta put them back on manually.

These sort of also tend to be low speed systems. I think some of the modern European systems are like 50 miles an hour or more, and I'm sure whatever SEPTA is doing in the northeast right now, those drivers are gunning it. They love going fast. Yeah, they do. They really fucking do. Flat out, like, foot down. So these are a lot more practical for public transit than, like, long-haul travel.

I don't think you could rig up trolley poles, trolley wires over, like, the entire interstate. I don't think you could do, like, the old Super Mario Bros. movie where everything ran on trolley poles. So you think, okay, we solved it, right? We have an electric vehicle that works pretty reliably, that can be scaled arbitrarily, these buses can be quite large because they have an infinite amount of energy they can pull from the wires, so what did we actually do? Are we expanding them? No. ALICE It looks as if you put them into a tunnel. Yes. So this is one of the underground stations on the MBTA, the Metropolitan Boston Transit

Authority. They decided in 2021, their trolley buses had had it, it was time to move to battery electric future, as such the Cambridge Bus Barn going to be converted for battery buses, which, I mean, okay, at least the bus barn has the electric service in this case, which is going to be a problem for converting a lot of other bus systems. Since major road work was happening on several roads where the trolley buses ran and they weren't intending on renewing the trolley buses or the trolley bus infrastructure, the MBTA just got rid of them. The wires came down in 2022, I want to say. Right, cool. Lost technology again.

Yeah, yeah. MBTA's excuse for this is that, okay, a lot of advocates came forward and they said, well, big cities like San Francisco or Seattle, they were able to keep and maintain their trolley systems. And they said, we're not a big city like San Francisco or Seattle. Other advocates came by and said, well, a city like Dayton, Ohio has kept their trolley bus system in order and they're expanding it. And they said, well, we're not a small city like Aden. We're a medium-sized city, I guess, which means we can't do shit. So, Route 71 and 73 are now operating with diesel buses with the promise of battery buses

in the future. Including segments in unventilated tunnels. ALICE Oh, we went back to the London Underground back in the day. JUSTIN Yes. And also... ALICE Just die. Just get on the bus and die.

JUSTIN Since these trolley bus lines were converted streetcar lines, all the trolley buses they had had a special door for left-hand boarding. The buses they're currently running do not have left-hand boarding. The buses they're currently running do not have left-hand boarding. Oh my God. So everyone has to crowd around the front of the bus and squeeze against the wall to get in. Okay. That's beautiful. I would also like to note that I live

in the big city of Seattle. And we are also currently buying a bunch of battery electric buses instead of building more trolley lines because they don't wanna, because the problem is that here they're like, well, we have trolley buses and we do have a lot of trolley buses. We run fully hybrids otherwise. But the thing is, is they're like, well, every time we put up a trolley line, we have to fight through 12 billion small Hitler landowners who are mad

about a wire in front of their house and the silent buses that run on the line. And so instead, we've decided to capitulate and do battery electric buses. Now, I love the King County Metro because they get me places. I again, autojournalist who does not own a car. But it's worth noting that this is a solved problem. Yeah, this is for public transit. This has been like very easy to fix for a very long time. You put up the wires, you put down the rails if it's enough, like

density of traffic, you know, this is this is not difficult. This is a solved problem. This is technology with like a nearly a century and a half of development on it. At this point, we are as perfected with trolleybuses as we ever will be, and we're just barely, y'know. We're assuming there's gonna be a lot of development on batteries that we don't know about yet. Right. Mmhm.

Yeah. It's like carbon capture again. It's like, we'll come up with something. Oh, carbon capture is a violation of thermodynamics. I mean that has no future whatsoever. Come on. I mean the other thing too is like they're building these giant charging stations for the battery buses in Seattle and like that is its own logistical problem because as you pointed out it takes as much energy as a small town

to run. Whereas you know know, you could just, I don't know how trolley line electrification goes, but I assume that it is slightly easier. You have a more constant power draw. You don't have these surges. The other thing is when SEPTA redid one of their bus barns for electric buses, we'll get to on the next slide, what they wound up having to do

was reactivating a bunch of trolley infrastructure to supply the power. So they just have the trolley infrastructure. They just don't use it. We should go back to the Milwaukee Road method, which is to build a bunch of beautiful Art Deco brick power stations. Yes.

Right next to your lines, and then we should just make it like an art installation. So this is not confined to Boston we did it in Philly too This is route 79 on Snyder Avenue, this is the same route as that bus I showed earlier back It's beautiful back in 2003. They converted it to diesel with an express promise to the neighborhoods that we will replace The diesel buses with electric buses as soon as possible. So this happened in 2003 and 14 years later, they were delivered some of these nice new

Proterra battery buses, right? And they ran for a few months and the frames cracked because they're made of fiberglass and the batteries are heavy. What? Oh my God. Yep. And there's lots of potholes in Philly. This particular one caught fire after being stored for a long time. It just decided one day I'm going to catch fire. Fuck yourself. I love lithium. Yeah. Route 79 is still run with diesel hybrid buses.

A lot of these battery buses have been plagued for problems like basically everywhere. I understand they're doing a little better in Europe. I understand that the new flyer buses sort of work, but they don't run well in the cold. The range is not as well as expected, especially with a vehicle that has a high duty cycle. Because you've still got to supply all that electricity. You're still building a lot of fixed infrastructure. Battery buses also have compounded problems because the largest energy draw on the bus isn't necessarily the motors. It's the massive HVAC system that's needed to keep the thing warm

when the doors open every block. Huh? Yeah. The only place that's managed to square the circle, to my knowledge, is Moscow. So the insane mayor of Moscow decided sometime back in 2012, we're getting rid of the world's largest trolley bus network and replacing it with battery buses. The first battery buses they got couldn't maintain traction and the heating system simultaneously. So now, in Moscow, which has one of the first all-electric bus fleets, the electricity supplies the motors, and there's a big diesel burner in the back that runs the heating system!

ALICE Fuck yes. Yeah. Cold furnace in the back, this is Russian excellence. We're almost back to the days of the atmospheric railway, where it also runs a grill, you know? Yeah. This is the new fryer. So, I don't know, just put up wires. I mean...

Get a train. Just get a train. Yeah, well, you know, a lot of this is, y'know, the argument for this is the climate. Y'know, I think there's a lot of stuff that's a lot harder to decarbonize that people give it credit for, but I will say, if you're really worried about the climate, the big thing should be modal shift. Just move people onto trains, onto buses, get people on bicycles, just move freight onto trains, y'know? If you try and drive a car in an unjustifiable way, climate starlin liam comes up in the

viper and executes you. Yeah! The one car that is allowed to drive. A nice thing about trains is they run on steel wheels with steel rails. There's very little energy loss when you're coasting. If you have an electric system, the energy you expend going up the hill, you can almost always recover going down the hill. It's ridiculous how energy efficient trains are. You know, it's not... Rubber tires have a lot of friction, that's why cars can accelerate fast.

That's also why they require a lot of energy. ALICE They also dump a shitload of microplastics and like, other really horrible things into the air. JUSTIN Like, three quarters of your blood is tire rubber at this point. Yeah, that's cool. JUSTIN Yeah, I mean, that's how I stopped worrying about... ALICE More if you ride in the Viper. JUSTIN I had microplastics paranoia for a bit, and then I found out, oh, that's not from like, plastic food containers, that's from tires.

It's all tires. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. Car tires are the kind of lead paint of our time. JUSTIN Yes. Lead paint, lead gasoline. ALICE And now, a plastic rubber combination. JUSTIN Yeah, so, y'know, it'd be nice if we could just do modal shift as opposed to, I dunno, dancing around, we're gonna electrify cars, we're gonna electrify trucks.

ALICE Every car on steel wheels, and turn all the roads into rails. JUSTIN I'm not saying that we're not gonna have cars, or trucks. ALICE I am, we should do that. JUSTIN Yeah, well, okay. No, I need a job. Please. You can review the new rail cars. Yeah.

There you go. I have wanted to do a car review for a train for so long. Come to Britain, we have trains, you can review them. We have trains here! Baltimore Trolley Museum will let you drive a trolley, I believe. Oh my god. That'll be a fun car review. Talk about the pickup on my, y'know, 12,000 horsepower diesel-electric train.

Yeah, train and driver. Oh no, it's a trolley. You can drive a PCC, it has foot pedals, it's weird. I don't know what horsepower went on there. It's probably like a hundred. Road and track instead of road and track, it's track. Oh my god, it's very funny. Thank you, thank you. Thank you, thank you.

I'm very tired. Yeah, let's try and move this along. Sorry. No, no, it's fine. That's my fault too. What did we learn? Ban cars. Give Liam the Viper.

Give me the Viper! Give me the Fuji XC4, and then when you are driving your car, and you're like, I know this is an unjustifiable journey, I should just walk, but I think I can get away with it, and you see the like, black on black, murdered out Viper coming up on you, you'll know that you are about to die, it will be just, and also I will get a really high resolution photo of you being murdered. Well, there's your problem, Climate Stalin. One billion years.

Yes. Thank you. You know, one day we'll get an episode where I can expound all my weird opinions about fossil fuels. Do you wanna just do a fossil fuels bonus? Oh, that would be fun. Do you wanna just write that, and we just do it this month? Yeah, well they're actually really good is the problem.

The problem is they're really good. Do you wanna write that up in the form of a podcast with slides, and then we do it in the next few days? Yes please. Problem is also they're really bad. Do you wanna condense that into a podcast with slides? Oh my god. We can put that in a show.

Can I put it on that one too, just for the hell of it? Sure, sure, fuck it, why not. Vicky, Vicky, back my god. We can put that in a shot. We can put it on that one too, just for the hell of it. Sure, sure, fuck it, why not. Vicky, Vicky, back to back. Yeah. So once again, the solution is trains, or barges, or anything that's more efficient than fucking grinding rubber tires against asphalt, constantly. The age of sale.

There have been some interesting developments in commercial sale, but I'll save that for the fossil fuels episode, because we have to go to bed. All of us. In the big bed that we share. We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. SHAKE HANDS FOR DANGER. Greetings November, Liam, Roz, and Devon. Devon with the I here.

Spelled wrong. Spelled wrong. Yeah. No, no. Delta Echo Victor Oscar November. Yes I said November twice, yes it's confusing. That's okay. Everyone thinks you're named after the month, but we know that you're named after the NATO call... call... phrase?

That's the Chevy Nova, she's named after the Chevy Nova. Alright, fuck it. Let's go, Roz! Let's go, Roz. Let's go, Roz! I used to work at an ethanol plant. Where we turned hundreds of thousands of tons of corn into a hundred million gallons of ethanol each year. I worked at the American Canesianism factory.

Process to do so is stupid, complicated, and involves high pressures and caustic chemicals. Only Americans could make the Keynesianism factory deadly, yes. The plant is held together by the most sleep deprived people you could think of. And accidents happen. This is about the time I got turned into a projectile. But many such incidents occurred, such as the time I got gassed by hydrogen sulfide, the time I got gassed by chromaline, which is not mustard gas as we originally thought, and the time I got gassed by yeast.

Or the time I briefly became part of a 480 volt circuit." ALICE What kind of Nivelle offensive late First World War shit were they doing to you out there, huh? SEAN To understand how I became a steam-powered projectile, I will do my best to explain this part of the process. Highly distilled ethanol, at around 199 proof, that's more than ever clear, has to be cleaned- ALICE I know that shit tastes good as hell. LORENZO Oh, hell yeah.

Has to be cleaned of all the remaining gunk. And to do this it is blasted through thick cotton cotton socks about four feet tall and over 120 psi. These socks like to clog. Sometimes they don't clog for weeks, but sometimes they clog several times an hour. I personally blame gremlins for this. Yeah, I mean, fluid dynamics or whatever. Basically the same thing. Sometimes stuff doesn't work as consistently as you like it to. One such night, the sock decided to clog halfway through my nice short 12 hour shift and I dutifully headed out to change it. The filter bank has two filters so you can keep one closed until it's needed.

And I opened up the feed line, letting 120 PSI of 200 degree Fahrenheit ethanol into the clean filter bank. And then I was staring upwards at the starry night sky, my head was ringing, and I was soaked in now very cold ethanol. Excuse me, very very cold ethanol. What happened as best as I could tell was, whoever previously changed the filter, they fucked up. They didn't put the gasket between the metal lid and the filter body, and even if they

had, they didn't tighten the gasket between the metal lid and the filter body, and even if they had, they didn't tighten the damn thing. ALICE I didn't know Boeing made ethanol. JUSTIN LAUGHS. JUSTIN There's no ethanol in kerosene, they need that energy density. So when I opened the feed tube, the top of the filter cleverly blasted off into who knows where, but not before... ALICE Oh, that's in space now. JUSTIN Yeah.

But not before directing a powerful stream right into my chest, sending all 250 pounds of corn-fed trans women roughly 20 feet back into a wall. Wait, wait, wait. Back up, back up a bit, back up a bit. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Uh, hello? Ladies? Are you allowed to forward her email address to guests of the show? So it's a violation of, like, podcast submissive confidentiality. Podcast hippo has to be invented because of this episode.

November, you have access to the email. I literally do, don't I? Okay. Twenty feet back into a wall, probably giving me a concussion. When I came to enough to make out sounds, I realized my coworker was yelling at me over the radio that we'd lost pressure. Well, no shit. Another coworker helped me unscramble myself, picked me up off the ground and shut down

the open filter. Dana called maintenance to get a new lid, because fuck if we were going to find it in a place that now had three inches of standing pure ethanol. That was the day I learned that ethanol, even under pressure and superheated, isn't actually very good at keeping a hold of a lot of heat. In the two feet between my chest and the filter, it cooled enough to not turn me into a lobster entirely. Oh god.

Incredible. For once, the person who had fucked up got yelled at, and absolutely nothing else about the process changed. ALICE Absolutely. JUSTIN Thanks for all the videos, you guys have helped keep me sane in my new safer job of professional pretty blue light staring. ALICE What?

Job? JUSTIN Don't stare at that. JUSTIN Welding. ALICE Oh. I thought we were just holding on to stare at that. ALICE Thank you for putting that together, yeah. JUSTIN Don't look at the pretty blue light. ALICE 250 pounds transfer and she welds.

Okay. Yeah. With love, Ember. Wait, that's part of my name. God, that's a cool name. One of us is gonna have to change. P.S. ethanol is a goddamn scam, don't fall for it. I wanna run my...

I wanna run my mouth. I enjoy drinking it, I think it's better than tetraethyl lead as an anti-NOC agent, I... Though I can't believe it's better than tetraethyl lead as an anti-NOC agent. I... No, I can't believe it's a scam. Fossil fuels episode. Yeah. Coming soon. Let's do it.

All right. I have a question really quick. Fuck you. Is it about her email? No, it's about are we done or no? Yeah, we're done. Yeah. Can I pump my book, please?

Well, we have to get Can I pump my book, please? We have to get to the next slide first. That was safety third. Okay, everybody's been very quiet. Shake hands with danger. Our next episode will be about Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Victoria!

Sorry, I have one thing. I've worked on it for two years, so I'm really excited to just get it off my chest. I wrote and shot a trans femme fashion look book with an automotive theme over the course of the past two and almost coming up out of half years. And it's finally available for pre-order. It will launch in April. You can buy it at my publisher, Career Books. It is a little bit more expensive than I was hoping, but it turns out printing nice pictures costs money. ALICE We will put a link in the description of this call. We deserve this, it's by Victoria Scott, it's fucking great.

JUSTIN It features cars from Friends of the Pod. ALICE That's true. JUSTIN Yes. JUSTIN Yes. ALICE It features Friends of the Pod. JUSTIN It's Friends of the Pod, there's car companies... ALICE Mmhm. It's great, it's genuinely like, one of the most talented photographers I know. So you could buy it.

Thank you. I am genuinely like, so goddamn excited. Sorry. That is all for me. Also I have a job where I write about cars, I write at motorone.com. If you're ever curious, I write a lot about electric cars. I do an engineering series, so I do those about once every two weeks. You're not allowed to do that in the world.

I don't know if I'd go that far. I'm a writer. Come on. That proves you've gone commercial. You're not authentic if you release stuff consistently. That's true. That's true. The people.

All right. Wrap this shit. Wrap it. Wrap it. Let's go.