When I parked the car, its computer said I had 90 miles of range, twice the 46 miles back to Milford. It was a different story at 8:30 the next morning. The thermometer read 10 degrees and the display showed 25 miles of remaining range — the electrical equivalent of someone having siphoned off more than two-thirds of the fuel that was in the tank when I parked.
In Europe, of course, they’ve it all worked out. Or do they? In the Netherlands, which stretches a full 100 miles from east to west, where gasoline is $8.50 a gallon, where the government is installing charging posts on every corner, where owners of electric cars are entitled to any number of tax breaks and freebies, sales amount to less than 1 percent of the market.
As Frankie (Frankie Van Oosterhout) used to say “If you can’t make it Amsterdam, you can’t make it anywhere.” If only President Obama would listen. But he won’t.
Afterwords
We make war in Afghanistan because, basically, nobody cares what happens in Afghanistan. For President Obama, and so many other liberals—who are, in fact, so many solutions in search of a problem—environmentalism is the moral equivalent of war, a war that we can fight pretty much forever without doing any real harm and without being in any danger of winning, which would leave us nothing left to do. Hell, it we can waste $80 billion a year in Afghanistan in a war where people actually get killed, why can’t we waste $20-$30 billion a year in a war where no one gets hurt? Sounds like a no brainer to me.
*Designed and built in sunny Cal with a $465 million loan guarantee from the U.S. government.
