Electric Vehicles. What You Are Selling, and What I Am Buying, Are Two Different Things. Louis Shalako.

We all know what we want...then again, there is what we actually need, and then there is what we can afford.

Louis Shalako

 

What would I actually need in an electric vehicle.

What I Don’t Need.

Why don’t we begin with what I don’t need.

I don’t need zero to sixty times of one-point-four seconds or less. I don’t need to get to one hundred in one-point-nine seconds. I don’t need eight hundred and fifty horsepower. I don’t need a thousand foot-pounds of torque. I don’t need a top speed exceeding two hundred miles per hour. I don’t need to corner at four and a half gees…I don’t really need five different modes. Economy, and economy, would be just fine.

More than anything, I don’t need to pay seventy thousand fucking dollars for it.

I don’t need gullwing doors, a whale-tail, and a high-speed aero package. It does not need rear-wheel steering. It does not have to be four-wheel drive or even rear-wheel drive, like a sports car. It does not have to make teenage girls cream in their jeans.

I do not need to plunge at high speed through pristine mountain rivers, I do not need to ford three feet of mud or hold my sideways track on a 45–degree slope. I’m not crawling up boulder-strewn ravines. I don’t need hands-free, autonomous driving, at 150-kph on the Highway 401 through rush-hour Toronto traffic. I don’t need any kind of miniature bubble-car, and I don’t need some behemoth that requires three steps up to the cab. I do not need to lift anything onto a truck bed that is getting on near four and a half feet off the ground these days, and I do not need an engine bay that requires a step ladder and a safety harness to check the fluids. I don’t need a million bells and whistles and this thing is fucking talking to me about my extended warranty and don’t I think I might want to get some counseling for issues related to anger and some kind of Oedipus complex…I do not need the internet in my vehicle, or a father-confessor, or some kind of artificial intelligence, which, having achieved the bare bones of self-awareness, which must inevitably become sexual, after a while, ladies and gentlemen. I do not need to binge on Seinfeld on my morning commute.

A little peace and quiet is all I need.

I don’t need to tow ten thousand pounds at eighty-five miles per hour all the way to Florida. I don’t need to push a button and it parks itself, I do not need to send the thing autonomously to the store for a litre of milk and a loaf of bread. I really don’t need seating for seven, ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine percent of the time—more likely, never.

It does not have to be plastic, or stainless steel, or carbon fibre.

It doesn’t even have to be aluminum.

An ash frame and hand-beaten steel panels, à la Morgan is going a bit too far.

This is not a three-wheeler, front-wheel drive, motorcycle-engine tourer of the 1920s.

I don’t need freaky styling. 

I don’t need a car only a Cylon’s mother, a little old robot lady from Pasadena, could love. 

I don’t need to impress a bunch of hicks when I go to church on Sunday. 

I don’t need power everything, or a Blaupunkt stereo with 750-watts of 21-speaker theatre sound.

I don’t need fine Connolly leather or burled walnut trim. 

I don’t need screens in the back end or even six hundred miles of range.

If you want my money, for fuck’s sakes, give me something I can actually use—

Cross-country trips to see my agent, get a million-dollar advance. 

Lunch with the client at the Four Seasons. 

Track days at Laguna Seca really don’t enter into the equation.

What I need, is a little more prosaic. What I need is the Volkswagen Kombi of the 21^st Century.

Track day in the Behemoth.

What I don’t want.

I don’t want to have to purchase a high-end phone for a thousand dollars, or worse. I don’t want to have to upgrade to the most expensive phone plan ever—right now, I’m paying $28.25 per month, for phone and text. I don’t want to pay a couple of hundred a month to the service provider, (for seven to nine devices, no less), just for the one extra privilege of plugging in my vehicle.

I live in a three-floor walk-up apartment in the central city. I don’t want the landlord to put in one or two charging stations, and then jack the rent by six hundred a month…I don’t particularly want to charge up in five minutes, and it sure would be nice if I could use coins and bills in the machine—I don’t particularly want you to track my every movement, even though I am sure the data would be extremely valuable to the manufacturer and other service providers.

For crying out loud, give me something I can use.

***

What I Want and What I Need.

Whether I want it or need it, for my present purposes, a low-cost, versatile and efficient minivan is the best option. My Chrysler has stow-and–go seats. I would prefer to simply remove them, better yet, sell me a two-seater with a flat deck for cargo space. Give me a tailgate that clears my head and two sliding doors on the sides. They don’t even have to be powered. We could save a few dollars by leaving some of the powered options off the vehicle. Give me a minivan, for about twenty-thousand dollars, with a range of 150 to 200 miles.

The odds of the landlord putting in charging stations anytime soon are rather slim, but then, at this point in time, there isn’t much demand from low-income, working class folks, senior citizens, foreign students, and guys on disability…they’ve been reading all the horror stories and disinformation coming out of the anti-faxxers and climate change denialists.

Give me two heated seats. One would think that a heater, with good defrosting capability is a must-have. In Canada, air conditioning is a must for most of the country, although how much people use it in northern parts of the country is unknown to me—probably less often than southern Ontario. However, when you do need it, you really need it, as anyone who has been stuck in a major traffic jam on a hot summer’s day will agree. That’s especially true with a diesel bus stuck right beside you and you’re sucking in all those fumes. If nothing else, with a/c, you can recirculate the air and keep the windows closed.

I want good visibility, in all directions and on all sides…

I want good lights, wipers, signals, I want good size wheels and tires without going too sick or indulging pure vanity. This thing is not a show car, it is a rather utilitarian machine. That being said, additional seating, as an option, should be appropriately priced, if I should care to order that second or third row of seating from the dealer or any aftermarket supplier.

A certain level of customizability should be built-in. What I need, is to deliver plastic totes full of frozen pizza dough. A carpet-installer, a locksmith, a taxi company would obviously have different needs, and the vehicle should be easy to configure, whether on the production line, or by a secondary builder. In the latter case, I am thinking of the manufacturers who purchase a chassis and cab combination, and then they put an aluminum box or a flatbed, or some other specialized application on the back end. Think the old fashioned ‘cube’ van and you get the idea. Look underneath, it’s a Ford, a GM, whatever.

My exact same vehicle is good for camping, holidays, or just putting about town with the minimum of excess dead weight—and two rows of rear seating weighs a good four hundred pounds in the Chrysler.

I’m not saying the thing needs to be ugly, (the Chrysler isn’t ugly, for example) it does not have to have big slab sides and flat planes for the hood, front end, windshield. Far from it, the real design challenge is to make it look as good as possible, without going all Flash Gordon on the drawing board.

This is not a space truck, not yet anyways—perhaps that will come.

(For that, we have to invent anti-gravity. – ed.)

Here's something Louis could actually build, ladies and gentlemen...

If you were to produce a rational kit design, it would be intriguing, at the very least, for those with a home shop or other facilities.  I would love to build my own car. Which even I can admit is just crazy—

Not a serious option for serious manufacturers, I get that part.

It should have a mount for a trailer hitch and a reasonable towing capacity. I want a good roof rack. It should be able to carry one or two passengers and a minimum of 1,200 lbs. of load. The spare wheel should be accessible, either from inside, or in a frunk—none of this shit where the spare wheel is under the centre of the vehicle, hung on a cable, and the fucking thing is so rusty by the time you need to pull it out, that you can’t get the damned thing off anyways, and so you need to call the auto club…you’re only going to get so many free tows.

I would prefer manual switches and buttons, in all the right places. I do like a radio, that’s all very well. I don’t particularly need GPS or satellite navigation.

Give me a centre console, a capacious glove box, and a couple of drink holders. I don’t necessarily need electric seat adjustment. Capiche? Just keep it nice, simple and efficient for my needs.

That being said, it would be best if I can just plug it into a 110-V receptacle, the same one many readers use to plug in their hedge trimmer or Christmas lights. I don’t necessarily need to charge that battery in five minutes. Here’s the thing. I could drive it to work, plug it in, and then, living in an apartment isn’t a problem. I’m at work for a minimum of three or four hours at a stretch, and that’s plenty of time to recharge from a commute of about 25-30 kilometres. As far as I’m concerned, that thirty-dollar extension cord from the hardware store shouldn’t even get warm.

I agree, that a battery with greater range is somewhat desirable, because no matter how long or short the trips, you don’t need to charge up quite so often.

As for battery replacement, that really ought to be as easy as undoing a handful of bolts, easily accessible from below, with the vehicle on a lift. Lower the vehicle, unplug a few connectors, and pull the thing out the back end, or the passenger side, or whatever. For that, you could have simple bogie wheels, on retractable arms. Simply wheel the new one in, jack that into position, plug it in. Throw the nuts back on them bolts, retract the bogies, and you’re ready to go. Here’s the thing: a lower capacity battery is simply cheaper to replace, and you also have a vehicle with a potential life-span of fifteen to twenty years. It doesn’t weigh a ton, and it really does not need to be integrated into the load-bearing structure of the vehicle. If the battery was in the frunk, then it’s four to six bolts, a few plug-ins, and you can lift that out with a chain-lift in a job that couldn’t take more than half an hour.

As an option, a simple Briggs & Stratton, one-cylinder engine and a gallon of gas, hidden in an outer compartment, perhaps the right rear fender, would be available for emergency charging. If they can put an electric starter on a model airplane, they can do it in a vehicle fender…put a decent muffler on there and the cutest little catalytic converter and you really got something.

It ain’t exactly sexy, but all of this is doable.

The real question is why in the hell haven’t you done it yet—this is why the Chinese are going to cream this market, all too soon, ladies and gentlemen. They will produce some reasonable battery-electric vehicles at half the price of internal combustion vehicles and that’s when the market really takes off.

In the meantime, you’re still thinking of supercars; and the pickup truck as a status symbol.

Here’s the deal, okay. Maximum price, $20,000.00 brand-new, with a few options and upgrades if folks want to pad that up some. A sensible warranty on the battery, motor and drivetrain.

Make it fucking easy for me, okay.

And the world will beat a path to your door.

 

END

 

The County of Lambton operates fourteen charging stations.

This seems to be confirmed by EVhype.

In Sarnia-Lambton, charging stations have been installed, to great fanfare in local media, only to be taken away some time later, not so much to any great fanfare from local media.

The Volkswagen Buzz is coming to Canada in late 2024.

Here is a question. Is the U.S. 100 % tarriff on Chinese EVs meant to protect the U.S. EV industry...or maybe it's the U.S. internal combustion industry they're protecting, bearing in mind what I said above. What about consequences, intended or otherwise? Will this tend to drive Chinese investment into battery plants, vehicle assembly plants, in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, which might very well fall under the North American Free Trade Act? In which case, they would no longer be subject to such high tarriffs. (Video from the CBC)

Louis Shalako has books, stories and audiobooks available from Google Play.

See his works on ArtPal.

 

Thank you for reading.