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StS Episode 238: Electric Vehicle Mayhem feat. Brian Dunning

Standard disclaimer: All show transcripts—yes, including this one—was AI-generated and skimmed by at least two busy and fallible humans. They offer an overview of the show but you’ll find occasional typos and glitches and therefore should not be assumed to be accurate or verbatim. Readers who wish to quote anything here for any reason are encouraged to check it against the original audio at the time stamps provided. Thanks.

KEYWORDS: Electric Vehicles, Brian Dunning, Eyewitness Fallibility, Optimus Robot, Space X, Circumbinary Exoplanets, Self-Driving Cars, Skeptoid Podcast, Tesla, Cobalt, Economies of Scale

0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

(MUSIC)

0:00:10
BR: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is episode 238. I am one of your co-hosts, Ben Radford, and with me is…

Celestia Ward:  Celestia Ward. Hey Ben, what are we talking about this week?

0:00:34
BR: This time we have a friend of the podcast, a long-time skeptic, maybe you’ve heard of him, Brian Dunning.

CW: Of Skeptoid fame, yes.

BR: Yes, but here’s the curious thing: So in doing Skeptoid, Brian covers lots and lots of subjects, you know, from paranormal conspiracist theories, blah blah blah. This time we’re actually not going to have him on for one of those sort of classic unexplained mysteries, but instead EV myths.

CW: Electric vehicles, yes. You know, we don’t often get into technology, but you know, hey, I’m open to it. There’s definitely skeptical angles. And I’m sure you’ve heard some rumors or persistent myths about electric vehicles.

0:01:27
BR: Yeah, and it’s one of the things where, you know, just for years, I mean, especially I’d say the last 18 months or probably two years, it’s been sort of this barrage and EVs are not a panacea. I mean, they have their problems like all technology and all things do, but I just noticed over and over and over again, I kept seeing these memes on social media that were dunking on EVs, talking about how horrible they were and, you know, I’m not an expert on it, but I knew that Brian is and so I figured, well, you know, maybe he can help us sort the truth from the myths.

CW: So before we get to Brian, what are we skeptical of this week?

(MUSIC)

0:02:02
BR: So coming across my radar recently was a case out of South Carolina where there was a man named Freddie Owens who was executed days after a key prosecution witness said that he lied on the stand.

CW: I remember this. Yeah, they most likely innocent man put to death.

BR: Yeah, so yeah, he’s he’s now I mean that’s that ship has sailed there’s  gonna be no more appeals for him. Of course. This is not the first time there’s been lots and lots of you know stories about exonerations and miscarriages of justice and so on. But it is interesting and somewhat sobering to recognize that in many of the cases, not all of them, but many of them, they were based on eyewitness testimony. That was what helped put them away or entirely put them away. As I’ve been talking about for decades now, I talk to Bigfoot believers and they say, well, eyewitnesses are very reliable. Of course, with my background in psychology and just having done this and researching the work of Elizabeth Loftus and many others, we know that’s simply not true. The fact that the general public places far more credibility in eyewitnesses than psychologists do for example, or police do, is less of a problem when you’re talking big for UFOs. But there are many of these real life cases where people have been imprisoned for years, decades, in some cases even put to death based on flawed testimony. And I think it’s important to sometimes remind people that, yes, these things do have consequences.

CW: Yeah, it’s not just a matter of being pedantic over what somebody saw in the woods at night. People really have this urge to believe that their senses are perfect and other people on a jury will believe someone who is absolutely sure they saw somebody do something. So yeah, again, too late for this particular gentleman.

0:04:05
BR: Yeah, and of course, keep in mind that I witnessed fallibility. I mean, that can come from a number of sources, right? It could be it could be they simply misunderstood something, right? Someone thought they they thought they saw a gun turned out to be a cell phone. But the eyewitness at the time said, yes, he had a gun. Well, that’s that may have been their sincere belief, but they were simply wrong. Other times, of course, there are so many lies. And I think part of this is that it’s complicated by the believe the victim mantra, because in many cases, particularly criminal cases, the eyewitness is the victim or a victim. That’s why they were there, right? That’s why they are able to presumably identify the defendant. And of course, that complicates people, especially especially social progressives, because, you know, we want to believe the victim. There’s truth default theory we talked about earlier this year, last year. Yeah. So anyway, it’s just basically I think that there can at times be a conflict between critical thinking and justice, particularly when it comes to eyewitness testimony.

0:05:09
CW: Absolutely. It’s also a reason why solid skeptics are often not chosen for juries.

0:05:15
BR: That is true. Both the defense and the prosecutor, they want you to be a tabula rasa. They, the less you know about the justice system and psychology and critical thinking, the more malleable you are, and therefore they want you on the jury.

CW: Yeah. Yeah.

BR: So what are you skeptical of this week?

0:05:31
CW: Well, I’ve got two things that kind of caught my eye on the news. And it’s ironic because we’ve got a technology-driven episode this week, and my Swayzos are both technology-driven as well. And they’re from the same source, but in opposite ways. I’ll get to it here. The first thing that caught my eye was on October 10th, there was a big PR event that Elon Musk put on called Wee Robot. It was basically a showcase for investors to get excited about the robots that he’s got coming out and the cyber cabs and various AI systems. And I’ll quote here from Elon Musk himself, it can be a teacher, babysit your kids, it can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks, whatever you think of, it will do. Now, do you know what he’s talking about here, Ben?

0:06:27
BR: Probably some robot he thinks is going to be serving astronauts on Mars. I often don’t know what the hell Musk is talking about.

0:06:34
CW: It is his robot, the Optimus robot. There were a bunch of them at this big event and they were doing all this stuff that looked really cool. The AI driven autonomy of these robots was what was being hyped. And Elon did not exactly state that they were doing anything human assisted, but he didn’t deny it either. These robots were walking around, chatting with the party guests, pouring drinks, and giving people high fives and playing paper rock scissors.

BR: Whoa, hold on.

CW: Are you getting skeptical, Ben?

0:07:14
BR: Well, yeah, I mean, there’s a difference between, you know, this being entirely autonomous and there being somebody either controlling it. All right, where are we going with this?

0:07:29
CW: Well, I saw a clip and the first clip I saw was this robot just talking to somebody saying, hey, how are you doing? Well, where are you from? Oh, I know that area, blah, blah, blah. And it had a California accent. It sounded like a surfer dude and everything. And I immediately just had this gut reaction of like, that’s just a remote ventriloquist act. It’s a thing I’ve seen dozens of times at state fairs, a Big Tex at the state fair of Texas, which is going on right now. Big text is a giant automaton. And the guy in a van is on a microphone talking to people through Big Tex.

0:08:03
CW: So I was pretty primed as a carny, as an ex-carny, if you will, to see this as, okay, this is just, this is an actor interacting with people. But you know, I’m like, well, AI has come a long way. It’s possible that it can have a conversation like this. Maybe we’ll see. So I, of course, tried to do a bit of a deep dive and looked into the tech journalism that came out about this. And yeah, it does turn out that Elon was operating from the fake it till you make it playbook. There were headlines like the day or two afterwards that said these robots were modern mechanical Turks. From Fortune magazine here, it says, Elon Musk’s Optimus Bot stole the show at Tesla’s RoboTaxi unveil but the AI was all smoke and mirrors. According to many outlets, these robots were not originally planned to be part of the event, but about three weeks beforehand, Elon Musk decided that they had to be there. There was not enough time to get the software ready, and so their solution was remote operation, which is exactly what happens at the state fair when you have some automaton interacting with people. And apparently it fooled a lot of folks. Many of these investors who are supposed to be tech savvy, were quick to believe that it was actually AI that they were interacting with. People said that they were convinced. But then afterwards, when word leaked about the fact that these there were humans puppeteering these these robots, a lot of commentators sort of changed their tune. And they said, well, what Elon Musk was offering was just a glimpse of the future And it wasn’t proof of concept per se it was just you know It was a glimpse of what you know modern day life could be years from now and they didn’t out and out call Musk a fraud or anything, but as to whether or not it worked, well the next day Tesla stock took quite a dip it fell by about 10% which decreased Elon Musk’s personal fortune by about $15 billion. So I would vote no on that. It did not really work.

0:10:11
BR: Yeah, it strikes me a little bit like the Elizabeth Holmes-Theranos case where she built this whole house of cards and I think last I heard she’s either serving time or is soon to get out. But where again, you fake it till you make it. You know, she claimed that she had developed this cutting edge blood test that could do amazing things and turned out she was using over the counter blood tests that had been available for years and rebranding them as her own. Anyway, there’s a really good book called Bad Blood by John Kerry Roo for anyone’s interested in the Theranos case.

0:10:47
CW: And the second thing that caught my eye was also Elon Musk related. Did you happen to see the ginormous space launch that happened on Sunday?

0:10:57
BR: Is that the one that returned to the launch pad and the chopsticks? That was cool.

0:11:02
CW: Yeah, that was really cool. Yeah. So I got to give Elon, he has a loss and a win for this week. SpaceX pulled off a pretty major feat with their Starship rocket test flight. And honestly, that’s something that would have been hard to fake. I don’t think he faked it till he made it on that. Now, for a while, SpaceX has had these boosters that, you know, that fly back to a recovery area, rather than just burning up or falling into the ocean. And these are the smaller Falcon 9 rockets that he’s been using for a while back. But recycling these things saves SpaceX millions of dollars. And they wanted to do the same for their giant Starship, which would be the biggest and most powerful rocket humans have built. And it uses a quote unquote, super heavy booster. So on Sunday, in what’s been called a chopstick catch, the launch towers big metal arms kind of pinched, kind of caught the enormous booster, which is 232 feet long or 71 meters for our Canadian friends. They gripped it above the ground and held it there. And there was much rejoicing. The roomful of engineers were very happy. And so was NASA. NASA has ordered two of these starships for the Artemis 3 mission, which will get, which will hopefully get astronauts to and from the moon before 2030. So that’s something to watch for. The uncrewed spacecraft that was launched by this booster flew for about an hour and then made a controlled landing in the Indian Ocean. So good week, bad week for Elon Musk. Maybe this triumph that he had at SpaceX will occupy his mind for a little bit and he’ll stay off of social media and not spread any misinformation for the next couple of weeks. One can hope.

BR: I would not bet on that but one can hope. Well there’s one other item that crossed my desk. Did you hear about the Supreme Court decision regarding the truck driver named Douglas Horn?

CW: No I haven’t.

BR: So Mr. Horn is a long-distance truck driver and apparently he was reading High Times magazine which I don’t know if you’re familiar with that one but in the back of the the magazine it mentioned a wellness product called Dixie X and it was supposed to get you “high AF.” I’m not sure what “AF” is, I think it’s like “Altitude Flight” or something. Anyway it’s said to be rich in CBD but here here’s what really drew him, 0% THC.

0:13:41
CW: So he could use it, but also pass his trucker test.

0:13:44
BR: Yes, yes, again. So it was gonna get you “high AF,” whatever that is, but without testing positive in THC, you may be able to guess where this is going. So in order to establish that the product did in fact contain 0% THC, he did his own research on YouTube.

0:14:03
CW: Okay, okay. I’m starting to think that the letters we should be concerned about are not A-F but B-S.

0:14:11
BR: So, Mr. Horn, after satisfying his curiosity apparently on some YouTube videos that yes indeed there’s no THC in it, he did in fact fail a drug test and he was fired. And he’s like, well hold on here, they told me he had no THC. So he bought another bottle of it and had it tested. And it was sent to an analysis company who said, yes, it does, in fact, have THC, which is why it appeared in your urine. And no, we’re not going to mail it back to you because that would be illegal. So Mr. Horn asked the Supreme Court to state that the company that he bought the Dixie X from had engaged in racketeering.

0:14:52
CW: Now, I already want to give this guy credit for, because you don’t just go to the Supreme Court. You start at an early court and then you work your way up to the Supreme Court.

0:15:00
BR: Yes.

0:15:01
CW: Just getting the stuff again and sending it out to a lab to be tested is a thousand times more initiative than any stoner I know would have taken with this. So kudos to you, Mr. Horn. Now what happened when the Supreme Court looked at this?

0:15:19
BR: Well, it’s still being decided. It hasn’t been decided. The arguments went before the Supreme Court a couple days ago. So they’re gonna lick into it and decide whether or not the company’s false advertising amounts to racketeering. I’m not holding my breath, but in the event, in case others are in a position, don’t trust YouTube videos to tell you whether or not the product you’re using has THC in it.

0:15:46
CW: Or for that matter, stuff that’s advertised on the last page of High Times Magazine. Is this company, do you know if this company is even still operating? Do they have any money that can be acquired in a lawsuit?

0:16:00
BR: Apparently so. Yeah, apparently this is, I mean, I think this happened fairly recently and I think the company is still in business. So, they’re like, yeah, sorry about that. There you go.

0:16:05
CW: Well, good luck, Mr. Horn. Okay. All right. Well, without further ado, let’s get to Brian Dunning and talk EVs.

(MUSIC)

CW: And we’re here today with Brian Dunning of Skeptoid Media, the closest thing I know to a skeptical conglomerate these days. How are you doing?

0:16:46
Brian Dunning: I am doing wonderful. It’s so great to be here with two of my best long friends. Long, long, long time friends.

0:16:53
CW: Friend of the podcast, Brian Dunning. Now we had you on about almost exactly one year ago, episode 210, I looked it up, to talk about your UFO movie.

0:17:05
BD: Oh yes, yeah.

0:17:06
CW: The UFO movie that they don’t want you to see. And did many people go against the advice of the title, how’s it going?

0:17:14
BD: It’s, you know, the funny thing is, it’s gotten the most traction on Tubi. Actually about four months after it came out, it was one of the trending recommended movies on Tubi, and it got something like four million views in about 30 days. I never get, I mean, I’m a podcaster mostly, so I never get stopped on the street, but I got stopped on the street probably about four times during that month. Hey, you were on my TV when I fell asleep on the couch and woke up last night. Because Tubi just starts playing, you know, whatever the next recommended film is. And that was it.

BR: Right.

BD: And it’s been happening again. It was done, it was, that ended for four or five months and now it seems to be doing that again at, not at quite as high a level, but it’s been, had a big boost the past three months or so. So that’s, it’s very cool to see. I don’t get stats, but I think it’s up to about five or 6 million views, just judging by what do you call it? Click through rates and.

0:18:15
CW: Well, hopefully those are all awake views and not just people falling asleep. And having to be autopilot them.

0:18:21
BD: Frank doesn’t ask if they were awake or asleep. So I don’t care.

0:18:25
BR: Take what we can get. So speaking of projects, your myriad projects, as Celestia, you mentioned you are a multi-tentacled conglomerate. When we saw you at Skeptic Camp here in New Mexico, you mentioned a new movie project brewing and you were a bit tight-lipped about it, but in a coy sort of knowing way. Are you legally able to say anything about it or whatever happened to that?

0:18:50
BD: The interesting thing is, yes, but we are the ones with the rights to say who’s legally able to talk about it or not. So nobody’s telling me that I can’t talk about it. I’m just deciding that I can’t talk about it.

0:19:03
CW: So you purchased rights to do something.

0:19:05
BD: We have the rights to a book that I believe is going to be the top selling nonfiction book of 2025. And I’m right now in the midst of putting together all of the pitch materials and a teaser trailer to go out to distributors and get the thing funded. And this is going to have to be something that we’re not going to be able to produce the way that we’ve produced our films here at Skeptoid Media, which is with, you know, crowdfunding and micro-budgets of, you know, $100,000 and things like that. This is something that’s going to have to have to have like a actual Hollywood movie budget. And so we’re going to need strong distribution partners. This is like our first like grownup project.

CW: I’m amazed that you even know how to navigate something like that.

0:19:49
BD: And you know, you just have to, you just have to learn.

0:19:52
CW: Yeah.

0:19:52
BD: And each time you do a project, you end up meeting people and they introduce you to people. And sooner or later you find out how all of this stuff works and you have a roadmap. And so we’re following the roadmap right now and there’s people that I check in with who are super helpful. They’re friends of the company, friends of the material certainly, and eager to see this thing get taken care of.

0:20:17
BR: Are you able to confirm or deny that George Clooney is attached? If you can’t say, I understand.

0:20:23
BD: I think I can basically confirm that he is not attached.

BR: Okay, that’s something. You hear it here, folks.

0:20:28
CW: Throughout all this you’ve said you have the rights to talk about it and you still haven’t mentioned what it is. Is there a title, a subject, an author, anything you can spill?

BD: There is, but all of that would give it away. The thing is that we’re in potential competition with other producers.

0:20:47
CW: Oh, so you’re at liberty to not say.

BD: I am at liberty to not say. And I get to be the one who tells everyone that I talk to, this is a nondisclosure project. You’re not allowed to discuss that.

BR: Oh, very cool.

BD: That’s kind of fun, because usually I’ve been the person that other people tell that to.

CW: And before we jump into our main topic of electric vehicles, you recently had some, I would say, out of this world news from a family member and it would be something that I would want to brag about if I were a parent. So, tell us what your daughter discovered.

BD: Okay, so my daughter is, she has a physics degree and she is doing graduate student work in astronomy at San Diego State right now. And now she’s working on a paper that’s going to be published to announce all of this. And I know very little about it. And everything that I do know, she’s already said on Facebook and social media and stuff. So, I’m not revealing anything that I’m not supposed to. But she has discovered the 15th known circumbinary exoplanet. So, that’s a planet orbiting a binary star. And when a planet orbits a binary star, you know, it can have like a wildly eccentric orbit because these, you know, basically Tatooine, Luke’s planet with the two suns.

0:22:07
CW: Yeah.

0:22:08
BD: So Luke’s planet, Tatooine, is a circumbinary exoplanet. So she has discovered one of those. It’s probably a gas giant, probably about Saturn-sized. I have no idea what the name of the system is and all the numbers. I’ve seen it, but it’s long numbers that I have no clue what they are. And these are rare enough and I guess hard enough to detect because the planets have like crazy orbits. They’re not necessarily repetitive enough that you can say, ah, there’s one, oh, there’s one.

0:22:37
BR: This is not something that we would just happen to casually stroll up there and look up in the sky and say, oh, look at that.

0:22:44
BD: Well, okay, there’s like, I think it’s about 52, 5,300 exoplanets that are known right now, give or take, there’s only 14 known circumbinary exoplanets. That’s how rare they are and how hard they are to detect. She’s discovered number 15. It’s definitely worthy of a paper and she gets to be the lead author and that’s just wildly cool and I’m like, you know, dancing the Macarena with a big brightly colored wig on all day because I’m a dork and don’t know how normal people behave in the world.

CW: It’s nice to hear somebody is elevating the Dunning name.

BD: Thank God.

CW: That’s fantastic. And yeah, I can’t even imagine the tidal forces on a planet like that with a binary solar system. Wow.

BD: Yeah, it’s gonna be really weird, isn’t it?

CW: Yeah, I used to into astronomy but it’s been a hot minute. I remeber how they used to plot when they were trying to make the planets in our solar system geocentric.

BD: Oh, yeah.

0:23:46
CW: I mean, I wonder if planets orbiting a binary system do some weird loopy loops like that.

0:23:55
BD: I have no idea. She knows. I don’t.

0:23:58
CW: Okay.

0:23:59
CW: Well, we’ll have her on next.

0:24:00
BD: Okay.

0:24:02
BD: So without further ado, let’s begin with the basics. So Brian, we have you on here. I’ve been meaning to have you on the show to talk about this for a while. So let’s just start at the very basics. So like just fundamentally, like what are these EVs we keep hearing about? Are they like the flying cars and the Jetsons? They run on ether or cosmic vibrations? How does this work?

BD: Something like that, yeah. So when I first started writing about electric vehicle myths, and I guess I’ve done just by way of background for the listeners. So I have a podcast called Skeptoid, and I think I’ve done about five or six episodes on various iterations of all the myths about electric cars. Because for some reason, this became a political issue so generally speaking half the country opposes electric cars and half the country loves electric cars and it’s something that everyone loves to fight about and so you have a lot of misinformation and particularly disinformation uh… posted online social media various news websites et cetera trying to just make up false bs about electric cars to make them look bad. And so it was very much within my wheelhouse as a skeptical podcaster to write about these. And then I ended up getting one. My car like completely, literally fell apart. And so I went out and got a Tesla Model 3. And the funny thing is I picked it up like right as the pandemic was hitting. So it sat in the garage and didn’t go anywhere for like a year because of the lockdowns. So I have a Tesla Model 3, so full disclosure, okay?

0:25:44
CW: To clarify the cart before the horse here, you didn’t get a Tesla, fall in love with it and then become an advocate. You wrote about all the myths and learned all this stuff and were writing and podcasting about it and then you got a Tesla.

0:25:58
BD: Well, yes, although most of the writing I’ve done since I got the Tesla, when I had some first-hand experience. But really, I mean, I got it based on friends who already had them and who had been absolutely raving about them for a number of years. I’ve got two friends, I think, who got the original Tesla Model S, like the very original original when it first became available. In fact, I just thought of a third. I have three friends who have those and they still have them today.

0:26:27
CW: Really?

0:26:28
BD: Yeah, which I think, God, update, dude.

0:26:31
BR: Well, let me ask you this. Most people have not driven Tesla, just statistically. I have not, not that I feel like I’m, I’m not losing sleep over it, but if one were to suddenly be thrown into a Tesla, again, without sort of extolling on the great virtues of it, how is it sort of different than, what would be the first couple of things you would notice if you were fresh to it?

0:26:53
BD: The ridiculous power and torque. It just blows your mind. I have what was, I think, the slowest Tesla available when I got mine. And I still hesitate to punch it because, I mean, you feel your eyeballs squish. It’s just a really weird feeling. Your brain squishes to the back of your head. That’s the first thing you notice. And then the fact that it’s silent is just amazing. I just absolutely love that. I want to say I’m a fan, having an electric car for several years now, I’m a fan of electric cars and I’m definitely converted. I am very up in the air whether I’d get another Tesla. And this has nothing to do with Elon Musk and he’s a very controversial figure and a lot of people boycott him. I have no interest in any of that. My hesitance to get another Tesla is based around all of the weird stuff about them. The things that, oh, I have to be different and unique.

0:27:52
CW: Did you get your finger caught in a cyber truck back hatch or what happened?

0:27:57
BD: That didn’t happen to me, but, you know, like they, the thing that annoys me most is they and Rivian are two manufacturers that refuse to allow CarPlay in Android Auto, and I love CarPlay. I’m an Apple guy, I love CarPlay. It’s in all of our other cars, and that annoys the heck out of me. The new ones, they no longer have turn signal stalks. It’s a button on the steering wheel, and not even a real button, just like a touch-sensitive button. And where I live, we’ve got a lot of roundabouts, and so you’re often having to signal while the wheel is cranked 90, 270 degrees.

0:28:35
CW: Oh, that’s a design flaw.

0:28:37
BD: It’s terrible.

BR: They use turn signals where you live? Where are you?

0:28:45
BD: I’m in Bend, Oregon, and, yes, we use turn signals. We’re generally very polite drivers.

BR: Okay, because here in New Mexico, I see that twice a year. What about you, Celestia?

CW: I’m just trying to imagine relearning where my turn signal is. I’m sorry, I’m too old for that. I’ve been driving for like over like about three decades and I cannot imagine moving my hand to the center of the steering wheel to push a button.

BD: And there’s other weird things like nobody can figure out the door handles. You give someone a ride, you pick someone up, they cannot figure out how to get into the car. And I can’t find how to unlock the door. So I like have to open my door so that they can get in their door and then I have to open it for them. And then they can’t get out of the car because they can’t find the button to open the door. It’s just a lot of stupid, stupid stuff like that. And there’s no rain sensor. Every car on the planet has a rain sensor, so its automatic wiper mode works. The Tesla’s try to use the cameras, which is just a non-starter, and so if it ever rains, you’re basically screwed. You have no automatic wiper mode, and you have to manually push a button every time you want the wiper to go.

0:30:04
CW: Oh, the humanity.

0:30:06
BD: So, but it’s just, I mean, there’s so many little things like that that says, okay, I love my electric car, but I’m done with Tesla. Okay. But I will say that their last updates, their most recent updates to the full self-driving mode are incredibly good You can legitimately drive anywhere in town now and park without touching the steering wheel or the pedals and It’s amazing. And the thing that the reason I’m excited about that is Handicapped people blind people will be able to drive soon and be totally self-sufficient. Drunk people can get home from the bar and not die and people who get older and who get tired or have micro sleeps as they drive will be able to get home and not die.

CW: The accessibility factor, I hadn’t really even thought about that.

BD: I think that’s huge. I think that’s something that you don’t make a big enough deal about because it really is there already. And they’ll have to turn it on and things like that, but if you can do that, you can get anywhere you need to get in town now.

0:31:19
BR: Is there any reason why that’s proprietary to Tesla? I mean, isn’t the technology, is Tesla the only one that can do that? Again, I’m not up on the latest on EVs.

0:31:29
BD: I don’t know a lot about that either, but I know Google’s Waymo, the taxis that they have in a few cities like San Francisco, they are extremely good too. They basically get the job done. You go and you get in the car and you sit in the back seat and there’s no one in the front seat and you get there. And that’s pretty darn cool. So I don’t think it’s totally proprietary. In Tesla’s case, the thing that made the big difference was for a long time, they were using like what we used to call artificial intelligence. If anyone who’s listening understands programming, what we used to call artificial intelligence was basically an enormous list of if-then statements, right? If there’s a stop sign here and if there’s a car coming this way, then push the brake. That was how it worked. But now it’s just Tesla has the advantage of having all of these drivers over so many years now sending so much driving data to them, their artificial intelligence has now just kind of digested that and understood what to do. So it’s not any human programming, it’s just a massive, massive database of actual driving data and AI analysis of that. And that’s why it suddenly became so good. I mean, it drives like a person does. It’s really eerily cool to sit in the car while it drives like that.

0:32:51
CW: All right, well there are a lot of myths about electric vehicles. And as you mentioned, it’s become kind of a political hot button. And interestingly enough, the half of the people who like EVs and half of the people who hate EVs have kind of flip-flopped a couple times, it seems like, where you don’t know who’s going to hate them this week. But the myths have been fairly persistent and enough so that you can go to the EPA.gov website and actually see some of these tackled there as well. So why don’t we hit you with kind of a laundry list of myths and you can run down your explanation of why these are totally BS here. Well number one, what happens if the power goes out? Oh no, you’re screwed. It’s almost like if the wind stops and your windmill won’t give you power, you’re just helpless. What happens with EVs when the power goes out?

BD: So I’ve got an answer to this based on a personal anecdote.

BR: Those are the best kind.

BD: Two, three years ago, I guess when I did my whistle stop tour, I visited 14 cities and visited across the US in 14 nights and visited listener groups and gave little talks or did whatever. And during that trip, so I drove a hell of a long way for two weeks straight every day. And during that trip, I got stuck in a blizzard in Montana. And Montana has like one highway through it that has superchargers every 150 miles, which was like the minimum way back when the original Tesla’s came out and you needed that low of a distance. You know we’d go twice that far now. But because it was a blizzard and batteries absolutely do lose performance, we’re losing 20-30% in this extremely cold temperatures and with all the precipitation and snow on the road, there’s a lot more drag on the vehicle. Now the same same drag and inefficiency applies to gas cars too, I should point out. So I got, I pulled off, I got a notification on the screen said, oh, suddenly, oh no, you can’t go to the next charging stop, you have to turn around and go back to the next one. I said, oh screw that, and I ignored it. And I went on and the town’s power had been knocked out, the entire town’s power had been knocked out by this blizzard. So I pull up and I pull up to the Tesla superchargers there, two other cars showed up over the course of this event. So those three of us there in Teslas were at a gas station, the superchargers were at a gas station. Within an hour, there was probably 200 cars lined up down the road waiting to be able to pump gas because they can’t pump gas when the power’s out. Okay? Powers out the no electricity in town is not an advantage for gas cars they can’t pump fuel and we ended up stuff all stay in overnight at a hotel because i guess is pretty serious uh… there’s a hotel on the other side of the freeway the other side of the freeway had power so there’s like one hotel in one restaurant that had power uh… and then the next morning power was back on i got in my car and drove away, and here’s what’s hilarious, is as I’m driving away, this long line of Montana cars, hundreds of cars long, I’m not kidding, they’re all like laughing and pointing at me as I drive away. Think about that. They’re still going to be there. They’ve been there for hours.

0:36:20
CW: Okay, so the takeaway from that is when the power goes out, you can’t fill your gas up either.

0:36:29
BD: Yeah, it’s not an advantage.

0:36:32
CW: Yeah. Okay, well, unless you’re one of those nutters who’s got like 85 red plastic containers with gasoline in your garage, which I don’t recommend.

0:36:42
BD: There are those nutters, but there’s probably more people who have solar power on their house and are perfectly well able to charge. So and you can’t charge a gas car with your solar panels.

0:36:53
CW: That’s true. That’s true.

0:36:55
BR: I am one of those nutters. I have solar panels on my house, and I also have a Prius hybrid, which actually, Brian, you, at one point I reached out to you and I asked you for some advice, and you gave me some advice, and I didn’t take your first choice, but I took your second choice, and I’m happy with it. So yeah, it works out great for me.

0:37:18
CW: Well, let’s build on that point. And I’m gonna skip ahead to another myth here. We’re gonna make this myth number two. EVs are just a bait and switch scam. We’re robbing Peter to pay Paul because the power still has to come from somewhere. And you don’t shrink your carbon footprint because it creates pollution to make the electricity in the first place.

BD: Right.

CW: And Ben’s got solar power, but a lot of people don’t. So, yeah, how does the equation work out there on a larger scale than just Ben’s house?

0:37:50
BD: So I could give references because I’ve written about this, but just the basic, the overall answer to that is economies of scale. When a power plant generates electricity for a million houses, that’s a lot more efficient than if each house had its own individual generator. So economies of scale make a tremendous increase in efficiency. So that’s the basic reason why a power plant, a conventional power plant powered by coal, oil, gas, whatever dirty fuel you wanna come up with, that’s still cleaner than all of these cars driving themselves burning gasoline. Due to the economies of scale. It’s just so much more efficient to generate electricity at a huge scale than it is at a tiny scale.

CW: Even with what you lose running the current to people’s houses and then into the car, it all still works out.

0:38:43
BD: It all still works out, yeah. And this has been studied extensively. It’s something that’s very trivial to look up and verify on your own. You just have to go to Facebook memes to find information to the contrary.

0:39:00
CW: Yeah, I’ve seen the meme with the diesel generator trying to power up the EV, yeah.

0:39:08
BR: So we’ve talked a little bit about the power outages and of course where the power comes from, what about the batteries, right? I mean, obviously, again, I have a hybrid, so I sort of have the best of both worlds, but these EVs, they’ve got batteries that are super heavy and super expensive and not gonna last forever. So what about the complaint that batteries are ridiculously expensive and they need to be replaced often?

0:39:36
BD: Yeah, so again, all of this data is available online because Nissan has had the Leaf out for a very long time. Those are the oldest batteries that you’re going to find in large numbers. And Tesla has been out less time, but more batteries. And what we find is that the oldest batteries are lasting an average of about 22 years. That’s not terrible. If your battery happens, if you get a lemon, if you get a lemon, and electric car lemons are no more frequent than gas car lemons, if you get one and your battery somehow has to be replaced within the first few years, federal law requires that to be warrantied for eight years or 100,000 miles, basically most of the manufacturers have said, okay, we just got to do that then. So there is no such thing as anyone paying a penny for a battery replacement in less than 10 years. You see it online all the time. It’s a lie. It’s federal law, okay? The batteries are free. But it just doesn’t happen. You know, you own an electric car, you end up just by osmosis, you end up meeting and knowing a lot of other people with electric cars. None of us have ever even heard of anyone we know who knows someone who knows someone whose battery died. It’s just not that common. I mean, how often do you buy an iPhone and the battery doesn’t work from day one? It just doesn’t happen. Your battery lasts as long as everyone else’s.

BR: Yeah, and the other question is how long, you know, and again, I don’t know this, this is an abating question, but does the average person keep their car that long? You know, I’m just wondering, it’s like if you’re that worried, like, oh my God, you know, is this battery going to die on me in 18 or 20 years? How likely are you to have that car? Are you going to trade it in for a newer one or a different one? I don’t know.

0:41:39
CW: Well, I picked up a used EV, full disclosure for me, and it’s a hybrid model. And the battery is, I think, seven years old, but I think it’s rated for 10 years. So I’m like, okay, I’ve got at least three years, and I looked at how much it was gonna cost to replace this battery. I’m like, okay, if I need to buy a whole new hybrid battery, it’s gonna cost me $3,500.

BD: If you were to replace that battery within 10 years, that would be an outlier. That’s very rare.

0:42:07
CW: According to the warranty, it said it should last at least 10 years. So I was just looking from the manufacturer’s specs.

BD: Okay, so the legalese.

0:42:16
CW: The legalese says- Yeah, 150,000 miles or 10 years, or was it 15 years? I’d have to double check, but-

0:42:26
BD: It should be 10. And you’re going for 150,000 miles is what’s standard.

0:42:30
CW: Yeah, 10 years, 150,000 miles. And I’m under that and the car’s still running. And if it happens to run out at that time, I’m like, okay, I can spend $3,500 to get a new battery. Because the first time I got a Ford Explorer, I had to spend $4,000 changing out a very expensive transmission issue. So, I mean, used cars come with potential problems.

0:42:53
BD: They do.

0:42:54
CW: And a battery is just another one.

0:42:55
BD: I mean, this is not one of your questions, but one of the things that I love most about having an electric car is the zero maintenance. I’ve got a shelf in my garage of oil filters and all these fluids and everything. They’re covered with dust because I haven’t touched them since 2020. There is zero maintenance when you have an electric car. Literally zero maintenance.

0:43:17
CW: Now, see, that is stunning to me. When you mentioned that in our prep work for this show, and I went through over some of your episodes, you’ve done more episodes on electric vehicles than we have done on Bigfoot.

BD: That just means you don’t give Bigfoot enough attention. You need to get a lot more serious about that issue.

0:43:37
CW: We do. If we can get Bigfoot to drive an EV, we’ll have a crossover show the likes of which the world has never seen. So, that is amazing that they just don’t have scheduled maintenance. You don’t have to get in there and change the oil every month. I mean, you do, don’t you? What do you do with a Tesla?

0:43:59
BD: The thing I’ve had to do most is replace windshield wipers.

0:44:02
CW: Okay, yeah.

0:44:03
BD: And I bought one set of tires.

0:44:06
BR: To be fair, the windshield wipers I hear are extremely expensive.

BD: For electric cars, yeah, that windshield wiper, that’s a very… What’s fascinating is, since I have a Tesla, I’m in all of these Tesla owners groups on Facebook and so forth, and so many people think that it’s some kind of a holy relic that, oh, it’s a Tesla. It can’t use regular wipers. It has to use special wipers. Everything about it they think has to be special. And people are always saying, my god, it’s a car. The paint is not special. You don’t have to wash it a special way. Wash your damn car at a car wash. Put on wipers that you get at AutoZone. Replace your tires at the Pep Boys or whatever tires. You don’t have to do anything special. It’s a car It’s not a holy relic.

0:44:57
CW: Well speaking of treating these things with kid gloves the other myth number four on our list here is that electric vehicles will not work in extreme hot or extreme cold. Or if the place is flooded you’ve got all these problems that will happen to a battery-operated vehicle that don’t apply to a gas-powered car. You want to talk about that?

0:45:20
BD: So cold weather, yeah, absolutely. You do get… When you’ve got like a storm, like I was talking about that situation in Montana, when there’s precipitation on the road, precipitation falling, all cars lose a fair amount of efficiency from that. So that’s not something that’s unique to electric cars. It’s just something that the anti-EV crowd likes to bring up. But what is unique to electric cars is the battery. The battery is slower to charge and discharges faster when you have really cold temperatures. And in my experience, I would say it’s gotta be below freezing, below 32 Fahrenheit, zero Celsius before you really see those effects. And that’s not, a lot of the country doesn’t have that issue, but a lot of it does. So yeah, you do lose, I’ve had to plan for 20 to 30% less range than expected. In really, really bad freezing blizzard conditions. Most of the time I don’t care, it just doesn’t matter.

CW: As somebody who lives in an area that hit 120 degrees this summer. I noticed my car switching automatically from EV to gas because it knew, the little car brain knew that the gas would be more efficient right now at this level of heat.

0:46:39
BD: So I took my car to Las Vegas a couple of summers ago and I posted a question to one of the Tesla mailing groups. I said, hey, I know we’ve got battery issues at really cold temperatures. What about really hot temperatures? When it’s over 100, does the Tesla care? And everyone who answered said, no, it doesn’t care. And that’s been my experience. That when the temperatures got really hot, it makes no difference at all. So, and this is just purely anecdotal. So this is without any science behind it. It’s my experience and from the experience of other owners, nobody that I’ve heard of has had a problem with hot temperatures.

0:47:16
CW: Yeah, I asked my mechanic that very question before I bought this EV because I said, hey, I got a line on a used EV. We live in Las Vegas, so I mean, how often do you see cars towed in here because their batteries pop? And that was literally how I phrased it because that’s my rudimentary understanding of what happens to a battery when things get too hot. They just they blow up or something. So, no, she said, no, we rarely see any EVs with any problems whatsoever.

BD: And then as far as dealing with deep floodwaters, EVs don’t need air to run. So, you know, your car is going to flood because it can’t get any air into the engine a lot sooner than an EV is, because an electric motor is a big sealed unit. It doesn’t care if it’s underwater or not. I’ve never heard of problems from that either.

0:48:07
CW: So if you drive your car into the lake, not that I recommend that, I do not recommend it.

0:48:12
BD: I wouldn’t either.

0:48:12
CW: You won’t have the situation that a very frantic Donald Trump talked about several months ago.

BD: Dealing with the sharks?

CW: You’re dealing with a battery, it’s going to electrocute you and sharks. Well, he was talking about battery-powered boats, but…

0:48:29
BD: I think anyone who’s concerned about whether to get an electric car or not, they should consider the shark problem. I think that should be foremost on their list.

CW: Okay.

0:48:38
BR: Duly noted. Okay, well, you talked a little bit about it before, but let’s just sort of just cement it in there. What about the limited range thing, right? That’s always been one of the big boogeymen, like, oh, my god, you can’t go very far. It’s only practical for people who, you know, work close to home and things like that. And you have to spend hours and hours to go anywhere. What’s the deal on that?

0:49:00
BD: So there’s a lot to say on that. First of all, I advocate that, hey, you should get an electric car or you should not get an electric car based on two factors. Number one is can you charge at home or at work? If you can charge at home or at work, great. And number two is does your car work on the Tesla Supercharger network? And a lot more and more cars do now, but they haven’t for a long time. I think that you need both of those things for an electric car to make sense to you. If you can’t charge on Supercharger networks, and if you can’t charge at home or at work, I would say don’t get an electric car. Wait a year or two until they all do.

0:49:43
CW: Now, what’s the difference between the Tesla supercharger networks and just the regular EV stations I see all around town?

0:49:50
BD: So the difference is several fold. One is that the superchargers are frigging everywhere. I can drive anywhere. Anywhere I ever drive, I pass stations that I don’t need. That’s not that’s no longer an issue. That’s not the case with people who don’t have cars that work on Tesla superchargers. Most of the charging stations you see around are like really slow trickle chargers. They’re basically useless. If you’re actually on a trip and you want to stop and fill your tank and keep going, you need to have one of these major, massive dumps, huge amounts of electricity into your car very quickly. And that’s basically Electrify America and Tesla superchargers. And Electrify America stations are far more scarce and frequently broken. And all of the ones that are slow chargers are also frequently broken, which is bizarre to me, but nevertheless, Tesla superchargers are never broken. Once in my entire life have I pulled into one and was not able to use it and the problem was that someone had come and cut the cord.

0:51:05
CW: Why are they so much better and less frequently broken? Is it that they have a better maintenance program? Do people fix them a lot faster?

0:51:12
BD: Honestly, I don’t know. I mean, that’s something that’s internal to Tesla’s company. And as we all know, they refuse to answer any questions from the press or the media. So we really don’t know. I mean, a couple of years ago, there was a, not even a couple of years ago, I think it was about a year ago, they announced that they were firing everyone in the supercharger program. And I was on a trip with my wife somewhere and we stopped at a charger and there was a tech there with his laptop plugged into the infrastructure and we asked him about that and he said I don’t know anything about that. So who knows? I have no idea what’s going on. What I can tell you is my experience as a supercharger network is staggeringly reliable. It’s basically been a hundred percent reliable for me.

CW: And you’ve traveled a lot.

BD: I’ve traveled a lot in the car and you end up charging for a few minutes. Five or ten minutes is typical. I don’t know why people say it’s hours unless they’re just trying to denigrate electric cars. That’s false. When you’re at a big charging station, a high voltage one like Electrify America or Tesla, you’re there five or ten minutes. You’re not there an hour. That’s ridiculous. People wouldn’t buy them and love them so much if that was true.

CW: Well, mine being an older model and a hybrid does take a while because I have to trickle charge it, but I love just being able to plug it in at night and then the next morning it’s charged and I can go anywhere and do my little errands around town and not spend a drop of gas.

0:52:44
BD: Well, and I think Ben, that’s probably the most significant answer to your question is that studies have shown, and I have cited these studies on my show, that electric car owners typically waste less time refueling than gas car owners. And the reason for that is because most of them can charge at home, and so most people always have a full tank whenever they leave their house.

0:53:10
CW: Yes, I haven’t had to use my home refinery at all.

0:53:19
BD: Yeah. 99% of all of our driving is within a few hundred miles of our house. So we always have a full tank and we can always do whatever we need to do and come back home. And we never need to stop and waste time refueling. A gas car person, they can go, you know, their range may be longer, and so they may, you know, stop only every three, four hundred miles, but when they do, they’re there for five or ten minutes. Electric car owners, most of them, are never there at all. So, in the aggregate, electric car owners waste less time refueling than gas car owners.

CW: That makes sense.

BD: And people don’t believe it until you sit down and, you know, work out the numbers and go, oh yeah I guess so.

0:54:04
CW: Well with all these people in all these houses and all the supercharger stations around the world or around the US at least sucking power from the electric grid, won’t these electric cars result in the infrastructure failing and the grid not being able to keep up with demand.

BD: Yeah, I mean that’s a very, very popular charge right now and it’s also false. And most of the studies around this have been done in California because California is the place where you’ve got the highest EV adoption, you’ve got the California government mandating a certain percentage of cars be electric, you know, by whatever year they keep changing it, I don’t know what it is right now. And so California is the most controversial area for this, and it’s such a huge population and such a huge market that that’s where all of the studies have been done. And it’s not even a drop in the bucket. A lot of times you’ll say, if everyone in California went out and bought an electric car tomorrow, then the whole grid would crash. Okay, maybe that’s true. If everyone in California went and bought an air conditioner tomorrow and turned it on full blast 24 hours a day, the electrical grid would crash. Cars don’t need to be plugged in all the time. They’re not drawing full power all the time. Most of the time cars are sitting parked. Some of the time they’re spent driving. Less of the time than that they’re charging. So most cars are not even connected to the grid most of the time. And when they do, they’re using basically what your house’s air conditioner uses. It’s just not that much. And so the studies find that these are just dropping the bucket numbers. It just does not increase it significantly.

0:55:53
CW: The real Mobius strip irony I’m seeing here is that your air conditioning, again, I live in a place where everybody’s got air conditioning and you’ve got to crank it and crank it and crank it during the summer. And for each couple of degrees it gets hotter that draws more and more power off the grid for people to stay in a comfortable range in their homes. And if you’re spending some electricity on a car that then does not contribute the greenhouse gases, which makes climate climate change a little bit less of a factor, then it’s just kind of this rolling cyclical thing where it’s like, yeah, yeah, we will save the power that we would normally have to use on the air conditioners if we just didn’t have all the rise in temperature with each summer going on and on and on. So it makes total sense to put that energy into a car.

0:56:47
BD: The average home uses 11,000 kilowatt hours per year. So basically 30 kilowatt hours of electricity per day. And when you have an electric car owner, that adds eight. So 30 for the normal house, add eight for an electric car. Now that’s a big chunk. Sure, that’s gonna increase your bill, but it’s only a 27% addition. And everyone in California does not buy an electric car every day, okay? A small percentage of them have it. So cut that 27% down by a lot to represent the number of people who actually have electric cars. And residential grid capacity in California only needs to expand 2% a year to accommodate electric cars and it already expands four and a half percent a year. So we’re not talking numbers that make much of a difference. We’re really, really not. And also you got to remember that only a fifth of California’s grid capacity is residential. Almost the vast majority of what California uses is, you know, industrial, etc, etc, etc. This residential use of electric cars is just not that big a deal. And it’s well within the capacity. That’s why there’s never been a problem.

0:58:08
BR: Well, and of course, you know, as you pointed out before, is that, you know, when are people charging their cars? Well, they’re not charging them while they’re driving. So, in a lot of cases, they’re charging them overnight, which is when the, that’s when the, number one, the power is cheaper oftentimes, and number two, that’s when there’s not a higher demand anyway because it’s not…

0:58:29
CW: Yeah, it’s not the prime time for your air conditioner and all the other…

0:58:35
BD: My own experience is I probably only drive around town probably half hour, 45 minutes a day on average. So I don’t even plug in my car every week. I’ll plug it in overnight once every week or two. If I see, oh, it’s down to like 30, 20%, better plug it in, and I plug it in up to about 70%, and that happens within a few hours overnight. So it’s not even plugged in 90% of the time, let alone charging and drawing current.

0:59:06
BR: Yeah, and I just realized, I mean, like for me personally in my driving habits, and I’m perhaps atypical for a couple reasons, including that I work at home. I charge my car probably three times a week. So I’m not charging it every night anyway.

0:59:24
BD: Well, you have a plug-in hybrid, right?

BR: Yes.

BD: Okay, so you don’t have to plug it in at all, but if you do, you don’t have to burn gas, right?

BR: Right, right. And Celestia, how often do you plug yours in?

0:59:38
CW: Well, I also too am a little atypical. I usually plug it in each night and then use it for whatever the next day. But, you know, generally it’s just taking the kid to school and maybe running to the grocery store.

0:59:49
BR: And what sort of – so I’m curious because I haven’t asked you this. So what’s your – we talked about Brian’s range. Again, Brian has a full EV Tesla. I’ve got a Prius. I can run about 25 miles on a full charge. So that’s basically pretty much anything I need to do in a given day. How far, what’s your range?

1:00:12
CW: Mine is a much older model, and it is a Ford Fusion Energy. And it got great reviews when it was out, but they’re no longer making it. However, my battery still gives me about, if I’m running the AC full blast, 15 miles. But 15 miles, I can take the kid to school, I can go to the grocery store, I can do a lot of things right around my general neighborhood. But you know, if I’m going across town, I’m going to burn some gas.

1:00:40
BD: The whole talk about range is something that’s fascinating to me because I’ve owned, I don’t know, six, eight, nine cars, and only one of which has been electric. And, honest to god, I have no friggin’ idea what the range has been of any of them. I never thought… I had Volkswagens for a long time, then I had Audis, then I had Porsches, and at no time did I consider, well, what’s the range of this car in miles? I have no idea. I could probably figure it out if I generally knew what the gas tank capacity was and I generally knew what miles per gallon I get, but I never did that calculation. I never cared. It doesn’t matter. But who can charge at home and who can use a supercharger network, it doesn’t matter. There’s never a case, there’s never a case when range is a problem.

CW: Just to be the contrarian, I will bring some of my anecdotal data here, or anic data, and I And I do have a friend who tried to take their Tesla up to Eureka in northern Nevada. There was one super, one charger facility they found online. They’re like, okay, we can charge there when we go to this little tiny, like population 200 person town. And when they got there, it happened to be broken. I don’t know if it was the supercharger one that you mentioned was like rarely ever broken. You’ve never seen it broken, but for some reason, when they got there, they couldn’t charge. So they actually had to be towed someplace to be charged. And that was the, that was the only instance I’ve heard of that. And they were in Northern Nevada, which is, it can be very desolate.

BD: And Nevada is definitely one of the supercharging deserts.

1:02:22
CW: Okay.

BD: Um, but I mean, I would never drive. So I wouldn’t I wouldn’t drive there. I wouldn’t take the test. But if I had to go somewhere where I knew I wasn’t, I didn’t I didn’t know I was going to be able to get back. That’s the same thing as in a gas car. I’ve never once taken my car. We used to we used to we’re desert rats. We used to go out in the desert all the time. Death Valley ends of Borrego Desert, where you might go for hundreds of miles and never get anywhere near a town. I wouldn’t do that unless I knew I could get gas.

1:02:54
CW: Yeah.

1:02:55
BD: Who among us is ass enough to go and drive their car somewhere where they know they’re not gonna be able to refuel?

1:03:02
CW: Yeah.

1:03:03
BD: That’s why Tesla drivers don’t run out of fuel any more often than gas drivers do. You have to be some kind of a moron for that to happen.

1:03:11
CW: Well, I’m glad to hear that it’s changing that way. But I mean, I understand the fear, the nervousness about, okay, gas stations, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a gas station in like every town, every city. But for a lot of people who are driving EVs, they’re looking online to find out where the chargers are. And yeah, sometimes the charger, when you get there, it’s broken. So I can understand the hesitance.

1:03:37
BD: But again, that’s why I say you need to be able to use the Tesla Supercharger network. Fair. Because there are Tesla chargers that aren’t supercharger. There’s privately owned ones, like the one that I have in my garage. That’s the same one that a lot of hotels have, and a lot of businesses will just put one out there. And sometimes those are disconnected. Who knows? A fuse blue? I have no idea why. They might not work. But if there are superchargers, you can get there. I’ve had my car four years now, five years now. And that one experience I talked about in Montana was the only time where the power was out and it was out for a few hours. So I wouldn’t have gotten towed anywhere. I just said, okay, fine. Went and had dinner, still wasn’t on, crashed in the hotel. It was on in the morning and I was out of there. It’s just not that big a deal. And all the people there with gas cars were in exactly the same boat.

CW: They just didn’t realize it.

1:04:29
BR: But they’re laughing at you, giving you the finger as they wait in line for another four hours.

1:04:33
BD: Yeah. It was hilarious to me. Not that I laugh at other people’s misfortunes, but they did, so I felt justified.

1:04:40
CW: Okay. So, well, we haven’t dipped our toes into politics of EVs yet, but we’re about to here. This is the number seven, myth number seven, we wrote down here, is something that’s pushed often from conservatives. And that is that EVs are being pushed by politicians for no good reasons. And it’s just a conspiracy. And, you know, the Harris-Walls administration, if you let them into power, are going to mandate that everybody has to buy an EV and it’s really not good, we need to keep using gas, but it’s just political. Can you speak to that at all in terms of like how much political pressure really is there for people to buy an EV?Is there any pressure?

1:05:28
BD: A lot of that is straight up disinformation because even in California nobody has ever talked about taking away anyone’s gas car or stopping sales of gas cars. You can always go buy a used car. Nobody’s ever even brought up the concept of that not happening. I know California has had all new car sales must be electric by such and such a year. I think they’ve rolled that back. I’m not sure what the situation is right now, but nobody’s ever talked about taking away your gas car.

1:06:00
CW: Well, what if you have your rifle on your gun rack in your truck? When they come to take your guns, will they also take your truck?

1:06:08
BR: How does that work?

BD: I don’t know.

1:06:13
CW: Either way, we’re getting ripped off somehow by some politician according to every political ad.

1:06:18
BD: I mean, it’s the reason it’s become a political issue. I mean, there’s a great example is the magazine Reason, which is largely a libertarian publication they publish anti-evey articles and they love all of the anti-evey misinformation and the reason they do is because they object to California’s mandates of a certain percentage of electric car of of new car sales being electric they consider that to be a violation of freedom et cetera et cetera i understand that maybe it is a violation of your freedom to own whatever kind of car you want.

1:06:52
CW: Many of these people in this extreme camp also believe it’s a violation of your freedom to have to drive under 65 by a school or to be pulled over by a cop if you’re a sovereign citizen.

1:07:05
BD: Yes, yes. But I’m trying to stay away from extreme examples. I do think it is a valid argument to say the government shouldn’t be telling me what kind of car I can or can’t buy. Valid argument, okay? But nobody’s going to disagree with that argument who accepts the science of global warming. That’s the whole reason all of these things exist, is because global warming is real. I have had to deal, as a science writer, I have had to deal with the global warming fight for 20 years and I won’t even have the conversation anymore. If you are still at this point denying the reality of human-caused global warming, I’m sorry, I’m not even going to waste my breath. Go your merry way. Go believe whatever you want. Go believe the flat earth. Go believe whatever you want to believe. But that is really the only reason, and because that became a political issue, that is really the only reason that these anti-EV articles opinions exist.

1:08:05
BR: Well, let me ask you, there’s something that I’m trying to parse out. So as you sort of mentioned in this, Lyssa touched on, that the anti-EV crowd tend to be libertarian and also Republican. But Tesla’s Elon Musk is supporting Trump, and Trump is on the record as both sort of mocking EVs, but also I saw a quote from him the other day where he said he loves EVs. So what do you make of all that?

1:08:34
BD: I don’t know. I mean Elon Musk, obviously he’s a very conflicted character. People have hugely strong feelings about him. He’s got a religious cult following, and he’s got a religious anti-Elon Musk hater following and he’s interesting because he’s clearly he has come out as a not a conservative but a populist, a far-right populist and he also produces electric cars. So that’s a huge conflict right there. I think it was great that he invested in Tesla in its early days. The fact is Tesla was never going to have a problem finding an investor. If it hadn’t been Elon Musk, it would have been anyone else. Has he been good for the company? I think that’s a very debatable issue, but he is the one whose money got it going initially and whose Silicon Valley connections got it going. But they would never have had trouble getting money. So, I don’t necessarily credit him for making the EV wave happen. It could have been anyone, it just happened to be him.

1:09:41
BR: Yeah, I just think it’s funny that, again, you have this sort of paradox of the Republican Party traditionally very pro-coal, pro-oil, this and that, and then all of a sudden you’ve got his biggest backer selling electric cars, and I don’t know, I’m not trying to parse it. It’s just bizarre to me.

1:10:04
BD: But there’s a lot that’s bizarre in American politics today.

1:10:07
BR: This is true. Okay. Well, let’s turn from some of the inflated or not complaints by the conservatives to one that I’ve seen oftentimes and I’m sure we all have by the more liberal sources, which is that ultimately EVs are a bad idea because they require so many rare earth minerals, their mining is causing human rights atrocities and ruining the environment. I’ve seen memes, I’m sure we’ve all seen them, where there’s some African, probably in Sierra Leone or Nigeria or something, who is in this, you know, some teenage kid and he’s doing this mining for these rare earth things and he’s like, you know, tell me again how this is saving the earth. So what’s the answer to that?

1:10:50
BD: So there’s basically two elements that are used a lot in EV batteries that have the potential to cause environmental trouble, lithium and cobalt. Most lithium comes from Australia. Australia complies very well with environmental regulations, so we really don’t see much of an environmental problem from lithium mining. The other half is a very different story. Cobalt. Most of cobalt comes from DRC, the Congo, and historically, cobalt was not used very much, not nearly as much as it is today. And so the cobalt mines were, this is a funny term, I love it, they call them artisanal mines, which means basically child labor.

1:11:37
CW: Oh, no.

1:11:38
BD: Like manual labor.

1:11:39
BR: Artisanal.

1:11:40
BD: That’s an artisanal mine.

1:11:41
CW: So you’re not getting like bespoke minerals. It’s just child labor.

1:11:47
BD: So, yeah, child labor was the whole problem. But, however, since the rise of electric cars and, you know, pretty much electrification of everything else now, the needs have grown enormously and artisanal mines are no longer really able to be a part of the picture. Most of the mines in Congo have been bought by Chinese companies and Chinese companies have thrown enormous amounts of money at them. They’re completely mechanized. There’s not a child laborer in sight. It’s all huge heavy equipment. And the buyers of Cobalt, they use supply chain auditing companies to make sure that there’s compliance with child labor laws. And reports by the, and this is like, it’s like a whole kind of James Bond spying situation. You got guys creeping through the jungle, spying on mines with binoculars. These are how these supply chain auditing companies work. And they really don’t find violations anymore because the artisanal mines, they simply, they can’t be a part of the electric car battery market anymore. They just cannot produce enough. So, that problem has largely been solved. And I don’t want to sound like I’m dismissing it because there are an estimated 40,000 child miners still out there in the Congo. Most of their product is probably not going to electric cars, it’s going to smaller sourcing, but still, that’s a problem. And that’s being dealt with by the people whose job is to deal with that. The interesting thing is that most of the battery technology that is current and tomorrow does not even use cobalt. about half of Tesla cars, I think, and all of Ford’s electric cars, they use the LFP batteries, which don’t have any cobalt at all. So the child labor issue is kind of a 10 years ago problem as far as electric cars go, and it’s just going to get better going into the future.

1:13:57
BR: What about the, regardless of the child labor laws, what about the environmental degradation aspects of it? I mean, we’re still dealing with in a lot of cases, you know, strip mining and mining that’s, you know, doing lots of harm to the environment, right?

1:14:13
BD: Yeah. So, that comes down to what the individual country’s environmental laws are and how they comply with it. What are Congo’s environmental laws is a great question that I don’t know, but I do know that these major Chinese companies are not able to get away with violating them. In the lithium mines in Australia, they’re very well complied with, so we don’t really have problems in Australia. Now, that doesn’t mean that they don’t do the strip mining. They do, but once they extract all the ore, they have to restore everything. They have to make sure there’s no residual chemicals and they have to restore the ground to what it looked like before the mining was done. So you don’t really have a lasting impact from that. How it is in the Congo, I assume it’s similar, but that hasn’t been something that’s been reported on as much, so I couldn’t tell you.

1:15:04
BR: Fair enough.

1:15:05
CW: And last of all, in our sort of series of myths here that we’ve been having you take shots at, what happens with the battery after you’re done using the car, after you have all these cars year after year going to junkyards, is it safe to have the batteries just sitting in a junkyard? Do we need to like excavate a hole in a mountain like we do with nuclear waste and shove all the batteries in there? How do we dispose of these?

1:15:29
BD: They don’t sit in junkyards because they’re crazy valuable. They’re full of very valuable metals. So electric car battery recycling technology is still very, very new. A lot of what happened, a lot of the recycling of these batteries that happens is they just keep using them in some other application, like they’ll put them in a factory or something and run machines off of them where they don’t care that this battery is down to only 50, 60% of its capacity. It still works, and so they use it for that. So, that’s where some of the recycling happens. But the most exciting and interesting part of the field, and if I was going into college right now as an undergrad, this is a field I might very well go into because it’s gonna be an enormous growth industry, is just the, how you deal chemically with all of these elements that are valuable and useful that are now stuck in this expired battery form. So, I would have to go to the news every week to be able to give you a current answer on this. It’s changing so fast. Every time I do, there’s something new that I’ve never heard of. And it’s interesting. So, it is definitely a growth industry. It is definitely in its infancy, but there is not a car battery on the planet that someone is not going to want very soon if they haven’t already taken it.

1:16:50
CW: Oh, well, if you listen to SGU, which I know a lot of our listeners know, the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, they kind of have a pet love. Yeah, well, every other week they seem to talk about some sort of battery futurism. Not so much to be skeptical about it, but to be excited about like, oh, I heard that now they’re looking into batteries where after you’ve done with them in your car, you take them out after 20 years and you plug them into your home and then it becomes part of your home battery. So yeah, you’re bringing up the whole V to G issue. V to G, that sounds like a sex term. What is that? V to G is vehicle to grid.

BD: Oh, okay. When your car is in your garage, it’s plugged in and you’re getting electricity from your house, how about if it works the other way, where your car can power the house? Now, this requires hardware to be installed in the car, requires hardware to be installed in your house, and this is also something that’s relatively new. I believe, and I could easily be wrong, I believe the Hummer, the electric Hummer, is the only car right now that fully supports this. The Cybertruck and the Ford Lightnings, I believe, have partial support for this and can be upgraded. And I’m probably wrong about some of that. But when people complain about the effect of electric cars on the grid, in the very near future, electric cars are gonna be the grid’s best friend and biggest support. Because let’s say it’s a hot summer day and there’s all these cars sitting in garages plugged in, the grid can draw from all of those cars.

1:18:33
CW: With the permission, with the permission of the owner, yeah.

1:18:37
BD: You get paid for it, of course, and you can opt in, you can opt out. That’s already, I believe there’s pretty much already law for that, for how all that’s going to work. The owners have to opt in and they do get paid if battery comes out of their car and goes back into the grid. Oh my gosh, it’s going to be like day trading for power.

CW: Right. You’re like, oh, I charged at four in the morning and now I’m getting sweet reward for my power that the city has to buy back.

1:19:01
BD: You know, that’s funny, but you’re probably not wrong.

1:19:03
CW: Well, you’re talking about bi-directional charging, which was actually the next question I had lined up for you.

1:19:11
BD: The grid is to me the most exciting part where the electric cars support the grid, but bidirectional charging, same thing. We have a, my wife’s car is a Ford Power Boost pickup truck. We have horses and so we need horse trailers and things, so we have to have a truck capable of towing. And it’s got a hybrid battery in it. If our power goes out in the house, we can plug our house into the truck, and the truck will power our house for about three days. If we got a full tank of gas, it can power it for about 10 days. The engine will cycle on and off as needed to recharge the hybrid battery in the truck. So that’s a very cool thing, too. Suddenly, if you live in a remote area where you would otherwise have to have a generator to deal with power outages. Now you can just have an electric car, or as in our case, a hybrid, that will power your house for you.

1:20:10
CW: I have another bit of anecdote. There was a friend of mine in a rural part of the US, sort of Southwest Virginia kind of area. And during a particularly bad flood, he put his electric vehicle up on blocks and the floodwaters came in. A lot of stuff, you know, didn’t work. And he was able to run his major appliances and things he needed with his truck power. And even my old little Ford Fusion Energy has got a full-size outlet where if I needed to, if there was a blackout or a brownout and I had to plug in my laptop, I could just get in the car.

1:20:52
BD: Yeah, what I love about this Ford truck we have is that it’s got the regular outlets, but it’s also got a 240 volt outlet with 7,200 watt service. So that’s what the house plugs into. And I mean, we’ve never had to use it, but we’ve practiced with it. And I turned the air conditioning off and everything works fine. I mean, all the lights are on, the refrigerator’s on, no problem. I find that just very cool and it gives great peace of mind too.

1:21:25
CW: Well, as we wrap up these myths, I have a couple of questions about the future here. As you know, as you mentioned, not every charging station out there is going to fit every electric vehicle. Tesla’s run on the Tesla plug-in, the Tesla superchargers, and mine doesn’t fit that. I do have a few friends who are kind of remaining on the fence and they want to see who wins this battle of Tesla versus everybody else. Do you know what’s going on with that? Is there a battle being fought right now for the future of chargers?

1:21:58
BD: I do, yeah. Tesla already won that battle, which is good because they had the only really significant and really useful charging network. So they had to lobby hard for this and it was a big fight for years. And nobody thinks it’s stupider than me that all the manufacturers didn’t agree on a standard to begin with. That’s just crazy. But they didn’t. And, you know, everyone has to compete. They’re all in the playground together and they have to, who’s the biggest bully. But Tesla won, so the Tesla plugs are now called the NACS, North American Charging Standard. And I believe that all except maybe one or two manufacturers have agreed to make their cars NAX compliant by 2025 or 2026. So when I say don’t buy an EV unless A, you can charge it home and B, you can use the Tesla network. Within a year or two, that’ll be pretty much everyone. So yeah, that battle is thankfully over.

1:23:05
CW: Perfect. Well, it’s nice to know what’s coming in the future here. Now, to finish up here, what do you think in your opinion, and you are by far the best person I know to have an opinion on this. What is the biggest non-mythical drawback to owning an EV right now?

1:23:23
BD: Non-mythical?

1:23:24
CW: Yeah.

1:23:25
BD: Let’s see. What is it that I ever struggle with?

CW: For instance, if you asked me, I would probably just say the price tag. They are still expensive. But what do you see as the biggest drawback?

1:23:39
BD: Okay, well, that they’re expensive is not true. You can get articles on Consumer Reports, your payments are going to be less if you get an electric. Not every electric car has to be the highest end Lucid Air or Tesla Model S that’s a hundred and something thousand dollars. I mean, you can get a used Model 3 for $20,000 now.

1:23:59
CW: See, I had my one drawback and you’ve just proved it to be mythical.

1:24:02
BD: Yeah, but because you don’t spend any money on service generally, you don’t spend any money on maintenance and insurance and you factor everything in, people who own electric cars generally spend less money than people who have gas-powered cars. The initial price tag of the car is going to be higher in many cases, but that’s offset because you never need to service the damn thing and you never have any repair costs.

1:24:22
CW: From a lower middle class viewpoint, people who are going paycheck to paycheck and perhaps don’t have the credit to get a good loan, it’s not going to be accessible for as many people like that because you can do the math. You could be like, oh, it’s the old argument about do you buy the good pair of boots or the cheaper pair of boots that you have to replace every year, that old economic model. Because the initial price tag is higher, that means sometimes people fully understand, I will save more money in the long run with this, but I don’t have $25,000. I can only afford to buy a $5,000 hoopty car, so that’s what I’ve got to get. So aside from that, which I do view as a drawback.

1:25:18
BD: If they don’t plan to insure it or do any maintenance, sure. But the reality is they’re going to have those expenses. And so their monthly payments are still going to be higher with that cheaper priced gas car.

1:25:30
CW: Oh, I’m used to people who don’t want to do payments ever. So they just take their $5,000 and they buy it.

1:25:34
BD: Nobody wants to, but the reality is most of us have to.

1:25:37
CW: Yeah, okay. All right, so having done away with that, what would you pick as the biggest drawback to an EV car? Your answer can be nothing. If you want your answer to be no, there’s absolutely no drawbacks, you can.

BD: For me, honestly, and I’ve already talked about what I don’t like about the Tesla’s particular personality quirks. The major drawback for me personally is that I’ve always been a gearhead guy and I love shifting and the lack of a manual transmission.

CW: The vroom vroom sound?

BD: It makes my life filled with bitterness to the point that I’m probably gonna get some old manual shifter car just so that I have something on the weekends.

CW: You can’t like shift it and downshift it and go vroom vroom.  Okay, well fair enough. I asked you your honest opinion and you gave it to me.

BD: Yeah, some of the manufacturers are making like fake shift points and everything and trying to like simulate that experience. To me that is just so embarrassingly mind-numbingly stupid. I’ll never ever need it.

CW: Oh come on, we all have digital cameras in our pockets that make a shutter sound when you click it.

BD: That’s true.

CW: To take a photograph.

BD: That’s true.

BR: Well, I’ll tell you my the main I have two main complaints with my my Prius Prime. One of them is the lack of trunk space.

CW: Oh, that is a drawback.

BR: Yeah. Well, again, it’s, you know, I, I, it’s not it’s not a huge I mean, I don’t I don’t, you know, gnash my teeth about it, but it is. Before this, I had a Honda Fit, which I could fit several elephants, like literally full-size African elephants in the early days. It seemed like I thought of that. That’s just how it is because, you know, the battery is big and it sits in the back. So that is one thing. So if you’re looking for trunk space, now again, that’s just for the Prius Prime. There may be other models that are great, but that’s one thing. And the other thing is, for my car, because it’s meant to be, of course, very fuel efficient and aerodynamic, it sits very low. And so sometimes I sidle up to a curb and then I open up the door and I almost break the door off because suddenly I’m scratching it because the car is so low. But other than that, I’m happy with it.

1:27:57
CW: Oddly enough, I have the same two complaints. And maybe it’s because we’ve both got hybrids, but my car is very low. I know there’s like one speed bump at the nearby post office that I can’t do unless I like go around to the far end of it without scraping on the bottom. And then there’s the trunk space. Oh, that hurts on a road trip. On a road trip, I really like being able to put suitcases in the trunk and I can fit snacks and like a backpack, but not that much else.

1:28:27
BD: So in my Tesla Model 3, I have as much trunk space as any car I’ve ever owned. And it’s also got a frunk, the front trunk. Now it’s a bit smaller, but that’s two places to store stuff, but you fill the back with suitcases, you can fit a couple more suitcases up in the front.

1:28:43
CW: So yeah, you don’t have the combustible engine as well as the battery. We’ve got the two systems.

1:28:48
BD: Well, that’s true. Yeah, if you’ve got a hybrid, you still have an engine and the engine is the thing that takes up all the space.

CW: Yeah. Well, if we go full EV, we don’t have to worry about it, Ben.

BR: Duly noted.

BD: Do it.

CW: Well, Brian, thank you so much for joining us. It has been fun picking your brain about these various EV issues and myths and drawbacks and positives. Why don’t you tell listeners, once again, where they can find you?

BD: I am at Skeptoid.com for almost everything. That’s the Skeptoid podcast, find it wherever you get your podcasts, where I talk about EVs and all the other, basically examining the urban legends, the true science, true history behind urban legends, conspiracy theories, paranormal claims, kind of all the fun stuff that we always heard about and we want to know what’s truly going on with them. So Skeptoid.com.

CW: And will you be at SCICon this year in Vegas with your Skeptoid mafia, as you call it?

1:29:44
BD: We’re gonna be there, but we just go there mainly to schmooze with donors and stuff. We’re not, this year we’re not presenting or doing anything, we’re just gonna be there as ordinary attendees to basically meet with a lot of people who support what we do and press the flesh and just be present.

1:30:02
CW: Well, you heard it here. If you don’t want to be pressured into donating money to Skeptoid, avoid Brian Dunning at SCICon.

1:30:08
BD: Absolutely, because we’re going to get you.

(MUSIC)

1:30:26
CW: Well that was cool talking to Brian and I feel like deja vu, we’re going to be talking to him again real soon.

1:30:31
BR: Yes, I certainly will be because I have been signed on as a driver for his Death Valley tour later this month. So I’ll be out in Vegas commandeering or going commando. I forgot how he phrased it, but I’ll be rolling around Death Valley talking about legends and lore and just having a good time.

1:30:52
CW: So now are you gonna be driving like a like a fancy like four-wheel vehicle or are you guys just taking a bunch of rental cars out?

BR: I think the description the email I got was a fried out combi.

CW: Oh a what?

BR: A fried out combi.

CW: I have no idea what kind of vehicle that is but okay.

BR: Clearly you’re not a Man at Work fan never mind. It should be fine. It’ll be fine.

1:31:16
CW: And I’ll be attending SCICon and meeting up with hopefully many listeners. If you see me, stop me, say hello. We’ll chat, tell me all your complaints about the podcast, and I will relay them to Ben and make them his problem. All right. Take care, everybody. We’ll see you next time.

1:31:34
BR: Bye-bye.

1:31:35
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