EV Flop?

I've been following the EV story since the early 2000s. I used to hang out on stock market message boards back then and closely followed the drama of a Canadian company called Zenn Motors who was partnered with a company in Texas called EEStor who claimed to have a revolutionary solid state hyper-mega-capacitor with immense energy density. Zenn Motors entire business was hyping the possibility that the EEStor energy storage system was going to be demonstrated any day now to pump their stock.

Eventually I got bored of that and just moved on. It was an interesting lesson though. There are lots of companies like that which make a living off greed and the good nature of "investors" who hope they've found the next big thing and will get obscenely rich from a $500 "investment". There are oil and gas companies like that, gold and silver miners, and many tech and biotech companies like that as well.

The interesting thing about that story is Zenn and EEStor zeroed in on the main problem with electric cars at the very inception of the EV mass market. The EEStor vaporware addressed the problems with chemical batteries: slow to charge, limited lifespan, low energy density. If the EEStor gizmo existed, EVs would be a no brainer replacement for ICE engines, but it doesn't.

Currently it's possible to build a pretty good car with lithium-ion batteries, but they have limitations and look to be relegated to niche use cases. Lots of engineering time and resources are currently being wasted on things like battery powered busses and trucks and heavy equipment, but that's probably at least partly funded by government funny money and all that effort will go into the trash.

One of the things that's very interesting about EVs is the original sales pitch of their simplicity = low cost and higher reliability did not pan out at all. A well made and maintained gasoline or diesel engine is probably going to outlast multiple $20,000 batteries, motors, and power electronics in a typical EV. Even though it has dozens or hundreds of moving parts, the process of manufacturing and assembling such a complicated mechanical contrivance is far superior to the latest electric tech crapola. 

Anyway, the reason I'm writing on this topic at all is the EV flop story is totally mainstream at this point. Everybody and their 80 year old mom knows it didn't work out as originally sold. The hype and propaganda and PR engine for that industry is out of gas apparently. Governments are still pushing EVs especially in Europe, but the audience for the government sales pitch dwindled to a handful of fanbois at this point.

The EV story has lots of similarities to COVID vaccine sales techniques. EVs were massively over-hyped and the sales pitch and reality were separated by a vast gulf. Eventually people can't help notice they were lied to. The reality of EVs is they're probably about as resource and energy intensive as ICE vehicles--possibly worse, and for typical drivers they're far more expensive and less capable and practical overall.

The EV topic isn't as politically partisan as COVID vaccines, though. For a while the COVID vaccine topic was dominated by shrieking leftist retards. Eventually most people figured out the vaccines didn't really work that well and only the most strident paid lefty oriented shills were left defending and pushing them. With the EV topic though, people seem capable of making an assessment based on observation and calculation instead of environmentalist hype.

People often make car purchases based on a fairly well thought out set of requirements, features offered by different cars, prices, total cost of ownership and the like, so the hype only works on some subset of the population.