Non-electric cars haven’t “guzzled” gas – most of them – for decades. There are a few that still do, models like the V8 powered Dodge Charger and Challenger most blatantly – and they are of course on the Automotive Enemies List, compiled by people who use “gas guzzler” in the way that some people (often the same people) use “racist” or “misogynist” to cat-call that which isn’t but which they simply don’t like for reasons of general disagreement.
In any event, why it is the business of the person who didn’t buy the “gas guzzler” and isn’t the one paying for the gas it “guzzles” is a question – per The Chimp – that is rarely asked. It is like Jones bitching about his neighbor’s lawn, which is larger than his own and takes his neighbor more time to mow. The neighbor isn’t knocking on Jones’ door and demanding he mow the lawn, nor pay for the fertilizer, etc.
The whole thing is motivated by nothing more than the offense taken – how dare you! – by people who simply don’t like it that someone else has chosen to buy a car that “guzzles” more gas than they think is proper etiquette.
Oh, yes – there is the bogey about “externalities” – this idea that the guzzling of gas imposes indirect costs, shouldered by others, such as the cost of maintaining carrier groups to protect the oil supply chain (never mind that America was energy independent, oil-wise, when Orange Man Bad) and of course, “climate changing” effusions of atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide, a pre-Rona beta test of kernel-of-truth exaggerated to hysterical proportions in order to impose draconian solutions to a problem that doesn’t exist, in any meaningful sense.
The climate changes. This is news? It gets episodically warmer, then colder. Sometimes more and sometimes less. It is all a function of incredibly complex, interwoven factors (e.g., solar cycles/activity, natural events on earth such as volcanic eruptions) that the “experts” themselves have not divined though many pretend to have certain knowledge of the works, with incredibly simplistic solutions proffered that seem to always entail “sacrifices” by the average guy that always seem to redound to the benefit, financial and otherwise, of the stratified elites most unctuously sermonizing about the necessity of these “sacrifices.”
And now these same people are shoving electric cars down the throats of the average guy like a farmer force-feeding a pate-de-foi-gras goose.
This is interesting, given that electric cars are energy hogs – precisely because they are being force-fed to the average guy as the does-it-all replacement for his not-electric car, even if that car doesn’t “guzzle” gas.
The energy-hogging being a function of the attempt to make electric cars capable of emulating the all-around versatility of not-electric cars, which can easily cruise for hundreds of miles at 70-plus MPH without stopping once along the way, unless the driver wants to.
In an electric car, you have to.
But short range is only one of the EV’s many problems and not the problem as regards energy-hogging, per se – though it does aggravate the problem.
In order to even approach the highway capabilities of any IC car – i.e., to have the ability to travel at speeds of 70-plus MPH for more than 150 miles without having to stop – an electric car must lug around enormous and enormously heavy battery packs. A typical EV battery pack weighs in excess of 1,000 pounds – which is hundreds of pounds more than a fully dressed cast iron big block V8 engine from the “gas hog” muscle car era of the ’60s weighs.
