A slew of furious social media posts, some garnering millions views, blasted the electric vehicle market after their expensive – and climatista-touted “green” vehicles – failed to operate amidst plunging winter temperatures.
Breitbart wrote:
Angry Tesla owners have been sharing videos of their vehicles refusing to start during the massive winter storm that impacted both the United States and Canada.
The Daily Mail reports that numerous Tesla owners have reported being unable to access their vehicles due to frozen door handles during a severe winter storm in Canada and the United States. Rachel Modestino, a meteorologist from Ontario, experienced this issue firsthand on December 23 when temperatures reached a low of 5º F and her car’s door latch failed to function.
To be certain, much of the vitriol was aimed less at electric vehicles in the macro and more at Elon Musk in the micro. That much was made obvious as many of the most popular videos limited their outrage to Tesla in particular. A sizeable portion of the population has been told to dislike Musk for his stance on free speech and his purchase of Twitter.
One of the more popular videos derided Musk by posting a short clip of their frozen-shut doors while captioning the scene “bet ya didn’t think of ice in the design.”
@elonmusk bet ya didn’t think of ice in the Tesla design 💀 #ONStorm pic.twitter.com/4nPhle9eh4
— Rachel Modestino TWN (@ThatMetGirl) December 23, 2022
Of course, childish leftists blaming Elon Musk for their failed purchases is the hallmark of short-sightedness of zombie sheep. As many articles written from both a left and right perspective have noted, cold temperatures are a massive problem for battery-powered cars.
In a frighteningly famous example, an early 2022 snowstorm in Virginia stranded countless drivers on even the major freeway system of I-95. In many cases, drivers were stranded in their cars for over 24 hours as emergency crews slowly unraveled the wrecks, cleared the snow, and got stalled vehicles moving again.
For EV owners, the cold drained batteries faster than gas-powered cars used their fuel to run the heater, leading to massive concerns about freezing to death.
The Washington Post, one of the most ardent proponents of ridding the world of fossil fuels, conceded in an article shortly after the Virginia blizzard that electric vehicle owners were right to “be anxious” and faced concerning conditions.
It is a scientific fact that batteries of all kinds lose capacity more rapidly in cold weather, and that includes the sophisticated lithium-ion ones used by Teslas and other EVs. Carmakers can, and do, mitigate cold-weather “range anxiety” through various technologies; Tesla is touting a new “heat pump” to extend winter range. Drivers can save battery power by, say, turning off the heat. The issue cannot be eliminated, however, as Tesla acknowledges on its corporate website.
Any EV driver stuck on I-95 was right to be anxious — not only about a rapidly dying battery but also about recharging it. Cold would make that process much more time-consuming, assuming there was a charging station nearby, and that the electric power system hadn’t gone out (as it did in parts of Virginia on Monday).
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