“If more people buy EVs instead of internal-combustion vehicles, how will
governments make up the tax shortfall? Right now, about 40 per cent of what
you pay per litre for fuel at the pump goes to governments.”
I spend a lot of time these days reading, listening and discussing the use of electricity to propel automobiles compared to conventional gasoline and other alternatives, such as hydrogen. It comes with the job. The ground is shifting, and it’s better to be on top of what’s happening than running to catch up.
So, I’ve been reading about how Big Oil will react when everybody starts running out to buy electric cars. And how the end of internal-combustion will be just like the end of film for cameras — it will (seemingly) come out of nowhere and be so sudden that everybody will wake up one day and wonder what happened.
And that some European countries will ban the sale of gasoline and Diesel-powered cars as of such-and-such a date. And the province of Quebec will soon start fining automakers that don’t sell enough EVs.
And then there are the questions I’ve been asking in discussions, for which I don’t hear too many answers.
We, apparently, produce scads of excess power. This is produced overnight when people aren’t using it. We — or so the story goes — have to “dump” it (sell it for much less than it’s worth). If this is so, why do we have an electricity crisis in Ontario, where people can’t afford to pay their electrical bills and it’s sufficiently serious that the provincial government is paying for advertising saying not to worry, it has a plan.
Every summer, people are asked to either turn down or turn off their air conditioners so that we don’t risk brownouts or, worse, blackouts. What will happen on those days when a million electric cars are plugged into the system?
For the rest of this column: https://www.thestar.com/autos/2017/08/12/why-gasoline-and-diesel-will-be-around-for-a-long-time-to-come.html