We rate the claim that "electric vehicles are more efficient than internal combustion vehicles" as fake news

From Wealth Daily

Unplugging, reteaching, unblocking and de-Nazifying the most electric, ignorant, biased and racist fakeries in the week's fake news.

These 'savings' come at great cost

This week the Department of Energy released a propaganda piece about fuel cost savings of electric vehicles over gasoline. It's a perfect example of the mind-numbing sophistry you can expect from a government agency pushing a lie in an effort to form "public policy."

Of course, the poor saps over atThinkProgress latched onto it like a tick to a dog. Those progressive Greenies love anything that grows government and siphons more money out of the middle class – even if it's hardly progressive technology, given that electric cars are more than 100 years old -- and into their second (or is it their first?) religion*: the global warming scam. (*It's difficult to discern whether government or global warming is their first religion, and it may depend upon the day you ask.)

According to the pointy-heads at DOE:

Electric vehicles are more efficient than internal combustion vehicles, but fuel cost comparisons can be complicated because the price of gasoline and residential electricity vary considerably by state. To address this, the Department of Energy developed an eGallon tool that shows the fuel cost of operating a vehicle on regular gasoline versus electricity for any given distance.

ThinkProgress went even further, writing:

The DOE says "The average fuel cost savings for all states was 60%." But, in reality, the savings are going to be much, much larger — probably 80 percent or more. That's because the actual price most electric vehicle (EV) owners will be paying for electricity to charge their vehicles will be much lower than the DOE assumed.

But what the DOE – and the ninnymuggins at ThinkProgress – did not include in their "savings" analysis is the cost of making electric cars and the billions of dollars in government subsidies (ie, printed money, which is a hidden tax on everyone) required to make electric vehicles remotely affordable. And then there's the interest on the long-term loans required to make the purchase.

Just Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla (and SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp.) had raked in $4.9 billion in government largess by 2015. It's doubtless well north of $5 billion by now.

According to a report by the Los Angeles Times from 2015, Nevada gave Tesla $1.3 billion in incentives to build a battery factory near Reno. The Palo Alto company has also collected more than $517 million from competing automakers by selling environmental credits. In a regulatory system pioneered by California and adopted by nine other states, automakers must buy the credits if they fail to sell enough zero-emissions cars to meet mandates. The tally also includes some federal environmental credits.

The lefty investigative news organization Pro Publica reported that the electric car industry has received billions in government subsidies. The lithium mining operation Chemetall Foote Corp., which operates the only lithium mine in the U.S., got $28 million in "taxpayer money" to increase production at its plants in Nevada and North Carolina. Honeywell raked in $27 million from government to become the first domestic supplier of conductive salt for lithium batteries. The company that builds batteries for the Chevy Bolt and Ford Focus got $300 million from the government.

Tax incentives of thousands of dollars go to each purchaser of an electric vehicle. This is all money out of everyone's pocket And the federal government continues to fund the installation and upgrade of infrastructure for electric car charging stations.

A recent report by Investors.com found that when combining federal, state, and local subsidies, car buyers can get as much as $15,000 or more in government subsidies for buying an electric car. And it turns out these tax subsidies are simply another government giveaway to the "rich," something one would think the progressives at ThinkProgress would find deplorable.

Reviewing the latest figures of tax credits for electric car purchases, 79% were claimed by households with annual incomes greater than $100,000 per year. Combined with households making greater than $50,000 per year, upper-income taxpayers claimed 99% of the tax credits for electric cars. Government at every level is spending a significant sum on electric car subsidies. The total value of federal manufacturing grants and loans was $40.7 billion over the lifetime of the program, with another $2 billion in federal subsidies for electric car purchases. In California, another $140 million was appropriated for state electric car subsidies as part of the 2017-18 state budget.

And chargers aren't inexpensive. In-home chargers cost $500-$1,000, and having it professionally installed will double the cost. Public charging stations run $2,300 to $6,000 each.

Nor are electric cars really "clean." As Wired.com notes:

Each stage of an EV's life has environmental impacts, and while they aren't as obvious as a tailpipe pumping out fumes, that doesn't make them any less damaging. Let's start with the basics. Your electric car doesn't need gas, but it still might get its energy from burning carbon. It depends on how your local grid generates electricity. "If you use coal-fired power plants to produce the electricity, then all-electrics don't even look that much better than a traditional vehicle in terms of greenhouse gases," says Virginia McConnell, an economist at the environmental research firm Resources for the Future.

ThinkProgress claims that charging electric cars is cheap because the demand for electricity "has been flat for a decade – a trend that is projected to continue for the foreseeable future." That's a good thing, because current infrastructure in states like California can't handle the load already. And if everyone is forced into an electric car, which is where we're headed, demand for electricity would skyrocket.

Blackouts cost American businesses $150 billion per year, something else neither the DOE nor ThinkProgress figured into their "savings" calculations. And cars can't be charged when the electricity isn't flowing.

We rate the claim that "electric vehicles are more efficient than internal combustion vehicles" as fake news.