American Taxpayers On The Hook For EV Charging Stations

Help me out here, readers.

Was there a time in the 20th Century when U.S. taxpayers spent millions of dollars to build gas stations across the fruited plain?

Or did the free market take care of that when people traded in their horses for Model Ts?

I’m asking because the Biden administration announced that it’s spending $100 million of OUR dollars to repair charging stations around the country, replacing ”old” ones that are already failing.

In the EV world, “old” chargers were built before 2019. Yep, four years later and they’re already antiquated.

Difficulty finding places to charge EV batteries is one of the main reasons most Americans won’t even consider an electric vehicle.

In a Wednesday story headlined “Even Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg Can’t Find a Reliable EV Charger: U.S. Launches $100 Million Effort To Upgrade Public Chargers That Have Become Scourge Of Drivers,” The Wall Street Journal reported that about 6,000 chargers are “temporarily unavailable.”

This expenditure appears to be in addition to the $7.5 billion Biden’s Infrastructure Bill already earmarked to build new charging stations across the nation.

Any time government has to meddle in free markets, it’s to goose Americans into unwanted behavior.

Most of the WSJ story is behind a paywall, but here’s the lede:

America’s electric-vehicle drivers are increasingly unhappy with public charging , as problems that include glitchy or inoperable equipment seem to be getting worse, not better.

Now the U.S. government plans to launch a $100 million effort to try to tackle the reliability issue and make public charging less annoying and more consistent. The funding aims to repair and replace thousands of old or out-of-commission chargers that are contributing to a roll-of-the-dice sensation among EV drivers, who never know what they might find.

Around one in five attempts at charging at a public station outside of the Tesla network is a bust, according to an August study from J.D. Power.

Fact is, most of us like gas-powered cars. What we don’t like are the sky-high gas prices caused by Biden’s deliberate attempts to shut down American oil production and deplete our Strategic Petroleum Reserves. Any minute now, Biden will be on his knees again, begging the Saudis to pump more oil.

Seems our C-student president is incapable of understanding what’s he’s done. By intentionally driving up the cost of crude, he’s enriching Russia, which is nothing more than a giant gas station. By making Russia’s main export more valuable, Biden is actually helping to fund Putin’s war machine in Ukraine.

Back to the darling of the left: electric cars.

While overpriced EVs might be delightful for those who can charge their cars at home and who drive no more than a few miles a day, they’re a major headache for those in more rural areas, or apartment dwellers who don’t have a way to do overnight charging.

In a scathing story last month in The Federalist, Stella Morabito wrote about her week driving a Tesla: “I Rented A Tesla For A Week And Am Totally Sold On Gas-Powered Cars.”

Morabito listed a litany of problems she and her husband encountered during their miserable experience driving through Washington State:

First, they found battery draining to be “stress-inducing” as they spent most of their road trip constantly calculating miles and trying to find charging stations online.

Once they found a charger, they discovered that the length of time they were left to kill was intolerable, often more than an hour.

She also worried about their personal safety when they were forced to charge the car in a deserted and dark parking lot.

Finally this: “Texting while driving is required,” she noted. That is due to controls being handled from a computer screen.

“After test-driving one for an entire week, we learned we will never buy a Tesla or any electric vehicle as long as we have the option of gas-powered cars or even hybrids.”

Look, if folks want electric vehicles and are unbothered by the knowledge that poor children in Africa are forced to strip-mine cobalt and lithium to make their batteries, well that’s their business.

But using our tax dollars to make charging their EVs more convenient is wrong.

Here’s an idea: Levy a charging tax on EV owners to pay for the building of new charging stations and for the maintenance of those malfunctioning four-year-old chargers.

Let the rest of us use our money on the astronomical cost of gas.