Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has a drive to remake America based on the belief that it’s only a matter of time before carbon emissions from vehicles destroy life on earth.
So, Ocasio-Cortez came to Congress with big plans to force all Americans out of gasoline and diesel engine vehicles and into electric models through the Green New Deal.
But her socialist dreams keep hitting the brick walls of reality.
Among numerous obstacles to transition to a new form of transportation is the utter lack of charging stations.
Rather than let the market develop naturally—at a pace dictated by power grid capacity—Democrats are swiping taxpayer dollars for their pet projects.
Joe Biden has used major funding bills to redirect a significant amount of taxpayer money to build charging stations nationwide.
His ultimate goal is to make taxpayers pay for a nationwide network of 500,000 EV charging stations.
But reality just destroyed Biden and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s “green” dreams.
The handful of Americans already driving electric vehicles are already discovering they aren’t able to use the public charging stations that already exist.
A J.D. Power and Kelley Blue Book (KBB) study found that electric vehicle owners reported that their local public charging stations aren’t working more than 20% of the time.
Additionally, J.D. Power found last August that 20% of the more than 11,500 EV drivers they talked to couldn’t charge their vehicle at the nearest public charging station during the first of half of the year.
And things aren’t getting any better.
KBB discovered that number jumped to 21% when data from the second half of 2022 was included.
On top of that, 72% of EV drivers reported ending up in a situation where they were unable to charge their vehicle due to the station being out of service, 12% reported dealing with long lines or wait times, and a full 10% said they experienced payment system errors.
Brent Gruber, J.D. Power’s executive director of global automotive, says the problems plaguing charging stations are a massive obstacle—one that won’t be solved by the government’s planned massive building project.
“We can’t add new chargers and let all those old ones fall into a state of disrepair,” Gruber explained in an interview with KBB.
“We have to manage the maintenance of those as well because that’s the only way we’re going to meet the consumer demand,” he added.
While J.D. Power didn’t name the companies involved, the study found that failure rates ranged from 3% at one compared to 39% at another.
Democrats have blown through billions of dollars in an attempt to build up the infrastructure for electric vehicles, but the country remains unable to handle what’s already on the road, much less cope with an influx of millions more electric vehicles hitting the road.
The list of problems surrounding mass adoption of electric vehicles continues to grow more onerous.
California, which is leading the nation in the push to force drivers to part from their gasoline powered vehicles, has already illustrated the problems coming when state officials had to warn electric vehicle owners to avoid charging during a heat wave that threatened to cause the electrical grid to collapse.
Political Animal News will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this ongoing story.
