What will American roads look like in the not-to-distant future if Barack Obama realizes his version of Hitler's dream to create a volkswagen for the American people - an electric car for every man, and for every man an electric car (purchased from Government Motors with taxpayer subsidies)?
At the Washington Post, Charles Lane sits stuck in Wednesday's snowstorm, and contemplates life in Obama's bizzaro world:
The situation could have been worse, I realized: My fellow commuters and I could have been trying to make it home in electric cars, like the ones President Obama is constantly promoting, most recently in his State of the Union address.
It is a basic fact of physical science that batteries run down more quickly in cold weather than they do in warm weather, and the batteries employed by vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf or the Chevy Volt are no exception.
When the temperature drops the chemical reactions happen more slowly and the battery cannot produce the same current that it can at room temperature. A change of ten degrees can sap 50% of a battery's output.
...The batteries also have to work harder so the effective range of the car is also significantly reduced...Cold has a negative impact on all aspects of battery operation.
Alongside the negative impact on the batteries cold also has a negative impact on the driver as well. Drivers need to be warm to operate the vehicle effectively so on top of the reduced range and power of the batteries just from the temperature they also must operate the car heater to keep you warm. This will further reduce the range of the car.
...for the Leaf, which touts a 100-mile range under optimum conditions (i.e., mild weather and no big hills like the ones I had to negotiate on 16th Street), Nissan is designing a "cold weather package" of options. But neither the cost nor the availability date has been announced.
So if Obama's goal of 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015 bears fruit, and if global warming continues its curious course of not actually occurring, expect to see thousands of Americans who took Obama at his word to be killed, most likely by exposure, as they freeze to death in discharged cars, or who lie frostbitten in snowbanks after attempting to walk home those last few miles after the battery has coughed it's last frozen wheeze...
Just think of the third-world imagery - a nation brought to heel by a snowstorm, with abandoned cars and dead bodies littering the streets, while somewhere, a sanitation department, upset with their union contract, refuses to plow streets.
And just think - this is the future Barack Obama aspires to, for all of us...