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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Breitbart; Police forces in Britain are facing questions over the waste of millions of pounds purchasing electric vehicles which are not up to the job of chasing criminals or responding to emergency situations.
Police ‘waste’ £1.5MILLION on electric cars that they admit are useless for chasing criminals because they ‘can’t go fast enough or far enough without a battery change’
- Reports found cars do not meet demands of urgent response or pursuit driving
- Forces have bought at least 448 environmentally-friendly vehicles to help them
- However almost all cars and vans are being used in non-emergency situations
By MARTIN BECKFORD FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 09:04 AEDT, 24 December 2019 | UPDATED: 10:45 AEDT, 24 December 2019
Police have spent millions of pounds on electric cars they admit are useless for chasing suspects or rushing to help victims.
Forces around the country have bought at least 448 environmentally-friendly vehicles to help them meet green energy targets.
But almost all of the cars and vans are being used in non-emergency situations or by chiefs to get to work.
Official police reports conceded that electric vehicles cannot meet the demands of urgent response or pursuit driving. They take too long to charge up to be ready for 999 calls and could run out of battery before a shift ends.
…
Isn’t this senseless waste of precious police resources just the epitome of green groupthink?
Greens know renewables are not viable in their current form, at least the smart greens know this – but they still advocate spending billions of dollars building them.
Any police chief with a minute of operational experience must have known upfront that electric vehicles were useless – but they all went ahead and bought hundreds of the things.
When historians look back at our time, it won’t be the delusions of impending eco-doom which define us, it will be the mind boggling waste, the cash expenditures authorized by politicians and senior executives who knew upfront what they were buying would not work, but paid the money anyway.
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That’s 1970’s Lego, how DARE you!
You beat me to that meme. HOW DARE YOU.
Young people will not forget that we bought them Legos and then played with them yourselves. (Or, perhaps My Little Pony, but that is another thing.)
On the other hand Stars are still a hot topic.
Oh the Horror…Their PLASTIC
A derivative of Petrochemicals
Wonder if they’re bade by the Plaztec Indians
Thank, Patrick MJD, that made me laugh at 6AM, first thing before coffee.
Regards,
Bob
I owned that set! Back when Lego men not only didn’t have arms, but didn’t have faces either.
(Happy sigh)
On topic, why am I surprised at this finding? Unless a vehicle needs to be exhaust free (indoor forklifts) there are few viable professional roles for EV. Here in my little home city the council has been signally for over a decade with an electric bus (painted green, just so you know).
Thankfully it went out of service once the battery died for several years but when it did ‘work’ it was unreliable. The council ran it as part of the free local community loop service alongside a couple of conventional 19 seat diesel buses and it struggled. This was a one hour loop service and this green monster would regularly get to being 15 to 20 minutes late. It would also struggle with hills. You got to enjoy the aircon cutting in and out as the power management system prioritised the wheels.
From memory they could run it for 3 hours and then needed to charge it again.
Great bus, unless you had to catch it.
Stupid thing is still around because good money after bad.
(Unhappy sigh)
Maybe that’s the cost of getting people to see sense. …
… but the result of the last UK election suggests that the people got there first.
Liberals like to think of conservatives as stupid. I wonder how many liberals can recite the Iliad from memory. Boris Johnson can. Liberals fancy that, because they’ve got a degree or two, that they’re educated. It’s kind of sad really, especially if their degrees are in something like women’s studies. We used to joke about degrees in basket weaving. How could we have predicted the total abysmal lack of scholarship that has overrun half of our university departments. /rant
I don’t think a bit of rote learning really demonstrates intelligence. I hope he’s more than just a one-trick pollie.
But Obama reading from a teleprompter showed how brilliant he was?
Trump can speak for hours without a written speach or teleprompter, but it is easier when you have values, not just poll tested talking points.
Well, Obumma could read (assuming he wasn’t just repeating what the ear-phone in his gigamongous ear was prompting).
Obama hardly ever held a news conference.
Said he would be transparent. The biggest liar president in
modern times. Said I would save $2500. My health insurance
went from $5500 to $11000.
No, but getting a SCHOLARSHIP to Eton, does…
It is standard to disparage rote learning. That prejudice resulted in the failed experiment with the ‘new math’.
The underpinning of understanding is domain specific knowledge. In math, that requires rote learning of things like the times tables. In business education, it requires actually knowing about the industry for which you’re writing a case study. It’s why most Harvard MBAs are lousy managers. MBA education that relies on case studies rewards BS much more than wisdom.
Knowledge matters a lot. If you want to say anything sensible about the Iliad, it helps to have it memorized.
I agree with you about the math. When I was tutoring math at a local middle school several years ago I can’t tell you how many of the students couldn’t tell you what 4 * 4 was without a calculator. Without a knowledge of the basic times tables it becomes almost impossible to understand how to solve for variables in algebra using simutaneous equations or understanding how to balance chemical equations.
He is the author of several books on Roman civilisation and the history of London, has knowledge of the main European languages as well as Latin and Greek, so probably quite intelligent. But also said to be rather prone to complacency and laziness. I doubt that he is up until the “wee hours” studying official documents as Mrs Thatcher did -other types of figures perhaps.
Whatever you may say about Boris – and I have said a bit – he is lucky.
Lucky in that the Leader of the Labour Party is an unreconstructed Marxist, who came with a complete crew of unemployable innumerates.
Lucky in that the Leader [am I overstating the case?] of the Liberal Democrats [how crass can you be with a non-applicable Party name?] was Poor Daft Jo ‘Swinson’.
Auto
Boris’ intellectual gifts go far beyond a good memory. He, like Trump, is a TV performer, but also a serious scholar, as well as an important journalist. His reports from Brussels almost single-handedly created Tory Euroskepticism, formerly the province of fringe Labour loons.
Here he goes toe to toe in defense of classical Greek civilization against Mary Beard a leading historian of ancient Rome, herself a TV personality:
https://youtu.be/2k448JqQyj8
I read a comment by a Greek woman who studied all the classical Greek stuff in high school, and she said she couldn’t understand a thing he said.
Homeric Greek differs even from Attic. I studied it in college, and Boris nailed it.
It’s because we study Homeric poetry in modern Greek phonology, which is very, very different than the Erasmian, whereby most non-Greek Europeans study it.
By the way, Erasmian phonology is closer to the original, but quite off, too.
(Most Greeks are extremely uneducated, so my advice is you never, ever have any faith in what they say at all!)
OK, so a native Greek speaker who studied the Illiad knows less about the subject than those who studied it in non-Greek schools. Got it.
https://twitter.com/YiokastiM/status/1209466603030667266
Erasmian phonology is an artifact of Roman Catholic scholarship. It began as a practical joke on Erasmus, who once he realized what happened disavowed it. So no wonder the woman mentioned above couldn’t understand a pronunciation that only exists in western academia.
@icisil
She’s a native Greek speaker???
Modern Greeks DO NOT speak ancient Greek.
The two languages are vastly different.
The former is my native language and the latter I studied six years, you?
Erasmian phonology is closer to the original phonology of Homeric Greek than modern Greek phonology is. Some of it is wrong, though.
And Johnson has a British accent.
Therefore, it is pretty improbable that a Greek lefty would have understood him. She couldn’t and she had no intention to.
I have watched the videos.
He does speak Homeric, but with an Erasmian phonology and a British accent.
It is very funny, yes, but Johnson is a clown already…
Hehe
As my Dad always said “educated fools”
Don’t be silly, it is Underwater Basket Weaving….
Its useful if one intends a career in foreign affairs because it teaches how power structures interact, and students can come to the subject bereft of any prejudices that the last thousand years of history may have imbued them with. 🙂
The Police/Fire/Emergency Vehicles shouldn’t have to depend on unreliables to power their vehicles. BUT, if criminals were limited to EVs it would make police work easier.
But they are so Green when the Plod use them to visit Brits at home to query them on the “intent” of their on line comments.
Bureaucrats do not care if the expenditures are pointless and wasteful,in fact that is almost a must.
Agreed – it’s easy to see why they were purchased, whoever was on the purchasing board got great big promotions and maybe some kickbacks for buying these, while anyone who said they needed to stick to the Tried and True was probably kicked back down to night shift.
Is there more to this? 448 vehicles for 1.5 million means 3,348.21 per vehicle.
The way I read the title is that the police spent an additional $1.5 million on EVs, after they stated how useless the cars are.
That’s mid-range mobility scooter prices in the UK.
About 1/2 price for a Standard Segue scooter.
Perhaps the Bobbies will be assigned Segues
Bout right for a golf cart
Stupid is as stupid does.
Got an emergency? Bring HORSEPOWER please!
999, … what’s your emergency?
“My electric car didn’t charge fast enough for me to get away from the guy who just robbed me.”
OPERATOR RESPONDS: Stay calm, stay where you are, … as soon as the next available police car finishes charging, someone will be there to help you.
It’s probably the same elsewhere, but here in Cream Tea Country of Devon, UK, in rural crime situations when a crime is reported the police simply say “We’ll get someone out to you as soon as we can!”. On the other hand, like the old joke about it, if a caller says “There’s somebody trying to break into our house & we’re elderly & frightenend what might happen, oh wait, it’s ok don’t rush, my husband’s just shot him!”, there’ll be half a dozen police cars, two helicopters, & an Armed Response Team surrounding your home within minutes!!! Can’t wait for them to get an electric helicopter, that’s gonna be some real fun!!!!
+1000
I have always said that to get a quick response say that if the Police don’t hurry you will have to kill the burglar for your own safety.
There was a recent case of an EV police car chasing some bad people and it actually ran out of charge and had to stop.
Yep. I know from personal experience that if the cops seem disinterested, telling them you’re going to handle the situation yourself brings an immediate response.
“But almost all of the cars and vans are being used in non-emergency situations or…………….
……………. by chiefs to get to work.”
well…nice to know they didn’t have to buy their own cars
To each application an energy source best suited to purpose.
Right. For anything other than the most dire situation, a cop on a tricycle is issued, shouldering a plastic bat.
The green politicians aren’t nearly ambitious enough. What’s needed is electric fire trucks.
I propose a new internet law named after me.
Now THAT has to be the [Blockquote] of the year
A great law, but please allow me to amend it a little:
“It’s hard to think up with something so stupid that someone hasn’t already built.”
What is really shambolic is that when a vehicle runs out of juice before shift change, the police who should be out on patrol are sitting in the station drinking coffee. And if the battery is good for an entire shift, the next shift can’t go out until the vehicle is recharged.
Unless their is a drastic change in charging time there is only one solution: increase the number of cars so you always have one fully charged to swap for one needing charging. That would be a budget buster, and you are still failing to meet the need for speed.
A Tesla accelerates 0-60 in 2 seconds and has a range of +300 miles. I dont see how they lack in soeed?
If you use the 0-60 in 2 seconds then their range drops completely, you do not get both.
So a Tesla which has been out on patrol fo 6 hours will not be able to give high speed chase.
https://news.sky.com/story/police-officer-forced-to-give-up-chase-as-tesla-electric-patrol-car-runs-low-on-battery-11819706
The other thing you have to remember is that Police Vehicles have much more Electricity intensive equipment and are much heavier than standard vehicles.
I would not like to see a £100,000 Tesla used in a rolling road block to try and stop a determined bunch of Robbers.
It would be very badly damaged.
If you need an American vehicle for a roadblock, I recommend the M1 Abrams, or any of the other full size SUVs.
Not to mention fire bomb an EV, and it very quickly blows up, one small electrical short and goodbye. Try a Molotov on one, and you bet it will be entertaining.
I’m waiting to see the day some stinking rebel goes up in smoke in a greeny greeny EV van, or try tell them the resulting smoke is non toxic and not harmful to the ummm atmosphere…
Hey but didn’t we know all this stuff from the ‘leccy milkfloats that drove cow juice deliveries to people’s doorstops daily until very recently in London?
0 to 60 has nothing to do with a high speed chase, unless whoever you’re chase is changing speed or direction a lot.
The point of a high speed chase is HIGH SPEED. How long can a Tesla keep up with a Dodge Challenger doing 120? And I’m betting it drains its batteries in a lot less then 300 miles at those speeds.
Besides which, how do you KNOW that Tesla has a 300+ mile range? Because the brochure said so? Because, the nifty software tells you so? The only way to KNOW your Tesla has a 300+ mile range is to drive it until it stops and see how far you went and that’s not very good for your Tesla battery, so, you’ll never want to do that.
The range of a Tesla, or any other electric vehicle, may or may not be what is showing on the screen and you have NO WAY to know if that number is accurate or is being fudged if you NEVER drive any further than a few dozen miles a day. You’re at the mercy of the software and what it tells you and the software can me made to tell you anything the manufacturer wants and, in most cases, on the fly. Oh, and don’t depend upon how much electricity it takes to ‘FULLY’ charge your electric vehicle. It will only draw what the software says it can and, if a 3/4 charge is what the software says is a full charge, then who the hell is to say otherwise? AND, you’ll never know you’re driving around only partially charged until you try and go on a long range jaunt and the excuses for why you only managed to get 200 miles on a full charge will be legion.
Think I’m being silly? Well, just take a look back at what Telsa did when Tesla owners who HAD NOT opted for the extended range battery option were tying to flee a hurricane in Florida. Turns out, many had the extended range battery and Tesla pushed out an update to vehicles in the path of the hurricane to allow them to utilize that extended range. Hmmm… Seems to me that Electric Vehicle manufacturers can, through the use of subterfuge, make it seem like the batteries in their cars last forever and never degrade over time, or very little that is. Again, who’s going to say otherwise? Gonna’ take it to an independent auto-repair shop and have them do a full diagnostic? If such a shop exists it will be using a manufacturer produced and approved diagnostic tool that will show everything is peachy keen because that’s what it’s supposed to show. About the only way to know if the battery pack is degraded would be to remove it, cut it open, and test each and every cell, individually, to identify how many were bad. Of course, there would come a point where there’s no hiding how badly a battery is degraded but, if that reality can be pushed out several years by fudging things a bit, then the positive PR of showing doubters of battery life wrong will be worth it.
Think something like that can’t happen?
Cast your gaze the direction of VW and their emissions standards scandal for a lesson on how an auto manufacturer can get away with using software to FUDGE numbers for years. Turned out the superior engine technology in use by VW was the software they were using to cheat the emissions testing and they made billions hyping low emissions and high MPG as a selling point for their diesel powered vehicles.
If a degraded battery pack bursts into flames and turns the entire vehicle into a puddle of aluminum, will there be enough left to determine the cause? Just wondering.
Rant over.
Cheers
Max
It’s probably cheaper to build all the battery packs the same and use software to limit the range to what the owner has paid for.
Yes, using only the middle 60 kw of a 100 kw battery lets it last about 15 years. The tradeoff is that eithrt Tesla never has to pay out warranty on the ’60’ or gets more money up front and still seldom has a claim.
Probably the police EVs are more like fully enclosed golf cart sized parking monitor units than P100 mosel S Teslas.
Unless it’s a motorway or A road, they’ll be plenty of twists and turns, most UK car chases end up going around the local back streets in an attempt to shake of the police car.
You do realize that the UK is relatively small, 480km will get you about half way across the country, transiting through multiple police districts, they could swap out as many Teslas ( assuming that’s the vehicle in use) as they want during the chase. Long distance chases are rare in the UK.
Anyway, EV’s are perfect for their intended role of patrolling the suburbs and towns, along with a massive saving in fuel costs.
jtom,
There is a solution, don’t bother with them in the first place.
I imagine there are plenty of non-emergency uses. I don’t know if there are 448 non-emergency uses, but I guess that depends on the size of the city.
They just need to invest in really long extension cords…
Or maybe they can install bicycle pedals connected to a small generator they can use to keep the charge up?
Overhead electricity lines, it worked for trolleybuses
Works fine, so long as the criminals agree to only to do their business in areas serviced by over head lines.
Or a Tesla Tender™.
Or an ICE “pusher”.
Meals on Wheels?
The entire CO2 Hypothesis is so utterly stupid its a painfully.
A painfully incomplete sentence.
Needs a verb.
What needs a verb; the sentence above or the CO2 hypothesis?
Yes.
The entire CO2 Hypothesis is so utterly stupid its a painfully. Hypothesis.
Many persuits involve helicopters too. So they will be deploying battery powered helicopters with battery powered FLIR at night? Yeah right!
An electric drone helicopter with a mounted machine gun is actually a thing.
Don’t think the UK Police forces have anything like that available, yet.
An electric drone helicopter with a mounted artificial intelligence (AI) extra-heavy machine gun (EHMG) is actually a thing.
Ask your local weapon retailer.
https://www.google.com/search?q=bruce+willis+the+jackal&oq=Bruce+willis+the+schakal&aqs=chrome.
Not to mismatch with https://www.google.com/search?q=bruce+willis+the+jackal&oq=Bruce+willis+the+schakal&aqs=chrome.
An electric drone helicopter with a mounted artificial intelligence (AI) extra-heavy machine gun (EHMG) is actually a thing.
Ask your local weapon retailer.
https://www.google.com/search?q=bruce+willis+the+jackal&oq=Bruce+willis+the+schakal&aqs=chrome.
Not to mismatch with
https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-huawei&sxsrf=ACYBGNSNpEG1DkjQN7TiMzO-wFaIvxMu9g%3A1578433776884&ei=8PwUXsbUNYzamwWU77XQBg&q=Schwarzenegger+cigar+helicopter&oq=Schwarzenegger+cigar+helicopter&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-serp.
I have inside/personal information about what’s in the works in the way of electric vehicles, and you know what? Because of stories like this WUWT post and other information readily available on the web I’m pretty sure it’s plain ol’ bullshit.
Really? They aren’t suitable? Who’d have thought?
Meanwhile here in Oz, a newspaper story today is encouraging children to nag their parents to do more about climate change, because of all those nasty fires that are actually rather common in Australia when its summer and a drought, worsened by people living in the bush who are not allowed to remove trees close to their homes because of idiot Council regulations.
I am advocating starting with a reverse climate nag of getting the kids to cut their emissions by 75%. Remove all phones, electronic games, access to the internet , dishwashers (make them wash and dry by hand for their chores) and walk everywhere. Should be fun watching the reaction. Because these kids have been brainwashed thoroughly but with almost nothing about the consequences.
Excellent idea.
You are the generation that wants this; you walk the walk!
What country are you in? All authorities and websites in oz encourage tree clearing around dwellings. And how does going Luddite have anything to do with climate change. Solar powers all devices for us in bris.
Duh. A simple study would have told them that, and it probably did, but they continued to gain some social justice points.
If the chase takes our green crime fighters far from the city center they may have trouble finding a place to recharge if they hope to return home.
This is why electric vehicles must be compulsory for everyone and vehicles with thermal engines banned everywhere, with NO exceptions, because otherwise, as an example, thugs could commit their misdeeds with fire trucks or ambulances.
/s
s/ If gasoline engines are outlawed, only outlaws will have gasoline engines.
Marauders will rule.
Just like with firearms
Yeah, that high energy density fuel, that can be pumped in minutes, not hours, and organic, too, is politically incongruent, thus the justification for wasting the environment, a blight on the ecosystem, and the windmill gauntlets in a planned avian green new deal.
Donald L. Klipstein
” Is there more to this? 448 vehicles for 1.5 million means 3,348.21 per vehicle” I immediately saw that dude, and you can bet the media hasn’t.
“No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.”
–America’s Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution,Angelo M. Codevilla
The police are Subject to Orders. Their masters ordered “buy green vehicles”, so they did.
Replace the masters. Or at least mock them unceasingly.
That’s MY tax money they’re spending.
The rationale behind taxes is that the government know how to spend MY money better than I do. Nice to see it demonstrated.
They don’t call em ‘Noddy’ cars for no reason!