I feel bad about this. I shouldn’t have to do this, but you’ll soon see why I can’t not. And then I suppose we’ll see whether actual people make a difference.
…as opposed to corporate-types who believe they can eyeball the situation on the ground level from their ivory tower stools and assess the numbers incredibly well. So you think you got us all figured out, do you?
Guess we’ll just see about that, now won’t we?
I called them right up.
I pled with them, quite literally, for hours. On recorded lines, even. And the reason I feel additionally bad is because I delayed reporting all of this stuff to all of you because I was foolish enough and optimistic enough to believe I could help Electrify America sort through the colossal mess they’ve strewn right straight across the United States.
Before anyone figured it out and got all depressed about it.
And you thought Elon Musk was ambitious.
I told them, “Look, I’ll test them all. I’ll test every single last station you deploy. Every one at EVERY location. Give you the full report. I’m on the road anyway — just give me an access card so that you’re not preauthorizing $50 on my account
EVERY.
SINGLE.
TIME.
I.
TRY.
TO.
CHARGE.”
I can’t afford that goofy shit. Not only that, but once I get to five charges in a day, my credit union cuts me off like I’m an alcoholic at a dive bar and it’s 2:55 in the morning:
“You’ve had one too many already tonight, buster. Why don’t you go home?”
You Tesla people, you really don’t know. You don’t know how easy you have it. Hell, I’ve been on Turo. I did the four-day 2400 mile Model 3 adventure thing. I’ve seen your damned [s3xy] Supercharger network. You guys make me sick
with envy
you’ve got it so stinking easy.
Me?
More often than not I’ve got to call Electrify America up if I want to charge at an Electrify America location. Sorta get ‘permission,’ ya know?
It’s like some kind of weird club where the secret codeword changes on a daily basis, but you never know what hour in the day it’s going to change — so you’re left with your cord <ahem> in your hand sheepishly calling
1–833–632–2778
over and over again. I don’t know how many reps they have but I sure as hell am on a first name basis with quite a few of them:
“Oh hey Sheila. Yeah, it’s me again. Listen, can you have a look at station 1001–104–2, I think there’s something wrong with it. Yes, I’ll hold.”
…
{bad music}
…
{more bad music}
…
So I ask you, American public, is this really what you want?
I mean, I get it. I really do. We all want to feel good about our chances. We all want to believe we can lick this global warming thing good and proper. We all want to hear the great comeback story. We want to think Volkswagen cleaned up their act. Got it together. That they’re gonna come and save our collective day from those ‘nitwits’ over in Palo Alto.
“Can’t wait for the [insert ambitious prototype with ambitious range and ambitious charging here]. Volkswagen has really knocked it out of the park with that one.”
“er…but they haven’t built anything functional yet…”
“Oh yeah, but they will. They promised to. Look at the stations they’re putting in everywhere — they’ve even got their own Supercharger network.”
“Um…yeah…about that…”
NO.
No they really DO NOT. It’s not even remotely close. Not only that but
- they do not appear to care
- corporate shows signs of believing that no one was going to figure this next little ‘game’ they cooked up anywhere near as soon as someone actually did.
That person happening to be me.
They say, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
I believe that’s true. That’s why — even though I was pretty furious when I found out about Dieselgate
Silently I sorta thought, “Good show, Volkswagen! You almost pulled it off.”
And in some ways they did pull it off.
They lied their asses right off. So much so I’m not even sure what they could possibly be sitting on — I mean besides the stools mentioned above.
They betrayed consumer confidence to an exquisite degree: they perpetrated a calculated fraud of epic proportions, the emissions their vehicles produced (in contrast to what the testing showed) undoubtedly contributed to the premature deaths of countless people, and yet no one in charge actually went to jail. Say what you like, but that’s sheer corporate genius.
At least the first time someone pulls something like that off it sure is.
I mean really think about it for a minute:
Someone has to stay up pretty late at night and be pretty desperate to come up with a devious trick like that one, and there has to be some serious coordination to execute it on that kind of scale.
There’s no way some middle manager or junior engineer who isn’t connected all the way up to the top pulls that kind of thing off without quite a few hushed meetings taking place. Not without the tacit (if not formally written somewhere) approval of the higher ups.
Why would they even try it?
Probably saved them hundreds of millions of dollars is why. The prize for successfully faking the test was hundreds of millions. At least it would have been if they hadn’t gotten caught.
And so you can probably imagine what kind of pressure it took for Volkswagen to agree to pay $15.3B in the U.S. to settle a constellation of civil and criminal actions against them: It’s like being forced to make the choice of a bullet in the knee or one in the head. Given the chance to invest a significant fraction of that into a subsidiary that you own why wouldn’t you? In stations that you own?
Who cares whether they actually work or not? By the time anyone figures out they’re junk you’ll be sitting on a beach earning twenty per-cent.
Right, Hans?
Wrong.
Not this time and not on MY watch you sons of bitches.
Many of you probably haven’t been in ‘this game’ for long enough to see the riotously terrible stations UNaffectionately known as ‘Blink’ strewn all over the landscape. The word on Blink was they took some $100 million from the Federal government (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) and ostensibly invested it all in CHAdeMO chargers across the U.S.
Invested it in their pockets is what they did.
Maintenance?
Why bother? The principles of the company had already made enough money to live comfortably on, and once they’d done in that company — and sold the chargers for $3.3M during Chapter 11 — they no doubt imagined they’d live comfortable lives — free from the worry of being called out by a pestilent analyst like myself, years later, for the fraud they’d perpetrated on the American public.
NOT.
THIS.
FUCKING.
TIME.
Not again, and CERTAINLY NOT YOU, Volkswagen.
So you’re Blink. You get $100M from the U.S. public and you invest it in a bunch of charging stations you claim cost $50K apiece. Maybe half of them work for a year. You grease a few palms here and there, and at the end of the day — or five years, whatever it was — all of a sudden the collective assets of that entire company are worth just $3.3 million. Takes a real math whiz to figure out where all the money went — especially when you consider that EV drivers (myself included) were paying absurd rates for the power the whole time.
[Insert Volkswagen here]
::Phew, that was a close one!::
“So you guys, we really dodged a bullet with that ‘no jail time’ thing. But how are we going to pay as little as possible of this $15.3B settlement we agreed to?”
“I say we pledge $2B of it toward an electric vehicle charging network which shouldn’t cost even a tenth of that figure. Who’s gonna know? We can say they’re 350 kW stations. No one is actually going to build a 350 kW CCS-compatible car for years, and they’re sure as hell
not going to test every single one of them.
By the time anyone figures out the ruse, we’ll have killed off those annoying bastards in California.”
And you, John and Jane Q. Public, YOU are sitting there stupidly thinking I made all this shit up. Boy were you ever born yesterday.
Here’s a little math puzzle for you:
Q: If Tesla operates 670 Supercharger locations in the U.S. — each of which averages slightly more than EIGHT stations — and the install cost of a Tesla Supercharger station is around $250,000, how much should a roughly equivalent Volkswagen network cost?
Ah hell, it’s not puzzle. It’s multiplication:
670 x $250,000 = $167.5M
That’s M for MILLION, folks.
Now the real puzzle…
Q: Why would it ever cost over ten times as much to install less than half as many chargers at less than half as many locations?
A: It wouldn’t.
Bingo. You passed your fourth grade math quiz. Unfortunately, you didn’t pass your adult-level pay attention quiz and thus I’m obliged to ask you to
Retweet this high and low
so that others can put their collective intellect on it and start asking some serious questions.
It wouldn’t cost them anywhere near that much, and it didn’t.
And it shouldn’t, either.
Especially not with a last-five-tries success rate of 40% at said stations— like I experienced in the only non-Tesla mass market electric vehicle made and available in the U.S. to date.
If you all knew even one tenth of what I know about the electric vehicle charging infrastructure in the U.S. and how unbelievably screwed we are if we rely on promises from Volkswagen of all companies…
Oh for Pete’s sake, really! It really just does not end with these guys. And public opinion about the company is just fucking fine. Wrap your head around that for a moment:
You’re ready to lynch Elon Musk for calling out a shit talking cave diver while he’s in the process of trying to literally save people’s lives halfway around the world *AT SOMEONE ELSE’S REQUEST* and all VW has to do is swap out their CEO and everything is hunkyfuckingdorry?
You think ANY of this has anything to do with electric vehicles so much as it does continuing to sell combustion vehicles until the cows come home?
Yesterday. I swear you were all born on May 28th, 2019. I can’t believe you actually learned to read in the span of only 24 hours.
What about all those batteries they were figuring they’d get on the cheap from Korea?
Yep, you guessed it. They had even one-of-a-kind Zach Shahan over at Cleantechnica believing they had both a source and use for $48B in batteries:
You were coming on pretty strong, weren’t you, VW? You were gonna, anyway. You really were gonna. It’s all Korea’s fault. Amazing how many directions and how many fingers start pointing when the jig’s up and the work has to start.
But you really were gonna.
Except for the fact that your petrol bosses don’t want none of that nonsense.
You almost pulled that shit off, too. Look at Tesla stock. It’s an AMERICAN company in case you fucking FORGOT about that, Einhorn. You better pray to God I never see you at a Cornell reunion because you’re going face first down Libe Slope you piece of garbage.
You know, you look back at Volkswagen — at Dieselgate, which seems like only yesterday now — and it’s funny, because Tomoyuki Yamashita (a.k.a. the “Tiger of Malaya”) was actually HUNG for atrocities done by troops under his command — his excuse that “he didn’t know” wasn’t accepted by a military tribunal and none other than General Douglas MacArthur confirmed the findings of the court and the sentence.
Hung by the neck until dead.
Dieselgate was blink of an eye YESTERDAY and all of us sudden Volkswagen has become the electric vehicle darlings and Elon and the people at Tesla who have been working their asses off for five times as long (and SINCERELY) on electric vehicles AND who have a better product are on the outside looking in?
Like Frosty trapped in a damned greenhouse?
Are you really kidding me?
And the American public just munches this shit down like a bunch of puppies who don’t know the difference between a tuft of grass and hemlock. You guys all make me sick with your half-hearted attention and your “well I think this” when you actually don’t know the difference between your ass and a hole in the ground most of the time.
Yeah, the principle of
he who looks but doesn’t see is guilty of negligence
is true right straight up the ladder, and right straight down it on the other side.
Yeah, I’d rather have spent this time and effort elsewhere. Potentially more constructively. I’d rather have not resorted to such colorful language in an effort to get your attention, but I swear if you let this one slide you need to have your heads examined.
Part 2 — which I’ll regrettably have to do later in the week — will detail exactly how I know Electrify America is yet another shell game, how bad it is, and where we should go from here.
It’d be nice if a few of you who weren’t previously following me decide to do so. I don’t usually resort to this much profanity, I have not intended to insult any of you so much as get your attention, and I’m not getting paid for the kind of abuse I both take and give myself in order to keep the road clear for the electrification of our transportation system.
