As Useful as a Labor Minister with an Electric Ute

Nothing says “I’m an out-of-touch leftist” quite like a politician spruiking a vehicle that costs as much as a Mercedes or BMW, is made by a brutal communist dictatorship, and uses materials mined by child labour in Africa. Materials mined and refined in environmental disaster areas.

If you can stand by one of these “blood vehicles” while touting your “progressive” credentials, you’d have to be a leftist, if not a gibbering moron.

Labor’s Chris Bowen is both.

Over the weekend, electricity giant Transgrid launched the network’s electric ute trial alongside Chris Bowen at Transgrid’s Wallgrove depot in western Sydney […]

Mr Bowen also spruiked the new vehicle on social media, sharing photos and videos of the new “weapon”.

Weapon of Mass Exploitation, maybe.

It’s also instructive to see the “party of the worker” posing for selfies with a car that no worker could ever afford. The EV ute is twice the price of most utes.

However, the vehicle has also attracted plenty of critics, with 2GB’s Ben Fordham and Drive.com.au’s managing editor Trent Nikolic hitting out at its eye-watering $90,000 price tag, as well as the fact that it is made in China.

They pointed out that the NSW Government would struggle to roll out 30,000 new electric vehicle charging stations over the next three years as promised, and claimed the Federal Government’s target of 89 per cent of new car sales by 2030 being electric vehicles was unrealistic.

That should be no surprise, really. Even a baseline EV is as expensive as a luxury petrol car.

But if the price of the vehicle is ludicrous, so is its basic uselessness.

Mr Nikolic said […] “LDV quotes the range of that vehicle as 330km. Now if that battery pack was in a car it’d be about 500km, so it’s already reduced, because the ute weighs 3-tonnes, then if you go anywhere near its tow rating or load capacity you halve it, so there’ll be tradies driving to sites listening to you right now who are thinking, ‘What good is a dual cab going to be for me today if I get 150km out of it?’” he said.

As well as the price tag, and the environmental wreckage and human exploitation in mining for the batteries, there’s the brutal fact of where the EVs come from.

“It’s one thing that the vehicle is built in China, but just about every component of the vehicle will be built in China if we don’t start building stuff here.”

Well, that won’t be a problem… until a remote order from Beijing shuts down your dinky new electric ute. If that sounds far-fetched, just recall that Chinese hackers have shut down entire electricity grids in countries around the world.

Boofhead Bowen is also, hilariously, proving the wicked Coalition exactly right about the basic insanity of EV evangelism.

Meanwhile, the new trial comes just months after deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley infamously took aim at EV utes.

“We know we’re not going to have electric vehicles tomorrow,” Ms Ley told Sky News last August.

“And no one in the world is making an electric ute, by the way, and even if they were it would be unaffordable.”

Her comments came after former PM Scott Morrison bizarrely claimed electric vehicles would “end the weekend”.

“It’s not going to tow your trailer. It’s not going to tow your boat. It’s not going to get you out to your favourite camping spot with your family,” he said at the time.

News.com.au

As if an EV owner would be seen dead anywhere outside the Quinoa Belt, anyway.