As I wrote recently, there’s a big ol’ dirty secret hiding inside the Climate Cult’s beloved electric cars. Especially now that they’re burning all their formerly beloved Teslas.
That dirty secret is the dirty Chinese nickel mined and processed in vast, environment-polluting and worker-killing Indonesian industrial parks owned and run by China.
Far from ‘saving the planet’, global demand for cheap, Chinese-made electric vehicle batteries has brought about unprecedented demand for cheap, dirty Indonesian nickel.
China operates Indonesia’s two largest nickel-processing facilities, one of which accounts for almost 20 per cent of global nickel supply – and dumps vast amounts of heavy metals and other pollution into the seas around Sulawesi. The facilities are powered by a fleet of coal-fired stations that belch more CO₂ than Brazil.
The cheap, dirty, Chinese-owned nickel that runs the Climate Cult’s beloved electric cars comes at the cost of safer material produced elsewhere. BHP invested billions into a clean nickel-producing facility, only to have to mothball it because it couldn’t compete with the cheap, dirty product from Chinese-owned facilities in Indonesia.
But if EVs have a dirty secret, so do their cousins: hybrids.
They are sold as vehicles that will cut petrol consumption but tests on Australian roads show some hybrid cars use more fuel than standard models.
Hybrids are the cheap, Clayton’s version, of a full-blown EV. They feature a battery and electric motor to assist a petrol engine during short bursts. Hybrids are sold on a promise of cutting petrol consumption without the luxury-car price tag of a full EV. A Toyota Yaris, for instance, costs around $30k, compared to an entry-level EV price of $50 grand.
But if you think you’re saving the planet on a budget, you’re kidding yourself.
In one case, a mild hybrid vehicle used 12% more petrol than its internal combustion equivalent on highways and a conventional hybrid used almost 3% more fuel […]
GWM’s Jolion hybrid vehicle cut consumption by significantly less than promised, with a 17% fuel saving compared to 38% indicated by laboratory tests.
It also used more petrol than the standard Jolion model when travelling on highways.
The Subaru Forester mild hybrid used more petrol than its internal combustion equivalent by 2.8% on average, although the model has been discontinued.
Not all hybrids are a complete con:
Three out of four Toyota hybrid vehicles cut petrol use by more than 30% on average, while a Honda CR-V hybrid and a mild hybrid Suzuki Swift reduced fuel consumption by 23% and 17%, respectively.
Hybrids are also, perhaps unsurprisingly, better for inner-city dwellers rather than suburbanites with long commutes, or country folk.
Tests revealed hybrid vehicles were significantly more fuel-efficient on urban areas than rural roads and were at their least efficient on highways.
The Toyota Camry hybrid vehicle cut fuel consumption by 50% on city roads, but only 13% on highways.
The reason is simple: hybrids are optimised for stop-start traffic at low speeds.
“It’s that optimisation for the low speeds that has resulted in a decline in the efficiency at high speeds.”
As a result, conventional hybrid vehicles may not be as useful for drivers in regional or rural Australia as a plug-in hybrid or an electric vehicle, [Australian Electric Vehicle Association national president Chris Jones] said.
Except that we know just how terrible EVs are for the environment.
No wonder EV evangelists get so antsy when people point that out.
