WSJ Writer Describes a Miserable EV Road Trip

CLAY: There’s a great piece in the Wall Street Journal. We’ve been talking about electric vehicles and charging-related decisions and energy prices and gas prices certainly on a big level as we approach $5. Some people, I think it’s fair to say, who have substantial resources, are looking at the electric vehicle model more so. There’s a great piece in the Saturday Wall Street Journal. One of their reporters drove from New Orleans to Chicago and back.

And they plotted it out. It was incredibly detailed. We’re going to show up at this charging location. It’s supposed to be fast. And it was an abject failure. And I know there’s a lot of people out there, it’s one thing if you’re driving around, you’re not driving your car that many miles and you can plug it into your house, into your garage every night.

But I read that piece, and I thought, “This sounds utterly miserable, if you were trying to drive any kind of substantial distance at all.” I believe she was going New Orleans to Chicago. And she had to wait some places, because the charging speeds are so slow, for three hours for her car to charge back up. Buck, I am super impatient. That’s one of my flaws. I hate getting caught in traffic. I hate not being efficient. I would lose my mind if I had to wait three hours to charge my car up so I could keep driving on a trip.

BUCK: Clay, I didn’t choose the scooter life, but the scooter life chose me —

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: — because here in New York City the only way to get around in Midtown is to basically be in the bike lane. So I’m riding a miniature electric vehicle, but I’ll tell you: A charge on this thing over here, which when it hits speeds of 15, 16 miles an hour it’s not exactly street legal.

CLAY: (laughing) Have you ever had a girl hang on to your back on the scooter like a motorcycle rider would? Have you ever had multiple people on the scooter?

BUCK: I can tell you that some years ago in D.C., when I was living in D.C. and they had those share scooters —

CLAY: They disappeared. They were everywhere. Now they vanished.

BUCK: — I offered to give a female friend a ride home on my electric scooter. It wasn’t mine; it was one of these ride-share ones.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: What I didn’t think about, there’s apparently a 250-pound weight limit on these things. Not that they’ll break, but that they have not enough juice. So I’m not kidding we got on this thing and it went, “Brrr,” and went like 3 miles an hour. I don’t mean like theoretically. I mean actually 2 or 3 miles an hour, slower than walking.

CLAY: Did you have major hill-related issues to have to deal with as well?

BUCK: We got off after about two blocks. It did not exactly work.

CLAY: Your gallant attempt to provide scooter home did not work.

BUCK: I wanted to make sure the lady got home safe and sound. But I’ve got to tell you something, these electric scooters, you’ve got to charge them. ou’ve got to charge them for almost four hours to get a full charge.

CLAY: How far can you go on a charge? I have no earthly idea.

BUCK: They say… Now this is scooters. It’s similar. It’s battery technology, electric vehicle. They say you can go, I think, between 15 and 20 miles.

CLAY: That’s a lot.

BUCK: But pre-pandemic Buck might have gotten 15 or 20 miles, but what you find out is that there’s a weight issue. So, post-pandemic Buck it’s probably 10 to 12 miles.

CLAY: Post-pandemic pounds, which is, honestly… You joke about it. But every health decision that we told people to undertake was wrong, basically was the worst possible decision we could tell people.

BUCK: I really believe that the CDC should be destroyed down to the studs and they should try to build something in its place that actually has some intelligence and accountability to the public, for many reasons. But back on the electric vehicle front. I’ve been thinking for a while about, “Oh, what about getting a car here in New York and what if I got a Tesla?”

CLAY: What does it cost, by the way, for someone…? I don’t think a lot of people understand this. What would a parking place cost you in New York City where you live?

BUCK: If I had a garage on the block where the studio here is New York City, you’re looking at $700 a month, just for a garage.

CLAY: For a garage.

BUCK: For a parking spot in a garage. It’s about $650 to $800 is what it runs, very expensive to have a car in New York City. The truth is — just like Democrats, a lot of things, by the way — they don’t really want you to have a car. They make it annoying and expensive. And they don’t care that much about congestion.

They say, whatever, you shouldn’t be in a car in the first place. I will tell you, the bike lanes, they have made wide and luxurious. It’s like the Champs Elysées of bike lanes here. It’s like the Bronze Boulevard of Paris. You could ride four bikes across in the bike lanes. Meanwhile, I look at the poor suckers in traffic in their actual cars, and they’re bumper to bumper the whole way. This is the city planning when it goes wrong underway.

CLAY: You know what I was just talking about, because I’m coming up, what, next week; my wife is also coming up.

BUCK: We’ll get you an electric scooter when you come here, by the way.

CLAY: (laughing) I said I might have to try out an electric scooter. I actually told her, I said — because usually we’ve been to New York before, she’ll go shopping, she’ll hop on the subway, I said — “You cannot ride the subway when you are traveling. I don’t trust it to be safe. We’ll get you. You’ll travel in other ways.”

BUCK: It’s not even just the… That’s a broader conversation, and I was a subway rider for a very long time.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Right before the pandemic, I was on the subway four times a day. So I really know the subway well. It’s not just the crimes you read about; it’s the unpleasantness of having a completely insane person in their tighty-whities run up and scream in your face some gibberish. That happens all the time.

CLAY: Literally crazy.

BUCK: Yes.