 Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. Now I have no plans whatsoever to buy an electric vehicle, but you can't help but notice all of the problems that electric vehicles have exhibited so far. The fact that they're largely, if not entirely, fueled with fossil fuels. The fact that their infrastructure charging stations are problematic. That there's almost no reduction in pollutants. That the government's program is a giant subsidy for rich people. Or that the impressive technology in electric vehicle batteries, all of those resources could have been devoted to other, more pressing issues. And of course, then there's the rush to try to find the precious metals and the rare earth elements necessary to produce these vehicles, which scarred environments and had severe negative impacts as well as positive impacts on the affected population in those areas. Now this environmentalist agenda of electrical vehicles has been pushed on Americans with the sole help of very heavy subsidies. That's a quick and dirty way of achieving your goals, but it leads to very bad misallocation of resources and impoverishment and things only get worse over time rather than better. Now I've noticed recently two elephants in the room with electric vehicle sales. The first I put under the category that bigger is not necessarily better. That in designing subsidies, the government has produced a system which is heavily beneficial to very large vehicles with very large battery capacities. Electric vehicles, solar power, all of these things tend to do much better with small lightweight, short distance, small capacity issues so that it would favor things like hybrid automobiles and compact electric vehicles, golf carts, police cars on the island of Manhattan, specific uses which would enhance or at least ameliorate issues of economic efficiency. On the other hand, fossil fuels are well documented to be the preferable economic fuel when you're talking about heavy lifting, long distances, large capacities, trucks, planes, ships, where fossil fuels obviously have a comparative advantage. The problem here is that the government's actual subsidy has dropped hybrids and encourages large vehicles with large battery capacities. In a sense, the government subsidy is fighting electric vehicle comparative advantages and at the same time losing any possible pollution reduction advantages. So the first elephant in the room is that the subsidies encourage big cars with big ranges, not the smaller, cheaper vehicles where the biggest positive environmental impact might have existed. The second elephant in the room is that because electric vehicles and their batteries are so large, the cars essentially have become elements of mass destruction. I thought that in changing from an oil gasoline-powered engine and gas tank, if we took those two things out, that electric vehicles would naturally be lighter, easier to move around and so forth. But now the batteries have become so large and heavy that electric vehicles sometimes weigh hundreds or thousands of pounds heavier than fossil fuel vehicles. This of course creates a lot more wear and tear on our roads and higher taxes to keep them up. And also obviously it creates much more dangerous vehicles for the driver, for the passengers, for pedestrians, and of course people in other cars. There's going to be more death and destruction because of these very, very heavy batteries that are necessary to produce these long range driving features for electric vehicles. So when you look at the electric vehicle market and you see this problem of pushing large luxury cars rather than efficient smaller cars or hybrids, and then you take into account the fact that the electric vehicles are much more dangerous in terms of driving in accidents, it makes you wonder about who set up the subsidy and its broader economic implications. In other words, very heavy electric vehicles, that's a problem. Much more dangerous electrical vehicles, that's a problem. But it also I think most importantly tells us a little bit about, or maybe a lot about, the people who are bringing these things and forcing them onto the American consumer. Those small things should have been dealt with, they should have been expressed to the American people in the first place, but they weren't. And I think that minor issue tells us a whole lot about our government, who's running it and who they are running it for.