A heavy truck manufacturer is ceasing sales in Oregon because of an electric percentage mandate.
Oregon’s New Electric Truck Rule Is Disrupting Oregon’s Transportation Industry
On Dec. 20, Daimler Trucks North America issued a stunning statement: It would stop selling large diesel trucks in Oregon.
“Effective immediately, DTNA is pausing all orders for new internal combustion vehicles intended for registration in Oregon,”
Here’s how DEQ’s “Advanced Clean Trucks rule” works: Out of every 100 new Class 8 heavy trucks a manufacturer sells in Oregon in 2025, seven must be electric. That percentage of electric trucks will increase every year, reaching 40% of all heavy trucks sold in 2032.
Sounds a bit like an echo of the California home insurers discontinuing business in the state because of government mandates.
I missed this bit of news.
On a tangent, my latest gas bill is $230. That's twice as much as normal for this time of year. I received a letter from Northwest Natural Gas (I need to dig it out so I can quote it verbatim), but it basically said they colluded with politicians to require a certain percent of my natural gas to be "renewable", and therefore prices are essentially doubling in 2 years. Utilities typically are allowed profit as a percent of operating expenses, so if politicians make things more expensive, they are allowed more profit, so they have no incentive to push back, or reduce operating costs.
Exploding gas prices (pun intended) would normally push consumers toward "green" electric appliances, but PGE (Portland General Electric) has increased prices about 70% in the past 4 years.
The good news though is that Oregon has singlehandedly solved global warming, so everyone else can take a sigh of relief. I'm happy knowing that it just took me and a handful of other folks paying through the nose for energy to avert the climate catastrophe. It will totally offset emissions from China and India, because science.
My wife’s great grandfather made electric cars in the 1910s and 1920s, the Baker Electric. They had nickel-iron batteries, which will still work if you put fresh electrolyte in periodically, but they aren’t very energy dense.
The recent advances in nuclear fusion make me hope that cheap, clean electricity might keep civilization going when oil and coal eventually become uneconomical.
But I don’t think it’s inevitable that batteries will improve to the point of letting electric cars replace internal combustion motors. Maybe, but maybe not. They’re still the weak link, just as they were in the Baker Electric.
Also, we can’t even keep the grid up when everyone turns on their air conditioners, so what happens when people are trying to suck five or ten times as much electricity through those wires to charge cars? The government should be happy to let electric car demand develop slowly. We’re not near ready for a wholesale changeover, even were it a good idea, or distantly inevitable.
EVs are superior but for the "fuel tank", which is so inferior that its not the preferred option for most people and applications. As I point out, the battery is a $10,000 gas tank that takes an eternity to fill, is large and heavy, diminishes in capacity with use and time, requires temperature regulation, is sensitive to vibration, and might kill a person working on it.
If the battery only cost $500, could be charged in 5 minutes, and had 5x the energy density, nearly everyone would choose an EV.
