Not just expensive: toxic. Pillaging the ends of the earth rare minerals to make inefficient lithium batteries, with often underpaid if not forced/child labor doing the pillaging on behalf of Greta Thunburg & Friends?
I’m sorry, are children in Saudi Arabia drilling for oil with their bare hands?
Talk about environmentally and socially psychotic. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if lithium and other minerals needed for a massive-scale non-petroleum infrastructure deplete way sooner than oil ever would, turning into an extremely finite resource and crippling capacity expansion.
I’m not fond of oil, and I care about the Earth, but that also means protecting it from stupid people who will kill it with kindness.
Furthermore, most (all?) of those ego status symbol electric vehicles were made with petroleum power at various stages of the production pipeline. Imagine if TRUE innovation had been done to de-petroleumize production FIRST in order to prove it worked, instead of focusing on making your ego feel better for achieving nothing of import?
Apple’s “clean energy charging” is equally stupid. Building cars without using “dirty” energy would be far more impactful — and, ironically, likely impossible.
At least Apple’s ego is in the right place (/semi-sarcasm) by forcing suppliers to be the ‘efficient’ ones instead of trying to place the blame/burden on me and the rest of us as people who are just charging a cell phone.