No, not in the least.

800-Volt EV Charging: The Other Palliative for Range Anxiety
Taking 18 minutes to charge to 80 percent makes top-up pit stops suddenly more palatable

Not to anybody who remembers that the last time he gassed up his current ICE vehicle it didn’t take him even five minutes, it ain’t…and that was filling his tank completely, not stopping at 80% and then calling it a “top-up.” Not to even mention that said ICE vehicle cost him around thirty-forty grand to buy, considerably less than the hefty 56k-and-up tariff the little Green Weenie windup toys bring along for the ride.

“Range anxiety” has been a headline concern for electric vehicles. Some automakers keep trying to soothe it with ever-larger and heavier battery packs, so that consumers can go farther between charges.

The problem is that lithium-ion cells remain expensive, heavy, and in critically short supply around the world. And battery bulk alone, especially in monstrously powerful trucks, can be a short route to a relatively inefficient and prohibitively expensive EV.

The Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6 that I recently tested—a pair of wildly impressive, high-design EVs—take a different approach to solving range anxiety: an 800-volt battery architecture that delivers some of the fastest charging in the EV game, and unheard of at these price levels. These handsome crossover SUVs might not be able to cruise for 7 hours on the highway, like the 500-mile-range Lucid Air. But their ability to charge to 80 percent capacity in as little as 18 minutes shows how EVs might circumvent the problem of battery overkill and still be fully viable as interstate cruisers.

The Hyundai, especially, left fellow drivers doing double takes and whipping out phone cameras.

But not their checkbooks, one may have noticed. So far at least, the only proven way to move EVs off the showroom floor and into peoples’ garages is for goobermint to mitigate the heart-stopping sticker shock with a nice subsidy package—or, to put it more honestly, a bribe for swallowing the multitudinous downsides of these Loser Cruisers, at the government’s (taxpayer’s) expense. (HINT TO LIBTARDS: Having to resort to bribery to sell a products is NOT an indication of said product’s popularity with consumers. Quite the opposite, actually.) We won’t even go into the many other disincentives that add up to make EVs a very hard sell indeed. Like, say, the very real and serious risk that your shiny new EV strugglebuggy might explode and/or spontaneously burst into flames, taking down your house along with it.

TITLE BACKSTORY: Back in the middle/late 70s I had an interaction—an abbreviated one, for reasons which ought to soon be apparent—with the manager/salesman of one of CLT’s perennially cellar-dwelling music stores, the name of which I don’t remember. I had wandered in there out of sheer desperation in search of a pack of whatever semi-obscure guitar strings I was enamored of back then, kidding myself that I’d be more likely to find off-brand strings in an off-brand store—a hopeful hypothesis which the science would invalidate posthaste.

Music Store Dude’s idea about my quest for cheap but effective guitar strings did NOT concur with my own, oh no no. According to his professional Music Store Dude expertise, what I really wanted was a brand new, all-chipboard-no-tube, cheaply made, sounds like the worst cheap-beer-and-Indian-food morning-after diarrhea-dook you ever took smelled like, Peavey guitar amplifier. Having one of those crimes against rock and roll all plugged in and ready to befoul the air long before my entry into the shop had made the little bell hung over the door go “ding,” MSD leapt into Sell! Sell! Sell! mode, turned the offensive thing on, and began idly strumming the guitar he had been holding in his lap. After each chord, the guitar’s melodious tone curdled into a gnarly, muddy mess courtesy of that sorry-ass Peavey. Then Music Store Dude would beatifically roll his eyes Heavenward as he repeated the corny mantra that had clearly been drummed into him in the Salesmanship 101 course he had flunked out of in community college: Are you as impressed as I am? Are you as impressed as I am? ARE YOU AS IMPRESSED AS I AM?

There was but one answer to be made to this increasingly aggressive query, to which I immediately resorted in self-defense: I muttered, semi-sotto voce, something along the lines of Sorry, gotta go, I think I hear my friends at Reliable Music shouting for me. Which is where I kicked up my heels and hurried off to without further delay, and bought the stupid pack of strings that had so nearly brought a strange doom crashing down upon my head—Death by Shitty Guitar Tone. I should’ve just gone to Reliable in the first place. I don’t know why I hadn’t, but it was a mistake I would never make again. In every city I played in, I kept strictly to the music stores I was familiar with when I needed one, shunning all the weird-looking, down-at-heels ones as if they had leprosy.

Yeah, yeah, I know: Skynyrd used and endorsed Peavey amps, as did pretty much every other ’70s Southern rock hit factory you could name.

And so what? I’ve always been pretty sure the second part of “used and endorsed” explains the first adequately enough: those Southern rockers played ’em not so much because they liked ’em, but because they were being paid to look as if they did. Myself, I hated the damned shitburgers back then, and I still do now. But hey, if Peavey handed me a big enough wad of cash, I’d try my best to pretend I liked the useless boat anchors too.

Obligatory disclaimer/confession: I DID play a Peavey Bandit for a couple-three months in the earliest days of the BPs; it belonged to one of the guys I had originally conceptualized the band with, an old-school purist who just could not abide the Marshall JMP half-stack (ie, the King of Rock, long may he reign—one of the very best amps ever produced, by anybody) that was helping me work through my rage issues back then. I make no apology for my brief lapse into the Shame of the Peavey; after all, none of us is without his own skeletons in the closet, right?

The moral of the story? Never let yourself be taken in by a hustler (the gooberment) trying to pressure or swindle (or legislate) you into settling for an inferior solid-state counterfeit (EV) of the tube-driven (ICE) real deal. You’ll be throwing away your money (your money) in the end, it won’t work out as promised (your house will burn down), and the only one who will end up happy with the whole deal will be the salesman (goobermint).

Oh, one more point to be made: If your product is good enough you won’t even have to sell it, it will sell itself. In contrast to the Peavey band-endorsement hustle, do note that Jim Marshall kept strictly to his principle of not paying for artist endorsements, the lone exception—until 1991 and the release of Marshall’s JCM Slash signature-model amp—being Jimi Hendrix.

According to an old book I have chronicling the amazing history of James Marshall’s world-beating amps (Marshall, amusingly and ironically enough, was actually a drummer his own self, and had enjoyed some local fame playing jazz in London nightspots), their names partially explains the Hendrix exception. Jimi was introduced to Marshall at the small London music store and amp-repair shop James owned and ran—and where his iconic amps had originally been created, at the request of Pete Townsend, probably the most famous of several other shop hangarounds that would later become rock stars themselves—and was blown away by the coincidence of their names—James Marshall Hendrix, guitar god, and James NMI Marshall, immortal guitar-amp legend. The two became close friends, Jimi switched to Marshalls for good, and the rest is rock and roll history.

Some good stuff from the previously-linked article, for any gear-geeks that might be reading:

You’d think that a guitarist of Slash’s stature would have a warehouse full of amplifiers at his disposal. As it turns out, though, the Guns N’ Roses guitarist only has a handful of trusty heads, which were discontinued in 1989, and they’re all just about ready to be retired. “I’ve been using the same Marshall Jubilee heads at every gig and session since I got them in 1987,” says Slash. “A bunch of those got badly damaged at the riot we had in St. Louis in 1991. After that, I was really nervous about my amplifier situation because I knew that if anything happened to the Jubilees I had left, I would be totally screwed.”

It was in the aftermath of the riot (which was prompted by an abbreviated GNR set) that Slash and Marshall began discussions that would ultimately result in the limited-production JCM Slash. And while Marshall amps have been associated with many of rock’s legendary guitarists, this is the company’s first endorsement deal-not to mention its first signature model.

“I’m totally honored that Marshall is doing this,” says Slash. “I’m the first person ever to get a free amp from them-except for Jimi Hendrix. And from what I understand, the amps he had were just on loan.”

The new amplifier is an exact replica of the Silver Jubilee 2555. However, unlike the Jubilee, the JCM Slash boasts the guitarist’s “smoking snake” logo and comes complete with a pimpin’ snakeskin cover.

The all-tube, 100-watt head boasts a quartet of Russian EL34’s in its power section and a trio of ECC83’s driving its two-channel preamp. There’s also a handy, front-panel-mounted half-power switch that allows you to drop the amp down to a more manageable 50-watt triode mode perfect for smaller venues. Slash admits that even he runs his amps on half-power much of the time. “If you have a singer who’s sensitive to loud backlines like Axl is, having a half-power switch is a godsend. It’s the only I way I can get the power tubes to work as hard as I need them to.”

I got chills here. Honestly, reading stuff like this makes me miss playing more than just about anything else, it really does. Nothing sweeter or more satisfying than the spine-tingling yowl of a Model 1987 50-watt Plexi reissue firing a pair of Celestion G12T-75s, the rig I happily ran for many years. Never have I owned a setup I liked better than this one, and I’ve owned ’em all. I never liked GNR, but I do like Slash just fine. He’s an excellent player, and I envy him his guitar/amp setup.

Update! If you can’t bribe ’em, try extorting ’em.

Pete “Just Buy A Tesla” Buttigieg Buttplug (FIFY—M) Says To Get Used To Price Hikes Until We Have Energy Independence Based On Clean Energy
Just another reminder that the higher gas prices you are suffering under are intentional.

Ever since the Obama Administration, the left has made it their goal to make gas so unaffordable that the American people will dump the convenient and plentiful fossil fuels the entire global economy is based upon for “clean” energy sources.

Here’s Mayor Pete telling Americans that the beatings will continue until morale improves:

Here’s the thing to remember, even if all the oil we use in the USA were made in the USA, the price of it is still subject to powers and dynamics outside of the USA.

Which means, until we achieve a form of energy independence that is based on clean energy created here at home, American citizens will still be vulnerable to wild price hikes like we’re seeing right now.

Gay Mayor Pete and the Biden crew will never admit that gas prices were low under Trump and that it was because of his energy policy.

But now that Biden has made it impossible to drill in the US, then all of a sudden all the drilling in the world won’t help the United States. It’s a global market.

Forget the four years under Donald Trump, those never happened.

There’s nothing that can be done, except buying electric cars, building more windmills and solar panels, and keeping the serfs at home forever.

Never mind that Biden’s Energy Secretary even says that they are using the Ukraine crisis and rising oil prices to transition America off gas.

It’s all intentional. It’s meant to cause pain.

Yep, t’is. There must be some way we could return the favor and cause them some right back, don’tcha think? Gee, I wonder what it might be…

OBEY update! When bribery and extortion have failed, you might then try a little judicious legislation removing the serfs’ ability to choose for themselves.

Last week, the current Democrat Governor of Washington state, Jay Inslee, signed a bill into law that aims to ban the sale of most non-electric vehicles in the state by 2030.

This legislation follows the lead of other deep-blue states like California and New York that recently announced bans on gas-powered vehicles in a move to end sales of these vehicles no later by 2035.
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The Post Millennial reported that Inslee signed the “Move Ahead Washington” package into law stipulating that all publicly owned and privately owned “passenger and light duty vehicles 2030 model or later that are sold, purchased, or registered in the state” must be electric.

This legislation comes with a $16.9 billion price tag and will receive funds generated by taxes on gasoline.

Ummm, I believe I see a tiny little problem with this Supergenius!™ idea.

Inslee claimed that the package would help “combat climate change,” but the state of Washington will be reliant upon its residents and visitors continuing to fill their cars with gasoline in order to fund reach this green goal.

So here we are then, where every socialist tyranny eventually winds up: using the wealth only capitalism can create to fund their adolescent fantasies, feeding off the very host that sustains them until they’ve killed it.