EDITOR’S NOTE: Rick is on sabbatical this week, but he asked his good friend Army Bob to pinch hit for this week’s column:

by Robert M. Traxler

Electric cars are an interesting concept; Americans have a love of cars more profound than with we find in most nations.

Distances in our nation are greater than in most; we are just a bigger country, driving distances is the rule more than the exception. A person I served with during my three-year sentence in Washington DC (stationed there in the Army) commuted 150 miles one way per day, from as he put it ”“West-by-God Virginia to Washington.” He drove a sub-compact car that got some 45 miles per gallon and it took him nearly three hours each way.

In an article in BGR, an online source for tech news, they write:

“Electric vehicles are most certainly the future of the automotive industry — and you need only look at the outlawing of gas-powered vehicles for proof of that — but if you needed one more piece of proof to add to the pile, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, Ben Van Beurden, has some news for you. Van Beurden, whose position atop Royal Dutch Shell makes him the shot caller for its wholly owned subsidiary Shell Oil, says he’s ready to embrace the electric future, and he’s buying an electric vehicle in September to prove it.”

The death of the internal combustion engine has been predicted for four decades now, and it will not be made illegal for Americans any time soon. Electric car tech is just not there, but not because we have not tried. President Obama spent trillions of government dollars, read your dollars, on alternative energy with very little return. The road to hell is paved with good intentions; the electric car industry has not publicly commented on just how they will solve the cost problems, recharging problems, pollution in manufacturing and safe disposal of high tech but environmentally hazardous batteries.

To be even marginally competitive (.67 percent of new car sales were electric or hybrids in 2015), electric/hybrid cars receive a government subsidy of some 3,000 to 7,500 dollars. If every American vehicle was replaced with an electric vehicle, the cost just in subsidies to the government would be around $1,000,000,000,000, a large number even to the government, and that is using the average subsidies.

I must agree that electric cars or some other means of power will replace the internal combustion engine someday, but not anytime soon. The mandatory switch to the hybrid/electric car is a socialist dream; the government controls the subsidies, to whom and to some extent where they are given.

Having lived in Europe and Asia, one thing that stands out is the density of population. Electric vehicles that get some 150 to 200 miles per charge are fine in most of the world that commutes only a few miles per day. In wide open spaces America, we need the ability to travel nonstop for hundreds of miles, without stopping to recharge (in many models) every two hours.

During most of my life the progressive movement has been chanting that all we need to do is give the environmental green movement a “jumpstart” and it will replace the existing economy with a vibrant, new sustainable green energy economy. Green jobs will jumpstart the economy and we will be the dominant world economic leader once again. Oops, we did, but it didn’t; President Obama in his stimulus package gave billions to the green energy industry and we did not see the traditional fossil fuel economy replaced in any significant amount.

The beauty of a free enterprise democracy and a free open economy is that it works; market forces direct the efforts in the direction we want. When electric cars become affordable, reliable and convenient, they will replace the internal combustion engine with an electric conveyance. The industry can’t count on an endless stream of government dollars to be competitive.