Scotty Kilmer has over 6 million subscribers and on February 2nd, 2024 he released this YouTube video: ‘Proof Electric Cars are a Scam and the Media is Lying to You‘. And before I say anything more, I like almost everything Scotty posts on YouTube. He really knows his stuff. BUT, in this case I think he’s echoing every click-bait headline about what’s wrong with EVs you can find on the web. In summary:
- “the United States energy department has been caught massively cheating to boost electric vehicle efficiency data and the corporate media is ignoring this” – and he uses absurdly high compliance values as an example – OK, I think he has a good point here, but that’s not going to stop me from buying an EV. Next
- “if you’re like me you want to know what happened to those stranded motorists in Chicago why did all those Teslas get stuck frozen and they couldn’t charge them – and the Tesla Owners Club in suburban Chicago said they checked out 13 of these Tesla superchargers and three of them were completely out of order.”, Next
- “a lot of people use the Sentry Mode which is anti-theft thing so you can look at cameras you can be checked to see if anybody’s stealing a car and under Sentry Mode the car sap as much as 15% of your battery pack capacity in 24 hours so let’s say you park at an airport you got it there for a week or two you come back and your Tesla’s dead” – yup, that’s a thing, unfortunately. We talk about this in our Tesla new owners classes, so hopefully Tesla owners are informed and don’t use Sentry Mode in these situations. Next
- “this guy took a Tesla cyber truck on a cross country trip he went from Austin Texas to the Joshua Tree monument in California and back right he went 1340 miles and he had to stop 12 times to charge. That’s not very far range…” You can check out Dennis Wang’s (aka DennisCW) video here. Another good point, and I encourage you to watch Dennis’ video BEFORE you run out and buy a Cybertruck!” Next
- “people that don’t know anything about electric cars is they always give you some ridiculous charging time to charge them but that’s always from 20% to 80% so right there you’ve lost 40% range of the vehicle cuz you’re not going below 20% so that’s 20% you lost and you’re only charging it to 80% because past that it takes way too long to charge them so that’s another 20 so you’re only working with 60% to begin with… it would be like owning a gasoline car that had a 20 gallon tank but you could only use 12 gallons of the fuel and the was just sitting there unusable” Good point Scotty! And he goes on…
As usual Scotty makes some good points, and his comments are always well researched. However, this video was a bit click-baitish, and dug up a bunch of recent negative press which to many EV owners are more or less self-evident, but to prospective EV owners might give them second thoughts. That’s the real danger of this kind of media regurgitation. Nevertheless, Scotty provides a great service to the automotive community and I appreciate that! Thanks Scotty for all you do.