On Sunday, Fox Business posted an article that might cause you to rethink the idea of buying an electric car–particularly a used one.
The article reports:
Avery Siwinski is a 17-year-old whose parents spent $11,000 on a used Ford Focus Electric car, which is a 2014 model and had about 60,000 miles when it was bought, according to KVUE.
The teenager had the car for six months before it began giving her issues and the dashboard was flashing symbols.
“It was fine at first,” Siwinski said. “I loved it so much. It was small and quiet and cute. And all the sudden it stopped working.”
She told the news outlet that the car stopped running after taking it to a repair shop, and the family eventually found out that the car’s battery would need to be replaced.
The problem? A battery for the electric car costs $14,000, according to the news outlet.
However there was another obstacle to getting the car repaired:
The Ford dealership had advised us that we could replace the battery,” said her grandfather, Ray Siwinski. “It would only cost $14,000.”
However, the family found out that there weren’t any batteries of that type available anymore because the Ford model is discontinued.
The article doesn’t say whether or not the car was bought from a dealership or in a private sale. Either way, it seems as if Ford should be willing to reach some sort of agreement with the young lady to at least partially reimburse her for the cost of a car they no longer have parts for. No car should be unrepairable in less than 100,000 miles.
As I have previously stated, green energy science is in its infant stages. We have not yet fully developed or understood what it will take to wean us away from fossil fuels. At the present time, weaning ourselves away from fossil fuels is probably not a good plan. We are currently at the same stage as the very early scientists who were in search of a perpetual motion machine. That machine may be out there some day, but it is not out there now.