Oh, please, spare me the fairy tales about how Uncle Sam knows better than the free market. I’m reading THIS ARTICLE in Colorado Politics and, as usual, shaking my head at the Colorado Attorney General’s virtual signal to the enviros that doesn’t fly in the real world.
Mandating electric semis is like telling a toddler to bench-press a rhino—sure, it sounds adorable until someone’s faceplants in a pile of rhino excrement. But AG Weiser is running for Colorado Guv, and the only way to get more press than Bennet is to play tough guy with the Colorado taxpayers’ dime and sue Trump. Gees, Phile, lawfare against Trump?! That’s never been tried. But you grabbed the headline, so you must be happy.
You want real innovation? Let Henry Ford reinvent the car in 2025, not the Colorado General Assembly playing mad scientist with half-baked tech that can’t even haul your Amazon boxes to Aunt Edna’s front porch without running out of juice.
Let’s get real: today’s battery-electric big rigs are glorified golf carts with delusions of grandeur. They “promise” 150–200 miles, which is just enough to make you cry in the breakdown lane when your rig poops out halfway to Omaha. Meanwhile, most poor schleps are clocking 500 miles a day. It’s not a speed bump—it’s the Grand Canyon of “Are you fucking kidding me?” And hydrogen fuel cells? That’s the unicorn of trucking—everyone talks about it, nobody’s actually hitching one to their trailer any time soon.
Infrastructure? LOL. You’d need to pepper every interstate with more 180 kW dispensers than Starbucks franchises to keep these things humming. And good luck convincing your local grid to handle the load—rural transformers are already gurgling down deathbeds. The government’s “modest” 2032 plan? That’s fantasy novel crap. They tossed a few billion at chargers in an infrastructure bill, which is the financial equivalent of bringing a pea shooter to a nuclear standoff.
Oh, and let’s not forget the cost: these electric dinosaurs run two to three times the sticker price of a diesel beast. Tax credits do squat when you’re bleeding cash upfront, so guess who ends up eating the cost? Carriers jack up freight rates, retailers pass the tab to customers, and middle-class families get to pay for the state legislature’s virtue-signaling bonanza. All so some bureaucrat can slap an emissions badge on his résumé. But go right ahead and sue, Phil.
Here’s the skinny: real markets blossom on choice, not coercion. If electric rigs actually slashed costs and outperformed diesel, fleets would swarm them like moths to a flame. Until then, mandates just leash innovation, strangle competition, and saddle us with bill-paying misery. Let the industry tinker on its own dime, under the brutal crucible of actual consumer demand. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck in this clown car race—except the only thing getting run over is common sense.
