Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h / t gringojay – An ice storm and crash left drivers stranded in freezing conditions aboard Virginia I-95 overnight Monday. My question – what if they all drove electric cars?
27 hours commute: Virginia officials question after hundreds of drivers stranded on I-95 overnight
Ryan W. MillerDoyle Rice USA TODAY
The winter storm battered several mid-Atlantic and Southern states on Monday, closing schools and causing power outages.
In Virginia, motorists were stuck on a 50-mile stretch of Interstate 95 near Fredericksburg overnight. Five deaths in three states were due to weather.
Ice and snow left hundreds of motorists stranded on Interstate 95 in Virginia on Tuesday after a winter storm hit several eastern states and dumped more than a meter of snow in some places.
The storm ravaged roads, left more than 300,000 people without power in Virginia and Maryland and left at least five people dead across three states.
No hurricane injuries or deaths or traffic contingencies were reported in Virginia.
The problems started Monday morning when a truck plowed into the main North-South highway along the East Coast, triggering a rapid chain reaction as vehicles, state police said. other out of control.
On the roughly 50-mile stretch of I-95 near Fredericksburg, motorists were trapped in their cars overnight as ice covered the highway. The Virginia Department of Transportation tweeted Tuesday that the interstate section of the road remains closed.
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Josh Lederman, a reporter for NBC News, tweeted that he had been stuck in his car overnight and that many motorists had turned off their cars to save gas.
“Everybody (myself included) is taking exercise breaks outside of their cars, walking their dogs on the interstate. I poured snow in his bowl and let it melt into water,” he tweeted, detailing the challenge.
Senator Kaine finally arrived in Washington on Tuesday afternoon, about 27 hours after his journey began.
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Motorists survived Monday’s traffic jam by periodically running their engines to keep warm. When traffic finally started moving again, most vehicles had enough gas to finish their journey.
President Biden is pushing people to switch to electric cars, as part of his Net Zero plan. But EV batteries suffer severe performance loss in freezing conditions, and are more likely to fail altogether than gasoline engines under extreme conditions. Even if an EV battery doesn’t freeze, an EV battery doesn’t hold as much energy as a tank of gas, so the margin of safety is much thinner, for those stuck in inclement weather using up as much energy as possible. reserves on their car to keep warm.
In my opinion, if everyone stuck on I-95 had been driving an EV, the I-95 ice storm traffic jam could have turned into a mass casualty event.
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