Road realities
Re: "Nex Point looks to Asean's growing EV market", (Business, April 20).
Battery-driven electric vehicles (BEVs) need recharging stations like internal combustion engine (ICEs) cars need refilling stations. This infrastructure does not exist. Even a quick recharge takes an hour. Owners in condominiums cannot recharge their BEVs.
An ICE car stalled through lack of fuel can be solved with a can of fuel. Stalled BEVs have to be towed. A number of powerless BEVs will block the whole road system. BEVs must be parked away from other vehicles as they can burst into flames that cannot be extinguished. This occurred in a ship in the North Sea transporting cars, including a BEV. The ship was destroyed together with its cargo.
Due to their volatility, BEVs are difficult to insure and very difficult to resell. Their creation and disposal cause great damage to the environment. Above all, if too many people had a BEV, the current electricity grid would fail.
As Mr Toyoda, the former Chairman of Toyota, said, the answer is an HEV, an electric hybrid vehicle that generates its own electricity and avoids pollution in towns by using electric propulsion. An HEV battery is much smaller and is charged by the ICE and kinetic energy.
J C Wilcox
Weather wars
Re: "Dubai floods expose weaknesses to a rapidly changing climate", (BP, April 20).
"A rapidly changing climate" suggests "climate change" is changing rapidly, but there is no evidence for this. What this Bloomberg article glosses over is the extensive role geo-engineering and climate technology deployment have on weather. In the US alone, there are 50-plus private contractors selling geo-engineering services to anyone in the market. Clients include large agricultural conglomerates, government agencies, and foreign entities. It is far more likely that Iran (or other state actors) used drones to seed clouds in advance of a storm approaching the Middle East intended to wreak havoc across the area than it is for anthropogenic "climate change" resulting from manmade CO2 to have had a causative role in the recent catastrophic flooding in Dubai.
From satellite-born, ultra-high energy discharge devices that cause fires and earthquakes to mundane small aircraft spraying chemicals above a local corn field hoping to increase rainfall, these activities are very poorly regulated and can be extremely hazardous. We need to place a moratorium on all earth-destructive, man-plays-god insanity immediately. Bloomberg was correct in the overall tone of their article -- we have no idea what we are doing, and that is the truth.
Michael Setter
Broken bureaucracy
A month ago, I sold my motorbike, previously registered to my son in Chiang Mai, to a village neighbour living 200km north but still in Chiang Mai province. He was told he and the bike would need to do the 400km round trip to the city to change the ownership to his name.
A full four weeks later, we finalised this transaction by the only route possible, by paying 2,300 baht to a second-hand car dealer without the bike leaving the village. This is a truly disgusting state of affairs in a world of computer connections and modern mobile phones, and the Fang Department of Land Transport may as well just close down and save the taxpayer's money.
Lungstib
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