The Absolute Absurdity of the ‘Woke Electric Cars’ Insult
If you ever get the sudden, inexplicable urge to give yourself a headache, try searching for “woke electric cars” or “woke electric vehicles.” Whether your preferred flavor of headache involves articles, YouTube videos, or just memes, you’re in for an endless sea of anti-EV screeds — often fueled by misinformation or outright disinformation — on social media or on right-leaning news outlets.
Their arguments usually go something like this: EVs are “a tool of tyranny” being “forced” on us as the government takes away our precious gas cars; they run out of power too easily and will leave you stranded at the first sign of bad weather; they’ll leave the U.S. in permanent thrall to China, or kill our auto industry outright; and they’re worse for the environment than internal combustion engines, and thus aren’t going to fix climate change — which isn’t real anyway. (I think that about sums it up.)
I never see this sort of “content” coming from people with a deep understanding of the evolution of automotive technology, or batteries, or anything else that might qualify them to weigh in here. Usually, they’re from your garden-variety opinion-section cranks, or cynical grifters who make a living off their viral hits, or 40-year veterans of oil industry comms. You know the type. But they’re all very vocal in saying that electric cars, essentially, are woke. And while none of them can define what that means, it is clearly very bad.
