The bill in NC's legislature, called “Equitable Free Vehicle Fuel Stations,” also seeks to force private businesses with free EV chargers to note on their customers’ receipts the percentage of the purchase price that goes to the free charge, Ezra Dyers explains at Car and Driver. Because anyone driving a gas guzzler to a restaurant should know how much of the price of his hamburger finances a few pennies of free electricity to EV drivers!
Maybe establishments ought to do the same with people who drink from water fountains or use the restrooms. Shouldn’t I, an avoider of public restrooms, know how much I’m paying for other people’s toilet flushes when I guy a Big Mac?
Dyers also points out that EV chargers provide many economic benefits: Electricity is generated in the U.S., making us less dependent on countries like Saudi Arabia. If enough people use EVs, instead of internal combustion engines, that would reduce the price of gas and diesel. EVs are also jobs creators.
It's almost as though Republicans are just as hypocritical about their claims of being “pro-business” as they are about being “pro-life.”
But you can’t say the bill does nothing for the economy: “House Bill 1049 would also create a job, for the person who goes around and rips out the free public chargers—until that's done, which would probably be the better part of a week,” Dyers notes.
