Which is maybe good timing, because that's when Trump (and MAGA) are likely to be sent packing. A new regime that will bring back all the EV mandates will then provide the necessary impetus for devices such as the Scout.

Assuming we're not picking out pieces of already processed corn from radioactive dump piles by then for food.

Like other device-makers, Scout took pre-orders for vaporware. It is quite something that people are willing to pay even $100 to hold a place in line for the right to buy something that may never see the light of day.

And if/when it does, you may wish it never did.

News reports says Scout – meaning VW – is dealing with "technical problems" and "financial pressures." You don't say. VW's situation right now can be understood be comparing it with the Wehrmacht's situation just after the Battle of the Bulge. It is depleted, exhausted. On the verge of collapse.

Remember that just before VW began to try to sell devices – which it was effectively forced to do by the government as partial penance for having the gall to "cheat" on government emissions-certification tests – it had already been fined and otherwise made to cough up an estimated $30 billion and stop selling models that sold (i.e., its line of affordable, high-mileage, TDI-powered Golfs and Jettas and Beetles).

Not many companies – even VW, which is huge one – can afford to eat $30 billion in fines and settlement costs and also dump more billions into developing a new line of battery powered devices and have them flop. Yet that is just what's happened. VW has had to dial back some of the new EV launches it had planned and is idling production of the ID Buzz, the "electrified" homage to the classic Microbus VW used to sell that actually did sell – chiefly because it was cheap and practical.

The ID Buzz is neither.

It has a base price of nearly $60k and a best-case driving range of about 230 miles. Like all devices, its biggest failing isn't its short range so much as it is the long time it takes to suckle even a partial charge. There has been a kind of mass delusion that it is "fast" to have to wait for at least 15 minutes or so to get the electric equivalent of about a a quarter-tank of gas.