More X disinformation

Oh, OK, just one more.

X, everyone's favourite misinformation machine, has recently been sharing this photo of cars stranded in a snowstorm.

Captions in various langages - this particular one is in Italian - claim that this scene is in Germany in early December 2023 and it shows all the electric cars that have shut down due to the cold and been abandoned on the autobahn. Because, everyone knows, electric cars just stop working when it's cold. Don't they? 

This, I guess, is someone's idea of peak schadenfreude. Now, even I know that there aren't THAT many electric cars in Germany, but the picture has nevertheless been shared many, many times by doomsayers opposed, for whatever reason, to the rise of electric vehicles. 

A reverse image search using TinEye, however, shows that the photo was actually taken way back in February 2011 by an Associated Press photojournalist, and it depicts the aftermath of a snowstorm in Chicago, USA, not Germany. 12 years ago, there would have been hardly any electric cars in Chicago, Germany or anywhere else. 

It turns out the picture has actually been used for misinformation purposes many times for many different purposes in the intervening years. Some claim the image was captured in Texas, some even that it occurred in Pakistan!

It just goes to show what I've always said: don't believe anything you read on the Internet. Oh, wait....

UPDATE

Here's another similar one. There are multiple examples, both on Twitter and in various tabloid newspapers claiming that the whole (or sometimes most of) Olso's electric bus fleet failed during a recent cold snap there.

In fact, about 50-100 bus journeys out of 4,000 daily departures were cancelled for two or three days, until the city bus company, Ruter, figured things out. Embarrassing perhaps, but hardly disastrous. The issues have since been fixed by adjusting shifts and making changes to the charging infrastructure, according to Ruter.

But a lot of people clearly want to see this technology fail, and are willing to lie in order to achieve that goal.