I just love a war story – not about actual war, mind you, but about the mind-boggling snafus in the commercial world and day-to-day life. Apart from dollar bills being effectively set alight, the stories often involve major inconvenience, unrealised expectations and unimaginable exasperation on the part of the affected parties.

The two most common examples are electric vehicles and newly constructed apartment buildings. EVs failing to travel from A to B and major faults being discovered in high-rise towers, often to the extent that residents must vacate the premises – both are great content for curious journalists.

Leaving aside the humorous side to these anecdotes, there is an important point to be made here. It’s clear that people absorb a subject much better when reading a case study or looking at a video of an incident.  Compared with statistics, tables and charts, stories are just more compelling.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that data analysis is unimportant; it’s just if you are trying to make a point, stories do the job better.

The Wall Street Journal, in particular, regularly carries stories about EV misadventures. This is in marked contrast with many other mainstream media outlets which, just maybe, are influenced by the possibility of large ad spends by the big EV makers. The absence of negative stories is reinforced by the fawning attitude of many motoring writers who have been seduced by the EV fairy story.

An early EV disaster story involved a trip from Florida to Chicago and back. The author had regularly taken this long trip using a conventional vehicle but decided to hire an EV as an experiment. It was to be a quick trip as her travelling companion had to be back for work. She carefully mapped out her route, including the location of fast chargers. She should be able to spend some time in Chicago before making the return journey.

In a word, the trip was a disaster. A number of the chargers she planned to use were out of order and it took her literally hours to make a tiny contribution to the battery while having endless cups of coffee at a garden centre. Her accommodation provider was unimpressed by her request to use an extension cord to charge up the EV.

In the end, the trip took three times as long compared with using a conventional vehicle. After a few hours in Chicago, the pair were forced to begin their trip back to Florida. Needless to say, the initiator of the experiment regretted her decision. The mark was a definite F.

Then there was the guy who decided to drive his Tesla to attend various college open days in northern California with his teenage son. Again, he had carefully mapped out his route with the location of fast chargers in mind. Sadly, for him, he hadn’t taken into account the possibility of a blown tyre which occurred in the middle of nowhere.

The thing is that Telsas don’t carry a spare tyre because of the size of the battery and the complete lack of boot space were there to be a spare. Had he been in a big city, this wouldn’t have been a problem. A replacement tyre would have been delivered and fitted within a couple of hours.

But given his location, he had to be towed to the nearest town and holed up in some sub-standard accommodation until a replacement tyre could be sourced. After a couple of false starts, three days later the tyre emerged and he was on his way, having missed the open days entirely.

Then there was the enthusiastic camper, again in California, who thought he could use his large EV ute to tow his caravan to a picturesque camping ground. It was a mere 144-kilometre round-trip, so a fully charged battery initially should easily do the job.

What he hadn’t taken into account was the fact that the trip involved many hills and cresting them causes a rapid depletion in the battery. By the time he reached the camping ground, he realised that he wouldn’t have enough charge to get home and was forced to use the standard electricity connection available. It was agonisingly slow and stressful. He managed to limp home, promising to never use the EV ute for this purpose again.

It also turns out that EV chargers don’t work well in cold weather – and let’s face it, it gets damn cold in many parts of the world.  The location was Chicago and the bank of Telsa fast-chargers all effectively seized up as the temperatures fell below zero.

There were many unhappy campers either trying to charge their EVs or queueing to do so – a potentially dangerous thing to do in those temperatures.

But thought-provoking war stories are not simply the province of EVs – faulty, defective and even dangerous newly constructed apartment buildings are another source of fascinating fables.

The Opal Building in Olympic Park Sydney has been an unmitigated disaster. It was completed in August 2018, designed by a prestigious architectural firm. It has 37 levels and close to 400 apartments. By the end of 2018, residents were hearing loud bangs and cracking appeared. Some thought it was a bomb going off.

Residents were evacuated and after repair and rectification work was undertaken, they were allowed back to their apartments after many months. There have been ongoing disputes about insurance and the need for more work.

Mind you, this war story pales into insignificance compared with the saga of the ten-storey Mascot Towers building, south of the Sydney CBD. Its structural faults were so consequential that all the residents had to be evacuated and have never returned. Eventually, the New South Wales government has offered some miserly compensation to the apartment owners. But the folk who had bought the more expensive units (and continued to pay the body corporate fees) have been seriously dudded.

I won’t go into the details of the substantial apartment building built in Wollongong that has never – that’s right, never – been occupied because of its numerous defects and which stands there as some sort of symbolic edifice. And don’t even get me on to the flammable cladding debacle, which still hasn’t been fully resolved.

War stories are of course amusing – up to a point – but the real issue here is the link with government policies and their failure to take into account the major potential downsides of what is being promoted. Many countries have policies in place to push EVs, through both direct subsidies and/or tax concessions as well as regulation. In effect, consumers are pushed into buying EVs without fully understanding their limitations, including their limited range, inadequate charging infrastructure, high insurance costs and poor resale value.

When it comes to high-rise apartments, this is seen as the key solution to the imbalance between the demand for housing and supply. One of the problems, apart from the fact that many people may not want to live in apartments as their first preference, is the uncertain structural integrity of newly constructed buildings. The NSW government has been working on a fix but can anyone be sure?

Packing more and more newcomers into shoddily built high-rise apartments may not be the magic solution to our acute housing shortage or the panacea that politicians think it is.