Electric vehicle prices would need to drop by nearly a third for Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s ambitious sales mandate to be feasible, according to a new report from the Parliamentary Budget Office.
Blacklock’s Reporter says the mandate requires that 60% of new passenger vehicle sales be electric by 2030, but the Budget Office raised concerns about the economic viability of this target.
Unless policies or technologies change, the cost of electric vehicles (EVs) needs to decrease by 31 per cent if Canada to wants to reach its sales target of 60 per cent EVs by 2030, according to a new report released Thursday by Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux.
And what about the infrastructure needed to charge all those flashy new EV’s? Any new reactors coming on stream? No?
When politicians make important financial decisions based on a movie they may have seen as kids, it shouldn’t come as a shock if the results prove to be sub-optimal.
Field of Dreams was a hit 1989 film based on a 1982 novel about a 1919 baseball scandal. An Iowa farmer played by Kevin Costner repeatedly hears an ethereal voice advising him “If you build it, he will come.” So he constructs a ball diamond in a corn field and, sure enough, long-dead figures from a long-gone baseball team — including Ray Liotta as Shoeless Joe Jackson — come wandering out of the fields for a game of pick-up.
Last week, we reported that Ford was canceling its plans for a three-row electric crossover as part of an adjustment to its electric strategy because of cooling demand for EVs. Now we are getting a better look at just how much that strategy is changing and what it’ll end up costing The Blue Oval. Chiefly, Ford is expected to take on $1.9 billion in related charges and write-downs.
The cancelation of this three-row EV comes after Ford said in the Spring that it would be delaying plans for the model by two years to 2027. It also comes during mounting pressure to restore aggressive discounts to get their current EVs off dealer lots.
h/t Mauser
EV sales in North America face new market realities and automakers are shifting their production to meet actual, rather than anticipated demand. After being encouraged by government policy to invest tens of billions of dollars to transition to electric vehicles, companies are rapidly changing gears.
As Sam Fiorani, Vice President of AutoForecast Solutions observed in March , “Getting the first 10 per cent of the electric vehicle market is relatively easy with a good product and a market that wants that product. The next 90 per cent will be much harder to convert.”
Toronto EV driver can’t use closest overnight charging station because of permit restrictions
A Toronto-based Uber driver spends nearly half an hour most days walking back and forth between an on-street electric vehicle (EV) charging station and his home.
John Chen says he could cut that walk down to eight minutes each way if the city allowed him to use a closer charging station in his neighbouring permit parking zone.
He can’t charge his EV at home because he doesn’t have a designated parking spot and relies on street parking.
Despite living on the edge of his own parking zone near Coxwell Avenue and Dundas Street, Chen says the city told him he can’t get a permit for the other zone to use the closer charger overnight.
Canada will impose new tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles, aluminum and steel, lining up behind western allies and taking steps to protect domestic manufacturers.
The government plans to announce a 100% levy on electric cars and 25% on steel and aluminum, according to people familiar with the matter, speaking on condition they not be identified because the matter is still private. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to unveil the policy in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he’s gathered with the rest of his cabinet for a series of meetings about the economy and foreign relations.
Ford Motor’s decision this week to kill a highly touted future electric vehicle is a sign that the industry’s pullback on EVs is deepening.
The Dearborn, Mich., automaker said Wednesday it is canceling plans for an electric, family-hauler sport-utility vehicle that Chief Executive Jim Farley once touted as a “personalized bullet train.” The move added to the drumbeat of news from carmakers of delayed or scrapped investments into EV models, factories and battery projects.
General Motors, Volkswagen, Mercedes and other automakers also have curbed their EV ambitions in recent months. Taken together, the walked-back plans are an acknowledgment that the big investments outlined at the start of the decade got ahead of the consumer’s appetite for a full switch to EVs.
Ford Motor, which had once hoped to race ahead of other established automakers in electric vehicles, is again slowing the pace of its investments and new battery-powered models.
The automaker said on Wednesday that it would delay the introduction of a new large electric pickup truck by about 18 months, to 2027, and scrap a three-row electric sport-utility vehicle.
The company is also reducing the amount of money it plans to spend on electric vehicles in an effort to stem multibillion-dollar losses on the technology, while adding plans to introduce a new electric delivery van in 2026. A new medium-sized electric pickup is expected in 2027 as well, the company said.
As the federal government mulls whether to impose tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, some Canadians say they would jump at the chance to buy a cheaper EV manufactured in that country.
Ottawa held a month-long consultation in July on how to handle Beijing’s powerful presence in the EV sector. Tariffs are among the options on the table.
Michael Wawrykowicz, who lives in Edmonton, uses a small Mitsubishi EV he bought second-hand four years ago for short trips around the city.
Given this is the CBC, I suspect the article is a trial balloon sent up by the Trudeau gov’t.
Canada has developed a reputation internationally in recent years for being soft on China. The Hogue Commission has heard multitude stories of Chinese interference that have been known to the government with no action taken. Until Industry Minister François-Phillipe Champagne took the reins, investment review decisions handed Canadian companies over to companies that were Beijing-controlled. Defence spending is nowhere near what is needed for defence against Chinese forces in the Pacific or our own Arctic.
I’m not going to buy a domestic EV or a foreign EV.
Interesting … EU Cuts Planned Tariffs On Tesla’s China-Made EVs To 9%
The European Commission announced this AM that, in its ongoing findings of an anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese imports of battery electric vehicles, all Tesla vehicles imported from China will be subject to a 9% tariff. Proposed tariffs on other EV companies were revised slightly ahead of what could become EU trade policy later this year.
Of all the proposed duties on Chinese EVs imported to the EU, Tesla appears to be the big winner and will pay the lowest rate of 9%. Reuters noted the EU “set a new reduced rate of 9% for Tesla, lower than the 20.8% it had indicated in July.”
The Center for Strategic & International Studies just revealed the enormity of China’s subsidization of its EV industry
Will she or won’t she? Will Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland announce tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles this week? If so, will she follow the American lead and tack on a 100% levy on any battery-powered vehicle BYD or Geely might dare to try to import to the United States? Or will ours be a more nuanced — dare I say World Trade Organization-approved — approach like the “variable” tariffs the E.U. are finalizing? The entire Canadian automotive industry awaits her decision with bated breath, with more than $50 billion — the monies promised to Volkswagen, Stellantis, et al to build battery plants here in the Great White Frozen North — hanging in the balance.
What are Trudeau’s China class backers saying?
I realize that tariffs and electric vehicles aren’t the most alluring subject in mid-August, when we’re trying to hold on to the last weeks of summer.
But you have literally billions of reasons to pay attention — exactly 52.455 billion reasons, which according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer is the number of your tax dollars that governments have invested in the EV industry so far.
Trudeau’s investment or rather waste of our tax dollars on EV’s was a mistake.
It was an ideologically driven green-scam meant to bail out the auto industry which if it had stuck to ICE vehicles would be in much better shape.
China flooding our market with electric vehicles no one wants doesn’t seem like much of a threat.
Canada isn’t a country, so much as an elaborate program for distributing public money to a handful of manufacturing companies in southern Ontario. It doesn’t matter if the government in Ottawa is Liberal or Conservative. And it doesn’t matter if whatever is being manufactured is something people want to buy. The existence of industries in other parts of the country, such as oil and gas in Alberta, that thrive largely without subsidies only seems to reinforce Ottawa’s need to coddle Central Canada.
Now that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and his party have joined the chorus calling for more action against Chinese imports, a key decision facing Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland this month just got a little easier.
Cross-party consensus on the wisdom of lining up with the Biden administration’s incoming tariffs on made-in-China electric vehicles provides the government with more political cover. But there’s still a risk of incoming flak.
To understand how complicated this gets, consider how then-president Donald Trump’s earlier campaign against Chinese state-sponsored overproduction played out for the United States and its trading partners in what was then NAFTA, now the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA). That policy debate got very confusing for voters who like to slot politicians on a predictable left-right axis.
