The “$60,000 Electric Junkers to Save the Planet” industry is running into trouble. Tesla sales are down and GM is running into trouble with its lineup of electric junkers. Especially since with the Bolt gone, it has no more remotely affordable EVs. And the people who can drop a year’s salary to save the planet are buying luxury brands.
Western policy on decarbonisation seems to be driven more by emotion and boosterism than by what is technologically feasible
Never was the old adage “don’t buy the prototype, buy the redesign” more appropriate. Motorists who bought an electric vehicle in the belief that it would hold its value better than a petrol or diesel must be feeling a little sore. According to the AA, the secondhand values of the 20 most popular electric and hybrid cars was down 12 per cent in the first quarter of this year compared with the first quarter of 2023. That is the drop in value of like-for-like cars, not what buyers can expect to lose in depreciation over the first year.
For Elon Musk and Tesla, 2024 has so far been a rough year.
First, attacks in the Red Sea forced the shutdown of Tesla’s Berlin gigafactory in January. Then, “ecoterrorists” shut it down again in March.
To top it off, mounting competition from Chinese rivals forced Tesla to slow production in Shanghai in the face of weaker sales.
Say goodbye to the trucking industry as we know it, and goodbye to the American economy, too.
You might have missed it on Good Friday — which you can be sure was no accident — when the Biden EPA released its new tailpipe rules for semi-trucks, but the new rules will destroy how we move goods around the country.
A Canadian entrepreneur in China accused of stealing battery manufacturing technology from Tesla has been released on bail in the United States.
Klaus Pflugbeil, a Canadian citizen living in Ningbo, China, had a bond hearing on March 22 and was released on bail March 28, according to information provided by Danielle Hass, spokesperson for the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, in an email to CTVNews.ca on Monday.
A lead article in the sober-sided New York Times is seldom funny. Yet ‘A New Surge in Power Use is Threatening US Climate Goals’ earlier this month cracked me up. Check out this sternly dramatic first paragraph: ‘Something unusual is happening in America. Demand for electricity, which has stayed largely flat for two decades, has begun to surge.’ Personally, I’d have headlined that article ‘Well, duh’ – perhaps with the subhead ‘Aw, shucks’.
The leading advocates of mandatory electrification evince a profound hostility toward cars and the people who like them.
Like many Americans, I have all manner of problems with the Biden administration’s ongoing attempt to coerce us into electric vehicles over the next decade. I object to the federal government presuming that its role in our lives includes telling us what we may drive; I am unpersuaded that the law the White House is using accords Washington, D.C., the power to remake the car industry; and I am bothered by the false assumption that, because upper-middle-class people seem to like Teslas, the average citizen is yearning for his Ford Explorer or Toyota Corolla to be converted into a glorified golf cart. But, in addition to all of these more reasoned explanations for my opposition, I have another: I like cars.
Hertz just fired its CEO for one single, awful business decision. He is taking the fall for Hertz’s decision — on his watch — to buy 100,000 electric vehicles from Tesla, all for the American fleet. To say the decision was a flop is putting it mildly.
Hertz has about 3,000 domestic locations, and a fleet of about 430,000 cars, SUVs, and minivans. Each location obviously ranges widely from high volume to low, so this estimate won’t be exact, but that works out to about 35 E.V.s per location.
The Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has revealed its ambition: to phase out gas-powered cars in favor of electric vehicles (EVs). Incredibly, this announcement comes as we are flooded with overwhelming evidence that EVs are a market loser.
Indeed, the artificial boom and then meltdown of the EV market is a modern industrial calamity. It was created by government, social media, wild disease frenzy, far-flung thinking, and the irrational chasing of utopia, followed by a rude awakening by facts and reality.
h/t Mauser
DETROIT — Jeep maker Stellantis is laying off about 400 white-collar workers in the U.S. as it deals with the transition from combustion engines to electric vehicles.
The company formed in the 2021 merger between PSA Peugeot and Fiat Chrysler said the workers are mainly in engineering, technology and software at the headquarters and technical center in Auburn Hills, Michigan, north of Detroit. Affected workers were being notified starting Friday morning.
It is no business of the state to steer drivers from one automotive technology to another. But if the U.S. government should decide to do this, it should do so through Congress, not a regulatory agency. Where climate policy is involved, though, individual autonomy and popular consent have a way of being overridden. In April 2023, the EPA proposed a set of rules designed to ensure that, depending on which “compliance pathway” — a phrase redolent of a bureaucracy run amok — auto manufacturers took, electric vehicles (EVs) would account for as much as 67 percent of new light vehicle sales by 2032.
Progressive climate regulations could cost Biden votes in Rust Belt states come November.
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm’s four-day publicity tour for electric vehicles was always intended to draw attention — and it did, just not the kind she’d hoped for. Granholm and her caravan acted as ambassadors for President Joe Biden’s support for green energy and clean cars. But it’s hard to spend four days on the road without showcasing the downsides of electric vehicles.
Outside of Augusta, Georgia, Granholm and her team bumped up against a common limitation: too few EV chargers. Ahead of her arrival, Granholm’s advance team realized that they would have to wait in line. One charger was broken, leaving only three that worked.
Joe Biden has announced new rules that will see as many as half of all cars sold in America run on electricity by 2030.
The US President on Wednesday moved to adopt strict European-style tailpipe emission rules. The finalised regulations will require manufacturers to drastically cut the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from cars and trucks from 2027 through to 2032.
The rules will trigger a seismic shift in the US, a country dominated by cars and one where the price of gas is used as a barometer for household finances.
When the Alberta government announced its 2024 budget at the end of February, one item in particular raised eyebrows: a new registration fee of $200 on electric vehicles, beginning in January, 2025.
The justification was simple: EVs don’t pay fuel taxes when they are charged at home, which they often are. EVs are also, on average, heavier than their combustion engine counterparts, and thus, on average, more damaging to roads. Absent a clear usage metric by which to charge EV drivers for their share of road maintenance costs, an annual flat fee would be imposed.
A noted fiscally conservative think tank warned that a proposed federal mandate from the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to ban the sale of new gasoline/diesel-only powered cars after 2035 and allow electric-only sales is an unrealistic fantasy that would cause massive chaos by threatening to collapse the nation’s power grids.
“Requiring all new vehicle sales in Canada to be electric in just 11 years means the provinces need to substantially increase their power generation capabilities, and adding the equivalent of 10 new mega-dams or 13 new gas plants in such a short timeline isn’t realistic or feasible,” said G. Cornelis van Kooten, a Fraser Institute senior fellow and author of “Failure to Charge: A Critical Look at Canada’s EV Policy.”
