“EV’s – Electric Vehicles”

When you think of Germany, you think of cars. Germany invented the automobile and its leading car makers – Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche – are exalted global brands, have been for decades. These companies and their suppliers form the backbone of German industry, with more than 800,000 direct jobs and hundreds of thousands of indirect ones.

How many of these jobs will remain in a decade or two? Germany and other European countries where building cars forms an essential part of the industrial and innovation fabric – France, Italy, Slovakia, Czechia – could crash as China, and the United States, to a lesser extent, come to dominate the market for electric vehicles. The European automotive giants, especially the German ones, are lumbering beasts who came late to the EV revolution. At the same time, China has pretty much locked up some of the critical metals, such as cobalt, that no car battery can go without.

A couple of years ago I thought seriously about buying an electric car. Not a hybrid, but the full monty. There was one in particular I liked the look of and I even contacted a dealership to ask whether they’d accept my diesel-powered VW Touran in part-exchange. The answer was yes, but it was still eye-wateringly expensive. Was it worth it? I tried to persuade myself it would be, given the savings on fuel costs, the waiving of the congestion charge, etc.

Boy, am I glad I dodged that bullet. Scarcely a day passes without a new horror story about electric vehicles in the press. Over the past week alone, we’ve learnt that some popular models are depreciating at twice the rate of petrol cars, that the number of free electric chargers on Britain’s roads has dropped by 40 per cent in the past 12 months, and that the sheer weight of their batteries means these cars could be banned from bridges and multi-storey car parks. It’s carmageddon!

Recently, the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency proposed strict new tailpipe emissions standards. These standards would force fully electric vehicles to jump from 5.8 percent of new car sales in 2021 to 67 percent by 2032. The following list gives 25 reasons why the president’s lofty goals are unwarranted and would be both economically and environmentally harmful.

From rocketing electricity prices to absent chargers by way of bridge-rattling weight, the problems are mounting

The rollout of electric cars isn’t quite going to plan, is it? By the end of the decade it will be illegal to buy a new petrol car, but that doesn’t mean we’ve thought through the consequences.

There were always obvious problems with the technology: the electricity has to come from somewhere, and Britain isn’t installing enough chargers to meet government targets. And that’s before you take the rocketing price of electricity into account, which means that thousands of the handy roadside chargers where motorists could charge up for nothing have been pulled. There are nearly 40 per cent fewer than a year ago.

United Auto Workers (UAW) is delaying its endorsement of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, according to a May 2 union memo.

The Detroit-based union is holding back out of concern for recent Biden administration policies that encourage the transition to electric vehicles (EVs).

The UAW is in for a rude awakening I suspect.

Electric cars are losing their value at twice the rate of petrol vehicles, in the case of some models, meaning drivers have lost thousands of pounds to depreciating prices.

Electric vehicles (EVs) lost roughly half their value between 2020 and 2023, while petrol car prices fell by 37pc in the same period, according to used car finance specialists Choose My Car.

Its study found electric cars lost £15,000 of their value on average over the three-year period, compared with £9,000 for petrol vehicles. In some cases the gap was far wider.