In a surprising move, Volkswagen announced it plans to invest 60 billion euros in the development of new combustion engines as confidence in electric mobility plummets in Germany and elsewhere.
Chat GPT AI generated image
Strategy adjustment
“This change in strategy shows that the transition to electromobility is progressing more slowly than expected,” reports Germany’s Blackout News here. “Just last year, Volkswagen assumed that electric cars would account for 80 percent of annual sales in Europe by the end of the decade. However, the lukewarm reception for its own ID models is forcing the company to adjust its strategy.” Also see (motor1: 07.06.24).
As German sales of electric vehicles fall way short of government targets due to their unpopularity and high costs, manufacturers are seeing the writing on the wall: Electric mobility still has a long way to go.
Reality check
Originally, the Wolfsburg-Germany based VW planned to invest 180 billion euros only for the next generation of electric vehicles, but now it also plans to invest 60 billion euros for internal combustion engine development.
“The future is electric, but the past is not over yet. It is a third and it will remain a third.” Arno Antlitz, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer of the Volkswagen Group.
Electric mobility gets postponed
The announcement underscores the importance of internal combustion engines in the future, despite declarations from the media and governments claiming they would disappear over the next 1 or 2 decades.
Volkswagen said in 2022 it would sell only electric cars by 2033. This obviously is not not longer the case.
Other luxury VW brands like Bugatti, Lamborghini and Bentley are also focusing on continuing the combustion engine, but steering towards synthetic, alternative fuels.
Blackout News also reports, “Ford no longer believes it will be all-electric in Europe by 2030. Aston Martin has also decided to build cars with combustion engines into the next decade.”
What’s behind the sudden swing back to combustion engines and the growing aversion to electric cars?
As the recent European election results starkly show, customers are tired of being told what to buy and what rules to follow. Germany’s Green Party lost nearly half its voter base in last Sunday’s EU election. Moreover, China’s ability to produce electric cars cheaply is being increasingly viewed as a threat.
“The electric offensive from China is worrying established car manufacturers,” comments Blackout News. “Car manufacturers must react flexibly and invest in both electric and conventional technologies. This is the only way they can meet market and regulatory requirements.”
Federal and state energy policies, now pushing electric vehicles on a reluctant public, are running in conflict with other social and environmental restrictions banning vital materials and component imports.
As consequences, U.S. and European auto companies are racing into Chinese rare earth monopoly and other supply traps posing inevitable economic and national security threats.
American EV consumers who ride along will be left in a ditch along with dealers who lack essential inventory and profitable markets.
This is already occurring.
U.S. customs officials have seized thousands of German Volkswagens over a single part made in China’s Xinjiang region, believed to be in violation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), which requires importers to provide evidence that their goods were not produced with forced labor in order to avoid penalties.
Volkswagen was previously linked to such a violation when the German newspaper Handelsblatt reportedly obtained photographs showing Uyghur workers in military uniforms during the three-year construction of a car-testing track.
As reported in the Financial Times, U.S. authorities have also impounded and are investigating luxury brands produced by Porsche, Bentley, and Audi over suspected UFPLA violations involving electronic components, resulting in delivery delays of uncertain length.
A recent Human Rights Watch report has also warned that carmakers, including Tesla, General Motors, Volkswagen, and Toyota, are failing to ensure they aren’t using aluminum produced by Uyghur forced labor.
Aluminum is used extensively in EV manufacture as a mileage economy measure to compensate for heavy battery weight.
Whereas Tesla owns a factory in Shanghai that builds cars for both Chinese and international markets, they had reportedly tracked its supply chain back to the mining level without evidence of forced labor.
Then, factor in influences of new and existing environmental regulations influencing rare earth mining and processing for batteries, which represent a major EV cost
Biden administration’s anti-drilling and pro-EV policies have made America increasingly dependent on rare earth minerals mined for those batteries under atrocious slave labor and environmental conditions bureaucrats ignore.
China controls a stranglehold monopoly of about 80% of the global supply, with Congo a 90% source of vital cobalt.
As a consequence, Mountain Pass in California, the sole remaining operational U.S. rare earth mine that lost two years of production due to a 2016 bankruptcy, incredulously continues to send its mined ore to China for processing.
Expect those battery costs to escalate in concert with increased global demands for nickel — a primary component of lithium-ion cathodes — having already risen over six years from $10,336 per metric ton in August 2016 to $16,104 currently.
Purchasers should consider that, with a Tesla battery typically costing about $10,000, their resale price will likely have to be significantly higher than that of a comparably aged and sized internal combustion model in similar condition.
Also, expect that on the resale end, an average on-the-road 12-year-old used EV will be on its second or third new battery before an owner can sell it.
Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, Honda, Nissan, and Subaru have meanwhile all had to adjust new model sales prices upward due to the scarcity of semiconductors, a supply condition that will only become more precarious if and when government-mandated EV numbers multiply.
Currently, despite huge auto investments and government subsidies, this isn’t happening.
As reported in The Wall Street Journal, in September of last year, it took retailers over two months to sell an EV, compared with around a month for gas-powered vehicles and only three weeks for a gas-electric hybrid.
Falling demand and rising prices have prompted Ford to cut previously planned 2024 production of its F-150 electric truck in half after losing $60,000 on each EV sold while also pausing construction of a $3.5 billion battery plant in Michigan.
Facing similar realities, General Motors has said it will delay opening a planned large EV truck factory in Michigan by a year, citing a need “to better manage capital investments while aligning with evolving EV demand”.
This slowdown and resulting industry business losses are occurring both despite and in addition to generous $7,500 federal tax credit subsidies offered as EV incentives to reluctant buyers and jacked-up costs for gasoline models consumers truly want to keep vehicle manufacturers financially afloat.
Consequentially, China isn’t the only EV supply chain threat.
A 2024 political climate change returning the presidency and Congress to Republican control will hopefully replace that EV subsidy supply chain with free market choices that will end the greatest threat of all — Biden and Beijing’s influence over what we buy and drive.
This article by Larry Bell originally appeared at NewsMax
Audi will hit the brakes on its rollout of electric car models as consumer enthusiasm wanes in the face of high prices compared to petrol models.
Gernot Döllner, the boss of the Volkswagen-owned brand, said that he wants to avoid flooding dealerships and factories with the vehicles as sales slow. The Telegraph has the story.
“The advantage of EVs (electric vehicles) is becoming visible to consumers step by step,” Mr Döllner told Bloomberg News.
Official forecasts for electric car take-up in the UK were slashed by almost half last month. Sales of new battery-powered cars were expected to grow steadily until they accounted for 67pc of the market by 2027, under a prediction issued in March.
But that figure has now been revised down to just 38pc by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which said the take-up of EVs has been slowing.
Mr Döllner, who was an executive at upmarket stablemate Porsche, was hired in the summer to reinvigorate the mid-market brand, on which Volkswagen relies for a large chunk of its profits.
Audi, whose electric models include the £69,480 Q8 e-tron, faces cheaper competition from China, which is also a key market for Volkswagen’s brands.
While electric cars are cheaper to run, their initial price remains stubbornly higher than petrol and diesel models.
It comes as electric car sales fell by the most on record last month following Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s climbdown on banning petrol models.
Sales of EVs plummeted by 17pc from November last year, according to the statistics published by industry group the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.
The drop beat a 9.7pc fall in April 2020, when showrooms closed due to lockdown restrictions and a 7.9pc decline in the early days of EV sales in March 2008.
The Government pushed back a petrol car sales ban from 2030 to 2035 in a move which carmakers warned could knock consumer confidence in EVs.
Much of the 17pc EV sales drop from last year was due to a glut of deliveries in 2022 following months of supply problems.
But the percentage of electric cars being sold has fallen compared to the rest of the year, according to the figures, with EVs taking only 15.6pc of car sales in November compared to 16.3pc in the first 10 months of the year.
Volkswagen is likely to cut jobs in order to protect its profitability, it emerged last month.
On Monday, managers told VW brand employees of the plans for job reductions.
VW may cut jobs through early retirements, since it has a relatively large number of older workers due to retire.
Factory output for Germany, Europe’s manufacturing powerhouse, fell to a three-year low in September, dragged down by weak car production.
Output fell 1.5pc compared to August, the lowest production since 2020, with carmakers and their suppliers’ production figures dropping 5pc.
In October, Porsche said soaring borrowing costs and rising prices were starting to bite even its wealthy clientele.
It’s been a crushing week for the EV industry as the bad news that has been brewing for months was laid bare in the quarterly reports. Across the industry, corporate CEO’s are all admitting that demand is unexpectedly slow, orders are down, and suddenly projects are being delayed “indefinitely”.
Volkswagen admitted orders are down a shocking 50% and they are sacking 2,000 jobs in the software division. Ford posted an operating loss of $1.3 billion for the quarter — meaning they are losing $36,000 for every EV they sell. They face a ghastly full year loss of $4.5b, so not surprisingly, they are delaying battery plants, and plans to expand production. All up they are now holding off on $12 billion in investments.
The head of Mercedes-Benz described the market as “a pretty brutal space”. Harald Wilhelm hinted that some manufacturers won’t survive: “I can hardly imagine the current status quo is fully sustainable for everybody,” he said.
Panasonic has slowed EV battery production was reduced by 60% in Japan compared to the same quarter last year. While its US plants were OK, profit forecasts of the whole energy division were down 15% and depended on US subsidies.
News of cars kidnapping drivers, and airport car infernos have added to range anxiety and crushing interest rates to squeeze the EV bubble til it popped.
Toyota’s chairman and former CEO, Akio Toyoda, told reporters at an auto show in Japan this week that waning demand for electric vehicles (EV) is a sign that people are waking up to the reality that EVs aren’t the silver bullet against the supposed ills of carbon emissions they’re often made out to be.
“People are finally seeing reality” about EV technology…
Mr. Toyoda, a long-time skeptic of a full-steam-ahead adoption of EVs, stepped down from his role as CEO of Toyota this year amid criticism that he wasn’t serious enough about pushing the company into a quick adoption of battery-powered cars.
Peak EV has been reached too soon…
The Ford Chief Financial Officer, John Lawler, tried to put it in the best light he could
“The narrative has taken over that EVs aren’t growing; they’re growing,” Lawler said. “It’s just growing at a slower pace than the industry and, quite frankly, we expected.” —Automotive News
Even if EV sales are still growing, it’s far too soon for them to be tailing off. At this early point of the transition — when the EV share of the market is small, and if EV’s are going to take over the world in the next ten years, they should be going gangbusters. The really important narrative, that must surely chill the bones of any EV investor, was that the Chairman of Toyota said: ” People Are ‘Finally’ Waking Up to Reality of Electric Vehicles”. If EV sales growth is already shrinking it suggests the final size of the EV market, barring a miracle discovery, is not very big.
Many of these companies have bet big on EV technology, but they are not turning a profit.
Meanwhile, Volkswagen CFO and COO Arno Antlitz explained on a media call that EV orders in Europe are down to 150,000. That’s 50% lower than last year’s total of 300,000.
Despite the higher volume, EV losses continued to rise in the third quarter, with the company posting an operating loss of $1.3 billion, up from $1.1 billion in the previous quarter and more than double its loss from Q3 2022.
This means that Ford lost around $36,000 for every electric vehicle it sold in the quarter, surpassing its estimated $32,350 loss per EV in the second quarter. For the entire year, the carmaker expects a full-year loss of $4.5 billion for its EV unit. Why is that, though?
Ford admits that people don’t want to pay more for an EV than petrol and diesel cars:
Ford said in its earnings report that US EV buyers were “unwilling to pay premiums for [EVs] over gas or hybrid vehicles, sharply compressing EV prices and profitability.”
Even Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, perhaps the biggest EV evangelist in the industry, poured cold water on the EV market and general economic landscape. Musk noted on Tesla’s conference call last Wednesday that the company was delaying construction of its upcoming Gigafactory in Mexico due to concerns about global economic conditions stemming from rising interest rates that make financing cars more expensive for consumers, thus crimping demand.
Ford has halted billions of dollars in investment in EV manufacturing, warning that customers will not pay a premium for these vehicles. The auto giant announced in its third-quarter earnings call on Thursday that it would postpone $12 billion in planned spending on electric vehicle production and pause some major projects, including the construction of a new battery factory in Kentucky.
There’s a “hornet’s nest of anxiety ” about slowing EV demand
Honda and GM have abandoned plans to work together making a cheap EV. A year ago they said they expected “to begin production of “millions” of these affordable EVs by 2027.” Now, it’s none. What’s also shifted is that commentators on EV’s are all openly discussing “the slow down”:
…the decision to scrap plans for more affordable EVs is sure to deepen worries about the future of the EV market in the US and abroad. Tesla’s price cuts, shrinking profit margins, and softening demand has kicked up a hornet’s nest of anxiety about the massive shift to electric vehicles that’s currently underway.
And that anxiety is being reflected in a number of the big player’s moves, including GM’s recent announcements about longer wait times for its upcoming slate of electric trucks and Ford’s move to temporarily cut one of three shifts at the factory that builds the electric F-150 Lightning. –– The Verge
Bad portents: EV’s are taking twice as long to sell
EVs are … lingering longer on dealership lots. Dealers are taking 88 days to sell their entire supply of electrified cars and trucks, compared with 39 days in October 2022, according to Cox. Petrol-powered vehicles, by contrast, are selling in 60 days.
Only one-third of US consumers say the next car or truck they buy is likely to be electric, according to a survey from Yahoo Finance/Ipsos.
Even though sales hit a new record high, the slow-down is upon us:
A record 313,000 electric vehicles were sold in the US in the third quarter, according to data group Cox Automotive. Electric cars climbed to 7.9 per cent of total industry sales in the third quarter, up from 6.1 per cent a year ago, Cox Automotive found.
Even so, the pace of growth is slowing. Year-on-year sales growth for the third quarters of 2021 and 2022 was about 75 per cent; this year the increase was a comparatively cooler 50 per cent, according to Kelley Blue Book, a research company owned by Cox Automotive.
General Motors’ biggest bets on the future — electric vehicles, autonomy and subscription software — are all running into trouble, and now the likelihood of sharply elevated labor costs is raising the stakes even higher.
Electric cars: GM last week abandoned its target to produce 400,000 electric vehicles (EVs) through the first half of 2024, citing slowing demand, continued manufacturing bottlenecks and profitability concerns.
The company had already announced it would delay production of its next-generation electric pickup trucks until 2025 to figure out how to make them more profitably. And it recently paused production of its BrightDrop electric commercial vans until next spring.
Meanwhile, Volkswagen CFO and COO Arno Antlitz explained on a media call that EV orders in Europe are down to 150,000. That’s 50% lower than last year’s total of 300,000.
After releasing its results for the first nine months of the year, Volkswagen’s CFO said EV orders are down 50% in Europe. VW’s order intake fell short, attributed to a slowdown in the overall market, says electrek.co
The Volkswagen Group announced Thursday that EV deliveries increased by 45% YOY, reaching 531,500 in the first nine months of the year.
VW’s EV sales share stood at 9% in the third quarter for a total of 7.9% through September. The company said it remains on track to hit its (previously lowered) annual target of 8-10%.
Europe was Volkswagen’s biggest EV market, accounting for over 341,000 electric models (+61%) sold through September. China, the automaker’s biggest market in terms of profits, was next with 117,100 models sold (+4%). EV deliveries in the US rose 74% to 50,300.
Meanwhile, Volkswagen CFO and COO Arno Antlitz explained on a media call that EV orders in Europe are down to 150,000. That’s 50% lower than last year’s total of 300,000.
Europe accounts for over 64% of Volkswagen’s EV deliveries so far this year. Although deliveries grew slightly in China, Antlitz said the company could lose EV market share until new models built with XPeng begin rolling out.
Volkswagen EV orders fall in Europe
Despite EV orders falling significantly from last year in Europe, Volkswagen began seeing intake pick up in the third quarter.
Antiliz said although order intake was below targets, delivery momentum was expected to continue. He attributed the lower demand to the overall market trend.
Hildegard Wortmann, who oversees VW’s marketing and sales, explained earlier this month, “Our order intake is below our ambitious targets due to the lower-than-expected overall market trend.”
The VW spokesperson attributed the third-quarter growth to a high backlog waiting to be processed. He said that supply chain and logistics kinks are being smoothed out, leading to shortened delivery times.
Volkswagen lowered guidance earlier this year from 11% EV sales share to 8-10%. The automaker’s struggles led to production cuts in Germany last month over slowing demand.
Volkswagen ID.4 Pro (Source: VW)
The company hopes the “refreshed” ID.4 and ID.5, VW’s top-selling EVs, will help turn things around. The new models come with a new electric drive and battery, providing more range in addition to a modern infotainment.
Britain’s car industry has urged the government to dish out tax breaks or other incentives to encourage people to buy electric vehicles (EVs), amid fears that consumer enthusiasm is on the wane.
The government will ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030, but has wound back incentives for buyers – just as motorists have started to fret more about how much EVs cost and whether there is enough charging infrastructure.
Mike Hawes, chief executive of the British car industry’s Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, said EV makers had now made all the early, easier gains, and needed more public support to keep the 2030 target in sight.
Volkswagen’s managing director has warned the sale of electric vehicles is ‘stagnating’ as a poll revealed just 2 per cent of drivers would buy one in the near future.
Alex Smith warned there are currently few incentives to buy EVs. He claimed sales are in ‘stagnation’ with EVs still ‘relatively expensive’ compared to petrol and diesel cars, adding: ‘It’s true to say that with the retail price of an electric car, you will find a premium.’
It came as a poll of 2,375 UK motorists found that just 2 per cent would buy an EV right now. The survey, carried out for industry body the Society for Motor Manufactures and Traders found more than half are not planning to buy one until 2026 or later.
The figures led to growing calls for more support for private buyers to switch to EVs ahead of the planned ban on new petrol and diesel car sales from 2030. Full story
And things are no better in Germany:
Volkswagen AG is cutting temporary workers at its main electric-vehicle factory in Germany because of waning orders for its EVs in Europe.
The manufacturer plans to let go nearly 300 people at the Zwickau plant when their contracts expire in October, according to people familiar with the matter. The fate of around 2,000 additional temporary staff remains uncertain, the people said, declining to be named because a final decision hasn’t been made yet. Volkswagen is having a tough time selling enough mostly made-in-Germany electric cars to challenge Tesla Inc.’s global dominance. Lackluster economic growth as well as higher energy, living and borrowing costs in Europe have weighed on demand for its ID fleet of EVs.
The company hired around 2,700 temporary workers at the Zwickau facility near the Czech border to meet expected surging EV demand. But orders from corporate clients — which account for around 70% of the IDs built at the plant — have been plummeting since a federal subsidy for battery-powered company vehicles expired this month, one of the people said. Full story
When will the motor industry and government get the message that the vast majority of drivers don’t want the useless things?
Sadiq Khan’s controversial Ultra-Low Emissions Zone scheme for London was supposed to put the rocket-boosters under electric car demand.
With the Mayor pressing ahead with a highly-contentious scheme that forces non-compliant petrol and diesel car drivers to pay an eye-watering £12.50 a day to drive into the capital, the expectation was that hundreds of thousands of motorists would rush out to their nearest forecourt and snap up an electric version, triggering an explosion in sales of Nissan Leafs, Teslas and other battery-powered models.
True, sales are steadily increasing but not in the vast numbers that proponents of electrification anticipated or would like to see.
Proportion of cars on UK roads
In fact, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the car industry has misjudged the scale of demand quite badly. Vertu, which is one of Britain’s biggest car dealerships, has become the latest big name to admit that the sector is already suffering from a dramatic oversupply of battery-powered vehicles.
Indeed supply is outstripping demand to such an extent, that prices are tumbling rapidly.
The warning follows the extraordinary decision of German car titan Volkswagen in July to halt electric vehicle production at its sprawling Emden factory in north-west Germany and lay off a fifth of its 1,500 employees after sales of electric models fell 30pc short of forecasts.
Unwanted electric cars are piling up on American forecourts too leaving some dealers to refuse further deliveries until the backlog has eased.
One hopes politicians the world over are paying attention because what we are witnessing is another example of how the top-down economics of net zero increasingly don’t stack up: with the introduction of an entirely arbitrary 2030 ban on petrol and diesel cars, the Government is forcing manufacturers to churn out millions of vehicles, regardless of whether the market actually exists or not.
The deadline should be scrapped without further ado. This “cart before the horse” approach of trying to stimulate demand by creating supply is the wrong way round and almost never works in business.
Start-up Britishvolt tried something similar, promising to build a giant battery factory in Blythe, on the Northumbrian coast that would churn out enough batteries every year to power 300,000 cars.
Yet there was an even bigger flaw at the heart of its plans: it had failed to secure a single order – a situation that hadn’t changed by the time it ran out of money at the start of the year.
It’s hard to fault the intentions of the great net-zero crusade – a greener planet is something everyone should want to see. But far too much of it is built on hope rather than reality.
The Government’s policy on wind energy has proved to be similarly divorced from fact. The Contracts for Difference scheme, which guarantees a fixed price for the electricity that is produced for 15 years, is an effective incentive during more benign times but when overheads are surging, as they are now, it quickly becomes an impediment to progress.
With ministers showing little willingness to bend on prices in the face of rampant cost increases, major projects are being ruthlessly abandoned.
The biggest setback has come off the Norfolk coast after Vattenfall announced it would shut down construction of its Boreas wind farm. The 1.4 gigawatt development was set to power around 1.5m homes but the Swedish energy outfit insists a 40pc surge in costs, driven by inflation, supply issues and rising wages means it is no longer viable.
Without more generous state subsidies others will surely follow suit, shattering Britain’s stated ambitions to nearly quadruple offshore wind capacity from 14GW currently to 50GW by the end of the decade.
Yet perhaps nothing underlines the Alice in Wonderland disconnection of ministers more than the campaign to force the population to green their homes with heat pumps.
Even a ban on the sale of new oil boilers from 2026 has failed to convince people to make the shift largely because the cost of converting your home can be huge, so too the disruption and upheaval from having one installed, while much of the technology suffers from several major flaws.
It might explain why, in spite of a Government scheme that pays bungs of between £5,000 and £6,000 per household, less than 14,000 vouchers have been claimed since it was launched in May last year.
Naive politicians aren’t the only ones. Virtuous investors have wasted huge sums on other ‘green’ innovations such as fake meat that have turned out to be busts.
Perhaps the venture capital industry has got better at picking winners, though that seems doubtful. At one stage it could hardly have been worse.
A study by the American academic Ben Gaddy in 2016 found that of the $25bn ploughed into so-called “clean-tech” ventures, 90pc were abject failures, and close to all of them could be considered poor investments.
Here in the UK, the problem is compounded by our willingness to remain silent as more productive hi-tech industries that Britain should be building its future on are auctioned off to the highest bidders.
The takeovers in quick succession of Cambridge-based biotech firm Abcam by an American rival and of Staffordshire drug IT specialist Instem by French private equity make a mockery of our ambition to be a life-sciences powerhouse. This country’s help-yourself attitude to opportunistic foreign raiders has to end.
Equally, perhaps the time has come to accept that the economics of net zero are more fantasy than reality.
An article from John Ray explains how the Electric Vehicle movement is losing steam The electric car ‘revolution’ is a disaster before it’s begun.Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images. (The UK references are due to the original article appearing in The Telegraph.)
The electric car revolution is stalling, of that there can no longer be any doubt. It has left the big global carmakers floundering, uncertain of how to proceed in a race they reluctantly entered in the first place.
Electrification was initially met with fierce resistance. But once politicians held a gun to the heads of company bosses with a series of cliff-edge deadlines for phasing out the combustion engine, carmakers had little choice but to go all-in.
Century-old business models were declared dead and ambitious plans hurriedly drawn up to electrify entire portfolios from small city run-arounds to family saloons and SUVs, at astronomical cost. Even Ferrari has embraced the movement – much to the consternation of petrolheads everywhere.
But with electrification barely off the starting grid, one by one the big carmakers are already pulling back as demand badly falters.
Volkswagen is so concerned about flagging sales that it has taken the extraordinary decision of halting electric vehicle production at one of its biggest plants. Assembly lines for electric models will be paused for six weeks at the Emden factory in northwest Germany and 300 of its 1,500 staff laid off after sales fell 30pc short of forecasts.
This means production of the new VW ID.7 electric model, which had been due to commence in July will be pushed back until the end of the year. The ID.4 electric SUV and the upcoming ID.7 electric sedan will also be delayed.
“We are experiencing strong customer reluctance in the electric vehicle sector,” plant boss Manfred Wulff said.
That is remarkably plain language from the largest car manufacturer on the planet, and a company that recently announced plans to invest €120bn (£103bn) over the next five years in “electrification and digitalisation”.
It comes months after Ford poured cold water on the shift to electric with thousands of job losses in Europe.
Electric vehicle production is unable to support anything like the same number of jobs that petrol and diesel models are able to sustain, it said. Boss Jim Farley estimates that 40pc fewer staff will be needed to develop battery versions.
A generation of pure electric vehicle makers has hardly fared any better. On Tuesday, Lordstown Motors, the US electric truck specialist that Donald Trump once heralded as the saviour of a depressed Ohio town, filed for bankruptcy protection.
Even Elon Musk has been forced to repeatedly cut the price of Teslas in a desperate effort to prop up demand and protect market share.
But it’s the setback at VW that stands out, raising serious questions about whether politicians are making the catastrophic mistake of forcing electric cars on a public that doesn’t want them. Indeed, the decision to impose strict deadlines for the phase out of petrol cars could turn out to be one of the most ruinous policy decisions of our lifetimes.
Think about it for a second: an entire industry not only forced to abandon a product that the vast majority of people still want and use, but also bullied into channelling all its resources into making something on a colossal level that there simply isn’t the market for – at least not within the horrendously short timeframe that is being imposed on car manufacturers.
It’s industrial self-sabotage and a commercial, economic and social catastrophe in the making. But what’s worse is that the damage risks being far greater in the UK than anywhere else in the Western world thanks to the Government’s myopic obsession with arbitrary net zero targets.
While the rest of the industrial world seems to have largely settled on a 2035 deadline for petrol and diesel phase out, ministers, for reasons destined to remain a mystery, have decided Britain needs to hit this milestone five years earlier than everyone else.
It makes no sense at all, and yet the ramifications threaten to be huge. By diverting capital into something that lots of people essentially don’t want, it risks inflicting massive losses on an already fragile UK car industry.
It is pure fantasy to imagine that Britain – with a dearth of battery factories (consultants Alix Partners estimates as much as a third of Britain’s battery requirements will need to be imported), a paucity of chargers and dramatically higher energy costs – will be in any position to go fully electric in the next seven years. And the Government simply isn’t capable of solving any of these challenges in time, if at all.
The UK risks becoming the unfortunate guinea pig in a costly and dangerous experiment that persuades the rest of the world to push their own deadlines out even further, turning this country into an example of how not to become a nation of electric car owners.
This week, newspapers in the UK appear to be full of Carmageddon headlines.
Thanks to NetZeroWatch and Ballyb, for the compilation of EV warning signs on the road to West Debacle.
The big advantage of an EV used to be the cheap fill but that’s all changed in the least year with the energy crisis. If the workers can’t afford to turn on the oven to cook a Sunday Roast, they can hardly afford to power up a car.
In a bit of a bombshell last week, Volkswagon admitted that people weren’t buying their electric cars, quaintly referring to this phenomenon as “strong consumer reluctance”. Sales were so bad though, 30% down on forecasts, that they have closed the factory at Emden, Germany for six weeks and are sacking 300 out of 1,500 staff.
Meanwhile, the UK is speeding towards the 2030 EV mandate five years faster than the rest of the world, and the backlash is growing. A Daily Mail poll finds only 1 in 4 people think it’s a good idea to ban sales of petrol and diesel cars by 2030. Fully 53% of people don’t like it. Is the UK a democracy or not? Manufacturing and industry leaders are using words like “ruinous” and talking of “the end of UK car production.” They’re warning that 800,000 UK jobs are at risk. Nothing about this makes sense. EV’s are a lousy way to change the weather. No one even knows if EV’s will reduce carbon dioxide.
At the moment in the UK 36 cars are fighting over every public charging site. Electricity demand is expected to double in the UK due to EV’s yet there is no plan to provide the extra capacity. Perhaps the real plan is to get half the country onto electric buses…?
Politicians are forcing electric cars on a public that doesn’t want them
Ben Marlow, The Telegraph
The electric car revolution is stalling, of that there can no longer be any doubt. It has left the big global carmakers floundering…
But it’s the setback at VW that stands out, raising serious questions about whether politicians are making the catastrophic mistake of forcing electric cars on a public that doesn’t want them.
Think about it for a second: an entire industry not only forced to abandon a product that the vast majority of people still want and use, but also bullied into channelling all its resources into making something on a colossal level that there simply isn’t the market for – at least not within the horrendously short timeframe that is being imposed on car manufacturers.
It’s industrial self-sabotage and a commercial, economic and social catastrophe in the making.
Mandating EVs is an “assault on the working class” says Joel Kotkin.
EV owners are wealthier, the cars are more expensive, and mandates will put owning a car out of reach of the unwashed masses…
In simple terms, the push for EVs represents an assault on the working class. Two-thirds of all EV owners have incomes in excess of $100,000.
EV mandates are also likely to force up the price of now restricted traditional cars. In the meantime, greens will demand higher fuel prices to reduce drivers’ consumption of the demon petrol. Ultimately, as even the Washington Post recently admitted, electric vehicles are hastening a return to conditions not seen since the early 20th century, when the automobile was a luxury item. ‘New cars, once part of the American Dream, [are] now out of reach for many’, it notes.
Just to repeat… None of this makes sense. Even if people have a religious fixation on climate change, this isn’t the path to salvation:
Economist Bjorn Lomborg calculates that a wholesale shift to EVs will lead to a reduction of global temperatures of no more than 0.0002 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.
Kotkin asks “who benefits”:
So, who wins here? Certainly not middle- or working-class families for whom climate change barely registers as a primary concern.
…the biggest winner is China.
Today, China produces twice as many EVs as the US and the EU combined. Its leading EV maker, BYD, is now the world’s largest. Its electric-car exports are expected to almost double this year, helping it to overtake Japan as the biggest car exporter worldwide, according to the South China Morning Post.
China has control of much of the worlds rare metals. Giving up an industry with a century of expertise and mass public support for a new high risk industry that depends on foreign supply lines needs some explanation. No one believes we’re doing it to fix the weather.
——————-
Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His latest book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, is out now. Follow him on Twitter: @joelkotkin
There was a young climate-change tzar, Bought a brand new all E.V. car, Found that very few joints, Had quick charging points, Means this car can’t venture too far.
h/t CampsieFellow, Geoff Buys Cars; Volkswagen is scaling back electric vehicle production, laying off contractors, but internal combustion vehicle production remains unchanged.
Among the models affected are the ID 4 SUV and early production of the ID 7 saloon. Details of the shortening of shifts were provided by Manfred Wulff, head of the works council for the Emden plant, in response to an inquiry from the German Press Agency and an earlier article published by the North West newspaper.
While the production of combustion-engine models, including the Volkswagen Passat, continues unchanged, the factory holidays for electric vehicle line workers have been extended by one week.
…
Wulff indicates demand for electric vehicles is up to 30% below originally planned production figures.
“We are experiencing strong customer reluctance in the electric vehicle sector,” he told the North West newspaper.
Wulff said production of the ID 7 saloon had originally been planned to start in July but has now been delayed to “later this year”.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Volkswagen Emden plant said: “We are confident that the plant’s utilisation will increase again with the launch of the ID 7 at the end of the year.
An interesting video opinion piece on the issues with EVs;
Volkswagen says they expect EV production to pick up – presumably in anticipation of another round of European Union anti-consumer choice laws, to try to force more sales of EVs.
EVs are and for the foreseeable future will remain a rich persons’ toy.
I recently completed a driving holiday to the snow, via Western New South Wales. The roads were so bad even my 4WD couldn’t take them at full speed, especially Golden Highway and Newell Highway. In addition, there aren’t a lot of places to refuel between Goondiwindi and Dubbo – my long range 4WD was starting to look thirsty by the end of that leg of my holiday.
Even around Canberra, our nation’s capital, the roads were a disgrace in some places.
One leg of the driving holiday lasted 8 hours, across rough roads and mountainous terrain. Another drive I spent most of the day driving into a fierce headwind.
Despite all the hype, the fact remains that for any kind of serious driving on a reasonable timescale, you will need an internal combustion engine vehicle for the foreseeable future.
Some of the roads I drove on my holiday (video is from a few months ago);
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Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
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