Electric vehicles are huge money-losers for Ford

March 26, 2023 By Monica Showalter

We know that electric vehicles, whose manufacture requires rare earth minerals mined by third-world children, aren't clean. We also know that electric vehicles, which get their electrical charge from coal-fired plants and emit more carbon dioxide than conventional vehicles, aren't green. We also know that electric vehicles, as recent storms and heat waves have indicated, aren't reliable Now we learn that even at $70,000 a pop, complete with tax savings and government subsidies, green vehicles aren't profitable, either. According to Breitbart News:........To Read More

• The many disadvantages of electric cars - April 21, 2023 By Uldis Sprogis - It is a myth that electric cars are green because they have no exhaust emissions.  The fact is that, depending on the region, most electric grid power stations use fossil fuels such as dirty coal, gas, and petroleum.  So electric cars are not a green sustainable solution for now. Under moderate temperatures, most electric cars suffer from a limited average range of about 350 miles on a full charge, although some high-priced models can travel as far as 500 miles.  This makes long trips by car rather difficult, especially since there is a dearth of electric charging stations along the interstate highways and within city limits.............

 

Electric Vehicles Can Change the World, But Won't Change the Climate

By Rich Kozlovich

Do these misfits really believe the world is on the eve of destruction over climate change?  Does anyone really believe the world can change from fossil fuels driven vehicles to electric driven vehicles?  Do any of these misfit activists really believe it matters? 

On May 17, 2023 Jack Hellner posted this piece, "Why would anyone believe these people can control temperatures, sea levels, and storm activity forever?", regarding the insanity behind this economic and socially destructive drive over the blatantly false claims about catestrophic anthropogenic global warming, or climate change since the world isn't warming, saying:

The people who say they can control the climate forever if we are forced to buy electric cars and give up a lot of other stuff somehow can't figure out how to have AM radio stations without interference from electric vehicles. 

So, what's the answer to that little problem? Get rid of AM in car radios.  And what about those silly spare tires you don't need in an electric car?  Didn't know that?  Yes, there's no room in these cars because of the batteries, but don't worry, if you happen to have a luxury electric car, there's a service Mercedes-Benz EQC-400 offers so you can press a button and get Mercedes on the phone and get them to send a tow truck.  The driver notes:

“I’ve spoken to them, they’re sending a tow truck,".....“Quick five minutes on the phone, a $200 cab charge voucher to get home, [and the] car’s going to get towed to Mercedes and the car’s going to be fixed tomorrow apparently.......”

So now they're no longer stranded, and the driver, who clearly has a screw loose was so impressed with how Mercedes handled this.  Yet, one reader noted needing a tow truck, a taxi cab home, and a day or two to get the car back, and that was just to fix a flat tire, a problem that could have taken less than thirty minutes if there was a spare, is far from impressive.  Also, what are the options if you don't own a luxury electric car?  What if you're in an area where cell phones have no reception?  Are you stranded and left to the mercy of circumstance? 

Mr. Hellman goes on to make twenty-four keen and cogent observations, which amounts to the fact if the world descends into creating electricity via alternative energy production, such as solar and wind, it will be impossible to supply sufficient energy for our homes and businesses let alone electric vehicles.  

Batteries are far from safe and can unexpectedly catch fire, and extremely difficult to put out.  And if the battery for some reason won't work, it can't be fixed.  It must be replaced, and there aren't sufficient charging stations, and the distances that can be driving before recharging is small, and that distance become much smaller during winter months, and shorter if you foolishly use the heater, the radio and windshield wipers.  Imagine needing any silly stuff like that in winter.   Also, you had under no circumstance be hauling anything.  That can drop travel distance by as much as 70 percent.  It gets better.  To fully charge a battery can take up to "7 to 10 hours to fully charge many EVs using a Level 2 charger."

And it just keeps getting better and better.  It appears if temperatures rise to over 86 degrees, the heat reduces travel distances, and while it's claimed these batteries can last between ten and twenty years in a perfect climate, extreme temperatures at either end of the climate spectrum seriously reduce life expectancy.  Remember that battery that couldn't be fixed and has to be replaced?  It can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000.

Hellman goes on to describe the very unpleasant geopolitical and social consequences of this insane EV drive, and they're not pretty, and makes these absolutely valid observations:

And the last problem is this. Even if all the predictions were true and we all changed to electric, the temperature would only be reduced by a few 10ths of a degree in 80 years. Anyone who believes that prediction when the weather can't be predicted even for tomorrow should see if they have lost their ability to think. Why would we spend trillions, greatly destroy our quality of life, and destroy industries that directly and indirectly employ tens of millions to supposedly adjust temperatures by a minuscule amount?  

Everyone should remember that all previous dire predictions have been false. Why would new ones be better?

For over twenty years I've been writing about this insanity regarding anthropogenic global warming, and how it was nothing but scientific fraud.  The Hockey Stick and the claims from the East Anglia crowd have been shown by so many to be junk science.  How did I know that?  It was easy.  I always start with the premise that if it's coming from the left, or their secular religion known as environmentalism, it's a lie!   

But that's just the premise, because I really do care about truth, so then I spend a lot of time researching the information, and that includes reading all sides of an issue.   And invariably, once I've done that, I find their claims really are all lies.  Lies of commission, lies of omission, logical fallacies, data dredging, conclusions in search of data, and especially unproven and unprovable claims and speculation.  

The fact is if electric vehicles are forced on humanity, it would dramatically alter the world economically and socially, but it will not change the world climatically.   

I recommend reading all of Jack Hellner's commentary, it really is excellent! 

Biden Federal Government Goes Full Suicide Bomber Against America

May 14, 2023/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

From his first days in office, President Biden has promised — threatened — to activate the administrative state at every level to address and solve the “climate crisis.” In the orthodoxy of the Biden/Democrat climate cult, this is to be accomplished by reducing U.S. carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

Now, even if you believe that a little more CO2 in the atmosphere is some kind of a problem (it isn’t), there is nothing that the United States can do to have any meaningful impact on that situation, given that countries with populations a large multiple of ours (China, India, Africa) are building coal-fired power plants as fast as they can. Even if we closed our economy entirely and reduced ourselves to eating grass and bugs, the effect on the climate would be zilch.

Meanwhile we have waited through the first two plus years of Bidenism to find out exactly what punishments the administrative state has in mind for us for our sins of prosperity and enjoyment of life. In the last few weeks, we have learned at least part of the answer, in the form of a series of gigantic new regulatory proposals emanating from EPA and other agencies. The answer is, the federal government will become a suicide bomber seeking to blow up and destroy the American economy and the well-being of the American people.

Here are three major regulatory initiatives from the past few weeks, each one supposedly somehow addressing this “climate crisis” thing:

• On April 12, EPA released its proposed rule titled “Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light- Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles.” This rule essentially makes it impossible for automobile manufacturers to produce anything but fully-electric vehicles within a few years.

• On May 5, the Department of Energy released proposed new “efficiency” standards for dishwashers.

• And then on May 8, EPA released the mother of all regulations, with the endless title “New Source Performance Standards for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from New, Modified, and Reconstructed Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; Emission Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Existing Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; and Repeal of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule.” This is the long-awaited regulation that seeks a complete transformation of the electricity-generation sector of the economy, toward something that has never been demonstrated to work and whose cost is without doubt a large multiple of the system we now have.

I previously covered the new vehicle rule, really an EV mandate, in this post on May 5. True to form of regulators who treat their subjects with contempt, the rule never explicitly states that the cars we now use are henceforth to be banned. Rather, it is some 262 pages of impenetrable text, which has buried somewhere deep inside a formula (82 g/mile CO2 emissions) that only an industry professional would know effectively bans internal combustion vehicles. All manufacturers are to be forced to comply, irrespective of whether they can do so profitably.

What is the probability that the new EV mandate will put all large U.S. and European automakers out of business in favor of Chinese competitors who have an advantage in the EV segment? The regulators neither know nor care. From Engineering & Technology, May 9:

According to insurers Allianz Trade, China’s decision to invest heavily in EV production over the last 15 years has made it the global leader in this sector. . . . Chinese brands have seen their global market shares climb from less than 40 per cent in 2020 to close to 50 per cent in 2022. This is heavily bolstered by an 80 per cent market share in their densely-populated home country.

In the world of dishwashers, we already have dishwashers that don’t work very well. The reason is regulator-imposed restrictions on use of energy and water. Today, due to these restriction, dishwashers run for more than two hours, and still don’t get the dishes very clean unless you pre-wash them by hand. Well, with the new Energy Department rule, it’s about to get a lot worse. From the WSJ, May 12:

The proposal requires manufacturers to slash water use by a third, limiting machines to 3.2 gallons per cycle, down from the current federal limit of five gallons. New appliances must simultaneously cut estimated annual energy usage by nearly 30%.

And then there is the new power plant rule. This one is 682 pages. Again, it never explicitly says that fossil fuel power plants are banned; it’s just that the emissions standards that they set cannot be met by any fossil fuel plant. The WSJ on May 11 calls the rule a “death sentence” for fossil fuel power plants.

Supposedly the fossil fuel plants can continue to operate if they adopt some means to capture the carbon emissions from their exhaust. I have previously described this idea of carbon capture as a “war against the second law of thermodynamics.” Trying to capture CO2 from power plant emissions requires energy, and the higher the percentage of the emissions you want to capture, the more energy it takes. If you insist on capturing all of the emissions and somehow storing them permanently, it’s going to take more energy than the power plant produces. There has been endless talk about carbon capture for more than a decade, and there is almost nothing in the way of functional carbon capture systems, because as they capture enough carbon to be meaningful, their cost soars out of control.

Will there be any functional replacement for the fossil fuel plants by the time they are forced out of business? This rule doesn’t trouble itself with such matters. That’s for the low status people to figure out. Over here at EPA, we are much too important for that. Our job is to save the planet.

So the regulatory onslaught continues. We are told to expect yet more such regulations, notably in the area of home appliances, in the near future.

Put it all together, and the term “war against the economy” no longer does justice to what is going on. This is a full-blown attack by suicide bombers. They are so crazed with the righteousness of their cause that they couldn’t care less about the destruction and devastation they might cause to the innocent people around them, let alone even about their own death. Who ever thought our federal government would get into such a role?

Death of the EV dream, er, nightmare

By Duggan Flanakin May 13th, 2023 78 Comments @ CFACT

Now that the American Dream has been turned into a nightmare in part by overspending that has led to the highest interest rates in the 21 st Century, it is high time to admit that, as Melanie Mcdonagh writes in The Telegraph , the electric vehicle dream, too, “has turned into a nightmare.”

Mcdonagh, who admits she does not drive, points out many problems, among them the horrific impact when a heavy, quiet-running electric vehicle hits an unsuspecting pedestrian or a cyclist. She also notes that some of these “vehicles” are collecting data on route history and road speed that governments (and corporations) can use for remote surveillance (and marketing gimmickry). Another problem is that the much heavier EVs could collapse bridges and force lengthy detours.

Mcdonagh, however, has barely scratched the surface of the mess created by the hipster culture that believes everything sacred must be sacrificed before the god of carbon (dioxide) reduction. It turns out that manufacturing electric vehicles has to date been a bad investment for automakers, despite all the subsidies.

Ford Motor Co. says it will lose $3 billion on EV sales this year, after losing $900 million in 2021 and $2.1 billion in 2022, when the company sold 96,000 units. Price drops by Ford and Tesla (and doubtless other companies) are not coming because the vehicles are cheaper to manufacture but because demand has slowed despite the new Biden subsidies. As Robert Bryce points out, Ford in the first quarter of this year lost $66,446 on every EV it sold.

One reason for the huge losses is the increasing price of battery materials, reflected in the 7 percent increase in the volume-weighted average for lithium-ion battery packs from 2021 to 2022. The Biden subsidies are supposed to offset such costs, just as the Biden build in America plan (in Michigan, at least, by Chinese companies) has no chance of diminishing China’s huge lead in EV battery and vehicle production.

Senator John Kennedy (R, LA) recently asked, “If electric cars are so swell. why does government have to pay people to drive them?”

A new J.D. Power report points to a number of reasons that American consumers are sticking with internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. While the highest objections to EVs are high prices and lack of public charging infrastructure, vehicle range, charging times, and the threat of grid disruptions that render EVs useless are also deterrents. Other concerns are fires, power surges that lead to accidents, towing capacity and range, and performance in bad weather.

Even a third of Gen Z shoppers, who have been bombarded with pro-EV propaganda for most of their lives, admit they are unlikely to buy one.

It is obvious that the EV boom, such as it is, has been powered nearly entirely by heavy subsidies and marketing hype initiated by bureaucrats and politicians, most of whom have no background in auto sales or any service industries. Their M.O. is bribery and thuggery (forcing people into unwanted choices through market manipulation). Automakers are beginning to balk at these techniques, if only because they see their customer base shrinking once people cannot buy the vehicles they have used for decades.

While Ford and other companies are now boasting of the towing capacity of their EVs, the proof is in the pudding, as they say. >MotorBiscuit last month reported that the Ford F-150 Lightning and Rivian R1T can be souped up to tow 10,000 pounds, far short of the gasoline-powered F-150, but with an average range of only 88 miles. That hardly works for multiple tows in a day or for towing a trailer to a campsite 100 or more miles from home.

Imagine putting your family into the truck, hitching up the Airstream, and driving out to the mountains for a weekend at the lake. Finding a charging station where you don’t have to unhitch the trailer to get to the plug-in is a huge challenge, and you have to do this multiple times on a 300-mile trip. With a maximum 90-mile range, you need to recharge every 60 or 70 miles, taking 30 minutes or more for each recharge. You lose an entire day each way. So practical.

Far worse, though, are the risks and challenges to tow truck drivers with an EV that has stopped running. Not only are the vehicles heavy, they are dead weight, locked in park, and potentially suspect to spontaneous fires that ordinary extinguishers cannot put out. A 2021 National Transportation Safety Board report notes that “the energy

remaining in a damaged high-voltage lithium-ion battery, known as stranded energy, poses a risk of electric shock and creates the potential for thermal runaway that can result in battery reignition and fire.”

Of course, the bean counters with their glorious visions for an all-electric future (replete with blackouts, price increases, and other tricks to keep the majority of people off the roads entirely) do not take into consideration ANY of the real reasons people drive cars and trucks. Their ONLY consideration appears to be the imaginary reduction in carbon dioxide emissions their computer models insist can only happen by inconveniencing “the little people.”

But should those “little people” elect leaders who will end the inflationary subsidies and dictatorial mandates (including those that ban gas appliances, cripple the performance of dishwashers and HVAC units, etc.), the automakers who have heavily invested in EVs will adjust to real market conditions and continue improving long-cherished technologies.

In today’s increasingly top-down world, Mcdonagh points out that “you can’t even discuss the problems with electric cars without getting jumped on.” That is already beginning to change, especially in a freedom-loving America that has had a century-long love affair with the open road.

>Meanwhile, lurking in the shadows is an option that could both reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide and keep ICE vehicles on the road. Hydrogen-based synthetic e-fuels may be expensive today, but they can power ICE vehicles today and tomorrow without sacrificing a nation to the whims of China’s maniacal leadership.

Author

• Duggan Flanakin

  Duggan Flanakin is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow. A former Senior Fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Mr. Flanakin authored definitive works on the creation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and on environmental education in Texas. A brief history of his multifaceted career appears in his book, "Infinite Galaxies: Poems from the Dugout."

Emissions-free Electric Vehicles Are a Fantasy

Apr 21, 2023 By Diana Furchtgott-Roth @DFR_Economics Director, Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment

Key Takeaways

• Come 2032, if President Joe Biden has his way, most Americans who want new cars may have to buy electric vehicles.
• Research shows that electricity for battery-powered vehicles is coming from coal and natural gas rather than renewables.
• Until electricity can be generated by emissions-free power, battery-powered vehicles will generally increase, rather than reduce, emissions.

Come 2032, if President Joe Biden has his way, most Americans who want new cars may have to buy electric vehicles. While the administration insists that such a mandate will reduce climate change, the fact is, when adding up the emissions required to produce and power the batteries of electric vehicles, EVs can create more carbon emissions than gas-powered cars.

New proposed regulations on automobile emissions from the Environmental Protection Agency would require 60% of new car sales to be battery-powered electric vehicles by 2030 and 67% by 2032, compared to fewer than 6% in 2022.

The stated rationale: These cars produce fewer carbon emissions than cars with internal combustion engines, emissions contribute to global warming, and global warming poses a threat to the planet and mankind.

What the regulations don’t seem to take into account is that electric cars don’t have tailpipe emissions, but their batteries are charged using electricity. And much of electricity production—unless it’s from renewables, hydropower, or nuclear energy—still results in carbon emissions...........

Battery-powered electric vehicles might sound attractive when gasoline is over $3 per gallon. And electric Ford F-150 Lightning pickup trucks may be fun to drive, especially if you don’t need to tow anything, but these new purchases might not be reducing greenhouse gas emissions and saving the planet.

A 2022 paper by Kelly Senecal of Convergent Science and other scientists compares greenhouse gas emissions from plug-in, battery-powered electric vehicles with emissions from hybrid vehicles, which combine internal combustion engines with small battery packs.

The conclusion: Pure plug-in battery-powered vehicles can create more emissions than hybrids and even more than some traditional internal combustion engine vehicles—whose fuel delivery, air delivery, and ignition systems have improved over the past 20 years, increasing overall vehicle gas mileage.

Here’s why............To Read More....

White House’s Expensive and Unrealistic Push for Electric Vehicles

Bidens Electric Vehicle Push Is Unplugged From Reality

By EJ Antoni @RealEJAntoni

Key Takeaways

• Mr. Biden is hellbent on freeing Americans from the imaginary captivity of their reliable, safe, flexible and economical gasoline- and diesel-fueled engines.
• The Biden administration repeatedly refers to EVs as zero-emission vehicles, as if the electricity powering them did not have emissions.
• The average EV costs $61,000, which is 24% more than the average conventional internal combustion engine vehicle—hardly “affordable.”

President Biden’s latest push for electric vehicles, or EVs, is reminiscent of a soliloquy by Don Quixote: short on facts, long on rhetoric, and filled with unrealistic expectations. Sadly, though, Mr. Biden’s policy mistakes are moving beyond fiction to a reality that confines consumers to cars that are unaffordable and unwanted.

Like Don Quixote tilting at harmless windmills he thinks are giants, Mr. Biden is attacking American energy and the auto industry for daring to use fossil fuels. And as Don Quixote went from quest to quest attempting to free imaginary prisoners, Mr. Biden is hellbent on freeing Americans from the imaginary captivity of their reliable, safe, flexible and economical gasoline- and diesel-fueled engines.

That disconnect from reality perfectly encapsulates Mr. Biden’s energy policy. His Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed such strict regulations for cars and trucks that effectively mean that 54% of new vehicles sold domestically must be EVs by 2030.

Even if Mr. Biden managed a 500% increase in EV sales by the end of the decade, he’d still fall woefully short of his goal. The only conceivable way to make half of new vehicle sales EVs by 2030 would be if Americans were so poor that they could afford very few new cars, and thus the small number of EVs could still amount to half of all new vehicles. That’s right out of Mao’s Great Leap Forward.............To Read More...

Glaring electric car problem exposed after man’s tyre goes flat

Brooke Rolfe  May 10, 2023

An Australian driver has revealed a glaring problem with electric vehicles after finding himself stranded on the side of the road when one of his tyres went flat. Eddy May was driving home in his electric Mercedes-Benz EQC-400 on Sunday just before midday when his rear left wheel deflated, leaving him and his wife stranded on the side of the road in Adelaide.  Making use of an in-car customer service offered in the luxury model, he pressed a button and spent five minutes on the phone with Mercedes about the tyre.

“I’ve spoken to them, they’re sending a tow truck,” Mr May told his followers in a clip shared to TikTok. “Quick five minutes on the phone, a $200 cab charge voucher to get home, [and the] car’s going to get towed to Mercedes and the car’s going to be fixed tomorrow apparently,” he said. About 35 minutes later, the $128,000 vehicle was loaded onto a tow truck and the couple’s taxi arrived..............To Read More...

My Take - So, they were impressed with the service?  Remarkable.  There's no spare in these electric cars because they're full of batteries, and there's no room for a spare. Remarkable.  And this nitwit would most likely buy another one.

The Auto Industry In Jonestown

May 05, 2023Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

The notorious events in Jonestown took place so long ago that most readers probably don’t have personal memory of them. In November 1978, in the jungles of Guyana, under the powerful spell of a religious cult with a charismatic leader, and of an all-embracing groupthink, some 900 people somehow agreed to participate in a mass suicide. It was a shocking instance of the kind of collective insanity to which humans can be susceptible.

You might think that the Jonestown massacre was a uniquely extreme example of such a mass psychosis, perhaps attributable largely to unusually susceptible subjects or to the isolated location. Surely our best and brightest leaders of government and business would never fall prey to such collective craziness.

If you think that, then perhaps you should look at what is currently going on in the automotive sector of the economy, under the spell of the climate cult and of government functionaries demanding fealty to anti-carbon doctrines.

On April 12, 2023 the EPA released its most recent proposed regulation of automobile emissions. The document is titled “Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light- Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles.” It is 262 pages long in the standard Federal Register single-spaced three-column format, thus designed to be virtually impossible to read for anyone who is not getting paid to do it. But the heart of the proposed new rule is that, over a period of a few years, it is to become difficult-to-impossible for automobile manufacturers to continue to sell any significant number of internal combustion engine vehicles. Of course EPA never states that explicitly, and makes the game as difficult as possible for any layman to decipher. But try this language from page 29,196 (12 pages into the document and still in the early part of the Executive Summary):

GHG Emissions Standards. . . . The proposed standards are projected to result in an industry-wide average target for the light-duty fleet of 82 grams/mile (g/mile) of CO2 in MY 2032, representing a 56 percent reduction in projected fleet average GHG emissions target levels from the existing MY 2026 standards.

As I understand it, no internal-combustion car can meet this 82 g/mile CO2 emission standard on its own, so the standard effectively means that a manufacturer can only sell IC cars if it can also make and sell enough “zero-emission” cars to get an average down to this level. Thus does EPA deviously announce its intention to force manufacturers to make, and consumers to buy, all or almost all electric vehicles.

Now, at this point this is only a proposed rule. Currently, despite wide availability of electric vehicles, they have only about a 7% market share in the U.S. They also have many disadvantages as against combustion vehicles, including higher price, difficulty to repair when damaged, poor resale value, limited range, long time to recharge, and so forth. And all those are before you get to the most important problem with EVs, which is that the government geniuses are simultaneously working to destroy the electrical grid that is supposed to be the source of the energy for these things.

Might you think that the auto makers would be pushing back on behalf of themselves and their customers to keep combustion vehicles available? You would be wrong. From all appearances, the manufacturers are falling all over themselves to get on the electric car bandwagon. The EPA document itself contains a long list of industry announcements (from page 12,190 - 12,191):

A proliferation of announcements by automakers in the past two years signals a rapidly growing shift in product development focus among automakers away from internal-combustion technologies and toward electrification. For example, in January 2021, General Motors announced plans to become carbon neutral by 2040, including an effort to shift its light-duty vehicles entirely to zero-emissions by 2035. 

In March 2021, Volvo announced plans to make only electric cars by 2030, and Volkswagen announced that it expects half of its U.S. sales will be all-electric by 2030. In April 2021, Honda announced a full electrification plan to take effect by 2040, with 40 percent of North American sales expected to be fully electric or fuel cell vehicles by 2030, 80 percent by 2035 and 100 percent by 2040. In May 2021, Ford announced that they expect 40 percent of their global sales will be all-electric by 2030. 

In June 2021, Fiat announced a move to all electric vehicles by 2030, and in July 2021 its parent corporation Stellantis announced an intensified focus on electrification across all of its brands. Also in July 2021, Mercedes-Benz announced that all of its new architectures would be electric-only from 2025, with plans to become ready to go all-electric by 2030 where possible.

But as with the transformation of the electrical grid — where we forge ahead without ever having gotten a demonstration of feasibility or cost — the automakers are also forging ahead en masse into EVs with no demonstration that electric cars can become a successful mass product that fulfills all the functions that IC cars can fulfill. Tesla seems recently to have turned the corner into profitability, but with an expensive niche product that only the wealthy can afford and which is almost always a second (or third or fourth) car.

How is it going with other manufacturers? The Wall Street Journal had an editorial on May 3 summarizing the results so far for a collection of EV startups. There’s Lordstown:

Lordstown had manufactured only 31 vehicles by late February 2023—most of which had to be recalled. Losing patience, Foxconn on April 21 threatened to withdraw its investment, triggering Lordstown’s bankruptcy warning.

And Rivian:

Rivian commanded a $153.3 billion market capitalization. Now it’s worth less than $12 billion.

The WSJ summarizes stock trends of other EV startups:

[O]ther EV startups have crashed from their pandemic highs, including Canoo (down 96%), Nikola (99%), Faraday Future Intelligent Electric (99%), Rivian (90%), Lucid (87%) and Fisker(81%).

How about at the big traditional manufacturers. Robert Bryce at his Substack on May 3 collects some recent information as to Ford:

In March, Ford Motor Company announced that it lost $2.1 billion on its EV business last year. Those losses were double the losses it had on EVs in 2021. As I noted in a video I posted on TikTok on March 23, Ford made 61,575 EVs in 2022. Thus, the company lost about $34,000 on every EV it sold last year. I also noted that the costs of making EVs aren’t falling. Last year, the cost of battery packs for EVs went up by 7%. . . . Indeed, it appears Ford’s 2022 losses were only a warm-up lap. Yesterday afternoon, Ford reported a $722 million loss on its EV business over the first three months of 2023. During that span, Ford sold 10,866 EVs, meaning it lost $66,446 on every EV it sold.

Bryce goes on to quote a JD Power report from May 1: “[M]any new vehicle shoppers are becoming more adamant about their decision to not consider an EV for their next purchase.”

When I last had a post on EVs (February 23), several commenters expressed the opinion that they thought the manufacturers could overcome all the manufacturing problems (cost, battery capacity, charging, etc.) and thus EVs would shortly become the superior product in the marketplace. I suppose that is possible, although if central planning turns out to work in this instance it will be the first time ever anywhere. And further, there is nothing the manufacturers can do to make a country of 200 million or so EVs work when all the reliable generation on the electrical grid has been removed, and home heat has also been electrified. The auto manufacturers seem to be only too willing to go along with a collective suicide, a la Jonestown.

The self-destruction of America – from within

Peter Murphy April 29th, 2023 83 Comments @ CFACT

The President of the United States, Joseph Biden, gets more obsessed about climate change with each passing week. One recent example came last month is his latest attack on the automobile industry and the tens of millions of Americans who like and need the gasoline cars it produces. This obsession and its wider implications will only accelerate America’s demise from a prosperous and powerful nation.

The Biden administration is driving up the price of gasoline cars to force electric vehicles on anyone remaining who can afford them. They are doing this with new draconian emissions standards on new vehicles beginning in 2027, which must be reduced by more than half by 2032.

For example, cars and light-duty trucks have as a regulatory standard 186 grams per mile of carbon dioxide for 2026 models, which the administration now proposes to reduce to 82 grams per mile in nine years. Cutting already low emissions in half again makes for more expensive cars to manufacture and sell, which means fewer Americans affording and owning them.

Automobile industry analysts and even the Washington Post cautioned how aggressive and unrealistic are these proposed emission regulations, including the inability to manufacture, sell and support such a volume of EVs in the near term.

Not to worry, says Albert Gore, the executive director of the Zero Admission Transportation Association (not the former VP and pioneer climate crackpot & grifter, but another Gore). Mr. Gore claimed the administration’s regulations are “eminently achievable” and that “millions of advanced manufacturing jobs” will be created.

The auto industry is becoming a shell of its former self and inexorably transforming to an agency of the federal government. Look at the once vaunted Ford Motor Company, which announced last month the company’s electrical vehicle unit is projected to lose $3 billion this year and will not turn a profit before three years, if ever, absent massive government intervention. Ford’s CEO also expressed spot-on concern about the vulnerability of securing minerals for EV batteries from overseas.

Using Orwellian semantics, Michael Regan, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, assured us that these emission mandates are “following the market trends” and that the government is not requiring auto makers to produce electric vehicles. He further claimed the regulations will save $12,000 over the life of a vehicle not subject to the emission standards. In other words, since gasoline vehicles will be made much more expensive–by the government, not the “market”–and need more maintenance such as oil changes, consumers will purportedly save money on EVs.

Margo Oge, a former head of the EPA’s Transportation and Air Quality division during the Obama administration, made clear these new regulations are about “reduc[ing] the worst aspects of climate change,” including hurricanes, tornados, and wildfires as reported by CBS News. Typically, there’s no indication CBS asked Ms. Oge or other climate extremists for evidence that lower CO2 emissions will affect the weather.

The only way these new automobile emission standards come into being is by massive government intervention in the marketplace, not only by mandating them through regulation, but through massive taxpayer subsidies to auto makers and consumers to prop up the whole self-defeating endeavor, including those “millions” of new jobs. In fact, so-called “green” policies to force-feed wind, solar and electric vehicles are all about upending the free market, consumer preferences and liberty itself.

Before American consumers “save” money, on purchasing electric cars, we all will be paying much more in auto prices, taxes and overall inflation (via more government debt) to attempt the forced transition to EVs. This is not a theoretical prediction. It is economically occurring now from Biden’s climate policies.

Lower carbon emission mandates also may fall well short. A recent study published in the journal Productions and Operations Management found that lower emission standards by the European Union between 2000 and 2014 failed to curtail on-road emissions and increases the likelihood of non-compliance by automakers.

As more Americans cannot afford their own cars, gasoline or electric, our freedom and lifestyle choices will become more limited, including where we work and live. This is ultimately the objective of climate change extremists, that is, force more Americans to live in cities in “retro-fitted” high-rise buildings, use mass transit and ride bicycles – all in a futile effort to lower carbon emissions and save the planet, neither of which is assured, much less provable.

Imposing more expensive and restrictive living standards translates to a less free and weaker America. These ominous trends will not be siloed in transportation and energy, but include the withering of constitutional freedoms. The same expanding government bent on transforming the nation’s economy and how we live also is about controlling what you know and what is acceptable to believe, from Covid policies to climate change to issues of national security and more.

Accelerating the demise of gasoline vehicles with fatuous rhetoric and scientific-sounding planetary alarmism is a salient illustration that climate change policies are about government wielding “complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, [and] regimenting all industry [and] commerce.”

The dictionary defines that as “fascism.”

• Peter Murphy

  Peter Murphy is Senior Fellow at CFACT. He has researched and advocated for a variety of policy issues, including education reform and fiscal policy, both in the non-profit sector and in government in the administration of former New York Governor George Pataki. He previously wrote and edited The Chalkboard weblog for the NY Charter Schools Association, and has been published in numerous media outlets, including The Hill, New York Post, Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal. Twitter: @PeterMurphy26 Website: https://www.petermurphylgs.com/

Electric Cars Are Bankrupting the Auto Industry

By Daniel Greenfield April 03, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Ford reported that it’s going to lose $3 billion on electric cars in 2023.  Unlike most automakers, Ford reports its electric vehicle numbers separately, but experts estimate that most car companies are losing similar amounts on the dead end business.

Ford’s investment in Rivian’s electric cars can’t be helping. Last year the startup electric pickup truck maker was spending $220,000 to make the electric vehicles that it sells for $81,000.

That’s bad news for George Soros and for CalPERS: California’s massive public employees retirement fund and a ticking time bomb which owns hundreds of thousands of shares in Rivian.

GM and Ford both project that their electric cars will be profitable in a few years. Ford plans to make 2 million electric cars every year by 2025. That would be impressive considering that Ford only sold 61,575 of them in 2022. It sold 3,624 electric vehicles in Feb 2023.

That’s a long way from 2 million.

GM plans to sell 1 million electric cars by 2025. It sold less than 40,000 in 2022.

Projections like these might make sense if GM and Ford had hot products and untapped market demand. Instead there are too many electric car models chasing a tiny market. Electric car sales have yet to break the million mark. Most of the electric car activity continues to be concentrated in the luxury SUV market which only has so many buyers able to afford them.

Even the “affordable” electric cars, like GM’s Bolt, start at $30,000, and lose as much as $9,000 for the company.

The only way to create demand for electric cars is through government mandates.

After 2035, if you want to buy a new car in California, it’s electric cars or it’s nothing. California’s mandates that fined car manufacturers, forcing them to buy credits from electric car makers like Tesla, financed the electric car industry. By 2035, California will simply eliminate the competition.

New York, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington have also moved to ban the sale of new cars. About a dozen Democrat states have similarly decided to prevent residents from buying cars. Virginia’s House voted to drop its car ban, but the state’s Senate Democrats have kept it in place. Biden has proposed a similar ban nationwide following its adoption by the EU.

By 2040, GM expects to stop making and selling cars on the assumption of such a ban.

George Soros has reportedly lost over $1 billion with his Rivian investment, and his other electric car investments may seem shaky, but in the long term the leftist politicians he has backed are expected to eliminate the competition and clear cars off the roads and highways.

Automakers are spending billions to build electric cars that no one wants and no one can afford because governments have assured them of a captive market. And after all that money flushed down the drain, their lobbyists are aggressively pressuring legislators to impose new bans and keep the existing bans in place. They’ve also been seduced with the promise of subsidies and tax credits that will free them from the pedestrian business of actually turning a profit.

Woke pension funds and party donors have kept the pressure on to see that it pays off.

Detroit’s bet that customers will just accept this as the new normal and just pay higher prices for worse performance is a bad one. The electric car mandates are the work of a Democrat party that is closely tied to a wealthy elite even as Republicans are becoming a working class party. Assuming that half the country will just accept being priced out of the car market when car ownership remains the key to economic and social mobility is as arrogant as it is clueless.

Even assuming that Republicans remain too dysfunctional and outmaneuvered to significantly roll back the leftist agenda, the new car market will drastically shrink. Americans, like Cubans, will desperately work to keep old cars going because for much of the country they will be the only option. The number of illegal cars on the road will dramatically increase. But as brownouts and energy shortages continue to hammer California and other blue states that have also gone all-in on solar and wind power, those will be the only cars that can actually remain on the road.

Woke car companies will have their monopoly handed to them only to find that it’s worthless.

Like their former European counterparts, American automakers will become even more deeply entangled with the government. The inverse spiral of subsidies and sales will climax in bankruptcies. Detroit has failed to innovate and electric car theater is no substitute for actually doing the work to make the cars that people want rather than the ones ad agencies try to make them want.

Letting government mandates instead of consumer demand drive sales is embraced by companies that have given up on even trying to make an appealing product. If electric vehicles were legitimately popular, it wouldn’t take a ban on cars to make them economically viable.

American automakers used to be revolutionary, now they’re the regime.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribeto my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.