January was a bust, February was barely any better and the industry is expecting March to be slow as well.
The EV story is revealing its next chapter and its one many purchasers and early adopters will not like.
What drove the fizz was a couple of things - hype and free money.
Governments have decided EV's were a climate answer and got on board with rules and regulations around emissions that basically forced the industry into electric, whether they wanted it or not.
When the consumer didn’t join in, they handed out incentives.
The uptake improved but in most countries, it still didn’t really take off. America has them but they haven't worked, Australia has little, if any, appetite for them and New Zealand got a bit enthused but that’s all over with the change of Government.
So, there were regulations and bribes, and they still couldn't do it and now if you look all over the world Governments and industries are backing away. Everyone from Jaguar Land Rover to Ford are focusing on plug-in hybrids. Britain has backed away from banning combustion engines and Ford in America are re-investing in new engine factories and capacity.
People lost their sense of objectivity and Toyota here has highlighted that this week with their warning over used values.
What is a used EV worth? We don’t really know yet because the market hasn’t been established. And in that is the fear.
Markets are driven by demand. You can create demand artificially, the way we did with subsidies, or you can create demand by value, or performance, or sometimes hype.
The EV is plagued today with what it has always been plagued with; range, anxiety, price, re-charging issues and the unknown. When you compare an EV with a petrol car, the petrol still stacks up. Not in running costs but in convenience, distance, reparability and resale value.
All of this might, might change with solid state batteries or charging stations on every corner. But what we are fast learning is we jumped the gun, Government's jumped the gun, the industry jumped the gun, and the enthusiasts jumped the gun.
Sales don’t lie and worse - if the re-sale story turns out to be a dog, you watch the love affair with internal combustion go to a whole new level.
Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings - where this article was sourced.
Governments have decided EV's were a climate answer and got on board with rules and regulations around emissions that basically forced the industry into electric, whether they wanted it or not.
When the consumer didn’t join in, they handed out incentives.
The uptake improved but in most countries, it still didn’t really take off. America has them but they haven't worked, Australia has little, if any, appetite for them and New Zealand got a bit enthused but that’s all over with the change of Government.
So, there were regulations and bribes, and they still couldn't do it and now if you look all over the world Governments and industries are backing away. Everyone from Jaguar Land Rover to Ford are focusing on plug-in hybrids. Britain has backed away from banning combustion engines and Ford in America are re-investing in new engine factories and capacity.
People lost their sense of objectivity and Toyota here has highlighted that this week with their warning over used values.
What is a used EV worth? We don’t really know yet because the market hasn’t been established. And in that is the fear.
Markets are driven by demand. You can create demand artificially, the way we did with subsidies, or you can create demand by value, or performance, or sometimes hype.
The EV is plagued today with what it has always been plagued with; range, anxiety, price, re-charging issues and the unknown. When you compare an EV with a petrol car, the petrol still stacks up. Not in running costs but in convenience, distance, reparability and resale value.
All of this might, might change with solid state batteries or charging stations on every corner. But what we are fast learning is we jumped the gun, Government's jumped the gun, the industry jumped the gun, and the enthusiasts jumped the gun.
Sales don’t lie and worse - if the re-sale story turns out to be a dog, you watch the love affair with internal combustion go to a whole new level.
Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings - where this article was sourced.
5 comments:
The incredible thing is that so many fell for the hype. Even the lowest performance petrol car more than compensates for the endless nightmare of charging. There is not the wasted space. And not taking hundreds of kilos of deadweight for a ride everywhere, unnecesarily wearing brakes and road. if drivers were content with the perforamnce and space of cars around 1960, very economical petrol vehicles could be produced and with long lives like the recently reported 2 million mile old Toyota.
And to think some of my baby-boomer colleagues, most of whom I expected to have more sense, fell into the trap. After all these years they haven't learnt that there are no free rides. So, take the bribe they did and will now pay when they want to sell their clapped out EVs.
Well we won't need 10,000 taxpayer-funded charging stations will we? But is the government smart enough to figure that out?
Just like so called green petrol. Horrible stuff yet governments have tried to force it down our throats. They just haven’t worked out it is a con. Yet consumers have!!!
Same old story. Virtue signalling gummint provides generous subsidy thinking it's smarter than the manufacturers. Oops - "hidden" costs, e.g. get range by installing serious infrastructure for charging. Toyota and others had already found a solution - Hybrids. Battery goes flat use the ICE for a while. Particularly as the manufacturers had already started upping ICE efficiency to the extent emissions were down to the extent EVs have the greater carbon footprint (not to mention child slave labour in the DRC extracting rare earths for the batteries) over an ICE model until they've done 200,000km or so. Volvo published a comparison a year or two ago where this was established at one of their Swedish facilities manufacturing identical model SUVs of both variety power train i.e. EV and ICE
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