But first, the latest EV news.
Nissan are laying off thousands of workers, Toyota says the California regulations are unworkable, Trump has arrived, tariffs are an issue and he is anti-EV, and in Britain they are discounting EVs by a third because of rules that make manufacturers sell a certain number of EVs, and if you don’t sell that many you are fined.
Sales here are dire. Sales of petrol cars for the past month are up. Last month was the second best month of the year, apart from EVs, which sold next to none.
So, to the question - what
are they going to do?
Under normal market circumstances a product lives and dies on demand.
Demands can waver and prices are adjusted accordingly, models are updated, and marketing is refreshed to fizz up demand or awareness. But ultimately, if something doesn’t have a customer base it dies.
EVs don’t appear to have a customer base. They did, to a degree, when Government's subsidised them, but that I suspect simply gave early adopters a cheaper ride.
It's not like you can't get a good deal now, but even with a cheap price they still don’t sell. People, in bulk, simply don’t want them.
What's made this unique is the manufacturers have been forced into producing something, I suspect, they knew wouldn’t work.
They would have been way quicker to bail on a failed product if they hadn't had Government's lecturing them, hectoring them, and changing the laws and forcing them into a business that looks like it's going nowhere fast.
So the question is, just what needs to be done to either increase sales or kill off the whole idea and come back another day?
You can't force people into something they don’t want and the lack of sales show this to be true.
Are they going to ban regular cars? No.
Are they going to subsidise them forever? No.
Are jobs going to be lost, bottom lines going to bleed red and factories close because of all this?
Yes.
So, who blinks first? The
ideologues, or the realists?
7 comments:
The recent mania for EVs served to acquaint many unimaginative folk with the frustration and complication of modest range and the tedium of rechrging. Once bitten....
Can someone proof-read the posts before publishing? It's barely intelligible.
There appears to have been a problem fitting the article into available space - note how the right side of the article appears to have been sliced away. Will alert the editor.
actual EV sales globally are up - all this recent angst about decreasing sales is probably paid for oil-company propaganda. The rate of increase in sales had slowed for a while but is speeding up again. That means sales were increasing, just at a slower rate for a while. Nissan, Toyota, Ford, GM and European manufacturers are at risk of going out of business because they have deliberately slow-walked the transition to EV's and now are facing the existential threat of much cheaper and better quality Chinese EV's (never thought I'd say that!). There is no crisis, please get some facts.
I have been in electrical engineering all of my working life and believe that E. V.s are the future of motoring, but I won't be buying one just yet.
I'm waiting until the price comes down closer to that of an ICE, the range is much closer to that of an ICE, it can be charged in pretty much the same time it takes to fill the tank on an ICE, the battery technology improves so that they last closer to 200,000Kms. So, a few years yet I think.
Subsidies only serve to temporarily distort the market and give the seller an opportunity to increase profits while selling the product cheaper than previously.
Please don't get me started on the myth of recycling E,V. batteries.
Imagine the buyer/ownership remorse with current used EV values plummeting. Add range anxiety and it becomes nightmarish ownership. Some dealers won't even trade them.. at all.
EV vehicles - look, every form of transport has a propulsion system, and some are better suited to certain purposes than others. I much prefer electric trains for example (having ridden on many throughout Europe and other countries). Who hasn't been stuck behind a poorly-maintained diesel bus/truck and wished it was something (or somewhere) else?
As the battery tech improves, costs reduce and generation of electric power keeps pace, along with infrastructure, I can imagine the majority of urban vehicles will one day be electric (which would make sense). However, they appear to be largely irrelevant to the rural community. Another challenge, irrespective of design improvements, is that they are emissions-heavy to create when everything is taken into consideration, and then there's the re-cycling challenge.
Their components are called "rare earth minerals" for a reason.
Did I mention depreciation?
In the end, inventions do well on their respective merits, and cars etc are no different. Was the Model T subsidised, or the VW Beetle? Indirectly yes, but not directly. Subsidies might be well-intended, but the risk of distorting a natural market appears to be obvious, in hindsight.
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