Posted on 12/12/2023 11:16:53 AM PST by Red Badger
It’s nearly 2024 and there’s a two-month-plus supply of cars – many of them 2023 models – waiting to be sold before they become last year’s models. Most of these waiting-to-be-sold models are electric cars that aren’t selling because (drum roll, please) buyers don’t want them.
Never before in the history of the car business has the cart been put before the horse – as it has when it comes to electric cars.
Government has been interceding between car buyers and car manufacturers for more than half-a-century, imposing requirements that new cars must have equipment such as seat belts and air bags and back-up cameras, irrespective of the buyer’s desire to pay for them or his lack of desire to have them in his car.
It has decreed bumper-impact standards and even gone so far as to require that speedometers be dialed back to register no faster than 85 MPH.
But not until just recently did the government (feeling its oats, no doubt) go for broke and order the car manufacturers to build only one type of car – the electric car – and never mind whether people will buy them.
We see the results collecting dust on new car lots all around the country.
Of course, this was inevitable once it was allowed to pass that the federal government had any legitimate (constitutional, moral) business interposing itself between car buyers and car manufacturers. This began half-a-century ago, when self-styled “consumer advocates” such as Ralph Nader presumed to “advocate” for “consumers” – who were implicitly too stupid to form their own decisions and use their buying power to influence the car manufacturers to build cars they were willing to buy.
These “advocates” succeeded in leveraging the government to impose on “consumers” equipment such as seat belts and air bags – both of which had previously been made available to “consumers” (loathsome term; it smacks of hogs at the trough) who were free to buy them if they wished.
And free to not buy them, if they didn’t wish.
That was back in the Before Times, when people who bought things were still customers – and had the power to buy what they wanted without interference from “advocates” (or the government).
They were not made to consume whatever was placed before them – like hogs at the trough.
Once the “advocates” got their way – even just a little bit (and so it seemed at the time; what was the harm, after all, in having seatbelts in cars?) the precedent was set that got us to where we find ourselves now. The government – suffused with “advocates” – insists people must have electric cars and that the manufacturers must build nothing but.
A problem arises, though.
It is getting the horse to pull the cart when he has the option not to.
The government can (and has) decreed that nothing but electric cars will be permissible to manufacture – via being the only kinds of vehicles that are compliant with federal regulations pertaining to how much gas a car you choose to buy is allowed to use (and if that’s not sufficient, how much of a gas that does not cause pollution it is allowed to “emit”).
But it hasn’t decreed that buyers must purchase them.
Yet.
But it will. Because it must. Because that is the only way the government will be able to clear the inventory glut of electric cars people don’t want to buy. And the way it will make them buy electric cars is by making it illegal to keep the cars they have that aren’t electric.
Or too costly.
The government will say: Due to the climate crisis, only zero emissions electric cars will be permitted on public (that is, government-controlled) roads. You may keep your non-electric car.
Provided it’s parked.
Or they will say: Due to the climate crisis, we are levying a carbon tax on every vehicle that isn’t a zero emissions electric vehicle. Never mind that plenty of “carbon” is “emitted” via the burning of hydrocarbon fuels to generate the electricity that powers “zero emissions” electric cars. These taxes will be exorbitant. Most people won’t be able to afford to pay them.
Via such means and methods, the government will – so it hopes – clear the glut of EV inventory that is collecting dust at new car lots all around the country.
Except for one other problem.
Even if people no longer have any choice to buy something other than an electric car, if they cannot pay for it, they still can’t buy it. The government might as well decree that everyone in the country buy an “energy efficient” $600,000 house – else live under a bridge. Paraphrasing Margaret Thatcher – from the Before Time – after awhile you run out of other people’s money to spend.
The government lacks the means to pay everyone who currently owns a car to buy an electric car because it has no means except those it extracts from those it is forcing to buy electric cars. At some point, the bill comes due – only in this case there’ll be no one left with the means to pay it.
. . .
I can’t muster any sympathy for an industry that didn’t tell Bathhouse Barry to pound sand.
I am right with you, on week 4 or 5 of 2 weeks to flatten the curve, I bought a New Chevy Colorado, list was $34K, I gave him $25K out the door cash.
He stated the dealerships are marking up the price of ICE vehicles to offset what they are loosing in lack of EV sales.
~~~
Eventually the glut will get so big that shaddy dealing like that wont work anymore. Just because you got a larger margin on the units that are moving doesn’t mean that you don’t still have an enormous inventory that isn’t moving. Eventually you’re going to have to sell those damned things. That requires a price reduction, and the way many businesses do their accounting, if you took the cost in the previous fiscal year, then any sale of that old inventory shows as a profit.
The problem is, no one wants EVs. So a small price war isn’t going to move a lot of inventory. Prices will have to come down a lot.
Ford is absolutely going to go broke over this b s
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feature not a bug.
gotta break all the capatilist eggs to bake the tyrany utopia
And the consumer takes it in the shorts.....AGAIN
Ralph Nader was a communist in lust with Big Government; "Consumer Reports" magazine was a purveyor of crap reviews conducted and written by people who didn't know WTF they were doing.
Also, Ralph Nader prevented President Gore (accidentally).
They will have to dispose of these cars some way or another.
Perhaps a ‘FIRE SALE’?.................
Consumer Reports establishes their ratings by polling the people that subscribe to their magazine or online subscription service.
They send out an extensive 10+ page survey. I have filled it out several times when I was a subscriber. This is how they end up rating Toyota and Lexus as the most trouble free.
This is also how they consistently rate Land Rover, Chrysler and Jaguar at the bottom in reliability.
The pic on your post......if one of those goes up it’ll catch the rest....then you’ve got a real life man made environmental disaster on your hands.
Water won’t put it out, just makes it worse..............
There is a large parking lot where a shopping center used to be a few miles from my house. There are 1,000 - 1,500 Teslas sitting in this abandoned parking lot. They keep them charged. I keep waiting for the lot to go up in flames. They’ve been there at least a couple of years.
Yep. And that’s only one of who knows how many dirty little secrets about EVs
When my dash warning light comes on telling me to service the airbag, I think of my ex-wife.
A month or two ago there was a story here on FR of an EV that went into a lake at a boat ramp and caught fire and was burning under water.............
Stacking ‘em deep and selling ‘em cheap.
What’s an electric motorcycle cost? That may turn into my daily driver if they make me buy electric. Stick it to the man driving a motorcycle in the winter!!
What does Ford care. They’ll just take more government money.
“Prices will have to come down a lot.”
I’ve done enough research to have come to the conclusion I wouldn’t own one if it was given to me....and I meant that in all sincerity.
When it comes to EVs, it ain’t soup yet.....and very possibly never will be.
I believe it......interesting I did6hear anything about that on radio or TV. 🤔
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