Posted on 07/17/2023 9:38:52 AM PDT by Red Badger
The Left likes to treat skeptics of electrical cars as if they were Luddites. Truth is, making an existing product less efficient, but more expensive, doesn’t really meet the definition of innovation.
Even the purported amenities and technological advances EV makers like to brag about in their ads have been a regular feature of gas-powered vehicles going back generations. At best, EVs, if they fulfill their promise, are a lateral technology.
Which is why there is no real “emerging market” for EVs in the United States as much as there’s an industrial policy in place that props up EVs with government purchases, propaganda, state subsidies, cronyism, taxpayer-backed loans, and edicts. The green “revolution” is an elite-driven, top-down technocratic project.
And it’s increasingly clear that the only reason giant rent-seeking carmakers are so heavily invested in EV development is that government is promising to artificially limit the production of gas-powered cars.
In August 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to set a target for half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 to be zero-emission. California claims it is banning combustion engines in all new cars in about 10 years. So, carmakers adopt business models to deal with these distorted incentives and contrived theoretical markets of the future.
In today’s real-world economy, Ford projects it’s going to lose $3 billion on electric vehicles in 2023, bringing its EV losses to $5.1 billion over two years. In 2021, Ford reportedly lost $34,000 on every EV it made. This year, it was losing more than $58,000 on every EV. In a normal world, Ford would be dramatically scaling back EV production, not expanding it.
Remember that next time we need to bail out Detroit.
Then again, we’re already bailing them out, I suppose. Last week, the U.S. Energy Department lent Ford—again, a company that loses tens of thousands of dollars on every EV it sells—another $9.2 billion in taxpayer dollars for a South Korean battery project. One imagines no sane bank would do it. The cost of EV batteries has gone up, not down, over the past few years.
Ford says these upfront losses are part of a “start-up mentality.” We’re still pretending EVs are a new idea, rather than an inferior one. But scaremongering about climate and a misplaced romanticizing of “manufacturing” jobs have softened up the public for this kind of waste.
In the real world, there is Lordstown. In 2019, after General Motors—which also loses money on every EV sold—shut down a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, then-President Donald Trump made a big deal of publicly pressuring the auto giant to rectify the situation. CEO Mary Barra lent Lordstown Motors, a new EV outfit, $40 million to retrofit the plant. Ohio also gave GM an additional $60 million.
You may remember the widespread glowing coverage of Lordstown. After Biden signed his “Buy American” executive order, promising to replace the entire U.S. federal fleet with EVs, Lordstown’s stock shot up.
By the start of this year, Lordstown had manufactured 31 vehicles total. Six had been sold to actual consumers. (Most of them would be recalled.) The stock was trading at barely a dollar. Tech-funding giant Foxconn was pulling its $170 million. And this week, the company filed for bankruptcy.
Without massive state help, EVs are a niche market for rich virtue-signalers. And, come to think of it, that’s sort of what they are now, even with the help. A recent University of California at Berkeley study found that 90% of tax credits for EVs go to people in the top income strata. Most EVs are bought by high earners who like the look and feel of a Tesla. And that’s fine. I don’t want to stop anyone from owning the car they prefer. I just don’t want to help pay for it.
Really, why would a middle-class family shun a perfectly good gas-powered car that can be fueled (most of the time) cheaply and driven virtually any distance, in any environment, and any time of the year? We don’t need lithium. We have the most efficient, affordable, portable, and useful form of energy. We have centuries’ worth of it waiting in the ground.
Climate alarmists might believe EVs are necessary to save the planet. That’s fine. Using their standard, however, a bike is an innovation. Even on their terms, the usefulness of EVs is highly debatable. Most of the energy that powers them is derived from fossil fuels. The manufacturing of an EV has a negligible positive benefit for the environment, if any.
And the fact is that if EVs were more efficient and saved us money, as enviros and politicians claim, consumers wouldn’t have to be compelled into using them and companies wouldn’t have to be bribed into producing them.
The Left thinks EVs are Great ,they run on magic
I don't buy the Left's lies nor their stinking plug-in cqrs.
We had EV cars a century ago. They were replaced by ICE. Unless the magic unicorn battery could ever be found and made, EV’s are retardation.
Until now, activist/woke Fed.gov could push green energy schemes relatively easily:
- starting from a base of zero, people/grids were not affected
- 20 years of zero interest rates
- ever-increasing government debt and consumer debt
- China integrating into the world, dominating green minerals
- globalism
- cheap oil / cheap commodities
- supremacy of the USD and woke propaganda spread around the world
ALL of these things have reserved and have become problematic.
The fraud that is “green energy” is already being revealed. Woke Fed.gov will fight you and fight the trend with increased mandates and tyranny, but green-energy will crash.
“making an existing product less efficient, but more expensive, doesn’t really meet the definition of innovation.”
False Premise
and EV is not an existing product- unless you want to use just “Transportation”.
More expensive than what, another EV? Teslas have actually gone down price, unlike the F150.
Pushrod, ICE, has been the same thing for nearly 150 years.
Guess which one isn’t the innovation?
Want one, would be perfect for my extra car uses.
But can’t quit justify the cost.
My 20 YO beater with a heater will have to do for now.
The ICE cars are the ‘existing product’..............
How is an EV not the same thing — functionally — as an ICE vehicle?
Ford just lowered the F150 EV price by $10K & they’re having problems selling the EV Mustang.
Needs to be posted again and again!
And read by ALL Americans!
This “Green New Deal” insanity HAS to be stoppped!
Articles like this one will help!
It’s so ironic that people are avoiding “conflict diamonds” but, don’t realize the slave labor associated with mining cadmium, etc
Just this one article is damning for the fraud of electric nirvana:
EVs require longer usage and power. The mineral cobalt is a contributor to that longer output. American companies desperate to both create and meet a demand for more EV batteries have slapped a false label of “artisanal mines” on the rock heaps of Africa, in particular in the Congo. As Kara proves, when you hear EV or even artisanal mines, think “slave labor” on a scale that would make the Bible blush. While we charge our Teslas in our garages, children are coughing and scraping the walls of caves 50 meters below the surface of the earth in Africa.
It is not just the left. However, leftest tend to be the people that graduate with degrees in “studies”.
STEM graduates tend to be critical thinkers. Not as liberal.
Most people have no idea where their electricity comes from.
They have no idea how the energy is transferred from the burning of coal or the hydro power or uranium to turn a turbine and create electricity. Much less how it gets transferred to your eventual house.
“The “existing product” is a personal vehicle”
qualify it all down to whatever makes the argument
False Scotsman
Improvement over a Horse?
Not if there is no gas around.
Bicycle-
Bike is much healthier and less impactful on the planet-
A Tank is Safer
A Plane is faster
A Boat is better over water
A Bus carries more people
A Tanker carries more water
etc . . .
An EV is completely different “functionally” from an ICE vehicle.
I think we would agree-
Choice is the biggest part of it all-
Choose what works for you, in an open and competitive market, with no Goobermint subsidies.
Maximum Liberty for all.
Yep, and I still want me a Tesla S . . .Zoom Zoom!
Agree 100% with article premise. See tag.
and what’s with all the White Cars out there do the car dealers get a bonus for selling white ones ? I call them Climate Cult Cars ,LOL
“The Left likes to treat skeptics of electrical cars as if they were Luddites.”
Yeah, there is a liberal on FR that acts like that if you disparage oversized electric golf carts.
“EV’s are retardation.”
You will get the fanbois all upset.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.