Electric Vehicles Lead Major Car Maker to Report First Loss in Decades

Honda Motors reported its first annual loss in nearly 70 years, which came as a result of an emphasis on electric cars.

The Japan-based car company has been listed on the stock market since 1957, but the combination of electric vehicle bets and Trump trade policies led to its first-ever year in the red.

"EV demand has declined considerably, due to the rollback of environmental regulations in the U.S. and other factors," Honda said in a statement, per a report from Fox Business.

The company faces $9 billion in restructuring costs because of the lackluster electric vehicle demand.

It suffered a $2.7 billion loss in the past fiscal year, according to a report from the Associated Press.

Honda was hit with $9 billion in restructuring costs based on low electric vehicle demand and President Donald Trump's "Made in America" policies. https://t.co/xlXb8VndfW

Honda Motors CEO Toshihiro Mibe confirmed that it would scrap a previous target to make electric vehicles account for 20 percent of profits by 2030.

"We will continue our research to develop future technologies including electric vehicle batteries," Mibe remarked, per Fox Business.

Message from Jim Robinson:

Dear FRiends,

We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.

If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:

Click here: to donate by Credit Card

Or here: to donate by PayPal

Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794

Thank you very much and God bless you,

Jim

“The Tesla electric semi is now coming off the production lines and are already sold. The Tesla Electric semi is going to replace tens of thousands of diesels in many company fleets”

Interesting...Tesla semi cost 120k more than a new Diesel. That difference will buy about 21,000 gallons of diesel fuel. Modern diesel trucks will get about 7-9 mpg and the motors last 600,000 miles or more. Electricity isn’t free so the break even point is hundreds of thousand of miles. Sure Tesla doesn’t need as much maintenance but if the trucks are like the cars they will go through very expensive tires quicker. Time will tell how many miles the motor / battery pack will last on the Tesla. I just don’t see how buying Tesla trucks is a slam dunk decision for Fleet Operators.

Now when the rats get back into the Whitehouse, to the detrement of taxpayers, the tax credits / rebates will be a flowing.

The stupidity also is that most of the electricity generated to power these EVs comes from burning Natural gas, Coal, nuclear, hyrdo, burning trash, burning wood fiber waste, solar panels and LAST wind turbines.

Now this differs regionally. My buddy who has a Tesla Model S Plaid in Idaho Falls, ID gets 90% of their electricity from the dams on the Snake River. So, their power really is green(except for the construction of the dams).

There are people on FR that get most of the electricity from solar panels. Then they charge their own EV with that power.
They say the power is FREE, BUT how much did it cost to install those panels? What is the ROI ? What IF they had taken that same money and invested in NVIDIA, or the NASDAQ index or S&P500 index fund?

Then there are people here in New England. They drive an EV. They may even charge at home. The electricity comes primarily from burning Natural Gas, two nuclear power plants, hydro, burning trash and wood waste, solar and last place wind turbines. Why not just burn the METHANE where 55% of our electricity comes from?

I am in Nashua NH. ALL the city buses run on natural gas. That Methane comes into NH via pipeline from the mid Atlantic, Canada and LNG tanker into Boston.
So, there is a fair amount of logistics and infrastrucure to get it here. Not like PA, OH, NY, WV or other places where it is only a very few underground trapped in the Shale rock.

My point is that there are a lot of places where a Semi truck could run on Methane. that is because that truck returns to the distribution facility EVERY NIGHT.
Walmart has a huge distribution facility in Raymond, NH. Their trucks deliver to the stores all over New England from there and return to that facility to reload. If they can do this with city buses, why not semi tractor engines?

It seems like there is a lot of wasted energy turning that Methane into electricity to turn a motor.

Without the heavy incentives would you still have made the purchase? These numbers seem to show many would not.

Yes indeed (again I'm a good use case). Part of it is because the incentives often artificially inflated my upfront costs anyway (much like incentives do in other industries). So the incentives didn't save me anything.

My overall cash savings is $7,700 from 5 years ago when I installed a small solar system to test it for a year, liked it, and upgraded it the next year, which was the same year I bought the EV because my wife's gas crossover needed replacing anyway. So part of the solar upgrade math was charging the EV. Most of the $7,700 in cash savings is in the past 4 years (EV + extra solar). So call it $1,600 per year in energy cost savings.

That's net savings over costs (I pay a little extra in car insurance because the EV costs more than a comparable gas car, and a little more in homeowners insurance to have a high enough payout to replace the solar equipment as well as the house). And I pay a monthly payment to a loan I took out to hire the solar contractor and buy the equipment, hire HVAC to replace my two natural gas appliances with high efficient electric ones, hire an electrician to install two chargers for the EV, buy insulation for the house, etc. Every month that the energy project cost me more than it helped me (most notably while making car payments), I pulled the excess from the loan (adding to the balance). Now that the car (EV) is paid off, my budget pays down on the balance a lot faster.

My budget for home energy and transportation is $850/month -- the same it was in year 2019. $400 of that was the $400/month we put into a car savings account to repair and replace our existing used gas cars. The other $450/month (really it was $463/month) is what our energy costs were for our home and driving (large power bill + large natural gas bill + gasoline for driving). This was year 2019 -- the last year of Trump before covid monkeyed with energy costs. (It'd be ridiculous to bank on year 2020 gas prices lasting forever.) Now that the EV is paid off, my energy budget = small power bill + loan payment + a little extra on insurance -- below the $850/month and therefore I'm paying down the loan quickly. Think of the EV and solar project as allowing me to do away with the past 7 years' worth of energy price inflation. That was the whole point.

I calculate it every month when I get the power bill. I look at the telemetry from the solar inverters to calculate how much power I consumed, without the power company knowing because most of it didn't have to be pulled from the grid. From that I calculate what my power bill would have been without solar, based on the real world costs per kWh in the power bill. I also look at my EV odometer to see how many miles we drove that month and what gas prices are in my area (what it would have cost to drive a gas car). So it's gas savings, but with some reduction from overlap (the EV saved on gas but added to power cost, so it's not a 100% gas savings, but with solar providing 80% of my power most months it's very much a savings). I then do the same with natural gas savings.

Assuming a 3% increase in energy costs each year, and a 1.2% reduction in EV and solar efficiency per year (as per the warranties), my break even point is spring of 2032. That's when the balance left on the loan will equal the total savings. But that's only part of the savings. In reality, cash flow savings = that much more in our Roth IRAs growing tax free. I intentionally ignore that to add a little pessimism in the calculations (for things like how much to upgrade the solar again if I think about doing that).

Electric vehicles are too far ahead of their time. The forced adoption of the technology, still in it infant stage, has led to an overabundance of inferior, unreliable, and underengineered vehicles, which still rely on the rather low energy intensity of current battery technology.

There may be a vast leap in technology in which large amounts of electrical energy may be stored in a compact containment, and be released at a controlled rate, but the present development of batteries certainly is not that level of attainment. Until then, some form of on-board electrical generation, as in a hybrid automotive design, should remain the standard for the continued electrification of ground transport.

Hybrids work. They are just not given the kind of respect and concentration on development they deserve in this moment in time.

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.