Posted on 03/28/2023 5:40:57 AM PDT by Red Badger
Ford reported that it’s going to lose $3 billion on electric cars in 2023.
Unlike most automakers, Ford reports its electric vehicle numbers separately, but experts estimate that most car companies are losing similar amounts on the dead end business.
Ford’s investment in Rivian’s electric cars can’t be helping. Last year the startup electric pickup truck maker was spending $220,000 to make the electric vehicles that it sells for $81,000.
That’s bad news for George Soros and for CalPERS: California’s massive public employees retirement fund and a ticking time bomb which owns hundreds of thousands of shares in Rivian.
GM and Ford both project that their electric cars will be profitable in a few years. Ford plans to make 2 million electric cars every year by 2025. That would be impressive considering that Ford only sold 61,575 of them in 2022. It sold 3,624 electric vehicles in Feb 2023.
That’s a long way from 2 million.
GM plans to sell 1 million electric cars by 2025. It sold less than 40,000 in 2022.
Projections like these might make sense if GM and Ford had hot products and untapped market demand. Instead there are too many electric car models chasing a tiny market. Electric car sales have yet to break the million mark. Most of the electric car activity continues to be concentrated in the luxury SUV market which only has so many buyers able to afford them.
Even the “affordable” electric cars, like GM’s Bolt, start at $30,000, and lose as much as $9,000 for the company.
The only way to create demand for electric cars is through government mandates.
After 2035, if you want to buy a new car in California, it’s electric cars or it’s nothing. California’s mandates that fined car manufacturers, forcing them to buy credits from electric car makers like Tesla, financed the electric car industry. By 2035, California will simply eliminate the competition.
New York, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington have also moved to ban the sale of new cars. About a dozen Democrat states have similarly decided to prevent residents from buying cars. Virginia’s House voted to drop its car ban, but the state’s Senate Democrats have kept it in place. Biden has proposed a similar ban nationwide following its adoption by the EU.
By 2040, GM expects to stop making and selling cars on the assumption of such a ban.
George Soros has reportedly lost over $1 billion with his Rivian investment, and his other electric car investments may seem shaky, but in the long term the leftist politicians he has backed are expected to eliminate the competition and clear cars off the roads and highways.
Automakers are spending billions to build electric cars that no one wants and no one can afford because governments have assured them of a captive market. And after all that money flushed down the drain, their lobbyists are aggressively pressuring legislators to impose new bans and keep the existing bans in place. They’ve also been seduced with the promise of subsidies and tax credits that will free them from the pedestrian business of actually turning a profit.
Woke pension funds and party donors have kept the pressure on to see that it pays off.
Detroit’s bet that customers will just accept this as the new normal and just pay higher prices for worse performance is a bad one. The electric car mandates are the work of a Democrat party that is closely tied to a wealthy elite even as Republicans are becoming a working class party. Assuming that half the country will just accept being priced out of the car market when car ownership remains the key to economic and social mobility is as arrogant as it is clueless.
Even assuming that Republicans remain too dysfunctional and outmaneuvered to significantly roll back the leftist agenda, the new car market will drastically shrink. Americans, like Cubans, will desperately work to keep old cars going because for much of the country they will be the only option. The number of illegal cars on the road will dramatically increase. But as brownouts and energy shortages continue to hammer California and other blue states that have also gone all-in on solar and wind power, those will be the only cars that can actually remain on the road.
Woke car companies will have their monopoly handed to them only to find that it’s worthless.
Like their former European counterparts, American automakers will become even more deeply entangled with the government. The inverse spiral of subsidies and sales will climax in bankruptcies. Detroit has failed to innovate and electric car theater is no substitute for actually doing the work to make the cars that people want rather than the ones ad agencies try to make them want.
Letting government mandates instead of consumer demand drive sales is embraced by companies that have given up on even trying to make an appealing product. If electric vehicles were legitimately popular, it wouldn’t take a ban on cars to make them economically viable.
American automakers used to be revolutionary, now they’re the regime.
No, a government ban is just as disruptive as a government mandate.
Let the market decide who wants an electric vehicle, and who wants to build an electric vehicle.
We will achieve fusion power before then.
That’s great! We’ll need that energy to power all those EVs!.....................
The Government hates anything they do not control................
If the auto makers started making 1950 and 60 models they way they were built then people would buy them. Forget all the electronic crap.
The good news is that by 2035 the Energiewende to “renewables” will guarantee that there will be no reliable source of electrical power. And what about trips over 200 miles? Forget it. Take the bus. Unless you going to the Vineyard. Then you fly private.
Both Ford & GM deserve it. Maybe they can build solar panels? Or windmills?
Reminds me when the gov’t did NOT ban incandescent light bulbs. They simply wrote efficiency standards that were so strict that the laws of physics meant an incandescent bulb could never meet the standard. So we had to put up with the execrable ice-cream-cone fluorescents. The LED lights are finally providing a somewhat acceptable substitute, but I still have my hoard of incandescent light bulbs to use in my reading lamp.
That’s why it imperative that conservatives keep the House, regain the Senate and the Presidency. Otherwise, we are screwed..
Some days I just imagine and marvel at how great this country could’ve without the leftist forces that drag us down. Its really something to behold.
I don't believe that..
If Soros invested 1 billion in electric cars, you can bet your rubber duck somewhere he's shorting them by ten times that much..!
I don't thing George Soros invests on the positive side of anything. Especially in America, it's against his nature..
These are the same idiots who said that Tesla’s business plan could never work. The reality:
Energy is going green IN SPITE of regulation, not because of it. It didn’t go green in the last 80 years, because the technology isn’t there. Now that the technology comes from non-government sources after a century of statist meddling, the statists are desperate to say, “we did that!”
When you read that a car costs $220,000 but sells for $80,000, what they really mean is that all of the expenditure to bring the car to market divided by the number of cars ALREADY sold is $220,000. If you’re trying to see whether Ford should continue to make electrical cars, you need to ask what the cost of the NEXT car is. That won’t tell you whether overall it was a good investment by Ford, whether if you could go back in time, you should tell Ford to skip it. But it does say that GIVEN THE ALREADY SUNK COSTS, Ford should continue.
But Tesla suggests that HOLY COW! you can make huge profit margins to pay off those sunk costs quickly.
The Ban is coming 2030 or 35 is what lots of insane countries have already said
They will simply tax gas up the wazzoo, and force gas station owners to comply. Many will stop providing gas, so with fewer gas stations, lines will be impossibly long. Then insurance companies will raise rates on ICE vehicles. So basically they will squeeze people into getting EVs.
We’ll soon see Occasional Cortex tout a picture of a Suberban with a propeller stand on its solar celled roof - and telling us that the car runs on the wind and sun. And the faster it goes, the more the wind will turn the propellor, thereby generating electricity. Not even close to kidding. She and her leftist ilk are THAT stupid.
The only way to create demand for electric cars is through government mandates....
Remember the auto company bailouts?
Here is the payback.
DC now makes decisions on how auto companies are to be run.
Picture the vehicles running around Havana. That is what is coming here.
While concentrating on this electric frenzy, the back up on parts for repairs on ICE has exploded to the point where you are lucky if it does not take months to get the needed parts. My buddy needed a few parts for the trans on a 2019 mustang. While under warrantee, he had to go to five dealerships to find one that would accept the car. Shuffled off to a holding pen, he told me the number of vehicles in it was outrageous. So much so, no loaner offered but the dealer is paying for a rental.
It will only get worse with the dummies running our country these days. Add to that the woke dummies running our companies and catastrophe is around the corner.
There is no portion of functional normal society that government isn’t ready and willing to destroy just for the sake of change and self gratification.
That is fascism........ 😳
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