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.
Yup. I can't recall who said it, and I'm paraphrasing, but it was a newspaper magnate decades ago who said the first print is expensive, the rest are just cost of materials.
I have found it interesting that all the old leftist hippies and beatniks would drive VWs from the NAZIs. When I had the realization decades ago that they were of the same stripe as the NAZIs, it made more sense.
The driver came out and explained to admiring car fans how it was all electric
Tail gate open and close
Bed cover open and lift up.
Front storage open
Front storage refrigerated box
Side panel storage open and shut
Passenger and driver side door handles
With all the electrics I guess the range in winter sucks.
I saw one in Destin, FL a couple of months ago.........................
This article is totally full of BS. Tesla is making 20% profit every car. That’s how they have invested 20 billion dollars in new factories, have virtually NO corporate debt and 20 billion dollars cash. Other car makers are failing because they are bloated, not innovative, have hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate debt and are burdened with $5,000 per car in union costs.
I drove by their Austin facility, biggest building I’ve ever seen.
By 2030, portable EMP guns will be available. Concerned anarcho eco-fascists will drive thru government parking lots and fry every electric vehicle owned by the government. The government will be unable to go anywhere or do anything. That’s just a start.
No electric vehicles will exist by 2031. They will all be fried.
Tesla, besides being run far better than any legacy American auto maker in terms of costs, also has a reputation for producing an EV. The big 3 have a reputation for screwing up innovation.
Quirky, boutique products (EVs) are a completely different market than what the big 3 are good at.
Exactly.
What the article doesn’t discuss are the effects on manufacturers because of CAFE standards
Ford has the largest fleet of trucks and was forced, years ago, to manufacture hybrids, their one electric vehicle and eliminate cars and sedans from manufacturing
Trucks and hybrids are the most profitable vehicles for Ford.
The fines for exceeding CAFE standards would be worse than losing a couple billion on electric vehicles.
The Tesla factories in Texas and Berlin are only ramped up to about 20% of designed capacity so far. The new factory to be built in Mexico will be larger than either of them and use even more updated production methods.
Dang.
I live in winter climate and have a 15 year old energy sucking plasma TV. My take is it revenue neutral. I only watch it for a few hours a day. It cranks out some heat which comes in handy in the winter, but does increase AC usage in the summer. The picture is still great, so no reason to buy a new one. Most of the light bulbs in my house are LEDs
I’ve been checking out a horse.
Microchip, a US firm, is making a lot of uPs right here in the US. They supply most of those that are used in cars.
Actually, they put out less than 24 watts. A much bigger percentage of their output goes to visible light than for incandescent bulbs.
They don't last longer. I put them in my office, and replace them more often than I replaced incandescent bulbs. I had florescent eight foot tubes in my basement that lasted twenty years, now the LED-based versions are blinking out after just two years.
Yeah, some sets just have an unbeatable picture. My Samsung 46” LCD I bought for 4700 from Best Buy in 2007 has an awesome picture. The Ex is still using it. Power hungry tho and cranks out heat. I bought an LG 3D to replace it but picture is not as good. Much less power and heat from it tho.
I would walk thru a big box store and check which LED models have the best picture. Then look online for a good price and have it shipped. Almost all are under a grand. That plasma could seriously hurt someone if it fell on them. : ) I’d use a wood stove to replace the heat.
People so very badly overestimate EMP. There will be no portable EMP guns by 2030. Besides, EMP isn’t a magic destruction raygun. It can be managed rather easily.
It is indeed a heavy TV. I can't lift off the table it is on by myself. It has a solid base, so tipping over is unlikely unless in an earthquake..
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