Posted on 10/26/2023 3:16:12 PM PDT by thegagline
With signs of growing inventory and slowing sales, auto industry executives admitted this week that their ambitious electric vehicle plans are in jeopardy, at least in the near term.
Several C-Suite leaders at some of the biggest carmakers this week voiced fresh unease about the electric car market's growth as concerns over the viability of these vehicles put their multi-billion-dollar electrification strategies at risk.
Among the surprising hand-wringing is GM's Mary Barra, historically one of the automotive industry's most bullish CEOs on the future of electric vehicles. GM has been an early-mover in the electric car market, selling the Chevrolet Bolt for seven years and making bold claims about a fully electric future for the company long before their competitors got on board.
But this week on GM's third-quarter earnings call, Barra and GM struck a more sober tone. The company announced with its quarterly results that it's abandoning its targets to build 100,000 EVs in the second half or this year and another 400,000 by the first six months of 2024. GM doesn't know anymore when it will hit those targets.
***
While GM's about-face was somewhat of a surprise to investors, the Detroit car company is not alone in this new view of the EV future. Even Tesla's Elon Musk warned on a recent earnings call that economic concerns would lead to waning vehicle demand, even for the long-time EV market leader.
Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz — which is having to discount its EVs by several thousand dollars just to get them in customers' hands — isn't mincing words about the state of the EV market.
"This is a pretty brutal space," CFO Harald Wilhelm said on an analyst call. "I can hardly imagine the current status quo is fully sustainable for everybody."***
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
I want to cut the auto CEO's some slack for having to put up with the government forcing it. With everything from increasing CAFE standards to carbon taxes, it's tough to not give in and do what you have to do to keep your company out of regulatory purgatory.
Yes, and if there is not a course correction soon, the federal government will follow California’s lead and declare national mandates.
> Biden administration aims $2 billion in grants at US electric vehicle transition. <
He can’t be doing that unless Republicans in Congress agree to it.
Which of course they will.
What do you get when you cross a Auto exec with a vampire?
autoexec.bat
(Little IT humor there)
Soon they’ll be hat in hand, begging for a taxpayer bailout.
And they’ll get it!
No. Their multi-billion dollar suck-off-the-government teat strategy is at risk if they can't con people into buying these virtue-signaling toys.
I felta thigh.
Eta Bita Pi........
True.
As Robert Redford said in flatly refusing permission for the Dems to use the film All the Presidents’ Men for Dem Party campaign events:
“Neither party has anything to be proud of.”
Great point, and a critical point that shouldn't be missed.
You beat me to it, but I was planning to offer "...and the traditional free marketplace type of businesses that made America great are learning they have no place in the Leftist's future."
The hatred leftists have for the concept of privately owned corporations has been known for many decades, and now we see them as you suggest tinkering with the composition of corporate boards with a non-business agenda.
Dir...
A documentary narrated by Bill Moyers had the 1890s prediction by leading university scientists that due to coming population growth, large cities like New York would soon have such large increases in horses for carriages and wagons that the gallons of urine and pounds of feces will overwhelm the cities. They predicted there was no way out.
“lower total cost of ownership”
I don’t want my car stuck on a rural winter road in CT even if it is “cheaper”...EV...zero chance in this household.
Nope no slack. They should have done their jobs better. Could have rallied their unions. Should have stuck with high volume, low profit margins, and serve their customers.
She (my SIL) was bragging because her children were working with a not-for-profit organization (like they are Mother Theresa wann-be's).
I tried to tell her that everything is a business. Even being a nurse or doctor is a business (she was a nurse before retiring). If you don't succeed as a nurse, you go out of business (i.e., get fired) because your "customers" don't want to do business with you. Being a doctor is particularly a business for the same reason (she believes docs are truly altruistic). Being a preacher is a business because if you don't fill the pews, you go out of business.
Just because an organization is non-profit doesn't mean it is not a business. If they don't succeed, they go out of business.
Fire the CEO’s who bought in on it. “
A lot of if was a combo of being showered with taxpayer money and coercion if they didn’t “get their minds right”. They still have a gun to their heads with the fascist CAFE standards coming at them. The truth about all the problems with EV’s is just getting out the people are saying not me.
Getting Dylan Mulvaney to appear in some ads could probably help increase sales, don’tcha think?
For the type of fags that want electric cars, it might work.
Agree with most of it. You didn't say it, but you probably agree with me, a fellow EV owner (not Tesla), that the EV tax credit and other things just artificially inflate the cost of an EV. Much like govt money increases prices in other industries. IMHO EV's would be a lot cheaper if govt got out of the way and let the free market do its thing.
As for Alabama, our rate is 16.6931¢/kWh, 15.2528¢/kWh, 16.4816¢/kWh, and 16.5846¢/kWh cents on my last 4 power bills. Our stated rate is 12.4384¢/kWh, but that doesn't include the rate riders per kWh nor the 4% state tax. Since some of the rate riders vary per month (most notably the fuel charge whenever Brandon jacks up the cost of natural gas after Brandon and Obama forced Alabama Power to shut down some coal plants and replace them with "clean burning natural gas" fueled plants), the only way I can calculate my true per kWh rate is to subtract the flat fees and tax ($15.60 for us) from the total bill to get the total usage charge, then divide that by the total kWh pulled from the grid during that billing period. That tells me for every kWh I pulled from the grid the past few months I added about 16 cents to the bill, not 12 cents. I don't know if Texas' power rates have similar add-ons to the per kWh charges.
I'm not saying you and I made bad choices in getting EV's. I'm just saying if anyone reads us FReeper EV owners and think about getting one himself he should know the real math before doing so.
For many people an EV doesn't make sense. In my opinion with Alabama power rates and gasoline prices, a good rule of thumb is you should drive at least 12K miles per year (with Brandon's gas prices) for the gas savings to be worth the increase in power costs (and other costs with having an EV). If we go back to Trump's year 2019 lower gas and power prices (I hate using 2020 as a standard because the china virus and lockdowns affected prices too), then the threshold is probably 15K miles per year. In the past 12 months my wife and I put 28K miles on our EV, we can charge at home, and being married we have two cars anyway (with the other being an ICE pickup to handle the few times an EV won't do such as pickup chores or long trips through charging deserts). So our use case is a classic example of it being practical to get an EV and do most of our driving in it.
Love it!
The people that I know that (bit) bought into the ev jamboree are leisure users and were previously predisposed to lean hard to the coercions applied to their blind trusts.
Just saying, if it was so good everybody would already be all over it.
When the dubious check is fought so hard it will not fool everybody no matter what the grease applied.
I had those as a kid, too. I think Elon Musk did, as well.
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