These contraptions satisfy next to no one outside of a few specific buyers with unique needs, and, of course, our government overlords that are desperate to restrict our mobility to save the planet.
Last week, the rental car giant, Hertz, announced a huge reduction in its electric vehicle fleet, selling some 20,000 cars, about a third of its total, and planning to replace them with traditional cars instead. For some reason, the move was seen as surprising in much of the mainstream media, who promptly rationalized it as “complicated” rather than simply a massive blow to the entire EV strategy. According to MotorTrend, consumer demand, or a complete lack of it, is “just a portion of the total picture” and the real culprit is “repair costs for rideshare EVs, which were much higher than expected. This is not maintenance costs, which Hertz notes are lower than ICE vehicles, but rather collision repair costs.” The overall strategy, you see, is “in tact,” even “if it will take longer to achieve.” Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas, the head of auto and space research noted, it’s “another sign that EV expectations need to be reset downward across the market.” “While consumers enjoy the driving experience and fuel savings (per mile) of an EV, there are other ‘hidden’ costs to EV ownership,” he added including insurance, repairs, charging infrastructure, residual-value retention, and range anxiety. This is one way to look at it, I guess – if you prefer to view things divorced from reality. If you live in the real world, however, none of this should come as a shock, given the track record of selling next generation products that are less convenient and usable than the current generation is not good, defying every principle of the free market economy. Personally, I experienced the lack of demand first hand last year, traveling on business to Atlanta. In a skit right out of Seinfeld, I made my reservation for a mid-size vehicle, only to arrive at the rental counter and learn that the vehicle I wanted did not exist. There were dozens of people standing inline who just received similar news, waiting for hours on end for the ordinary car they (thought they’d) rented. The person at the counter informed me they had no idea when the car might arrive, but I could pay more for a minivan or a large SUV. No other cars were available right now. I opted for the minivan, not happy about it, but more interested in maintaining my schedule, only to witness lines and lines of Hertz Teslas in the garage, waiting on renters that never came. There were dozens of them – and few other, old-fashioned cars – because who in their right mind would want to rent an EV in a location where they don’t live, don’t know where the chargers are, and don’t have the time to figure it out? My final destination was about 100 miles north of Atlanta, placing the round trip at about the total range of the car. Where was I supposed to charge up if I needed to?
Sadly for electric vehicle proponents, Hertz was not the only negative news for the nascent industry recently. In December, Ford announced that the company plans to dramatically cut production of electric vehicles after experiencing billions of dollars of losses. They too insisted on rationalizing this outcome, “While we remain bullish on our long-term strategy for electric vehicles, we are re-timing and resizing some investments,” the automaker said in a statement that reads like it was written after Big Brother reduced the chocolate rations. “As stated previously, we have been evaluating BlueOval Battery Park Michigan in Marshall…We are pleased to confirm we are moving ahead with the Marshall project, consistent with the Ford+ plan for growth and value creation,” the statement continued. “However, we are right-sizing as we balance investment, growth, and profitability. The facility will now create more than 1,700 good-paying American jobs to produce a planned capacity of approximately 20 GWh.” Whatever Ford may insist, “right-sizing” means downsizing, and these cuts are dramatic – a planned 40% reduction in capacity and 30% in jobs at the facilities – after promising $3.5 billion in total investments, on top of $2 billion in taxpayer subsidies. Once again, the move should not have been surprising: Ford had previously estimated their electric vehicle ventures would result in a truly stunning loss of $4.5 billion in 2023 alone, $1.3 billion in just the third quarter, or a completely insane $62,016 loss per vehicle sold – more than the cost of most cars, period (On a side note, where does everyone think this money is coming from? They are paying for it by jacking up the price of their other cars). Lackluster sales of the F150 Lightning, an electric version of the best selling pickup truck in the world, are a key contributor to these mounting losses. Also in December, Ford sent a message to suppliers that it would cut production by 50%, to 1,600 from a planned 3,200 per week. Sales of the Lightning are currently running about 10% of its ICE sibling, 4,400 units per month compared to 44,000, nor are sales increasing as fast as the company hoped. Once again, the mainstream media blamed this less than desirable outcome on Ford. “Are the walls crumbling in on the grand electric vehicle experiment? Definitely not. A major reason for Ford’s reevaluation of Lightning demand is its price, and it doesn’t take a long look in the MotorTrend news archives to understand what happened here. And it was something Ford did to itself,” as though the company was supposed to keep selling these things at a loss greater than the base price of the model. Further, MotorTrend makes this claim despite being “loathe not to mention our own mixed feelings about our time with the truck during our long-term test, too. We’ve had qualms about efficiency and range prediction, towing frustrations, and groaned about expensive subscription features. In some ways, our trucks didn’t meet our expectations—and so there may be an issue with consumer expectations versus electric pickup realities.” You don’t say, please see the point above about it being near impossible to sell new products that are worse than the old products for most people’s needs?
Ford’s challenges are amid what has been described as an overall electric vehicle sales slump. As ABC News described it earlier this year, the “recent headlines for electric vehicles have been brutal: Sales are dropping. Momentum is slipping. Consumers are souring on the technology.” There are currently some 51 EV models available, all of which account for only about 10% of total US vehicle sales, far, far away from the 50% expected in just 6 years. In an early candidate for understatement of the year, John Voelker, an opinion editor at Car & Driver noted “the industry overall may have overestimated Americans’ initial fascination with them,” to use ABC’s phrasing. “Some of the manufacturers got overly ambitious,” he explained in the common refrain of blaming manufacturers for doing what the government and experts have demanded. “It may be difficult to get to 50% [of new EV sales] by 2030. We’ve moved beyond the early adopters now.” Why we need an expert to inform us that it’s going to be difficult to quintuple the sales rate while production is being cut in half in some cases is left unsaid, especially when Ivan Drury, Edmund’s director of insights, noted that selling EVs at loss is not unique to Ford. Audi, one of the largest automakers in the world, also announced it was scaling back electric vehicle plans. “Every EV on the market is being battered by bad news,” Mr. Drury explained. “Nothing is meeting expectations. A new set of buyers now mean a new set of concerns.” “EVs are getting harder to move,” he continued. “Earlier in the year they were still going for above MSRP. Once the average interest rate hit 7% EVs began to linger on the lot and now require a lot more work from automakers and dealers to sell.” Somehow, however, none of this across the board negative news is reason to question these plans, much less panic. “We’re not seeing the level of frenzied activity we saw earlier. There’s a slight tapering of demand and partially a market correction,” Ed Kim, president and chief analyst at AutoPacific said. “The rate of adoption has tailed off a little bit but it’s still growing. This is not a catastrophe for EVs. Don’t get panicked yet.” He added, “A lot of automakers overestimated demand for high-priced EVs. But that does not mean EV demand is dropping.” What, pray tell, does it mean then? Overall, it is enough to make one wonder if there would ever be a reason to panic according to these experts, if anything that might happen to question adherence to the prevailing dogma. Can you imagine if any other nascent industry performed this way, despite massive government subsidies over two decades? Generally speaking, sales that continually fail to meet forecasts, accompanied by cuts in production and the need to continue to sell products at a loss for the foreseeable future would be enough for most companies to question their entire approach, if not eliminate the service line entirely, rather than claim a massive industry wide decline is going to add up to more sales, somehow.
It is equally odd that these declines are never, ever perceived in the mainstream media as a political setback for President Joe Biden or the green agenda in general. It was less than two years ago that the Biden Administration bragged about securing the largest investment to fight global warming in the history of the known universe, the incorrectly named Inflation Reduction Act. On August 15, 2022, the White House website declared, “The Inflation Reduction Act will lower costs for families, combat the climate crisis, reduce the deficit, and finally ask the largest corporations to pay their fair share. President Biden and Congressional Democrats have worked together to deliver a historic legislative achievement that defeats special interests, delivers for American families, and grows the economy from the bottom up and middle out.” A key part of the plan was to supercharge, pardon the pun, the electric vehicle industry with massive subsidies to consumers. This included up to “$7,500 in tax credits for new electric vehicles and $4,000 for used electric vehicles, helping families save $950 per year,” and a general credit of up to $1,000 for families “that take advantage of clean energy and electric vehicle tax credits.” By any measurable, objective standard, the approach has been a total failure – even when the government is flashing thousands of dollars, 90% of car buyers have rejected these vehicles and seem likely to continue to do so. Nor is the first time the United States government has gone the subsidy route. President Barack Obama had a similar program, with similar fanfare including both the $7,500 credit and additional investments. “In 2008, the President set an ambitious goal of putting 1 million advanced technology vehicles on the road by 2015 – which would reduce dependence on foreign oil and lead to a reduction in oil consumption of about 750 million barrels through 2030.” All told, the federal government has spent billions upon billions of dollars on the electric vehicle dream only to have consumers defy them at every turn, but still there’s no reason to panic – at all, this is apparently totally normal, simply spend more money and surely the outcome will be different.
Ironically, electric vehicles aren’t exactly popular with the progressive climate change crowd either. “Hybrids and electric cars are fair game,” claimed a spokesperson for the environmental group, Tyre Extinguishers, which targets objectionable vehicles in England, deflates their tires, and leaves a note about how they are harming the planet. “We cannot electrify our way out of the climate crisis – there are not enough rare earth metals to replace everyone’s car and the mining of these metals causes suffering.” In the classic, “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” Roger Daltrey declared, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” to suggest that most revolutions end up recreating the past, rather than truly changing things. In the case of electric vehicles, we might update it to “Meet the new boss, worse than the old boss.” These contraptions satisfy next to no one outside of a few specific buyers with unique needs. They are less useful and flexible than their ICE predecessors, offering less range and longer fill ups, assuming you can find a charging station, plus higher costs to repair, not exactly a good thing for any new product. If you doubt this, just look at the headlines coming out of Chicago this week, when frigid temperatures literally killed electric cars and charging stations, leaving owners stranded, or consider other studies that show electric car range plummets by around 40% in weather below freezing. Environmental activists are no fans either, given the complexity of their manufacture and the invasive techniques required to mine rare minerals. Some have even claimed they are racist. Ultimately, it seems the only fans are those who insist we need to do something, anything to save the planet, whether or not it actually works, and the government given their long standing love for picking winners and losers, and devising grand schemes that never work. The consumer and taxpayer, as ever, will face the consequences, whether or not anyone wants to admit the truth.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 