All about EV

Written by Climate Discussion Nexus on September 3, 2024. Posted in Current News

There are several key pillars to Western governments’ climate policies, including wind and solar power and ‘carbon’ pricing. But a major one everywhere is forcing people to “choose” electric vehicles

And this jalopy seems to be collapsing.

Headlines warn that “Magna International cuts sales outlook as carmakers scale back EV plans” and even Heatmap deplores “Ford’s Big Blow to the EV transition” as Ford the American car company “has all but given up on making consumer electric vehicles”.

Unlike, say, Ford the Ontario provincial premier who, Dan McTeague of Canadians for Affordable Energy complains, is “at it again with more taxpayers dollars for EVs” in company, so to speak, with his supposed partisan foe Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

It is not climate-specific that politicians whose own private-sector careers were undistinguished or non-existent claim to know better than investors, entrepreneurs and customers what the future of some industry is.

They do it all the time and always have. But it always ends up crashing and this one seems to be doing it now. And possibly causing a multiple-policy pileup.

The extent of politicians’ economic folly, including on energy, defies belief. As columnist Lorrie Goldstein recently noted of Ford the politician, ostensibly a “Conservative”, he actually intended to shut down his province’s nuclear plants and natural gas plants all at once, even as he splurged on EV subsidies.

Goldstein asked:

“since the Ford government is investing billions of dollars to make Ontario a North American leader in manufacturing electric cars and EV batteries, where does it think the extra electricity needed to build EVs and charge them after they’re built, will come from if it simultaneously curtails nuclear power and natural gas? The energy fairy?”

They don’t think in those terms. They don’t have to.

But companies live at least some of the time in the real world of incentives and limited resources… unless they can tap into the state’s coffers, like Lion Electric next door in St-Jérôme, Quebec, which keeps cutting jobs while gobbling provincial subsidies for its unwanted buses and trucks.

As Carson Jerema put it irritably in the National Post:

“Canada isn’t a country, so much as an elaborate program for distributing public money to a handful of manufacturing companies in southern Ontario. It doesn’t matter if the government in Ottawa is Liberal or Conservative.

And it doesn’t matter if whatever is being manufactured is something people want to buy. The existence of industries in other parts of the country, such as oil and gas in Alberta, that thrive largely without subsidies only seems to reinforce Ottawa’s need to coddle Central Canada.

The farce that has become the electric vehicle industry, with more than $40 billion in Canadian subsidies and tax breaks, is, perhaps, the greatest example of this grift.”

It’s certainly not market-driven, despite what politicians babble. As Lorne Gunter put it delicately in this context, “Government planners are often lousy predictors of future trends and technologies.”

But at least, Jerema added, in the past these distorting and regionally divisive subsidies were for things someone somewhere did want, unlike EVs:

“Though the traditional auto industry was bailed out under the Harper government, you could at least make the case that Canadians were interested in buying cars and trucks.

As for the EV battery plants that the federal and Ontario governments are dispensing cash to, in order to be successful, they would have to produce batteries for cars that have a hope of selling, and that is not at all a guarantee.

Sales have fallen flat, as consumers are put off by the high cost and poor performance of electric vehicles compared to gas-powered options. Carmakers – such as Volkswagen, Ford, General Motors and Mercedes – are scaling back production, and even Tesla sales are dropping.”

So they are. According to the Montreal Gazette, “In a press release, Lion director Marc Bédard acknowledged that the electric vehicle market is facing ‘serious challenges.’” And as the Wall Street Journal explained, Ford the company’s changes in plans regarding EV SUVs:

“are the latest example of automakers unwinding EV-investment plans they made years ago, when it looked like there was big untapped consumer demand for battery-powered models.

There has been more hesitancy among car shoppers than auto executives initially expected, with surveys showing concerns about high prices and finding places to charge.”

Why executives listened to governments and zealots not customers we cannot imagine. But it’s costing Ford another $2 billion that it can ill afford.

The Canadian government was already severely embarrassed by news that the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, which swelled up like a dirigible in terms of staff (up from five in 2000 to 1,936 in 2023), cost (up an astounding thousand-fold, from $4 million to $4.4 billion) and risk as it turned the once-cautious government retirement plan that bought market-tracking mutual funds into a riverboat gambler, because it had plunged to the tune of $600 million into Chinese EV-makers that the federal cabinet says engage in predatory trade practices, out of a total portfolio in Communist China’s world-domination-bent, genocidal, slave-labour-employing economy now inexplicably at $7.5 billion.

Canada’s finance minister and deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland, who can give Kamala Harris a run for her money when it comes to cosmic vacuity, announced a review of tariffs on Chinese cars to a group of auto workers in Vaughan, Ontario, by saying:

“One, we believe in you. Two, we have invested in you and we are going to keep on investing in you because you are literally one of the engine rooms of Canada.”

Albeit an engine that can’t run on its own. And next:

“And three, we are going to protect you and defend you from unfair competition and I want you to know that 100 percent.”

As for her actual plan, she didn’t tell them what it was because she hasn’t got one. And nor it seems has almost anyone else, except perhaps Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, which gives some idea of how feeble the debate has become.

We’re not normally huge fans of the European Union and its democracy-deficient meddling.

But there’s a logic, and a warning, in the Euro News headline “Brussels edges closer to slapping definitive tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles” in which the Eurocrats say they’re open to discussions with the Chinese “government”, a term we put in scare quotes because it is of course a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Chinese Communist Party of which, rather than of the state, the “People’s Liberation Army” is a branch.

But if not:

“Brussels intends to impose definitive duties on imports of Chinese battery electric vehicles (BEVs), the European Commission announced Tuesday, edging closer to a long-term solution to shield the bloc’s homegrown BEV industry from unfair competition from Beijing.

In draft final conclusions of its anti-subsidy probe, shared with Chinese BEV producers as well as the Chinese and EU governments on Tuesday, the Commission unveiled its intended definitive duty rates for a range of BEV producers.

If approved by EU member states, those rates would apply for five years from their adoption, meaning Chinese producers would be forced into longer-term price hikes.”

Exactly.

But since the European economy is already reeling from costly climate-driven policies, where’s the upside for consumers? You can’t afford a Chinese EV, or get a domestically-manufactured one, you couldn’t charge either if you could, and the government won’t let you buy an internal-combustion-engine vehicle even if you somehow kept your job.

It’s also interesting how commentators are as free as politicians with advice to companies whose executive teams or Boards they are inexplicably rarely asked to join.

Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer, for instance, emailed that:

“It’s no secret that I want an automaker to make a small, robust, friendly little compact electric pickup truck – I’ve written about it before for Heatmap (several times).”

Which doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone actually knows, or that if they do know they care.

Ford has been making vehicles since five years before the iconic Model T breakthrough in 1908, and while the last 50 years have admittedly not been such as to inspire confidence, they probably know better than Meyer does what they can make and sell at a profit.

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