EV Reporting: Cognitive Disconnect -- The Day The Music Died -- January 9, 2025

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EVs are tracked here.

I'm just clearing out the inbox. This interests me not at all at the moment, but necessary for the archives.

I will post the links with little or no commenting.

Porsche, ZeroHedge, China sales slump. Link here.

China, renews car trade-in subsidy to boost hybrid, EV sales. Link here.

Honda: may delay new EV models due to Donald Trump presidency. Link here.

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EVs

Link here.

Wow, this was talked about on the blog years ago -- how this would absolutely devastate the automobile industry -- trapped between the California mandates and the reality almost everywhere else. The Obama/Biden legacy/reputation, with regard to EVs, will go the way of Angela Merkel in Germany.

The years just keep getting warmer. I mean this facetiously. At first, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told us 2016 was 0.94 degree warmer than the 20th-century average. Then the agency raised its estimate by several steps to 1 degree in 2020 before dropping it back to 0.99 perhaps under Trump influence. With Democrats back in charge under President Biden, 2016 started getting warmer again, reaching 1.03 degrees in 2023. The latest NOAA chart shows it 1.04 degrees warmer than the baseline.

Consider it a small evidence of what David Samuels, in a widely noted article, calls the legacy of Obama-era “permission structures.” By permission structures, he means a “whole of society” strategy of pressure and subtle bullying to force buy-in of Obama goals. I hit on a similar formula in 2012 when I explained that Mr. Obama imposed his will by giving voters “permission to think highly of themselves for thinking highly of him.”

One residue, which NOAA obviously participated in, was the permission structure behind today’s gathering boondoggle created by Obama-era mandated investment in electric vehicles.

A feature Mr. Samuels stresses is an Obamaesque ability to substitute new, instantly embraced ideas for old, instantly embraced ideas. In his first two years, Joe Biden justified his giant increase in EV subsidies and mandates by citing the “existential risk” of global climate change. Then that argument was junked overnight. EVs became a “strategic” technology that must be protected from Chinese competition.

Both arguments were nonsense, as I belabored here, yet were seamlessly echoed in the media in turn. Subsidizing green-energy consumption is simply to subsidize energy consumption, including fossil energy. EVs are “strategic” only for China, to reduce its reliance on imported oil in anticipation of military conflict with the U.S. For the rest of the world, including the U.S., electric cars are a consumer technology, albeit a fast-emerging and promising one. Sensibly, they’re also a technology that should have been left to consumers and carmakers to adapt and develop without distorting handouts and mandates.

The result is finally in view: a colossal self-destruction of the Western auto industry, with Germany’s at the forefront. Volkswagen is in a panic about Chinese competition to the money-losing EVs that Berlin forces the company to sell. Germany’s export-led economy is in free fall. Its bellwether auto giant, VW, is pursuing its first-ever domestic factory closures and layoffs.

Likewise, Ford CEO Jim Farley sees his company’s survival in the U.S. threatened by Chinese EVs given the tens of thousands of dollars Ford already loses on each of its government-mandated electric vehicles. The author of Germany’s auto mess, Angela Merkel, is now reviled as an unprincipled bandwagon grabber.

Don’t kid yourself.

The same reputational fate is coming for Messrs. Obama and Biden. Mr. Biden’s EV protectionism is America’s admission of defeat. The U.S. went from “Americans must buy EVs to save the planet” to “Americans must be prevented from buying cheap, high-quality Chinese EVs to preserve a government-created domestic boondoggle.”

 Much more at the link.

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Local -- North Texas
High Income Areas

My oberservation: our area saw incredible penetration of Tesla EVs, including the Cybertruck, starting several years ago.

All of a sudden, everything, with regard to EVs, seems to have plateaued. I have seen no additional charging points being installed. No change in the number of service stations across the entire region.

On a daily basis, I see one -- exactly one -- Cybertruck. 

Sophia, age 10, fifth grader, says she and her friends call the Cybertruck a garbage truck. That was unsolicited. She told me that as a Cybertruck passed us going in the opposite direction. She says they refer to it as a "garbage truck" because that's what it looks like to them.