• Tag Archives electric cars
  • Why EVs Are ‘Piling Up’ at Dealerships, Despite Massive Taxpayer Subsidies

    Ford Motor recently announced it is slashing prices on its F-150 Lightning, an electric vehicle the company rolled out in 2021.

    The Lightning now carries a suggested retail price of $49,995, about $10,000 lower than its previous recommended price tag ($59,974), a reduction the company says is possible because of lower “battery raw material costs and continued work on scaling production and cost.”

    It’s certainly possible that reduced overhead from battery minerals and production costs played a role in Ford’s decision to trim its price tag by nearly 20 percent, but that may be only half the story.

    Several reports show EVs are not exactly flying off dealership lots. In fact, there’s a glut of them.

    “After a prolonged period in which EVs quickly disappeared from dealerships, the electric vehicle industry now has the opposite problem: unsold models are piling up,” reported Money last week. “About 92,000 EVs currently sit on dealers’ lots; that’s a 342% increase from a year ago, when only about 21,000 did so, according to automotive research firm Cox Automotive.”

    Ford is not immune from the weakened demand for EVs. Sales of its flagship car, the Mustang Mach-E, have slumped, down 44 percent in May from the same month last year.

    The Lightning, which won the title of EV king of pickup trucks after Ford moved nearly 16,000 units in 2022, has fared better but is still struggling to keep pace with 2022. And now the company is facing some stiff new competition. (More on that in a minute.)

    This was not the scenario many people predicted.

    In April, the International Energy Agency released a report in which it predicted EV sales to increase 35 percent after a record-breaking year. But economists I spoke with said such predictions were overly optimistic considering current macroeconomic conditions.

    This invites important questions. Is the glut of EVs simply a product of tightened money supply?

    Apparently not. As Axios noted, the 92,000 EVs currently sitting on lots is comparatively high relative to gasoline-powered cars.

    “That’s a 92-day supply — roughly three months’ worth of EVs, and nearly twice the industry average,” wrote Joann Muller. “For comparison, dealers have a relatively low 54 days’ worth of gasoline-powered vehicles in inventory….”

    In other words, dealerships are sitting on a lot more EVs than gasoline-powered vehicles—despite efforts to entice consumers to buy EVs with taxpayer-funded credits up to $7,500.

    This is evidence that pretty much everyone—from central planners to auto manufacturers—misjudged the demand for EVs, which are not even as environmentally friendly as politicians would have you believe.

    Not only do EVs require an astonishing amount of mining—an estimated 500,000 pounds of rock and minerals must be upturned to make a single battery, physicists point out—but their carbon footprint isn’t much smaller than gas-powered cars.

    It turns out that EVs actually require a lot more CO2 to produce than gas-powered cars. EVs can make that up, but it takes a great deal of time because EVs also often run on electricity generated from fossil fuels. Just how long? In 2021, Volvo admitted that its C40 Recharge has to be driven 70,000 miles before its carbon impact is lower than its gas-powered version.

    All of this is to say that a bunch of unused EVs isn’t just a financial headache for auto dealers and motor companies; it’s also an environmental problem.

    That said, the weaker than expected demand for EVs doesn’t mean the future of electric vehicles is doomed. On the contrary, demand for EVs is likely to increase as battery technology and EV infrastructure improves. Ford’s Lightning, for example, only has half the range of its gas-powered F-150 because of its small battery—a clear concern when charging stations are not yet readily available in many places.

    For now, however, motor companies are competing with one another to attract customers in a smaller than anticipated EV market. Which brings me to Elon Musk.

    Tesla last week rolled out  its much-hyped Cybertruck, which is a direct challenge to the Lightning, and likely played a role in Ford’s price cut.

    Federal lawmakers may have created a glut of EVs with their meddling, and it’s likely to have an adverse impact on both the auto market and the environment. But one of the virtues of capitalism is that consumers will ultimately decide who wins in the EV market and who loses.

    Whether that turns out to be Musk’s Cybertruck or Ford’s Lightning remains to be seen. Either way, the competition is bringing down prices, which is a win for consumers looking to purchase an EV.

    But the glut of electrical vehicles on the market reveals the danger in letting lawmakers decide what consumers should be driving.

    This article originally appeared in The Epoch Times. 


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. (Follow him on Substack.)

    His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


  • Electric Cars vs. Gas Cars: Is the Conventional Wisdom Wrong?


    Joe Biden, the current front-runner of the Democratic 2020 field, promises the return of electric vehicle (EV) tax credits. The presidential candidate says that “a key barrier to further deployment of these greenhouse-gas reducing vehicles is the lack of charging stations and coordination across all levels of government.” Biden wants 500,000 new charging stations by the end of 2030, thereby incentivizing the use of electric cars beyond the advantages given when buying them.

    As it stands—and depending on the state in which the car is bought and withholding the individual tax situation of the buyer—some people can save up to $10,000 on a new Tesla thanks to this tax incentive.

    This policy introduced under the Obama administration had the intention of promoting electric vehicles in order to reduce carbon emissions, but what happened in the countries that eliminated the tax credits tells a different story. When Denmark got rid of its tax credits for electric vehicles, Tesla’s sales dropped by 94 percent. In Hong Kong, the company saw a decline of 95 percent as the city got rid of comparable tax advantages for those buying electric cars.

    According to Biden, that is because the right user incentives aren’t there, notably charging stations. However, the countries involved have considerably more charging stations than the US: Denmark has 443 charging stations in its capital Copenhagen, as well as over 500 more across the rest of the country. As for Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post reports:

    The move [Tesla opening a super-charging car park in Hong Kong] followed the opening of Tesla’s first supercharger station – which can fully charge a Tesla in just 75 minutes […]. Currently there are 92 Tesla superchargers at 21 supercharger stations, with more than 400 public and shared charging points.

    Clearly, the question of EV is not one of convenience but of price.

    Norway has the largest fleet of electric vehicles in the world, making up 60 percent of all new sales this year. Reporting on the story, NPR writes that “10,732 [sold cars] were rated with zero emissions.”

    The Institute of Transport Economics at the Norwegian Center for Transport Research lays out the ambition of carbon dioxide reduction through electric mobility.

    For these vehicles a massive transition to electric engines can result in an up to a 97 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions and up to 76 per cent reduction in energy use per transport unit.

    Adding to that, over 95 percent of Norway’s electricity comes from hydropower, of which 90 percent is publicly owned. That does not come without its downsides. As electricity consumption increases in Norway, the sector is unable to keep up. Last year, lack of rainfall and low wind speed exploded Norwegian electricity prices to the level of Germany (which is still in the process of phasing out nuclear energy). Norway then resorted to coal power, and as fossil fuel power imports exceeded energy export, Norway has actually seen an increase in CO2 emissions.

    This is despite the fact that Norway’s climate and geography make it ideal for the production of renewables, which is not the case for every state in the US. However, electricity production is only half the story of EV.

    Electric vehicle batteries need a multitude of resources to be manufactured. In the case of cobalt, the World Economic Forum has called out the extraction conditions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where 20 percent of the world’s cobalt comes from. Miners as young as seven years are suffering from chronic lung disease from exposure to cobalt dust. Not only does battery manufacturing account for 60 percent of the world’s cobalt use, but there are also no good solutions to replace it, which is something Elon Musk is struggling with.

    This does not even address the extraction procedures, complications, ethical conditions, and emissions produced by the need for aluminum, manganese, nickel, graphite, and lithium carbonate.

    With a European market estimated to reach a total of 1,200 gigawatt-hours per year, which is enough for 80 gigafactories with an average capacity of 15 gigawatt-hours per year, that need is set to increase exponentially.

    The renowned German research institute IFO declared the eco-balance of diesel-powered vehicles to be superior to electric vehicles in a study released in April.

    We know from the US Department of Energy that the average fuel economy of cars more than doubled from 1975 to 2018. Fuel economy is increasing while horsepower has also increased exponentially, making cars both cleaner and faster. In 2017, the average estimated real-world CO2 emission rate for all new vehicles fell by 3 grams per mile (g/mi) to 357 g/mi, the lowest level ever measured.

    It doesn’t even matter which car brand you feel loyal to since all brands have made comparable improvements.

    No wonder: As much as consumers might care about CO2 emissions, they are even more price-sensitive. Even those consumers who aren’t will eventually be swayed when they find out their car brand is costing them comparably excruciating amounts in fuel.

    Electric cars won’t be the one-size-fits-all solution to our current transportation challenges—at least not for the foreseeable future. As both technologies have up-and downsides, we need to consider what innovation can realistically achieve before we make calls for bans or rushed replacements.


    Bill Wirtz

    Bill Wirtz is a Eugene S. Thorpe Fellow at FEE and Young Voices Advocate. His work has been featured in several outlets, including Newsweek, Rare, RealClear, CityAM, Le Monde and Le Figaro. He also works as a Policy Analyst for the Consumer Choice Center.

    Learn more about him at his website.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


  • STUDY: ELECTRIC CARS NO GREENER THAN GASOLINE VEHICLES

    Electric cars, despite their supposed green credentials, are among the environmentally dirtiest transportation options, a U.S. researcher suggests.

    Writing in the journal IEEE Spectrum, researcher Ozzie Zehner says electric cars lead to hidden environmental and health damages and are likely more harmful than gasoline cars and other transportation options.

    Electric cars merely shift negative impacts from one place to another, he wrote, and “most electric-car assessments analyze only the charging of the car. This is an important factor indeed. But a more rigorous analysis would consider the environmental impacts over the vehicle’s entire life cycle, from its construction through its operation and on to its eventual retirement at the junkyard.”

    Political priorities and corporate influence have created a flawed impression that electric cars significantly reduce transportation impacts, he said.

    “Upon closer consideration, moving from petroleum-fueled vehicles to electric cars starts to appear tantamount to shifting from one brand of cigarettes to another,” Zehner, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, said.

    Full article: http://www.breitbart … an-gasoline-vehicles