VW Is Shifting EV Investment Dollars to Fund Further ICE Development
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Thieves have been targeting EV charging stations, intent on stealing the cables, which contain copper wiring. The price of copper is near a record high on global markets, which means criminals stand to collect rising sums of cash from selling the material.
The stolen cables often disable entire stations, forcing EV owners on the road to search desperately for a working charger. For the owners, the predicament can be exasperating and stressful.
Bicycle Built For Two
A passenger-carrying variant of the bike, seats two people in surprising comfort, complete with heated seats and large windows through which passengers can enjoy the astonished stares of passers-by.
Seems green.
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Truth About Cars: Stellantis May Cut Loose Suppliers to Cope With EV Costs
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Governor Youngkin today announced the end of the California electric vehicle mandate in Virginia, effective at the end of 2024 when California’s current regulations expire. An official opinion from Attorney General Jason Miyares in response to a request by the Governor and Senate Republican Leader Ryan McDougle confirms that Virginia is not required to comply with expansive new mandates adopted by the unelected California Air Resources Board (CARB) set to take effect January 1, 2025.
“Once again, Virginia is declaring independence – this time from a misguided electric vehicle mandate imposed by unelected leaders nearly 3,000 miles away from the Commonwealth,” said Governor Glenn Youngkin. “The idea that government should tell people what kind of car they can or can’t purchase is fundamentally wrong. Virginians deserve the freedom to choose which vehicles best fit the needs of their families and businesses. The law is clear, and I am proud to announce Virginians will no longer be forced to live under this out-of-touch policy.”
“Today, I’ve issued an official Attorney General Opinion that confirms that Virginians are no longer legally bound to follow the emission standards of California,” said Attorney General Jason Miyares. “EV mandates like California’s are unworkable and out of touch with reality, and thankfully the law does not bind us to their regulations. California does not control which cars Virginians buy and any thoughts that automobile manufacturers should face millions of dollars in civil penalties rather than allowing our citizens to choose their own vehicles is completely absurd.”
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
A normal Honda Accord needs about 40 pounds of copper. The same battery electric Accord needs 200 pounds. Onshore wind turbines require about 10 tons of copper, and offshore approx. 20 tons. The world will need to mine 115% more copper than has been mined in all human history just to meet “business as usual.” This would meet our current copper needs and support the developing world without considering the green energy transition. Six new large mines need to come online every year by 2050 to meet global copper demand, but the problem is it takes about 20 years between discovering a new copper mineral deposit and getting a permit to build a mine. None of this takes into consideration the upgrades to the electrical infrastructure needed to “electrify: the world by 2050. In short electrifying the world by 2050 is a politicians pipe dream that will never happen.
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
They were promised there would be no math.
The German chemical company BASF is moving its plants from its founding site in Ludwigshafen to countries with more favorable conditions (energy prices).
A green user complains that there are enough unused areas for wind turbines in Rhineland-Palatinate.
I ask GROK:
“In order to provide BASF in Ludwigshafen with a continuous supply of energy from wind turbines in Rhineland-Palatinate, a battery with a capacity of at least 20 TWh (terawatt hours) per year would be required.
To store 20 TWh of energy, you need 20,000,000,000 kWh / 13.5 kWh per battery = 1,481,481,481.48 batteries. Since you cannot use fractions of batteries, you would need at least 1,481,481,482 batteries.”
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Ford tells dealers to pause EV investments…
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
Whee!!! (Updated with better video)
Drone footage here.
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Major EU ports are almost full to capacity with Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) that no one wants to buy. A slump in sales across Europe has caused parking lots at the Belgian ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge to fill up with the Chinese imports.
The parking lots are each able to accommodate about 130,000 vehicles and are crammed full of MGs, BYDs, Nios, XPengs, Lynk & Cos, Omodas and Hongqis, among others.
Chinese EV companies have aggressively targeted European markets as they look to take advantage of the EU’s green agenda.
Stranding Capital
The worst aspect of central planning is not just that it misallocates capital, but that it actively destroys it. Centrally planned economies, from the Soviet Union on down, remain littered to this day with stranded assets existing in a largely unrecoverable state. EV subsidies are doing the same thing by wrecking the profitability of companies trying to cash in on such schemes.
The energy unit of Panasonic Holdings missed its operating profit guidance for the past business year due to lower electric vehicle (EV) battery production in Japan and a fall in sales of consumer products, the company said on Thursday.
Operating income for the key segment, which makes batteries for Tesla and other automakers, totaled ¥88.8 billion ($570.18 million) in the year that ended in March, missing its own ¥113 billion forecast, Panasonic said.
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Mirrors
Thousands of swimmers have been evacuated after the Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Centre became engulfed in flames on Monday afternoon.
Fire Rescue New South Wales said crews rushed to the sporting precinct after they received multiple calls about a fire at the swimming venue.
“FRNSW crews are responding to reports of a building fire after multiple calls have been received by ‘000’ with black smoke issuing from the roof of a building on Olympic Boulevard,” Fire Rescue NSW said.
h/t CanuckJack
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Three signs EVs are not catching on.
This is one of them.
You probably missed the Friday news dump. Biden’s final EV rules make it easier for China to get billions in Biden’s EV tax credits – with Biden acknowledging that the U.S. supply chain can’t meet the timeline for his green transition.
Y2Kyoto: State Of Anorexia Envirosa
Public opinion is beginning to shift. Maybe it’s the blackouts.
A year ago I noted that the discourse around climate policy had changed, prompted by the security of supply and affordability concerns emerging in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that sadly continues. The trilemma was back with a vengeance and has not gone away – recently the UK Government announced a renewed desire to see the delivery of more gas power station this decade, despite the lack of available abatement technology. […]
But probably the most seismic change in past year came in July when the Labour Party failed to win the Uxbridge by-election as voters rebelled against the expansion of London’s emissions charging scheme known as “Ulez” (Ultra-low emissions zone). As a result, councils up and down the country abandoned plans for similar schemes, and the unpopular incumbent Conservative Party saw an electoral opportunity, shortly afterwards watering down the electric car mandate and plans for heat pumps. The Labour Party is not immune to climate u-turns having recently abandoned its green-spending pledge.
However, it hasn’t all been good news. In February I took part in IE Week, speaking on the final day of the conference in a session devoted to electricity. Too many of the speakers spouted out-of-date mantras about renewables being “cheap” and painting a naïve picture of a green utopia with green energy, green jobs, sunshine and flowers. I likened it to a child’s picture of a house – ask any child to draw such a picture and you get something along the lines of the image shown – charming, but hardly realistic.
When asked about people sitting in the cold and dark in order to save a few pennies under the Demand Flexibility Scheme, one speaker hailed the “social media buzz” they were generating, failing to recognise that they were driven by poverty and not a desire to be “down with the kidz”. However on a more positive note these remarks did not go down well with the audience, many of whom thanked me for being the “voice of reason” in the room. Still, we need to do more to avoid designing energy markets with the affluent in mind, while ignoring the reality of the majority.
Chain Reaction
In the final year in which both nuclear reactors were operational, the Indian Point Energy Center (IPEC) generated 16.7 terawatt hours of reliable baseload power from its 2.1GW of combined capacity—enough to meet roughly 25% of New York City’s total demand. By mid-2020, only one of those reactors was still running, but it managed to do so for the entire calendar year without interruption, turning in a perfect capacity factor of 100%. Not bad for a facility that sits on just 240 acres of land.
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Ford’s electric vehicle unit reported that losses soared in the first quarter to $1.3 billion, or $132,000 for each of the 10,000 vehicles it sold in the first three months of the year, helping to drag down earnings for the company overall.
Ford, like most automakers, has announced plans to shift from traditional gas-powered vehicles to EVs in coming years. But it is the only traditional automaker to break out results of its retail EV sales. And the results it reported Wednesday show another sign of the profit pressures on the EV business at Ford and other automakers.
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Spectator: Desperate manufacturers are struggling to shift electric cars
The real reason for hefty discounts on electric cars is desperation. Since 1 January, manufacturers have been under the zero emissions mandate (ZEV), which demands that 22 per cent of the cars they sell in 2024 are pure electric cars. Should they fail to reach this target, they will be fined £15,000 for every vehicle by which they fall short.
How are they doing? Not very well, it seems. In the first three months of 2024, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) electric cars accounted for only 15.5 per cent of the market – virtually unchanged from the same period in 2023. Moreover, the target is not going to stay at 22 per cent. In 2025 it will rise to 28 per cent, then in stages to 80 per cent by 2030 and 100 per cent by 2035. Unless electric car sales pick up dramatically in the next few months, manufacturers are going to find themselves with an enormous bill at the end of the year. The situation is worse for many carmakers than the above figures suggest because some carmakers, like Tesla, are already electric-only. That means that the sales being achieved by others must be well below 15 per cent.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Analysts were not expecting manufacturers to miss the 22 per cent target. Just last December, S&P forecast that sales of electric cars would surge by 41 per cent in Europe in 2024, and by 66 per cent in the US. In Europe, it was believed, EVs would be accounting for 22 per cent of the market across 2024.
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
GM killing it on big trucks and SUVs and is showing it off.
Sold only 16,400 EVs in Q1.
Who could’ve seen this coming ..
More: Talk to any dealer … resale is so horrendous most wont keep the cars on the lot (they immediately wholesale a trade in if they can).
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Where, oh where, did the stupid rich people go?
As automakers continue to delay their electric-vehicle plans and report lower-than-expected sales, Canada’s goal of ensuring that at least 20 per cent of new vehicles sold by 2026 are electric seems to be in jeopardy.
Ford Motor Co. last week said it was going to delay EV production at its assembly plant in Oakville, Ont., by two years to 2027 from 2025. The additional time will allow the company to take advantage of an emerging battery technology and let the number of consumers grow.
Earlier this month, Tesla Inc. reported a decline in quarterly deliveries for the first time in nearly four years. The Elon Musk-led company attributed the fall to logistical issues, but analysts say that slowing demand for EVs also played a role.
General Motors Co.’s chief executive Mary Barra referred to this slowdown as well on an earnings call in January, when she said the slowing pace of EV growth had created some uncertainty. She still expects EV sales in 2024 to improve, but said “if demand conditions change, we’ll take advantage of our manufacturing flexibility … to build more internal combustion engine models and fewer EVs.”
Emphasis mine.