Colby Cosh;

Whirl with me back in time all the way to September 2023, when the federal and Quebec governments announced that they would be partnering with Swedish battery maker Northvolt to plunge headlong into the bright green future. Canada and Quebec would be laying out about $2.7 billion in capital, and more in downstream subsidies, to facilitate the construction of a vast, hypermodern battery plant in the province’s hinterland to help meet the world’s unlimited appetite for electric vehicles, creating thousands of jobs and contributing to global environmental health. “It’s a win-win-win — for workers, for communities, and for the environment,” trumpeted the prime minister. What could go wrong?

Brussels Signal: EU taxpayers set to lose more than €300 million over ‘green’ darling Northvolt’s bankruptcy

Oh and,

Porsche is backing off its most aggressive electrification plans. The legendary German automaker recently said it would continue developing internal combustion engines across its catalog to satisfy customer demand as EV sales take a hit.

Just The News;

An electric emergency vehicle belonging to a fire department in Germany caught fire and burnt down the new fire station.

The fire, which occurred on Oct. 16, according to Euro News, started from a vehicle that “contained lithium-ion batteries and an external power connection.” The blaze destroyed nearly a dozen emergency vehicles and caused between $21.5 million and $25.9 million in damage. No one was injured.

The stations, which opened a year ago, didn’t have a fire alarm system, Euro News reported because “experts considered it not necessary.”

NY Post;

The auto industry is big business in Michigan, and a major round of layoffs is revving the election into high gear for industry workers in the critical swing state — who blame the Biden-Harris administration’s heavy-handed electric-vehicle mandates for the painful job losses.

Stellantis, which manufactures Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge vehicles, announced last month it will lay off 2,450 workers at its Warren plant. While industry jobs in the state have been declining since 1990, Michigan autoworkers explained to The Post why Team Biden’s green-energy rules are at fault this time.[…]

“Listen, you wanna buy an EV car? Great,” she continued. “But the autoworkers, the automakers know that we can’t survive because the infrastructure isn’t there on EVs. Nobody wants to buy them.”

Ford slashed more than 1,000 jobs at its Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn after drastically scaling back its production of the F-150 Lightning, an all-electric pickup truck.

“It’s the way that the government now wants to go,” Gordon said of the transition to EVs. “And they completely made the wrong decisions on it because if you look, Ford has lost a lot of money.”

Ford reported a $132,000 loss in the year’s first quarter on each of the 10,000 electric vehicles it sold — which was 20% fewer EVs than sold in the same period last year.

Zerohedge;

As discussed earlier today, Germany’s economy is slowly but surely sinking, whether or not Mario Draghi’s proposal to flood Europe in new debt is eventually accepted, and nowhere is the pain more tangible than Germany’s iconic carmaker, Volkswagen, which we reported last week was considering its first-ever factory closure amid a dire economic backdrop, and which today took the shocking – for Germany – decision to end job protections for German auto workers as part of its cost-cutting push, setting up a calamitous showdown with unions as the country’s most important industry fights for its future.

This morning, the world’s largest automaker by sales canceled several agreements linked to a three-decades-old pact that was supposed to safeguard employment until 2029, V. […]

VW’s main target is its underperforming namesake passenger car brand, whose profit margins are getting squeezed amid a sputtering transition to EVs and a consumer spending slowdown. Carmakers in Europe are also struggling to compete with Tesla and new entrants from China led by BYDl, which have been selling cars at dumping prices, infuriating Brussels.

Cutbacks at VW are harder to push through than at other companies, especially since half the seats on the company’s supervisory board are held by labor representatives, and the German state of Lower Saxony — which owns a 20% stake — often sides with trade union bodies. The automaker, which employs almost 300,000 Germans, last week defended its plant closure plans, saying flagging car sales have left it with about two factories too many.

h/t MelindaPrevious.

H/T to Melinda, “I think this is a really big deal. If you read between the lines, a tipping point of union power vs ongoing Corporate viability has been passed, and he’s doing something about it. Come hell or high water.”

Volkswagen boss Oliver Blume, already battling slowing demand for electric cars and Chinese rivals, must now put aside his mantle as team player to tackle yet another tough opponent, Germany’s powerful labour unions.

The pressure on Europe’s top carmaker was laid bare this week when Volkswagen disclosed it was not only planning to scrap a 30-year old job security scheme but weighing the closure of plants in Germany.

Moritz Kronenberger, portfolio manager at Volkswagen shareholder Union Investment, dubs these the company’s “two holy cows”.

By taking them on, Blume sets a collision course with one of Germany’s mightiest stakeholder groups, the IG Metall union, whose main goal is to protect jobs and sites and safeguard the favourable working conditions in Europe’s biggest economy.

VW works council head Daniela Cavallo said unions would “fiercely resist” the plans, ruling out any factory closures on her watch. She said a staff meeting on Wednesday, where management will face workers, would be “very uncomfortable”.

Volkswagen has not closed a plant since 1988 when it shut its Westmoreland site in Pennsylvania. In July it said it might close an Audi factory in Brussels citing a sharp drop in demand for high-end electric cars.