Not only has the bubble popped, but everyone knows it’s popped.
After ten years, Apple abandons the fantasy of EV’s
Apple is believed to have spent “billions” since 2014, trying to develop an EV in the semi secretive “Project Titan”. They reportedly had 2,000 employees working on it, but this week, they dropped it like a hot rock, and, by golly, investors were relieved.
It came as a big surprise. Two years ago Apple was so serious it hired some veterans from Lamborghini. In January Apple was hiring drivers for its autonomous testing fleet. A few weeks ago the project was live but being downgraded to a less autonomous machine and delayed until 2028. But this week, employees are being laid off, and Apple is moving many of the workforce to AI.
Most commentators saw this as a cost cutting exercise due to competition from China, but some are seeing this as a bigger sign:
“It does not get much more shocking than this,” said Roger Lanctot, automotive analyst at TechInsights. “If you have more money than God and you decide not to pursue a particular concept it is a massive rejection of this value proposition.”
—Reinhardt Krause, Investors Business Daily
Now everyman and his dog is getting out
This news is not just about the failure of the autonomous driverless vehicle. It comes on top of the news that practically everyone in the auto industry is stepping away slowly. Mercedes Benz is pulling back on EV ambitions. They were aiming to get to the heavenly 100% electric zone by 2030, but now they’re bringing in a new combustion model in 2027. They say Europe won’t be ready by 2030 to go fully electric, and they are concerned about the lower than expected demand for EVs.
Aston Martin is also delaying their electric car program and explain it’s just because people don’t want them:
Aston Martin boss Lawrence Stroll has confirmed the reason for the delay was simply a lack of consumer demand for the latest EV model at this stage. — Express. UK
Tesla, the EV giant, still survives but the deceleration is breathtaking:
Even Tesla, the pioneer of the EV revolution in the US, has warned its rate of expansion will be “notably lower” this year. Domestic EV sales growth will decelerate to 11 per cent next year from an estimated 47 per cent growth rate this year, according to a forecast by UBS.
It’s rare in life to watch a bubble unravel so fast around us
In the middle of 2023 American car sales yards started to fill with EV’s that weren’t selling. Then the repair costs started accumulating and EV’s were becoming hard to insure, the second hand sales value fell. Then came the spectacular Luton Airport fire where 1,200 cars were cremated and an airport terminal collapsed. By late October the quarterly reports and the terrible earnings were piling up. VW orders were down 50%, Ford was losing $38,000 on every car. In early November one of the largest rental car companies in the world announced they were selling a third of their EV fleet because EV’s cost more to repair and customers didn’t want to rent them anyway. And that was before Americans found out that EV’s can’t be charged if the temperature gets below zero, and cars were stuck for days in a cold snap in Chicago.
The bubble was inflated with Big Government money. Despite all these failures and the obvious news that EV’s are not yet, and may never be, cheap and convenient, many governments still want to force people to buy them in the hope of slowing the storms in 2100.
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