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Lest we forget, the Luton airport carpark fire October 2023.
By Jo Nova We know it’s coming. One day, sometime there will be a skyscraper inferno started by an EV or a scooter and made so much worse because there were other EV’s in the basement carpark.
At the moment companies are fined $100,000 in Australia for failing to include high fire danger warning labels on kids beach towels, but it’s no problem if children sleep in a tower above a carpark full of EVs.
But after a spate of fires in China, Hotels there are starting to ask customers with EVs to park in open areas outside the building.
China bans electric vehicles from underground carparks
by Jamie Seidel, News.com
… Chinese hotels and property managers have begun to ban all electric vehicles – scooters, e-bikes, family cars or commercial vans – from their undercroft car parks.
“Hotels and other buildings in Hangzhou, Ningbo, Xiaoshan and other places in Zhejiang have banned electric vehicles from entering underground garages for safety reasons, sparking heated discussions,” Chinese online dissident “Mr Li is not your teacher” reported in a post to X (which is […]
By Jo Nova
No one saw this car crash coming?
EV’s represent just 0.9% of all cars on the road in Australia but plans to install fast chargers are already grinding to a crawl. Last year, Ampol was planning to build 180 EV charging bays by the end of the year. Instead it’s proved difficult to even reach half that target. Eight months after they were supposed to have 180 in action they’ve reached 92.
Just throw money…
A mere 3 weeks ago Ampol announced that thanks to a $100 million dollar grant from the Australian government they would install more than 200 new fast chargers at Ampol’s national network of petrol stations this year. But presumably after making a few phone calls they’ve realized it’s not going to happen. (You’d think they might have made the calls before putting out the press release? Or the Minister might have phoned a friend before tossing $100 million to the wind?)
Power grid foils Ampol’s big EV charger plans
Ben Potter and Simon Evans, Australian Financial Review
Ampol, one of the country’s largest petrol retailers, has dialled back plans to triple the number of electric vehicle chargers […]
By Jo Nova
Doubts are spreading about the “prospects of electric cars”
Sales of electric vehicles in Germany slumped 37% in July, compared to sales one year ago.
It’s not that people don’t want a new car, they just prefer a fossil fueled one. Sales of normal cars rose 7% in the same period.
Electric Car Sales Plummet 37% in Germany as Slump Deepens
By Wilfried Eckl-Dorna, Bloomberg
“The ramp-up of e-mobility is proving to be unsustainable so far,” Constantin Gall, a consultant at EY, said of the German sales results. “The market has lost all momentum and many customers doubt the prospects of electric cars.”
The slowdown leaves the auto industry exposed after investing billions in the ramp-up of the technology. VW, Europe’s biggest automaker, said last week it has cut capacity at high-cost plants in Germany and also might change the timing of its ramp-up in battery production.
EV’s made up 20% of new car sales in Germany this time last year, but that market share has now shrunk to 13%. This is not the way a raging new lifesaving technology takes over the planet.
In Sweden EV sales are down […]
By Jo Nova
It could have been so much worse
A Mercedes Benz EV started smoking in an underground carpark in Incheon, South Korea last Thursday at 6:15am. After the immolation, 40 other cars were burnt and another hundred suffered some damage. At least 16 people were taken to hospital for smoke inhalation. Some 48o households lost electricity, and later 121 people had to be relocated. It apparently burned for eight hours. Allegedly, eighty fire engines (or pieces of equipment) turned up with 177 firefighters. Some 209 residents were in the apartment at the time, and “nearly half” were rescued by firefighters from stairs and balconies.
The investigation is ongoing… but there are many puzzles. It wasn’t a cheap car, it wasn’t charging and had been sitting in that spot for 59 hours and nothing apparently triggered the blaze.
Not surprisingly, there are reports that residents in other Seoul apartment blocks are moving to ban electric vehicles from their basement carparks.
EV-phobia spreads, as police investigate cause of electric car explosion
The Nation
Incheon police on Tuesday said it is investigating what caused the mysterious explosion of an electric car last week, but some […]
…
By Jo Nova
It’s hard to keep up with the great EV unravelling
The best news for the EV industry this month is that Ford is only losing $50,000 a car now on its electric vehicles. That’s so much better than the $132,000 it was losing last quarter. But the true economic carnage is deep and widespread. The one sure bet in the world of electric vehicles was Tesla where sales rose two percent in the last quarter but their profits plummeted 45%. The fire-sale shifted cars but it burned the bottom line. Similarly Mercedes Benz profits were down 21%, mostly thanks to EVs. And Ford’s were down 35% (not surprisingly).
We knew things were bad when the new invention has a small market share but already half of the owners wanted to go back to the old style.
There is trouble even in China where shares in Evergrande New Energy Vehicle are down almost 40% so far this year. Apparently some creditors are coming after Evergrande seeking bankruptcy proceedings for two of its EV arms.
Nearly every major manufacturer is delaying new models or rewriting their targets. Ford is delaying several models, and is redesigning […]
By Jo Nova
The government has this hope that homeowners can be tricked into paying for the batteries (in the form of EVs) that the wind and solar industry need to make their useless random energy into something reliable. Now comes the news that not only are batteries hazardous fire risks and expensive themselves, but to connect to our grid in a two way arrangement we need to spend $3,000 dollars per household (or maybe $10,000) to buy the bit of equipment that makes this work. Not to mention adding another million gigawatts of generation so the cars can be charged in the first place.
Remember in the end, we are not buying EV’s because they go further, cost less, or are more convenient, we’re buying them because we want to stop storms in 100 years.
How many nice weather days will I get in 2100AD for that $3,000 inverter?
Household EV infrastructure could cost as much as $10bn, inquiry told
By Natasha Schmidt, The Australian
Interim Director of Monash Energy Institute, Roger Dargaville, said powering EVs in just one million households could cost as much as $10bn in power inverters.
Professor Dargaville […]
Image by Nerijus jakimavičius from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
They want you in an EV so they can use your battery to rescue the unreliable grid they built
There is a desperate need to add billions of dollars worth of batteries to smooth out our volatile grids. As I said last year:
The hapless homeowners will buy the back up battery for the grid and install it in their garage. (Sometimes they might drive it too.)
It’s so much the better if the unwashed masses pay for the batteries themselves, and so it has come to pass. Some academics in Canberra are excited that they finally proved the point and sucked some electricity out of 16 cars at a tight moment in February.
A vehicle-to-grid response: Electric vehicles fed power into Australian grid during blackout, says report
During a major storm event that eventually cut power to tens of thousands of homes, a fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) were able to feed power back into Australia’s electricity grid, according to a new report from The Australian National University (ANU).
These 16 cars provided all of 107 kilowatts for an unspecified length of time.
They let slip […]
By Jo Nova
Climate fatigue is upon us
Yet another survey shows most people know what to say when asked banal questions of climate dogma — “Yes they are “very worried”. But more than half the population don’t believe climate change is going to harm them and they have “no intention” of giving up meat, or their cars or their pets. And for people who only fly once a year, the idea of flying less was very unappealing. Worse, the under 35s like taking a series of flights each year is so normal now it’s “part of their identity”.
After years of this tedious preachy non-debate the report authors even had to acknowledge that “virtue signaling” was a thing, and it was turning off middle and lower class people. Rather than being seen as heroes, those who did a lot to prevent climate change were seen as boring and earnest, and either miserable martyrs or people who are “intentionally vocal” about their actions, partly as a way to show off. The working poor didn’t like being talked down to, and it reinforced the idea that “climate action” was something for people who could afford it. It’s a rich girls […]
MKinsey Survey
By Jo Nova
EV Mandated Revolution hits a hurdle
The first buyers of EV’s were their most passionate fans, and presumably the people-most-likely to love them, and in the best position to use them. Yet, when surveyed, 49% of Australians who owned an EV and 46% in the US said they want to go back to an internal combustion engine for their next car.
And the US and Australia are two nations where nearly everyone has a home-garage or driveway which makes EV ownership a bit easier (as long as the house doesn’t catch fire). Yet even with this cheaper and easier form of charging half the EV owners don’t want another one.
McKinsey & Co surveyed 30,000 people in 15 countries and were said to be surprised at the result.
Almost half of U.S. electric car owners want to switch back to gas-powered cars, survey shows
Brad Matthews, The Washington Times
Nearly half of American owners of electric cars want to switch back to traditional cars powered by internal combustion engines, according to a consumer survey released by McKinsey and Co. earlier this month.
They had their reasons (boy did […]
By Jo Nova
The cost problem is solved (for all the wrong reasons), but it’s still not enough
Around the world, governments are trying to force people to buy electric vehicles because they are nice people who are worried about polar bears. And since drivers out there all believe in climate change, according to all the pollsters, it shouldn’t be a big ask. (Who wouldn’t want to save the Earth?)
Supposedly, just 10 years from now, they told us, we wouldn’t be able to buy a new combustion engine car at all. Instead, not only are sales of new EV slowing rapidly, to the point where there is a glut, but as prices fall for used cars customers are not rushing out to pick up the cheaper second hand EVs either.
Look at how fast the turnaround in this market has been in the last year — a 25% price premium– gone:
Used EVs are now selling for thousands of dollars less, on average, than comparable gas-powered vehicles.
Kaya Ginsky, CNBC
The difference between the price of a used Tesla Model 3 and BMW 3 Series shows how a “premium” associated with EVs in the […]
By Jo Nova
EV manufacturers are backing away slowly from the Great EV Debacle
The government commanded the EV bubble, but even with billions in subsidies, schemes and advertising the chemistry didn’t obey. Somehow, even with legislation, the right discoveries didn’t discover themselves on cue.
VW has decided to use one third of its EV development money to develop a better fuel car instead.
Hey, it’s only 60,000 million Euro.
VW Will Spend Billions of Its EV Development Budget on Gas Engines
By: Adrian Padeanu, Motor1.com
Of the €180 billion ($196 billion) set aside in 2023 primarily for next-generation EVs, the German brand will now use one-third to continue the development of combustion engines. The announcement comes from Arno Antlitz, the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer at the Volkswagen Group. The company intends to spend roughly €60 billion ($65 billion) to “keep our combustion cars competitive.”
It’s a stark departure from the previous plan announced in late 2022 to build and sell only electric cars in Europe from 2033.
Only a year ago Volkswagon was confident it could build a cheaper EV. But a month ago they reported a 20 percent […]
By Jo Nova Saving the world with silent killers
A new study shows electric cars are twice as likely to hit pedestrians compared to petrol and diesel cars. Presumably this is because EVs are so quiet. Though it’s also possible the dash interfaces are hideous, and some menu options are more deadly and distracting than others. Or perhaps EV drivers are more stressed or feeling nauseous? The study didn’t investigate that.
Amazingly the data was from six to ten years ago in the UK, so countless people have died in the interim, and if it is just a noise issue, it could have been fixed, or at least investigated. Where is the precautionary principle when you need it?
And if electric cars are killing more people in cities, we would presume that Fido and Spot would be a part of the carnage too. But who would know what the car-pet-kill tally was? Well, manufacturers might — they own the camera footage, but no one is even asking that question. Animals have rights you know, but they don’t donate to Greenpeace.
The Greens are rushing headlong to roll out the auto-weather-saving-machines across the countryside, and they might be killing wallabies […]
By Jo Nova
Government plans to badger us into EV’s have hit a hurdle
Things are so bad in the world of electric cars that fields of the cars-of-the-future are appearing at ports in the EU. China has shipped 1.3 million EV’s there in the last quarter but they are piling up in car parks unsold. Countries within the EU are throwing money at customers to get them to buy EV’s, and companies are discounting too, but still it isn’t enough. EV sales fell by 11% across the EU and by 29% in Germany.
Across the Atlantic, something is going wrong in the USA too. The world’s top brand is renting space in shopping centres and airports in America to store the unsold cars.
Car dealers are warning they might not be able to sell many petrol cars, even when buyers walk in to buy them, because they can’t find enough EV buyers so they can meet the mandated target ratio. We might be at the start of a buyer freeze…
Chinese EV’s are filling up EU ports
There are just extraordinary shots of cars lined up in EU ports:
@NetZeroWatch
By John Varga, The Express […]
By Jo Nova
Call it an anti-subsidy to kill the product the customers want, and call it an anti-tariff to help foreign manufacturers
The Suicide of The West continues apace.
All around the West governments are concocting rules that force car manufacturers to sell a certain ratio of EV’s to petrol cars. In the UK if they breach the ratio they’ll be fined a savage £15,000 for every petrol car. In other words, if customers don’t voluntarily want to buy as many EV’s as the government thinks they should, the rules will force the car manufacturers to restrict the petrol car sales. Obviously, what’s left of the free market will pay big money for the rare and desirable petrol cars that are permitted to be sold. Soon only the wealthy will be able to afford them, while the riff raff have to catch a bus.
One Ford manager is helpfully telling the world what these rules mean:
Ford threatens to restrict petrol car sales to meet the UK’s EV targets
By Tom Jervis, Auto Express
Introduced at the start of this year, the ZEV mandate requires manufacturers to ensure that a minimum percentage of their […]
By Jo Nova
Chronicling the collapse of the Big-Government-made EV bubble
In today’s EV obituary column, Elon Musk has dropped a bombshell. Two months after Telsa chargers became the industry standard (which promised to save the other car makers) his profits fell, and he’s fired the entire EV charging team overnight. Hertz, meanwhile, has realized that dumping 20,000 electric cars in January was not enough, and it has to offload another 10,000 electric cars, which now amounts to half its EV fleet. And then comes the news that there might be a secondhand “timebomb” coming at the eight year mark when most EV battery warranties run out and cars will become “impossible to sell”.
As if that’s not enough, this week the fire and rescue experts in NSW are warning in the politest possible way, that they might have to do a “tactical disengagement” of a car accident victim, which means leaving them to die in an EV fire if the battery looks likely to explode. They say that first responders need more training, as if this can be solved with a certificate, but the dark truth is that they’re talking about training the firemen and the truck drivers […]
Rutger van der Maar
By Jo Nova
Remember when Ford was just losing $38,000 on every EV? Those were the good days
The biggest star in the automotive world at the moment is a black hole, and it’s swallowing whole industrial giants. It’s hard to imagine a faster way to sabotage whole nations than to disguise your spies as academics and environmentalists. Then get them to convince the government to command a whole new market into existence in a highly technological field with the wave of a legislated wand.
These numbers are astronomical:
Ford just reported a massive loss on every electric vehicle it sold
By Chris Isodore, CNN: 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 […]
By Jo Nova
It’s just another signpost on the way to the Great Green Economy Downunder
We’re watching the renewable bubble pop around us. Tritium was the wonder-child Australian technology business that built fast chargers for electric vehicles. It took 20 years to create, and only two years to unravel into receivership. At its peak in 2021, it launched on the NASDAQ and was worth $2 billion, now it is insolvent.
The Driven, explains just how big it was:
The company says it has sold more than 13,000 DC fast chargers in more than 40 countries. At its peak it claimed to be the biggest maker of fast chargers in the US with a 30 per cent market share (unclear if this included the Tesla network), and a 75 per cent share in Australia, and one of the top three in Europe.
When it launched in 2021, shares were selling for $2,500 each. The current price is $1.35.
Tritium Share Price. NASDAQ
Tritium is the perfect emblem for the Technocratic Planned Economy
Only one year ago the Prime Minister of Australia was raving about them, and using Tritium as the posterchild to sell […]
By Jo Nova
Electric cars and carbon target fantasies are hitting the wall
Right when they are meant to be growing by double digits German EV car sales are down an astonishing 30% compared to a year ago. Their market share is actually shrinking. EV’s are not much good at reducing carbon dioxide over their lifetime but they are very useful for pretending to “decarbonise” the transport sector. So this creates a vast hole in the German government’s so-called transition, which has fixed targets for every sector. Problematically, the transport sector just doesn’t seem to run on wind and solar panels, or pumped hydro. It’s hard to decarbonize. Liquid fuel is just too convenient.
It seems the German Transport Minister is threatening to ban weekend driving as an ambit claim to expose the absurdity of the Green’s position. He is warning that if the Greens don’t sign a change in legislation to average emission across all sectors, he will have to take drastic action to meet the transport sector goals, which means banning driving on weekends. (Trap set.)
The Greens responded like any petty tyrants would, saying he shouldn’t aggravate people unnecessarily, because there were other ways to fix […]
By Jo Nova
It’s just another day in the death of the early 21st Century EV bubble
The fantasy of battery powered vehicles that also fix the weather was foisted upon the people by Big Government. But all the regulatory wands in the world, and even billions in free gifts don’t make a market appear when the product is a dog.
EV’s are meant to be storming the market on their way to domination. But in the UK the market share of EV’s rose only 3.8% last month but the whole car market grew by 10% — so EV’s are in danger of becoming a shrinking part of the UK car fleet. Plug-in hybrids saw a 37% increase.
The EV experiment has gone so very wrong. Last year Ford was the number 2 EV brand in the US, but it was hit with the $4.5 billion dollar black hole of fiscal carnage, losing $38,000 on every single EV. Obviously, something had to change, and now months later, Ford is abandoning plans to bring in two new EV models, and retool their EV manufacturing plants. Instead, it is shifting to hybrid vehicles — copying the Toyota plan.
EVs have crashed […]
By Jo Nova
Our news is filled with fatuous lies every single day.
Mr Bowen, Minister for Changing the Weather, wants to force efficiency standards on Australian cars so we “have more choices”, he says. Mysteriously, it seems there are companies overseas making cheap, clean, wonderful cars who selfishly refuse to sell them to us. Crazy eh?
Would that be because:
Car salesmen want to save the world? There’s no market for efficient cars here. Australians prefer cars that burn up and waste fuel! It costs more to sell to nations with no efficiency standards since they have to install the Fuel Worse-ifier?
Or could it be they know Australians won’t buy their damn cars unless the government bans the cheaper ones first?
Mr Bowen, now says they never had a target. Of course! And people are mobbing him in the street wanting to buy expensive European EV’s:
Chris Bowen ditches doomed EV sales target
By Jess Malcolm, The Australian
Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen has walked away from Labor’s target to have 89 per cent of new car sales electric by 2030, casting doubt on the government’s green agenda.
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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