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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.
By Jo Nova
Nobody mentioned the nausea
The planet-saving cars that are being forced upon us have another catch — they might make you vomit. Apparently, motion sickness is “a thing” for EV’s, not that our public broadcaster would mention it in the regular adverts they run to tell us how wonderful EV’s are “with ridiculous savings!”. Apparently the silent sudden acceleration of an EV is leaving some stomachs in a lurch — and some adults, kids and even dogs are throwing up.
‘I need a solution fast’: Electric car owners complain of motion sickness
Zane Dobie, Drive
Another user said: “I drive in an electric vehicle a lot, and I’ve found that regenerative braking absolutely makes me motion sick. I’m not always driving, so I don’t always have control of how it’s being driven, so other people’s driving really makes me sick… I really need to find a solution fast”.
Some drivers also reported their electric cars making their pets sick too. “Since [buying] the Tesla, [my dog] throws up in it almost every time…”
The theory is that EV’s are too quiet, too fast, and have too few cues to warn our insides to […]
By Jo Nova
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 […]
By Jo Nova
History shall record the ignominious boom and bust of a car genre forced on citizens so they could produce better weather.
Things are so bad, Joe Biden has even put the brakes on his aggressive EV scheme, stepping away from the 2030 deadline. “It’s just a delay” of course. The plan would have forced car manufacturers to sell 3 EV’s for every 2 cars with a combustion engine by 2030. If customers didn’t volunteer to buy enough EV’s, companies would be forced to jack up prices of the cars everyone wants in order to cross-subsidize the discounted sales of the unpopular EV’s. Car dealers were appalled and said so.
EV sales growing in some places but falling in others. The shift has been so fast the full length of the supply chain is in turmoil. The price of lithium has fallen 90% from it’s peak, nickel has halved. Ford has sacked 1,400 people. GM has cut its workforce by 1,000. Hertz is selling one third of it’s electric fleet and cancelling $3 billion dollars worth of forward orders. A month ago, the biggest political party in the EU decided it would rather drop the ban on […]
Image by GrumpyBeere
By Jo Nova
Last year the acceleration in EV sales stopped accelerating. The industry was still growing they said, just not quite as fast. Now, so soon, the sales are actually falling. In the UK, EV sales dropped off a cliff, falling 25% last month. Perhaps it was just a bad month? But in California, home of global green dreams, sales have also declined, and for the last two quarters. Ominously, this is happening despite government decrees insisting every new car sold in 2035 will be an EV. Sales are supposed to be launching into orbit. Something is very wrong.
Meanwhile Hertz has taken yet another step away from their EV quest — after announcing they were selling off a third of their EV fleet at bargain basement prices, now they are cancelling plans to buy 65,000 Polestars. This was a $3 billion deal, and to let them out of it, Polestar has, by golly, demanded Hertz give them the right to buy back the old Polestars that Hertz wants to sell — that way Polestar can keep the older models off the secondhard market and stop the value from falling the same dire […]
By Jo Nova
The voter backlash begins
How much more would the car lovers and petrol-heads of Europe take? In draconian style, last February, the EU declared all petrol and diesel cars would be banned from 2035. It was their star policy for the Net Zero push. Car makers would have to cut their emissions by a shocking 55% by 2030 and an unthinkable 100% by 2035. It was to be the end of an era.
The idea was so big and embedded in the EU that only one month ago an insurance insider warned that his company was already devising elaborate plans for a world where everyone had an EV and the insurance giants and the government got access to all your data. Police would be issuing your speeding tickets while-you-drove, and insurance companies would be granting drivers a discount if they allowed them to sell all their data to the highest bidder. Indeed, the word was that insurance companies wouldn’t even insure petrol cars. Obviously only the rich were going to be able to afford a petrol car or an EV “with privacy”.
But now, the largest party in the EU is drafting a policy to ditch […]
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By Jo Nova
“Plugged in and not charging”
In the deep freeze this week, people all over Canada and the USA are finding out how complicated it is to own an EV in cold weather.
Not only do the cars lose a hefty 30 to 50% of their range, but the battery itself can’t accept charge if it gets too cold, so EV’s need to precondition their batteries before they can start to charge. (To precondition is EV-jargon for “warming them up”.) However, there is a point, as temperatures fall, where batteries cannot even heat themselves enough so they can start charging. They have to drain the battery to charge the battery. It’s a death-spiral towards a frozen singularity.
How cold is too cold? The ideal temperature for charging an EV is 15 – 35°C (or 60-95 F) so some advise preconditioning the battery when it’s below 15C. But the charging speed declines as the chemical reactions slow down, and it reaches nothing at about 0°C (32F). So if the car is minus five, the battery won’t even accept a charge.
At the supercharging station in Oak Brook Chicago, people have been trying for days to charge […]
By Jo Nova
With the western world hurtling into new cars that are more costly, inconvenient, slower to refuel, and prone to burning down carparks and cargo ships, it was only a matter of time before the cracks in the socialist car market started to show.
Around the world tonight headlines are sharing the news that Hertz is selling off 20,000 EVs, one third of their fleet, in order to buy some more fossil fuel cars. That can’t be inspiring news for customers thinking of giving up their gas guzzlers. As Oilprice said: Hertz’s Big Move Into EVs Turned Out To Be A Dud. And as Reuters headlined: Rental giant Hertz dumps EVs, including Teslas, for gas cars.
It was the perfect storm in a bad way. Apparently the customers didn’t want to rent them, and when they did and they scratched them, they cost too much to fix. (Repair costs were twice as high). Then the bottom fell out of the second-hand market, and to recover the depreciation losses, Hertz would have to raise the prices on a product customers already didn’t want. There was no way this was going to work.
The official dry Hertz announcement […]
By Jo Nova
People say things in a car they might never write in an email. Well, they used to.
Who knew? The Subaru privacy policy allows them to record your conversations and your face and sell that data to the highest bidder. Most likely (who reads these things) all the other car companies do too. When an AI analyzes it, presumably it will identify your voice (and you from the cameras). Anything you say in the public broadcasting world of private cars will belong to them, even if you are a passenger, and were never asked.
So if you want to have a private discussion about your political views, your children, your religion, troubles at work, intellectual property, discoveries, information that might affect stock prices, your thoughts on immigration, corruption, or mention any medical issues you have, or affairs anyone you know has had, don’t do it in an electric car. Imagine the blackmail, political, legal and insider potential with this data in the hands of…
“Subaru“, posted on Foundation Mozilla
Here’s something you might not realize. The moment you sit in the passenger seat of a Subaru that uses connected services, you’ve consented to allow […]
By Jo Nova
We elect an Australian government but get the EU rules
Just before Christmas the government quietly put out new emissions rules they know Australians won’t like. “Tis the season for dropping press release bombs.
Australia will adopt ‘Euro 6’ fuel standard by late 2025
Jacob Greber, The Australian Financial Review
Tough new petrol standards will be introduced at the end of 2025, potentially increasing the cost of fuel while expanding consumer access to leading-edge, mostly European, ultra-efficient vehicles.
By forcing Australians to buy expensive, unreliable cars prone to exploding, the government will stop families going on holidays, burn down a few homes, and keep friends from visiting each other, unless the nation of petrol-heads keep driving their old cars and Utes, Cuba style. For all this pain, the new rules will “slash 18 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions” which is equivalent to taking 280,000 imaginary cars off the road, or cutting 0.15% of annual emissions from China. i.e. nothing.
All Peter Dutton, the opposition leader in Australia needs to do to win the next election is to stand up for drivers in Australia.
Apparently Australians need to import more EU cars […]
By Jo Nova
Insurance companies just want to save the world right?
An anonymous insurance insider warns the plan is to force people to buy a digital car, and claims the push is so strong we won’t even be able to get insurance for a combustion engine vehicle. It sounds like a conspiracy theory except that insurers themselves admit Big Data from cars is worth a fortune, and they’ve have been lobbying to get your car data out of the hands of the car manufacturers (purely for your own good), and they’re already “involved in negotiations with the European digitalization and data protection manager”. Righto. Just six weeks ago, a Managing Director of Allianz insurance said he wants to track your car data so he can be “your invisible Guardian Angel.” Creepy, yes?
Wouldn’t you love to have your insurer, the police and the IRS as your back seat drivers?
Imagine a world in which the insurer acts as an invisible guardian angel to drivers, warning them of upcoming weather hazards or accident hotspots to avoid.
— Christoph Lauterwasser Managing Director, Allianz Center for Technology
According to GeoffBuysCars an insider at a large European insurance company has […]
By Jo Nova
Joe Biden wants half of all cars to be EV’s by 2030 to stop the storms, but customers have other plans
Such is the dour mood in sales yards, it only took three weeks to get nearly 4,000 dealers across the USA to sign on. Their joint letter to Joe Biden informs him electric vehicles are piling up in their sale yards. And even though the prices have been cut and subsidies applied — it’s still not enough. They plead with him to slow down with the EV mandates.
Rich Democrats buy EV’s but the poor and middle class can’t afford them, the charging infrastructure is not there and the grids can’t cope. If the price of traditional cars is forced up artificially to effectively subsidize and “meet” the EV Diktat, presumably most customers just won’t buy new cars at all.
Right now in the EV vision, sales are supposed to be accelerating:
Car Dealers to Biden: EVs Aren’t Selling
The Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
Dealers have a 103-day supply of EVs compared to 56 days for all cars. It takes them on average 65 days to sell an EV, about […]
By Jo Nova
Add it to the list. A survey of owners of 330,000 vehicles found that EV’s experience 80% more problems than petrol and gas powered cars.
So EV’s cost more to fuel, take longer to arrive on long distance journeys. They sometimes burn down ships, destroy airport carparks, and kidnap drivers. They are a national security risk, and a burden on electrical grids. Because they are heavier they create more potholes, wear out tyres faster, increase road noise and air pollution (from tyre particles). They also increase wear and tear on bridges and multistory carparks.
EV’s are on the verge of becoming uninsurable partly because near new EV’s may have to be written off after a scratch, and all EV’s need large empty spaces to be stored so they don’t destroy the cars around them.
And in the end, they barely reduce national fuel consumption, and no one even knows if EV’s will reduce CO2 emissions.
On average, electric vehicles are less reliable than other cars and trucks, Consumer Reports finds
By Tom Kriser, CBC News
Electric vehicles have proved far less reliable, on average, than gasoline-powered cars, trucks and SUVs, according to […]
By Jo Nova
Oh the irony — Green heat pumps and EV’s will need to be curtailed on a Green Grid
We’re watching the real time collapse of parts of the “Climate Industry” in on itself. The left eats its own. The EV’s and heat pumps the German government was coercing people to use are so incompatible with unreliable expensive energy, they will be among the first appliances to be restricted in the new clean green economy.
The truth is — Solar and wind power can’t power EV’s. In Germany the network regulator is working on ways to limit electricity to hungry EV’s and heat pumps so they don’t crash the grid.
The federal grid agency will throttle the charging power so EV’s will get just enough charge for a 50 kilometer trip from two hours of charging. Home owners will be offered a discount if they give control of their chargers to the government. Effectively the rich will charge their car or turn on their heater whenever they want. The poor will “save” €110 to €190 they never needed to spend with their old car or their old heater, and go withou electricity at peak times.
EV chargers, […]
Image by Anwarul Quddus Sikder from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The thrill of EV ownership in Australia has worn off before it even started
In news that will shock no one, except the Minister for Weather himself, Labor’s plan to have nine out ten new car drivers in an electric vehicle by 2030 has crashed into a mountain of apathy. The latest estimates from the Australian department in charge of guessing these things is that EVs will only be 27% of new car sales by then, not 89%. And the modeling assumes EV’s will be exempt from the usual tariffs and taxes, but finds most Australians would rather pay the extra taxes and get themselves a planet-wrecking petrol-head machine anyway.
Of course, in climate maths, 27% is practically the same as 89% because EV’s may not reduce emissions at all, but since the push to force them on us has nothing to do with carbon emissions, the theatrical chasm in their big plans is a major loss.
That and the dilemma of who will pay for the back up batteries to stabilize the windy wobbly national grid if car owners don’t?
By 2030, after years of propaganda and […]
By Jo Nova
Hertz was aiming to make 25% of its fleet electric by 2024, but is finding 11% is too much. Given there are whole nations pushing for 100% EV by 2035 there seems to be a message here…
Let’s thank Hertz for doing that experiment for us. It turns out EV’s didn’t work well in the high mileage Uber-type system because the drivers “drove them into the ground” and repair costs were much higher than expected. So Hertz moved some EV’s to the leisure hire department, but then the revenue per day in the leisure sector fell. Presumably people didn’t want to hire them.
It’s not that this is Bad News week for EVs — it’s quarterly reporting week, so companies have to tell investors things they’d rather not.
Great nations don’t force citizens to buy heavier cars with shorter ranges and bigger repair bills in order to stop bad weather one hundred years from now.
Hertz rolls back aggressive electric car plans
Car Expert
Hertz is slowing down the roll out of EVs onto its fleets as the CEO cites higher than expected repair […]
By Jo Nova
Last week the EV bubble popped
It’s been a crushing week for the EV industry as the bad news that has been brewing for months was laid bare in the quarterly reports. Across the industry, corporate CEO’s are all admitting that demand is unexpectedly slow, orders are down, and suddenly projects are being delayed “indefinitely”.
Volkswagen admitted orders are down a shocking 50% and they are sacking 2,000 jobs in the software division. Ford posted an operating loss of $1.3 billion for the quarter — meaning they are losing $36,000 for every EV they sell. They face a ghastly full year loss of $4.5b, so not surprisingly, they are delaying battery plants, and plans to expand production. All up they are now holding off on $12 billion in investments.
The head of Mercedes-Benz described the market as “a pretty brutal space”. Harald Wilhelm hinted that some manufacturers won’t survive: “I can hardly imagine the current status quo is fully sustainable for everybody,” he said.
Panasonic has slowed EV battery production was reduced by 60% in Japan compared to the same quarter last year. While its US plants were OK, profit forecasts of the whole energy division […]
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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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