Or the government should mandate lower emission standards, absent a technology mandate, over a stepped time period. For example DEF systems on diesel powered vehicles. Before the advent of DEF systems one knew if a vehicle was diesel powered simply by the volume of black smoke coming from the tail pipe. However now one never sees smoke from a diesel powered vehicle unless its engine was manufactured before the implementation of DEF or its in need of repair.

ICE powered vehicle emissions have been severely reduced in the past 30 years. Twenty years ago when viewing Los Angeles from a distance once could see a smog dome covering the metropolitan area. That dome no longer exists. In fact historical air quality data shows a tremendous reduction in green house gases. EV’e didn’t do that. Cleaner burning engines were responsible for that change.

If manufacturers were forced to make cleaner vehicles they would do so in the most efficient way possible.

Anthony, post 1401. This reminds me of an ordinance they enacted in Tokyo, Japan. Basically, the large tractor type trucks with the old “dirty” diesel engines were and still are prohibited from entering Tokyo. I think they implemented this ordinance in Osaka and a few other places. They implemented electric bus mass transit. The city was noticeably changed for the better. The air was more fresh and the buildings gradually became cleaner.

Why not natural gas vehicles? They only produce 15% of the pollution that gasoline and diesel vehicles do. Also, we have an unlimited supply right here. Fueling stations could be quickly built. Most of it could be carried by ship to natural gas docks such as those used in Germany.

If you toss a lit match into a puddle of gasoline it will not snuff out. It will go boom. Maybe you mean diesel?

First off - you cannot make "everyone happy". Not even with the best technology. because "It is not in the order of things".

You cannot get rid of EV mandates - because they don't exist - they are proposed to come in limited areas more than 10 years from now.

EV's subsidies are a drop in the bucket. Yes they provided $7.5 billion for chargers - but have spend zero. And the tax incentives are more of a unicorn and point of angst than real money.

The proposed tariffs are to make it take longer for CHINA TO KICK OUT ASSES in the EV market.





People approach this subject with more emotion than logic or knowledge. Thus the pervasive myths about EVs.

There is a huge amount of art and science to making cars cheaper. Many specialists, and even a good sized consulting shadow industry.A lot of it is not what most people would guess. Some fun facts about this:

People who buy exclusively on price buy used cars. So they are not your market if you are a car maker.

People do buy new for an number of emotional reasons; it look cool, it's better than yours, room for the dog and kids, real men drive trucks, germany makes the best, and my favorite "look at me".

Volume drives down cost - ever wonder why even an Econ-box has power windows?

The big advancement in the field today are the "Giga-Casting" of car subframes, simplification and consolidation of electronic controls (Single CAN buss, 48 volt power, minimal GUIs) and automated assembly.

So, most of what you are pointing to are being pioneered by BYD and Tesla. Others are waking up slowly, perhaps too late.

While you can't really get a good look at a BYD yet, go sit in a model 3. It is not futuristic minimalism - it is brutal cost cutting.

Agreed that mandates should be about emissions. And we do have emission standards now for the betterment of us all.

Yet - Many Americans will always fight any mandate that restricts their "right" to do whatever they want to - "screw the environment". Some kids spend good money messing up their ride so the can "roll coal" just to coat the streets with "liberal tears".

EV's are pretty harmless. And the minimal mandates that have been proposed are pretty harmless as well. Yet, just look at the self righteous indignation and outright lies. Makes you wonder about who we are...

In other words "this is why we can't have nice things"....

To Understand Elon Musk’s Descent, Look at His $46 Billion Pay Package


NYT
Dr. DeLong teaches economic history at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of “Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century.”

Elon Musk is not just another inconsequential Silicon Valley billionaire.

Most of his inconsequential peers have two primary accomplishments: showing up at the right place at the right time and being sufficiently arrogant to continue the course rather than diversify. Had their shoes been empty, someone else would have stepped into them, and things would have been much the same.

But Mr. Musk changed the world.

He wanted to jump-start the decarbonization of human civilization’s energy. He succeeded. He drove Tesla to create the electric vehicle industry as we know it. Yes, he overpromised. But he often overdelivered and overdelivered spectacularly. Truly wonderful things happened with Tesla’s performance as a technology inventor, deliverer and deployer.

But “happened” is in the past tense. Much has changed since 2018, the year Tesla dreamed up an unorthodox pay package that, in theory, tied Mr. Musk’s pay to the company’s performance. Problem is, the performance was not for making high-quality cars or making affordable cars or making cars at scale. The performance was for pushing Tesla’s stock price up.

This pay package was, I think, bad for Mr. Musk. And it was, I am sure, bad for Tesla and, by extension, our nation’s crucial fight against global warming, by far. Tesla is now asking its shareholders to reapprove this pay package, which would hand Mr. Musk an eye-popping roughly $46 billion, making him, the world’s richest man, one of its highest-paid executives.


I have a recommendation for Tesla shareholders: Vote no.

The board promised Mr. Musk — at his urging — that if he made the board and the shareholders truly wealthy by boosting the stock price, by whatever means, he could have 12 percent of the company. Yet I believe this pay package helped drive his descent from visionary business leader to bizarre carnival barker. And that set of incentives and responses should not be validated.

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Here I need to back up and tell you what meme stocks are. The standard example is GameStop, a company that runs about 4,000 video game and electronics stores. Trading at $5 a share at the start of December 2020, its price rose to a staggering roughly $150 a share at the end of January 2021. Mr. Musk joined the fun by tweeting one word — “Gamestonk!!” — and the shares soared to $483 two days later, before beginning a long, jagged decline. As of the start of 2024, it was almost $17 a share after a four-for-one stock split, far above the $5 of 2020, even though nothing much had changed about its (struggling) business. And a recent revival of GameStop mania has since pushed it up to $30 a share.

Who is behind all of this crazy? It is not people who want to invest in a slice of Gamestop’s business over the long term. It is, rather, that people who are buying GameStop as a way of pledging allegiance to an idea, a meme, a cultural-technological movement of some kind — and a few hoping to get rich by tagging along and selling at the top. Past stock manias and bubbles involved people who believed that the company involved would be profitable or at least that they would be able to make money selling their stock to a greater fool than them who had just arrived in the marketplace and still believed. But GameStop stock became all but disconnected from the profit-and-loss statements of the 4,000 GameStop stores.

And so it has become with Tesla. It was no longer about getting better at making high-quality electric vehicles for which there was strong demand. For Mr. Musk, incentivized by his pay package, it became about a stock price that must go up.

After 2018, Mr. Musk went all in. He made noise, particularly on Twitter. He still overpromised, but he no longer overdelivered; instead he jumped from moonshot theme to moonshot theme to boost the meme-stock association of Tesla. Humanoid robots! Cybertrucks! Fleets of Tesla robotaxis! An artificial intelligence supercomputer whose brain would be all the idle Teslas in the world, networked! And the share price did zoom, making him the richest man on earth, from about $20, give or take, around 2018 to over $400 in late 2021 before beginning a jagged and often interrupted decline to its still lofty $174.

Tesla had always had build-quality problems. But it used to have a road map for fixing them. And it used to have a road map for gaining manufacturing expertise, adding capacity, introducing models to crawl down from the rarefied technoexperiment and luxury car markets into the enormous market of providing what Americans see as their basic transportation. But those seem to have fallen away. The idea that there would soon be a truly affordable mass-market Tesla receded from real soon to maybe someday. Instead we got the Cybertruck, for which demand is rather limited, as it is not set up to do the things that people who use pickup trucks need them for. And meanwhile, in China, BYD’s blade-battery technologies and process-manufacturing expertise grew by leaps and bounds.

Unlike GameStop, Tesla sells products a bit more critical to our future than games like Call of Duty. For the world, Tesla has been nothing short of a beacon of hope, a carbon-transition technological spearhead to a more sustainable future with less damage from global warming, via a rapid build-out of electric vehicles and power. For our shared future, the world very badly needs to return to the Tesla before 2018, when it was creating the societal knowledge of how to design and efficiently build electric vehicles at a truly ferocious rate.

A management focused on the actual business Tesla is engaged in is far better for society than a management focused on what the pay package incentivizes Mr. Musk to focus on every hour he spends working on the company: continuing the run of Tesla as a meme stock.

John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1936, with characteristic British understatement, “When the capital development of a country becomes a byproduct of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done.” Voting for the pay package would validate this focus, and that is a damned shame, for Elon Musk is truly consequential. And that is a big deal.

Or perhaps shareholders should vote for the pay package out of fear: If Mr. Musk regards himself as betrayed, he may no longer spend time talking up Tesla and its share price — and without his meme stock mojo, the shares could falter. Toyota makes generally higher-quality cars and has revenue that in 2023 was more than four times Tesla’s but commands only about three-fifths of its total market capitalization. That is how far down Tesla stock could go.

But I argue that we must accept the possibility of short-term pain for a forever payoff. Tesla almost certainly accounts for a plurality of Mr. Musk’s fortune. SpaceX makes up the bulk of the remainder. And SpaceX appears to be in very good hands, as he trusts the awesomely competent Gwynne Shotwell, who, as chief operating officer of SpaceX, has managed the marriage of fire and ice, building an organizational culture that combines an astonishing attention to detail with a willingness to experiment beyond the limits of what had been thought possible. She proves that Mr. Musk is capable of far better business judgment. Business judgment that Tesla desperately needs. Right now.

DETROIT (AP) — Just before 2 a.m. on a chilly April night in Seattle, a Chevrolet Silverado pickup stopped at an electric vehicle charging station on the edge of a shopping center parking lot.

Two men, one with a light strapped to his head, got out. A security camera recorded them pulling out bolt cutters. One man snipped several charging cables; the other loaded them into the truck. In under 2½ minutes, they were gone.

The scene that night has become part of a troubling pattern across the country: 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.

Broken-down chargers have emerged as the latest obstacle for U.S. automakers in their strenuous effort to convert more Americans to EVs despite widespread public anxiety about a scarcity of charging stations. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults say they believe EVs take too long to charge or don’t know of any charging stations nearby.

America’s major automakers have made heavy financial bets that buyers will shift away from combustion engines and embrace EVs as the world faces the worsening consequences of climate change. Accordingly, the companies have poured billions into EVs.

Stellantis envisions 50% of its passenger cars being EVs by the end of 2030. Ford set a target of producing 2 million EVs per year by 2026 — about 45% of its global sales — though it has since suspended that goal. General Motors, the most ambitious of the three, has pledged to sell only EV passenger cars by the end of 2035.

Any such timetables, of course, hinge on whether the companies can convince more would-be EV buyers that a charge will always be available when they travel. The rise in cable thefts isn’t likely to strengthen the automakers’ case.

Two years ago, according to Electrify America, which runs the nation’s second-largest network of direct-current fast chargers, a cable might be cut perhaps every six months at one of its 968 charging stations, with 4,400 plugs nationwide. Through May this year, the figure reached 129 — four more than in all of 2023. At one Seattle station, cables were cut six times in the past year, said Anthony Lambkin, Electrify America’s vice president of operations.

“We’re enabling people to get to work, to take their kids to school, get to medical appointments,” Lambkin said. “So to have an entire station that’s offline is pretty impactful to our customers.”

Two other leading EV charging companies — Flo and EVgo — also have reported a rise in thefts. Charging stations in the Seattle area have been a frequent target. Sites in Nevada, California, Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Pennsylvania have been hit, too.

Stations run by Tesla, which operates the nation’s largest fast-charging network, have been struck in Seattle, Oakland and Houston. So far this year, Seattle police have reported seven cases of cable thefts from charging stations, matching the number for all of 2023. Thieves hit Tesla stations four times this year compared with just once last year, the Seattle police said.

“Vandalism of public charging infrastructure in the Seattle metro area has unfortunately been increasing in frequency,” EVgo said.

The company said law enforcement officials are investigating the thefts while it tries to repair inoperable stations and considers a longer-term solution.

The problem isn’t confined to urban areas. In rural Sumner, Washington, south of Seattle, thieves cut cables twice at a Puget Sound Energy charging station. The company is working with police and the property owner to protect the station.

Until a month ago, police in Houston knew of no cable thefts. Then one was stolen from a charger at a gas station. The city has now recorded eight or nine such thefts, said Sgt. Robert Carson, who leads a police metal-theft unit.

In one case, thieves swiped 18 of 19 cords at a Tesla station. That day, Carson visited the station to inspect the damage. In the first five minutes that he was there, Carson said, about 10 EVs that needed charging had to be turned away.

In very large cities like Houston, charging stations typically contain an especially large number of plugs and cables, so thefts can be particularly damaging.

“They’re not just taking one,” Carson said. “When they’re hit, they’re hit pretty hard.”

Roy Manuel, an Uber driver who normally recharges his Tesla at the Houston station hit by thieves, said he fears being unable to do so because of stolen cables.

“If my battery was really low, I’d have quite an issue with operating my vehicle,” he said. “If it was so low that I couldn’t get to another charger, I might be in trouble. Might even need a tow truck.”

The charging companies say it’s become clear that the thieves are after the copper that the cables contain. In late May, copper hit a record high of nearly $5.20 a pound, a result, in part, of rising demand resulting from efforts to cut carbon emissions with EVs that use more copper wiring. The price is up about 25% from a year ago, and many analysts envision further increases.

Charging companies say there isn’t actually very much copper in the cables, and what copper is there is difficult to extract. Carson estimates that criminals can get $15 to $20 per cable at a scrap yard.

“They’re not making a significant amount of money,” he said. “They’re not going to be sailing on a yacht anywhere.”

Still, the more cables the thieves can steal, the more they can cash in. At $20 a cable, 20 stolen cables could fetch $400.

The problem for the charging companies is that it’s much costlier to replace cables. In Minneapolis, where cables have been clipped at city-owned charging stations, it costs about $1,000 to replace just one cable, said Joe Laurin, project manager in the Department of Public Works.

The charging companies are trying to fight back. Electrify America is installing more security cameras. In Houston, police are visiting recycling centers to look for stolen metal.

But it’s often hard for the scrap yards to determine conclusively whether metal came from a charging cable. Thieves often burn off the insulation and just sell strands of metal.

The Recycled Materials Association, which represents 1,700 members, is issuing scrap-theft alerts from law enforcement officials so that members can be on the lookout for suspects and stolen goods.

Because charging stations are often situated in remote corners of parking lots, Carson suggested that many more security cameras are needed.

In the meantime, Electrify America said Seattle police are trying to track down the thieves in the video. And Carson said the Houston police are pursuing leads in the Tesla theft.

“We’d like to get them stopped,” he said, “and then let the court system do what they’re supposed to do.”

It's why I said that. Musk hasn't done anything without a US taxpayer subsidy attached to it. Look, he starts businesses in industries that beguile his age and wisdom. I wish him luck, however when its ALL done with taxpayer money...time to dig deep is your own pockets Bub. Perhaps...I dunno...that's why he wants the money he wants?

Good. It was an 11th grade English teacher that put that on a required reading list. Looked up the author and read what I could find in the library about her. She intrigued me. She writes in a style because she lived it. I put her right between Huxley and Orwell. It's gonna happen, its a matter of only when.

Well...at least the chargers don't have catalytic converters.....

I was today years old when I learned about this. The range of a Tesla can be incredible.

- Launched into space in 2018, the Tesla Roadster with a mannequin named Starman has now traveled a distance equivalent to driving all the world’s roads 80 times.
- Starman, dressed in a spacesuit, has orbited the Sun a little over 4 times, covering about 68 million miles.
- If its battery still works, Starman has listened to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” 627,759 times and “Life on Mars?” 845,879 times.
- This cosmic journey far exceeds the car’s 36,000-mile warranty, making it an extraordinary voyage.

Ah, but I do know you - through your writings.

Phobias 'o plenty there...

Right now is a great time to buy a used Tesla!

Selling a Tesla is kinda like trying to sell a five year treasury note from a couple of years ago with a 1.75% interest rate. You’re upside down!

Please don't be scared just because I have come to know you. In many ways it is the first step into the light - accept that people know you.

And we don't really argue. You draw conclusions from the articles that suit you and name call all who do not agree with your interpretation and inductive reasoning - such as it is. You know we could discuss these points dispassionately. But you would rather cross your eyes and defecate - demanding that people argue with the opinions of other (not your own) because you chose to post them.

And you know me: I'm not afraid of a car just because it has of different power train. I can trust my doctor and with steely eyes even take an injection - no lollypop needed.

So...I'm thinking we are kind of Yin and Yang.
And I only say that because I feel I know you so well.

And all on the original tires....

Ah, but you are a teacher. How else would any of us know how stupidly stupid we are without your entertaining assessment of lowly us? Why you have more erudite material in your little finger than most people have in their entire intestines - including the colon. And I assure you - we are not worth.

Evidence your keen insight that my car lost value when I drove it off the lot - who does that happen to? Only the stupidly stupid stooges. Favor us now; your vehicle has appreciated how much sence you bought it? 150%? Twice? Three times (like a lady)?

2 times a lady...




Electric vehicle startup Fisker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in a Delaware federal court on Monday evening, intending to sell its assets. This decision comes after recently halting production of its "Ocean" SUVs.

Joining the ranks of Arrival, Lordstown Motors, Proterra, and Electric Last Mile Solutions, Fisker's bankruptcy underscores the severe challenges faced by EV startups over the last several years. These challenges include depleted cash reserves, a high interest rate environment, and a downturn in EV sales, particularly in the face of Tesla's EV price war worldwide.

The startup, founded by former BMW and Aston Martin designer Henrik Fisker, whose EV company previously went bankrupt, released this statement:

"Like other companies in the electric vehicle industry, we have faced various market and macroeconomic headwinds that have impacted our ability to operate efficiently.

"After evaluating all options for our business, we determined that proceeding with a sale of our assets under Chapter 11 is the most viable path forward for the company."

Per the court filing, Fisker estimated assets to be $500 million to $1 billion and liabilities to be $100 million to $500 million. It noted there are approximately 200-999 creditors.

The announcement comes as no surprise. In February, Fisker issued a "going concern" warning about running out of cash in the second half of the year. In March, the company reportedly hired bankruptcy consultants and more recently missed a loan payment. There was speculation that a "large automaker" was interested in making an investment, but nothing came out of that.

In 2023, Fisker produced over 10,000 Oceans, less than a quarter of its forecast, but only delivered 4,700. Manufacturing of the SUV is currently paused as Fisker's future remains uncertain.

Earlier this year, Adam Jonas at Morgan Stanley called for a consolidation wave in the EV space. Tesla is the strongest EV company standing.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/ev-startup-fisker-files-bankruptcy-due-macroeconomic-headwinds

To listen to the Biden administration, the situation with electric vehicles is going swimmingly. People love them. Government subsidies make them more affordable. As a bonus, you get the pride and satisfaction of knowing that you're doing your part to rescue Mother Earth from carbon emissions or whatever. But according to a recent survey from McKinsey and Co. conducted this month, people remain unconvinced, particularly in the United States. They polled EV owners in nine countries and found that 46% of American owners of EVs want to switch back to gas-powered cars with internal combustion engines. There were lower levels of dissatisfaction in some other nations, but nearly half of American owners are experiencing regret.

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.

The consulting firm surveyed consumers in multiple countries: the U.S., China, Germany, Norway, Australia, France, Italy, Japan and Brazil. Between all of those countries, 29% of electric car owners want to return to driving internal combustion cars, with 46% of surveyed American electric car owners wanting to do so. This surprised the consulting firm, cutting against received wisdom about people’s switch to electric.

The survey asked owners about the primary reason leading them to want to switch back. The responses were the same ones we've been hearing about ever since the EV mandates began rolling out. The largest percentage cited a lack of charging infrastructure. Nearly as many said that the vehicles are too expensive to purchase and maintain. Others said that planning long trips was too difficult or that they were unable to recharge their vehicles at home.

Current economic conditions both in the United States and abroad are also impacting people's decisions when it comes to whether or not to purchase an EV. Everything is too expensive for many people these days, including vehicles and electric utility costs. (Not to mention food and everything else.) Driving up their costs further just for the privilege of having an EV simply isn't an option. A significant percentage of the drivers who were surveyed said that they planned to "downgrade" to a less expensive vehicle when making their next purchase regardless of which type of car they currently own.

As already noted, the outlook isn't nearly as gloomy in other countries. According to one estimate, the global market for EVs is predicted to rise to roughly 30 million sales annually by 2027. But that increase will not be driven by the United States. Demand in America has flattened and may even begin to recede in the near future. Enthusiasm among our globalist friends overseas always tends to be higher and they have bought into the entire climate change alarmism paradigm more uniformly.

The exception in that forecast and a potential bright spot for EV fans comes to us from Ford. They set a record for EV sales in the first half of 2024, largely based on a surge in sales of electric pickup trucks and their E-Transit vans. That's the good news. The bad news is that they are still losing a vast amount of money on each EV they sell. Also, even while setting a record, Ford is still only ranked second in the United States in EV sales. Tesla outsells them each year by a seven-to-one margin. Yet that's still a small portion of the total marketplace. Tesla's customers tend to be at the upper end of the earning spectrum and the vehicles are considered luxury cars. The outlook is different for people who need to save every dollar they can when deciding on their next vehicle.

https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2024/06/23/poll-nearly-half-of-us-ev-owners-regret-purchase-n3790784

Half eh?

So....much...tech...

Nearly half of American EV owners want to switch back to gas-powered vehicle, McKinsey data shows
Story by Breck Dumas • 1d


A significant share of Americans who own an electric vehicle have buyer's remorse, according to new data.

McKinsey & Co.'s Mobility Consumer Pulse for 2024, released this month, found that 46% of EV owners in the U.S. said they were "very" likely to switch back to owning a gas-powered vehicle in their next purchase.

The high percentage of Americans who want to make a switch even surprised the consulting firm.

"I didn't expect that," the head of McKinsey's Center for Future Mobility, Philipp Kampshoff, told Automotive News. "I thought, 'Once an EV buyer, always an EV buyer.'"

In the poll of nearly 37,000 consumers worldwide, Australia was the only country with a greater percentage, 49%, of EV owners than the U.S. who said they were ready to return to owning an internal combustion engine.

The other countries included in the survey were Brazil, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Norway. Across all countries surveyed, the average share of respondents who want to ditch their EVs was 29%.

The biggest reason EV owners cited for wanting to return to owning a gas-powered vehicle was the lack of available charging infrastructure (35%); the second-highest reason cited was that the total cost of owning an EV was too high (34%). Nearly 1 in 3, 32%, said their driving patterns on long-distance trips were affected too much due to having an EV.

McKinsey found that consumers' satisfaction globally with charging availability has improved some since last year's survey but noted it "still has a long way to go."

Of the EV owners across all countries, 11% said the infrastructure where they live is well set up in terms of charge points, 40% said there were not enough chargers along highways and main roads, and 38% said there were not enough chargers in close proximity to them.

The findings come years into the Biden administration's push for U.S. consumers and automakers to embrace EVs and reinforce other recent polling that indicates a major chunk of Americans are still not sold on going all-electric.

To further Biden's EV agenda, Democrats passed infrastructure legislation in 2021 that committed billions of taxpayer dollars to building a half million charging stations in the U.S. by the end of the decade.

But three years later, only seven federally funded chargers have been built to date, and the slow progress has sparked condemnation from both sides of the political aisle.

Original article source: Nearly half of American EV owners want to switch back to gas-powered vehicle, McKinsey data shows

Interesting article

I like investing in oil and gas pipeline companies. The demand for EV fuel is strong!

Is that the sound your fartcar makes when the power goes out???