Meanwhile, "Ford Halts Work on E.V. Battery Plant in Michigan/The company cited concerns about operating the factory competitively. It’s not clear if the pause is linked to its dispute with the United Auto Workers" (NYT):
".... Ford has warned that increases in pay and benefits sought by the U.A.W. would undermine its efforts to ramp up manufacturing of electric vehicles.
If unions got all that they were asking for, 'we would have to cancel our E.V. investments,' Jim Farley, Ford’s chief executive, said in an interview this month.... The president of the U.A.W., Shawn Fain, called the decision 'a shameful, barely-veiled threat by Ford to cut jobs' in a statement on Monday. He added, 'We are simply asking for a just transition to electric vehicles and Ford is instead doubling down on their race to the bottom.'"
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82 comments:
It's all about the graft, not the product. Think Solyndra.
The president of the U.A.W., Shawn Fain...
This strike will never end peacefully as long as the U.A.W is led by a party that supported the Irish Republican Army...
For Biden and his Democrats malinvestment is their stock in trade. It must be stopped.
This coverage by NYT is probably about as clear an admission as we'll ever get, that the Green Grift is a monumental piece of fraud and corruption --the biggest in world history-- and that it cannot go on.
I just need a way to translate this observation into an investment strategy. Do I short every company pursuing the grail of Decarbonization?
"Mr. Biden and Democrats in Congress last year authorized hundreds of billions of dollars in federal incentives"
"Incentives," right. The flood of bribes assumes, of course, that in the main green sectors profitable production is impossible in current markets. So what consumers won't pay voluntarily they must be forced to pay via taxes.
"But nobody is entirely sure whether these investments will be durable, especially in businesses, like battery or solar panel manufacturing, where China’s domination is deep and strong."
Actually, people are quite sure they can't be durable, unless we close the border to Chinese imports, but are afraid to run afoul of the prog thought police, and of course vested interests want to keep the bribes coming.
"The company cited concerns about operating the factory competitively. It’s not clear if the pause is linked to its dispute with the United Auto Workers"
Doesn't have to be. Going green is a losing proposition already for most companies. It's not clear subsidies will suffice to keep them "competitive," especially if progs also push labor demands.
Strange how our tax dollars must be used to create innovation. ...and then it never happens.
Ford is currently losing $40,000 per EV they're producing and selling. With government subsidies. I would think the halt is similar to Disney looking to unload ESPN. When a part of your business is losing money, you need to slow it down to figure out your next move. They need it to work. But they have to figure out if it can work, and if so, how it can work. And hoping cannot make it so.
Why would a company run the environmental risk of running a battery plant in the US?
The point was to take credit for electric vehicles while pushing the environmental costs offshore where they would not be counted.
CAGW is the biggest scam in the history of the world. This is blindingly obvious.
Let's look at EVs. Elon Musk is a business genius. Tesla is built on taxpayer subsidies. But the real issue is: Does more than 10% of the population really want a range-bound EV is that is very expensive? It is virtue signaling for rich people.
The Big Three all want into the EV business because they are jealous of Tesla's profits. The Ford CEO even wants to get rid of his dealer network and sell direct. Cut out the dealers' margin.
Solar and wind are inherently intermittent and that means unreliable. The electric grid requites that supply and demand be instantly matched 24/7. That means that there is wasteful overbuilding of reliable power. OPPD's engineers forced the Board to spend $450m on two natgas plants (right next to Facebook and Google data centers) to make up for all the unreliable wind and solar.
While we raise our electricity prices, China and India are lowering theirs. Germany has already chased away all sorts of manufacturing companies.
And for what? To save the Planet from burning up in 2100?
This whole scam is based upon faulty models (that have been wrong for decades) using corrupt data projecting global climate in the far distant future. That's not science!
The 2022 Nobel Prize winner has come out and said that climate change is not a threat.
But there's too much money being spread around to stop this. The bond lawyers and investment banks are getting their cut along with the engineers and general contractors. The useful idiot Greens pushing this actually believe this foolishness. The smart people cash the checks.
The Religion of Net Zero Carbon is the tyranny of the minority. It must be stopped and I'm doing my best in Omaha.
In the end they will not build the plants but they will keep the money
"Hundreds of billions". Shudder.
If they're going to hand out this level of subsidies, yet there remains doubt it's even going to work, wouldn't it be more effective to put tariffs on foreign solar panels and batteries instead?
https://nypost.com/2023/09/23/automakers-spend-millions-on-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-amid-strike/
BTW, I hope Ford, GM and Chrysler go bankrupt, again, when this EV disaster becomes apparent. People won't buy EVs at scale unless forced to.
The Green blight enjoys sustainable profits through labor and environmental arbitrage, market construction through pseudo science, and manufactured viability through authoritarian mandates.
The company is better off taking a strike than giving the union what it demands. It's a hard limit on union power.
The work today doesn't require the skill that it did long ago, owing to automation, so the wages have a huge downward pressure on them besides.
Big Daddy got his 10%... these bogus solar panel CEOs will get million dollar salaries and when they fail... golden parachutes!
It's a scam folks... just another scam and your tax money goes right to the bottom of the pit.
Farley already has lost billions on EVs. Mr. Market doesn't want EVs. But Uncle Same does. Mr. Market usually wins.
What has changed over a very few years can easily be changed back. The question is whether it makes sense to do so and if so, why?
The Chinese dominance of equipment manufacturing for solar does not prevent the production of electricity by people who have purchased Chinese solar panels. It merely affects the market in new solar panel purchases. Existing panels have a life of 25 years or more.
It follows that this Chinese dominance is utterly unlike the Arab or OPEC dominance of oil supplies. It cannot interrupt current energy use or impose new higher prices on current energy production. All it can do is to make it difficult to add more solar PV capacity, and then only for a short period as factories outside China would quickly get set up.
Hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives. Is there any conceivable way that could be a good idea? Of course not. If they know that, they're criminal vermin. If they don't know that, they're total idiots.
We've been down this path before. Can you say Solyndra?
Net result LOTS of bucks to friends of the left. Lots of worker bees fired. NOT lots of solar cells made.
Maybe everyone who wanted an electric vehicle already bought one, and the automakers will suffer another generational breakdown?
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/slow-selling-evs-are-auto-industrys-new-headache-2023-07-11/
It is very difficult to run a profitable car company even in a free environment. So much capital, lead times are 5 years long or longer for every model. The legacy firms are saddled with debt and obligations. Now add the political environment where Democrats need to give the UAW everything they ask for since Trump is the worker guy, not Democrats. Deadly. It's a little better in right to work states, but still tough...now add in the fact indicators are flashing that we're on the cusp of some sort of long overdue recession. Yikes! Many of the startups won't survive...but the government will trow Treasury (ie taxpayer) money at them to rig the stats for the Dems...
The government only invests in the politically motivated crap the PE and VC companies passed on. Congress critters only 'invest' in the winners the PE and VC companies invested in...after the fact, so to speak.
Well if the UAW is "simply asking for a just transition to electric vehicles" then they are not actually advocating for the industry to survive, since it depends on the 98% of cars sold that are not EV. Like other Democrats, the Union Head is only asking for a managed decline into poverty and darkness. As is anyone who advocates for "net zero" or "carbon neutral" policies. Look at Germany! What part of "total failure and economic disaster" do you redgreenies not understand?
But, But...
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2023/09/26/white-house-were-unilaterally-getting-money-for-climate-corps-congress-opposed-have-used-war-power-on-climate/
War Power son climate?
Unless the US puts tariffs on Chinese products, it will be hard to compete with them on price. Slave labor is cheap.
If it has potential, it can succeed without government subsidies; if it doesn't, it won't survive even with them.
Ford should be forced to hand that money over to the workers. If it's going to be pissed away stupidly, at least they will use it to prop up their local businesses instead of China and Bimini, which is where Ford will spend it.
If unions got all that they were asking for, 'we would have to cancel our E.V. investments
Awesome. We are pissing away tax money subsidizing EVs, wind turbines, and solar panel production. Let Tesla be the EV company.
God have us fossil fuels for a reason. They help feed the human race.
It's the govt picking winners and losers instead of the market in the name of the climate change hypothesis. There will be a lot more failures like Solyndra as these investments are not made on the basis of economic viability but in the name of faddish ideology. Eg. The govt is loaning $9 billion to Ford who is losing billions per year building EVs. I doubt they will relay the loan.
Biden and his ilk have put us all through massive inflation where real wages are down. He subsidizes Ukraine instead of helping Americans.
Now our idiot government is subsidizing EVs and driving up the cost of good old fashioned gas powered cars that people actually want buy. But with interest rates and the the crazy increase in the cost of new and used cars...Americans can afford to buy them.
So asshole Joe, who created all these conditions, is going to go picket with the UAW. Kick ass clown show.
[Shawn Fain] added, “We are simply asking for a just transition to electric vehicles and Ford is instead doubling down on their race to the bottom.”
Well, Shawn, sometimes reality intrudes and we simply cannot get everything we want out of life.
We are simply asking for
Oh, simply asking! Is that all?
a just transition
Justice! Well, we all want that. Can we dig down a little into what constitutes "justice," and why, and who defines it, and why?
to electric vehicles and Ford is instead doubling down on their race to the bottom.
Content-free cliches are not helping. Ford claims that your "ask," which includes (if I've heard correctly) a more than 1/3 raise based on a 40-hour work week with a reduction in hours to 32/week but to receive that raise as if still working 40 hours, will make it impossible, economically, for them to continue to pursue their EV line. What, specifically, is your counterclaim? What's the current cost of labor at Ford, what's the current cost of producing EVs, and where, other than from the EV line, could the savings come from to bump the labor cost by more than 1/3?
If the counterclaim is "The fat cat executives need to take pay cuts to pay us!" then you also need to demonstrate that that alone would be sufficient. And also that their compensation is sufficiently in cash, not LTIs or other non-cash means, that a reduction in their cash compensation would cover those raises for the workers.
If only they authorized the mining of the necessary raw materials to make those things.
IOW Graft.
If these things were important to the market the market would already be producing them.
Why do I feel like it’s a kickback scheme?
Too early to guess. Recent discovery of large lithium deposit in US.
Ford halts work..........because battery powered vehicles are a scam?
This is not viable economics. Electric cars still pollute at the energy generating station, but it’s not in my backyard!
Remember all of those jobs as insulation installers Obama created in his stimulus package in 2009?
You don’t?
Solar and wind power are not feasible power sources for an electric grid except in rare circumstances. As soon as you have enough of this in your grid, there will be blackouts, and if you rely on it exclusively there will be blackouts all the time, assuming it functions at all. If you want you sacrifice to the CO2 gods, then it is nuclear plus hydroelectric and geothermal where plausible, supported by natural gas. If you insist that solar and wind are the only valid options, my assumptions you are one of three people: you run a solar and/or wind power company, you have no idea what you are talking about, or you are a loon.
The purpose of this money is to reward Democratic Party supporters, who will profit greatly even if their companies go under, and as a sop to the dupes that think they are saving the world.
How much government subsidy is going to Vivek Ramaswamey company Immunovant? Any? That stock IMVT is up over 100%. Today.
Further to my previous post:
From Forbes:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2011/09/06/president-obamas-green-jobs-pretense-is-an-unmitigated-fiasco/?sh=76a56b4b43ab
Fundamental Transformation is exciting!
madAsHell said...
"Why do I feel like it’s a kickback scheme?"
Because it is.
Rich said...
To reiterate. If the mareketplace wanted it we wouldn't be subsidising it. What conclusion can you draw from that?
Duh Nooyawk Tee asks, Can the U.S. make solar panels?
Yes, but... which is the same answer to another industrial question, Could the Soviet Union make toilet paper?
Hundreds of billions in subsidies mean only one thing, there's no non-insane incentive to make solar panels.
Too early to guess. Recent discovery of large lithium deposit in US.
It'll be interesting to see how hard the government greenies work to make mining it impossible.
When did we ever vote on a transition to EVs and Net Zero Carbon?
We didn't.
The tyranny of the minority.
Can it be true, as I have heard, that China is busy making solar panels and the like in coal fired plants.
If they’re serious about climate change being an existential crisis, it wouldn’t matter where we bought the solar panels or batteries or whether they were made by union labor or not, all that would matter would be putting up huge solar panel farms and replacing ICE vehicles with EVs. All this business about saving the planet but only doing it with good paying union jobs just means they don’t really believe it’s an existential crisis, as if that was really in doubt.
The thing that is so evil about all this solar and wind in the grid is that it raises electricity prices and that is a regressive tax. It can also be deadly.
Germany has the highest electricity prices in the world and also the most solar and wind. They shut down their nukes.
The Center for the American Experiment modeled what net zero would really cost in MN and WI. Power prices will triple and there will be deadly blackouts in the winter.
I've told the OPPD Board this numerous times, but they plunge ahead. Authorized to borrow $2b plus last month.
Hey Sec Granholm has SHOWN us, that Electric Vehicles WORK!
All you need is:
No place to go..
No particular time to get there..
A fleet of IC cars to travel ahead of you, to smooth things out..
Some IC towtrucks..
Just have these ingredients, and Electric Vehicles will work like a Charm*
a Charm* like you'd get from those mysterious shops that sell you magical items, and then it turns out they're cursed, but when you go back later there's no sign the shop was ever there?
Wouldn't it make more sense to de-incentivize imports from China? When the US did that with Japanese automobiles, those manufacturers moved a lot of their operations to the US.
"When did we ever vote on a transition to EVs and Net Zero Carbon? "
They passed it by calling it the "Inflation Reduction Act," and simply lying to Manchin about it.
I plan to buy a plug in *hybrid* for my next car, but the idea of going straight EV? Well, it makes zero sense. Maybe if I lived in a city where it never gets below -22F and I didn't have to drive more than 100 miles on such a cold day, with the heater and defroster running at the same time that my battery performance was getting hammered by the cold.
Dave Begley @10:36,
But the real issue is: Does more than 10% of the population really want a range-bound EV is that is very expensive? It is virtue signaling for rich people.
Um. Any vehicle is "range-bound," unless you happen to own a truck with a small thorium reactor in the bed. Everyone has to refuel. The part of your statement that is true is that refueling an EV takes a lot longer than refueling an ICE car. Which is why, when we take our Tesla Model S on a road trip, we plan stops to coincide with meal breaks. For anything else, there's no need. My husband just did a concert set in Newport, and he can get there from Salem and back w/o difficulty. Though, of course, there is also a Tesla supercharger in Newport. (That's new; the previous closest one was in Lincoln City, maybe fifteen miles up the coast.)
And, yes, a Model S is pretty expensive. But a Model 3 is sort of generic semi-fancy price. And right around here there are Teslas everywhere, mostly Model 3, but a few Model S, more than one Model X, and the occasional Model Y. There are two white Model 3s in the next block alone; once I saw them drive in at the same time.
Now, is this scalable? Well, of course not. There are a surprising number of people who think that electricity just magically emerges from a plug, just as pork chops are born wrapped in plastic and styrofoam in the refrigerated section of the local Fred Meyer. Anyone thinking that soon everyone will have a Tesla or equivalent (except that there is no equivalent) is delusional, though that is the basis on which the country is apparently relying.
Why did Ford really suspend construction of the battery plant in Michigan?
Ford suddenly pauses massive EV battery project that Republicans are probing over CCP ties - Ford repeatedly defended the proposed billion-dollar factory despite its reliance on Chinese company for key technology
"It follows that this Chinese dominance is utterly unlike the Arab or OPEC dominance of oil supplies. It cannot interrupt current energy use or impose new higher prices on current energy production. All it can do is to make it difficult to add more solar PV capacity, and then only for a short period as factories outside China would quickly get set up."
Good luck if you don't have the machine tooling, the know how, the raw materials to do this. We know how to make ammo plants and they have 2-3 year lead times.
I do agree it's not like oil. That's a good point, but it's not that easy to start an industry from scratch.
"Recent discovery of large lithium deposit in US."
How nice. I second the commenter asking if the Greens will ever allow the deposit to be mined, but I would go further and note that mining (and processing) is energy-intensive. How many earthmovers are being designed and built for EV operation?
Any?
Yeah, I didn't think so. Therefore getting at that lithium to make more batteries for the EVs, will require us to build and use a whole hella lot of CO2-spewing infrastructure.
It makes sense to decouple from China, in more than just EVs, steel making, a lot of manufacturing should come back home. The Chips Act also makes sense, since we are planning a war with China that is going to leave Taiwan looking like Ukraine, we will need to have our own chip manufacturing. The thing is that these transitions, as well as any transition to EVs, is going to leave us poorer, and that is the plan, BTW, poorer and unable to pay back the tens of trillions of dollars we owe without simply inflating the debt away, at the same time we destroy any remaining private pensions and people's retirement savings.
Ask Germans how printing money to pay debts worked out. They ended up with a mustached guy in charge.
Solar panel manufacturers in the US cannot compete with Chinese made Solar panels without subsidies or tariffs. However, the government subsidies will all go to reliable Democrat party supporters, and donations will flow into Democrat coffers, Quid Pro Quo. See Solyndra.
Remember "Nuke the Whales"? Outre!
They've gone green.
Now the wind farms are rackin and stackin them.
Fundamental Transformation is exciting!
Michelle Thompson:
I live in NE. Cherry County, Nebraska is larger (in square miles) than the entire state of CT.
Could I drive to Chicago or Mpls on one charge? I doubt it. I drove to both this year with my powerful BMW X5.
This Friday, I'm driving 180 miles (one way) to Holdredge. I'm sure there are no EV charger stations there.
Another issue is range anxiety. On top of that, in the winter the battery doesn't go as far.
And don't give me "the-government-will-build-charging stations" argument.
EVs are for rich coastal elies. It's a big and rough country outside the coasts.
Harun @ 3:12: "...Good luck if you don't have the machine tooling, the know how, the raw materials to do this." Amen. I would think the know-how would be a big problem. When you make stuff, you learn (often from bitter experience) optimal methods: what to do, what NOT to do, and who you need to call to help you, but only on Wednesdays. There is a whole web of knowledge that is both general to the widget you want to make (read the patent; read the technical manual) and also specific to your instantiation of widget-making. A million details that can't go in the recipe book.
So if it takes you 2-3 years to figure out how to ramp up a process you used to do more often, a process to make very familiar and pretty-tolerant stuff...how long is it going to take you to scale, prove-out, optimize, train, etc etc, your workers and your workplace to make stuff that is finicky, fragile, demanding super-clean or super-precise process? What will your yield be, and how soon, and at what sacrifice of resources you could have put into something better, if only the Chinese hadn't been so uncooperative?
There is no way that the US can profitably be in the solar panel business, and every legitimate business owner knows it. The Chinese control the raw materials and the tooling technology, and they have massively lower labor costs. This is clearly the Democrat graft machine firing up to pump money to their chosen business friends and to cycle a lot of that money back to the DNC and into their personal pockets.
It’s obvious that the climate program to further enrich politically connected elites is on its way out.
1. Big Union labor will be destroyed, along with contributions to Democrats if they don’t cut it out. The big 3 US auto companies will be manufacturing only in Latin America. How does a US auto worker make $250,000 per year vs a$10,000 per year auto worker next door? If the government subsidizes US auto workers. That is the only hope, they can build gas cars for the next 25 years and scrape by til a distant collapse after existing pols are dead.
2. Europe (Germany) finally knows how self destructively stupid they have been. Brussels realizes that there is no percentage in being king of a pile of sh*t.
3. The Voice of Science (tm) is now allowing papers that criticise the climate team. Young scientists are under the thumb of their elders. The young guys are chomping to take over and expose the dumbness of the original climofascists who are now old and in the way. New PhDs are going to be iconoclasts and will take over, and tell the new truth.
4 The cool, like Gates, are moving away from climate. The slavish followers will follow, it’s what they do.
So I expect another last big pulse of government climate cash to ex democrat pols on the way out, then a move on to a new moral panic to make money off of. Perhaps we need to build big lasers to kill the aliens in the ufos or something.
I want us to be making giant lasers to kill extinction-level asteroids! (More properly, I suppose what I want is the ability to spot them WAY off, and then the ability to deflect them accurately so they miss us without creating a debris field that creates its own problems.) After all, that's a climate change disaster we know already happened.
How's it going with even predicting, much less controlling, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions? How about stopping plate tectonics, or might that have some knock-on effects we'd rather not experience?
Wasn't there a similar corporation that was begun with billions from the tax roles, funneled to Obamas bestest most talented most brilliant alternative Energy Green friends? Solyndra, they called it? I heard the phones have been disconnected. No sign of the money though.....
MDT,
Another nuance of "range": if I *needed* to, I could literally double the range of my Honda Odyssey by putting four 5-gallon gas cans in the back. These are good quality NATO style gas cans, they probably cost me about $40 or $50 a piece. The gas to fill them... well that's gas that we would be needing to buy anyway for the extended part of our drive.
Now calculate the equivalent for an EV.
Command economies and government industrial policies always fail.
We call it "Bidenomics".
It has gotten totally out of hand, and we will all be poorer because of it. The US automobile companies have been among the worst-managed enterprises in the world for forty years. More bankruptcies are coming, and the moronic time-servers running these zombie companies will get bailed out again.
Don't vote for Biden Democrats. They reek of failure.
Why is my money, and your money, being spent on this. (or actually being watered down by this--they spent the actual money a long time ago).
EV vehicles are either practical or they are not. "Investment" in the face of economic reality is either foolishness, or graft, or both.
Why didn't they just give Musk a few hundred billion to buy Ford's EV production line? He seems to know how to do it.
Credit card debt near record highs… people struggling to make ends meet given inflation and how expensive life has become since January 2021. Now the UAW demanding a 40% raise to go along with a 4 day work week, as if the two could co-exist.
I’d bet a lot of our hard working people with families to support would love to have that.
Hopefully they kept the 10% for the big guy.
Dave Begley,
I know it's mostly "Thompson" out there, but for me it really is "Thomson," no p.
There are not, it is true, many Tesla superchargers in NE. But one of the three now there is in Kearney, which is awfully close to Holdrege. (The others are, of course, in Lincoln and Omaha.) So I think you needn't worry on that score. 180 miles x2 would be cutting it pretty close for a Tesla, but 180 miles with a charge in between wouldn't be trouble. No, not even in the winter.
"Range anxiety" means not knowing whether you have enough juice to complete your trip. This has been a problem for a century-plus before (modern) EVs existed, b/c ICE drivers suffer from it, too. I remember many car trips where the driver was trying to estimate how much gas was still in there when the fuel gauge had dropped below "empty." I mean, what was "empty," wink wink, and what was actually empty?
I am not going to give you the "relax, Da Gummint will take care of it" argument, because I don't remotely believe it. Musk, I basically trust. The Biden Admin (or, honestly, whatever follows it) I don't.
Any thoughts, Rich?
No?
"Yeah, I didn't think so. Therefore getting at that lithium to make more batteries for the EVs, will require us to build and use a whole hella lot of CO2-spewing infrastructure."
What the enviros don't seem to grasp is that it takes a hell of a lot of fossil fuels to manufacture green...........stuff.
Michelle Dulak Thomson said...
"Range anxiety" means not knowing whether you have enough juice to complete your trip. This has been a problem for a century-plus before (modern) EVs existed, b/c ICE drivers suffer from it, too. I remember many car trips where the driver was trying to estimate how much gas was still in there when the fuel gauge had dropped below "empty." I mean, what was "empty," wink wink, and what was actually empty?
*****************
That's a disingenous argument. How many people really run out of gas? Unless you live in a really isolated paprt of America, every city and town has a gas station within driving distance.
Not even 1% of this country has anything close of that for EV charging stations. And of course, with scarcity comes the problem of high demand. Jennifer Whatserhname discovered that for herself, getting flunkies to hold a space so she could jump the queue.
And btw, when you travel by car out in the West you'll find gas stations strategically placed on desert highways so as to be a welcome oasis for cars needing refueling.
How will desert EV stations be hooked up to far away electrical grids?
And, what about places with really cold winters? Even if you get your EV started, you lose about 12-15% of range, while charging times can treble.
As others have said, Fundamental Transformation in FUN!
Can the U.S. Make Solar Panels?
Answer: yes.
Next question: can the firms led by people with sufficient political clout and connections to snag one of those grants actually succeed in building solar panels thar are affordable and efficient?
Answer is an exercise left to the reader.
Dear Tesla owners: How long does it take a Supercharger to recharge your car for a 200 mile leg? An hour? So a Supercharger could serve 24 customers in a day? With say 5 charge points (and time between cars) the facility could serve 100-110 customers a day. (Some would be stuck waiting until 2-3-4 AM but them’s the breaks.) During “prime time” (7 AM to 9 PM) the facility could serve about 75 cars.
And there won’t be a competing charge station nearby —as is true on almost street corner in America for ICE vehicles.
I can’t wait to see the Tesla rallies in the hinterland. The queues will be monumental. In bad weather, shivering in a snowstorm at midnight, heater off and still needing a push to reach the charge point as your turn is called. Green Utopia!
Remember the Mad Max movie where all the vehicles were pieces of various cars and trucks put together to make a automobile that would run. And there was a major shortage of oil and gas. That's where we are heading right now. All because of the government interference and the global warming/cooling scams. People will be scouring old rural fields and junkyards to buy old ICE vehicles and then rebuild them into something that works. The old shade-tree mechanics that can rebuild a motor in their garage will be in hot demand. As will welders. Now that's a trade to learn if you want to make big money in the future.
"But nobody is entirely sure whether these investments will be durable"
I do. The answer is no. If yes, private investment via existing corporations and banks would do it. It is only happening to get the billions of government money.
"But nobody is entirely sure whether these investments will be durable"
They are not investments. They are taxpayer funded graft. Since they are taxpayer funded there is no incentive to succeed. The money will go into the pockets of donors and friend of the politicians who voted for this and then the compaies-so called- will go bankrupt.
So no. They are not investments and they will not be durable. Failure is built into the equation.
Owen,
I can speak only for my husband and myself, but we have our own charger at home, so the car starts out fully charged. In our experience we can get to Newport and back without recharging at all, and that's the longest semi-regular trip we take. (My husband takes the car to Portland quite often -- a couple dozen times a year -- but that is absolutely easy for the Tesla.) Outside of maybe 1-3 road trips yearly, therefore, there is nothing to worry about. Hubby had, for some years, a summer gig in Estes Park, CO, one requiring (e.g.) a recharge in Rawlins, WY. Never any trouble there either.
The one time I do remember trouble getting accommodated at a supercharger was when we ran right into a sort of convoy of other Tesla drivers going to a confab in (IIRC) Albuquerque following the same supercharger route. That was inconvenient, to be sure. But rare. And some of them had come down from British Columbia, which means that cold weather is no absolute barrier.
Agree about the ubiquity of gas stations -- now. But always? How many were there 15 years after the introduction of the Model T? Not one on every other street corner, amirite?
Again, I am specifically not saying that this is scalable. It isn't. Even Tesla, despite some very rapid building and a meticulously designed national map that continues expanding, won't have anything more than a small fraction of the market at peak. I'm putting it, generously, at 20%. And all other makers combined are unlikely to break 10%. That's w/o assuming a very rapid expansion of nuclear power, or else some other cheap, non-fossil source of energy (I'm thinking of somehow exploiting the temp differential between surface temperatures and those a few miles down . . .) In the Pacific NW we have a lot of water power still now, though it's essentially all being exploited already. Elsewhere, there are only wind and solar, necessarily intermittent.
"Oligonicella said...
Too early to guess. Recent discovery of large lithium deposit in US."
It's owned by the Chinese. And more than lithium is required to make a battery.
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