The EV Bubble: It's Over

This blog has expressed great concern about electric vehicles from the time they went from niche to "mainstream." And, while quite a bit of mud has been slung at me for that position (especially from a person at Yale University who shall remain nameless), it was richly validated last week.

As Jo Nova writes,

It’s rare in life to watch a bubble unravel so fast around us

In the middle of 2023 American car sales yards started to fill with EV’s that weren’t selling. Then the repair costs startedaccumulating and EV’s were becoming hard to insure, the second hand sales value fell. Then came the spectacular Luton Airport fire where 1,200 cars were cremated and an airport terminal collapsed. By late October the quarterly reports and the terrible earnings were piling up. VW orders were down 50%, Ford was losing $38,000 on every car. In early November one of the largest rental car companies in the world announced they were selling a third of their EV fleet because EV’s cost more to repair and customers didn’t want to rent them anyway. And that was before Americans found out that EV’s can’t be changed if the temperature gets below zero, and cars were stuck for days in a cold snap in Chicago.

The bubble was inflated with Big Government money. Despite all these failures and the obvious news that EV’s are not yet, and may never be, cheap and convenient, many governments still want to force people to buy them in the hope of slowing the storms in 2100.

The cherry on the sundae was Apple's announcement that it has abandoned its ten-year problem to build an electric vehicle. 

Given America does not have enough electricity in the right places at the right time -- and that, thanks to solar and (especially) wind -- the electricity we have is less reliable. The evidence I have seen indicates that more coal would have to be burned to meet the electrical demand. 

One good thing about the decline of EV's is that there may be fewer children put into slavery to man the lithium and other rare earth mines.