Electric vehicles, the Goldilocks cars — they work only if not too cold or not too wet.
Electric vehicles, the Goldilocks cars — they work only if not too cold or not too wet.
W e may have hit Peak EV (Electric Vehicle).
Deloitte’s Global Automotive Consumer Study has just found a “rise in U.S. consumer interest in internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and a decline in hybrid and battery electric vehicle (BEV) purchase intent.” Interest in buying fossil-fuel cars rose nine points, to 67 percent, while interest in hybrids fell to 21 percent and in EV’s to 6 percent.
Corporate buyers are also saying “no mas.” Hertz, the largest car-rental company, announced it will sell 20,000 EVs and buy more fossil-fuel cars instead. Axios called it “an abrupt reversal” that came because car repairs for EVs are so much more expensive and the wait time 25 percent longer. Few expect Hertz to now follow through on its pledge to buy 175,000 EVs from GM.
Then, to top it all off, an electric double-decker bus burst into flames in London this month, causing rush-hour chaos and what Britain’s Daily Mail called “an inferno.” It took three fire engines to put out the blaze.
Guy de la Bédoyère, a columnist for the Daily Sceptic, recalls taking the same bus route every day as a kid in the 1960s: “I’ll tell you this for nothing: [The bus] never burst into flames.”
In the Midwest, the problem this month wasn’t the heat of a fire, but a freezing cold snap. Tesla owners all over Chicago reported not being able to charge their cars. Many charging stations were out of order, charging took far longer at working stations, and the need to heat vehicles while waiting to charge was draining their batteries to zero. Brandon Welbourne, a Tesla owner in Chicago, saw ten cars towed away after their batteries gave out in line.
Cold weather causes lithium-ion batteries in any EV model to lose efficiency, because more power is required for driving and heating the cabin and battery.
And extreme weather can also hit EV owners in warmer climes. In the wake of Hurricane Ian in 2022, at least a dozen electric cars caught fire after being exposed to salty floodwaters that caused them to short-circuit.
“Saltwater [from any kind of coastal flooding] is a death sentence for traditional lithium-ion setups, corroding and subsequently short circuiting the battery,” reported the magazine Popular Science.
Whatever the advantages of EVs, it is fair to say these are not all-weather vehicles.
All of this helps explain why the public is resisting enormous governmental and social pressure to buy EVs.
“Although electric vehicles have been promoted by presidents, governors, tax authorities, and tech wizards, sales trends indicate that the American public isn’t listening,” concludes a report by Todd Buchholz, a former director of economic policy under President George H. W. Bush. “Neither policy inducements nor price cuts have been sufficient to overcome the hurdles of physics, consumer inertia, and an unreliable electrical grid.”
Buchholz points out that despite price wars, EV sales rose by just 1.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2023. EVs tend to sit on dealer lots three weeks longer than gasoline-powered cars. Mercedes-Benz admits the market is a “pretty brutal space.” Ford is losing $36,000 on each unit sold and just announced it will shut down one of two production shifts for its electric pickup. Volkswagen has called it quits on a plan to build a new battery plant.
And then there is the anxiety over charging. J. D. Power reports that 21 percent of public chargers do not work at any given time. Los Angeles County has more public electric fast chargers than anywhere in the country. The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern visited 30 locations in Los Angeles and ran into problems at 40 percent of them.
The states with the richest subsidies for EV buyers — California, Illinois, and New Jersey — have growing budget deficits. How long can these states keep the money spigot open?
Toyota, the one carmaker that has focused on popular hybrids while still selling gas cars, has seen its stock price outperform GM (which promised to stop making gas cars by 2035) by 40 percent this past year. Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda says people are “finally seeing reality.”
That reality includes a key fact that makes EVs potentially unreliable: America’s faulty electrical grid. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that the average duration of blackouts doubled between 2013 and 2021, from 3.5 hours to more than seven hours, while their frequency jumped by nearly 20 percent. Who wants to wake up some morning and discover a blackout has rendered his car a useless lump of metal?
Nonetheless, the Biden administration continues to pour subsidies into the EV fiscal black hole. It’s both foolish policy and incompetent execution — the Biden budget has allocated $7.5 billion to spend on EV chargers, but not a single one was built in 2023.
Buchholz says the federal government needs to stop shoving consumers into EVs. He quotes President Eisenhower, who once said, “You don’t lead by hitting people over the head: That’s assault, not leadership.”
When it comes to EVs, President Biden is also hitting his own head against a consumer wall and expecting different results.