Demand for electric cars has dried up and it’s time for a rethink, says billionaire founder and Chairman of chemicals giant INEOS, Sir Jim Ratcliffe. Writing in the Telegraph, he says the “notion of a quick transition away from petrol was always barmy”. Here’s an excerpt.
The electric car is not popular today. The early adopters have all bought theirs so now the car giants are having to persuade ‘normal punters’ of the merits of going electric. And they are having none of it.
There is a rather fundamental drawback with the electric car. It simply doesn’t do what you want a car to do. It doesn’t get you from A to B reliably if you are on a long journey. And you have no idea whether you will be able to fill it up. Put it together and it’s referred to as ‘range anxiety’. And it’s very real.
Electric is fine and dandy for the short local journey, but should you decide to head off for the hills, forget it. And hence demand has dried up. Tesla is making 14,000 workers redundant. In March, German sales of electric cars collapsed by 30%. You can’t give a second-hand electric car away in the U.K.
Politicians have been dreaming of vote-winning green agendas and utopian engineering and energy switches. Dreams of course, don’t need to be real. They don’t need to accommodate the needs of the consumer, the practicalities of installing colossal new infrastructure and the small matter of where all this electricity is coming from. Coal?
Flipping transportation from fossil fuels directly to electric is not like flipping a light switch. The very notion is barmy, which is why the USA predicts electric car take up by 2050 in the USA will only be 20%. In Europe, our idealists are heading towards 100%.
Ratcliffe outlines his preferred transitional design of an electric vehicle with range extender (REX): “You can charge it in the normal manner. However, tucked away under the bonnet is a small engine and a generator. The engine powers the generator, when requested, which in turn charges the battery. The engine is not connected to the pedal, so is simple, efficient and reliable.”
“Why would you ever buy a fully electric car when you have this option of an electric vehicle with a range extender and complete absence of range anxiety?” he asks.
Worth reading in full.
In the same newspaper, Matthew Lynn says “the electric car carnage has only just begun”: “Ford has just confirmed what has long been feared: that the latest quotas are punitive for U.K. consumers and a gift to China.”
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The demand for racism seems to be far exceeding the supply.
Grifters are gonna grift.
If anyone tells you that you are a victim, its usually because they want to control you…
True. But I should like to add an important qualification. The doctrines touted by the Andrews of this world are not “anti-racist” at all; they are in fact expressions (witting or unwitting) of racial hatred, and of the most hateful kind, laying the blame for the world’s ills upon one people and one ethnicity alone; and, as a result, demanding rafts of coercive policy against that people, policy effectively cast as some variety of justified revenge. No end to these coercions and discriminations is offered. Worst of all they rest on skewed, partial, dishonest history (witness that abominable little woman so recently exposed for pretending that some invention was “stolen from slaves”) and notions of inherited, collective guilt – notions which can be found at the heart of extremist movements throughout history and across the world. I am delighted that at least some of the purveyors of this poisonous nonsense have been laid off; let the rest of them follow.
Time to see if Hard Lines is on duty….Maybe you’re aware of the recent episode in London where a black woman was caught shoplifting and it all kicked off because she said the store owner assaulted her. Lo and behold the local black community are pulling out their racist victim cards and calling ‘white supremacy’, the laugh being that the shop owner was Asian, but don’t let that stop you being a black racist! The second laugh, take a look at the video in the comments section showing store footage of what actually went down and who the violent culprit really is. The woman’s proper psycho but because she’s black she gets a free pass??
https://twitter.com/BFirstParty/status/1701913748707918120
If you scroll down you can see how it all started. He’s trying to stop her leaving with stuff she hasn’t paid for. Then he’s restraining her while someone rings the police but she’s fighting him the whole time. Was he meant to just let her leave with her swag, like they’re doing in the US? Who do you think is at fault? Apparently she was arrested for shoplifting in the end but I’ve a feeling his business is done for.
https://twitter.com/Dhrubtim/status/1701641089059328136
Nothing is doing quite as much to assist social breakdown as the Police’s reluctance to police petty crimes. If you don’t crack down on petty crime, you open up decriminalisation of a broad range of offences against the person and property, which is largely what has happened over the last 10 years.
It’s the sense of entitlement and justification for their crimes, whether it be crimes such as stealing or, at the other end of the spectrum, murder. It could be the ”kill de boer” over in S. Africa, where black people are targeting white farmers to torture and butcher or it could be this example, in the US. Horrific murder caught on camera. The DM covered it and the article is linked in the comments section. Would they have done this had the cyclist have been black?? But they’ll find some way of justifying it, right? But only they get to cry ”racism’!”
https://twitter.com/RadioGenoa/status/1702964440486842766
The police are too busy cracking down on very petty (non)crime such as comments about lesbian nana’s. The same police force no longer investigates shop lifting if the goods stolen are worth less than £250. Then there’s the all the thought crime to investigate such as taking a picture of a poster with a sticker on it. Everybody above the rank of sergeant needs to be sacked so we can start again with constables who want to do their job and keep their communities safe.