Buyer interest in new electric cars has slumped by nearly two-thirds since the start of last year, new figures released this morning suggest, but Government is full of ideas to push the unwanted products on an unconvinced public. The Mail has the story.
Online vehicle marketplace Auto Trader said it recorded a 65% drop in inquiries for electric cars last month compared with January 2022.
The company’s Road to 2030 report blamed the decline in demand for electric vehicles (EV) on a multitude of factors, including their premium price tags, the cost-of-living crisis, higher interest rates for borrowing and increase in energy prices.
The report follows Elon Musk’s suggestion that he will slash the price of Teslas in the U.S. for a staggering sixth time this year in a bid to rejuvenate demand for the company’s battery vehicles.
The price of Model Y vehicles is to be cut by £2,400 to around £37,743, and the Model 3 vehicle by £1,600 to £32,100.
After a series of cuts, the models are a respective 29% and 15% cheaper in the U.S., its largest market, than at the start of the year.
In response, shares dropped 4% in New York during after-hours trading, adding to its 18% decline in the past six months.
Tesla has already slashed U.K. prices of its new cars various times in the UK in 2023, which in turn has hammered the value of second-hand models in recent months.
Auto Trader’s report published on Thursday said the new EV market is being hampered by a lack of affordable choices, with very few models available priced between £20,000 and £30,000.
The analysis also stated that new EVs are an average of 37% more expensive than petrol and diesel cars. …
The RAC says that many motorists are being priced out of EV ownership, which is resulting in them keeping their older – more polluting – petrol and diesel cars longer.
By doing so, it threatens the Government’s targets to cut air pollution levels in the coming years before the ban on sales of new petrol and diesel cars in 2030.
Ministers are currently consulting with industry about the introduction of a Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate from next year, which will require manufacturers to sell an increasing share of electric cars annually in the run up to the ban on sales of all new motors with internal combustion engines.
From 2024, it has outlined that 22% of all sales by each mainstream car maker must be zero emissions at the tailpipe, and by 2030 this sales share will need to rise to 80%.
Failure to meet these objectives would land manufacturers with fines of up to £15,000 per vehicle over the targets set out in the mandate.
The Government hopes that by introducing penalties it will force the hand of vehicle makers to bring more affordable cars to market that more drivers can afford.
Net Zero really is an anti-capitalist’s and statist’s dream, with never-ending cause for heavy-handed Government intervention and regulation to force people to do the ‘virtuous’ thing over the thing they want to do and that is most convenient and affordable for them. Pure coincidence I’m sure. The only downside of course is more people not being able to afford to buy and do stuff – so, er, increased poverty, in other words.
Worth reading in full.
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First thoughts?
An impressive article with much to commend. It ends prophetically:
“Organised transgression is all that is left.”
Too damn right. A massive, massive clear out.
Drain the swamp.
An interesting article, nicely rounded-off with a tribute to altruistic anarchists who have been literally hacking away at those who would impose their views on others.
The elevation of a fictitious, non-sentient grouping above sentient individuals tends to the detriment of all. I realised this in my short-lived marriage many years ago. My wife and I had plans for the future and the marriage became a project – a project to serve. As we drifted apart, it seemed that we had to protect the marriage. But the marriage was not a sentient being. It experienced no benefit from our servitude. Yet two people were becoming miserable through supporting it. The answer was simple – separate and become individually happy.
Now translate this to the fealty that the people in a country seem to have for a non-sentient government and all the top-down institutions it spawns. The people become miserable serving that which oppresses them. The solution is the same as with my marriage – separation.
Then the onus is on us as individuals to follow our moral compass, to live ethically, cause no harm and, if so motivated, be a net contributor to the welfare of others. That makes our lives meaningful and happy.
Interesting but for my taste over elaborated.
The most aggressive, the most likely to resort to violence end up getting their way over the more permissive, those most willing to compromise. To me it’s that simple. The most aggressive wins.
The woke, the climate zealots, the pathological collectivists are not feeling any push back. Those of us who just want to be left alone to lead our lives as we wish are constantly feeling the sharp end of their demands, their judgments and their aggressive ideas.
Personally I’m fed up and have now made it a point that anyone who defends these impositions has an uncomfortable experience and senses anger. Seething anger. Verbally for now.
These people won’t stop until they start feeling some heat. Personally. For their moronic, destructive ideas. They need to feel push back on a personal level. Urgently.
For know it’s verbal.
Very good comment. The loudest voices are the ones that get heard. You see this in particular on the issue of the environment which has been hijacked by climate activist politicians pandering to UN agenda’s rather than to their own citizens and the army of useful idiots gluing themselves to roads and buildings. You are unlikely to see placards with “JUST START OIL” on them. Because the people who know climate change is an eco socialist scam don’t shout it from the top of bridges or as they chuck paint about in art galleries.
Reminds me of when I was at university in the early 80s. ‘Nuclear power, no thanks’ stickers proliferated. I had a set of stickers which said things like ‘Stone age, no thanks – atoms for energy’. But the problem, always, was where to stick them as they were sure to attract violent reprisals.
I never miss an opportunity to say to people, “but we need MORE carbon, not less – otherwise all the plants die.” Always met with baffled silence because they don’t understand primary school science, they just repeat the brainwashing.
Solzhenitsyn recognised that violence is a crude way for a political regime to implement its agenda and maintain control over a population. Such a strategy not only needs massive resources to police people’s conduct, but explicit in its use of brute force, it also risks provoking widespread hatred and massive resistance. To the extent that narratives are central to how a regime furthers its agenda and interferes in our lives, the most productive form of resistance to that regime is to undermine the influence of its narratives within ourselves.
I knew people could sleepwalk. But I never knew a whole continent could. Europe is sleepwalking to multi cultural disaster. The only type of politician to be trusted on this is the Polish guy I saw on GB news about 4 days ago (Dominic Tarczynski) who insisted he would have a zero tolerance approach to illegal immigration and that “not one” migrant would enter Poland illegally. I always hear squirming liberal progressives ask “what is wrong with mass immigration” and my immediate reply is to tell them to look at Sweden where it is against the law to criticise immigration or immigration policy and you could face jail for pointing out eg that sex offences and rapes committed by immigrants are at a rate 20 times higher than that of indigenous Swedes. ——–International treaties coming from the UN etc where 3 quarters of the countries are either ruled by Kings, Colonels, Dictators and assorted tyrants are dictating to supposed democracies on how they run their countries. How long before this “transgression” by the people occurs? Will we have to be a country of 100 million with a ring road around the Orkneys before people wake up?
We have Magna Carta, Bill of Rights 1689 — But even it the UN document itself is Article 33 on UN Territorial Waters Maritime Law. We have a right to remove any illegal invaders.
But maybe the right to remove “illegal invaders” is trumped by the right to seek asylum. But even if it isn’t there is no political will from our UN lackey Politicians who are all sucking up to the one world government agenda that wants to destroy national identity and culture so we all just feel like citizens of the world and are easier to govern by the bunch of pretend to save the planet technocrats that no one will ever be able to vote out.
Don’t forget Viktor Orban in Hungary. The first European Leader to dig his heels in!
It is not just Britain that faces the loss of liberal individualism; it is the entire direction of global governance. Best seen are the commitments our country – and others – have made by signing up to UN Agenda 2030, which will eliminate air travel except for the wealthy, meat eating except for the wealthy, motoring except for the wealthy, as well as a range of behavioural requirements to ensure that, in the common good, we act sustainably. The poster child for this is the WEF, which encourages the participation of business in state directed activities, effectively embedding at best oligopolistic practices that are established to protect the interests of the participants. A UK focus alone does not expose these global movements and issues, as the UK – largely due to its massive debt – seems now to be under the ideological control of the globalists.
As well as Net 0 Agenda21/30 we have the UK FIRES Report that seems to be a UK wide
subsidiary of AG2030. These draconian measures, that Sunak now ‘won’t’ be enforcing, apparently never existed.
Spot the difference between this:
‘To Blair and his circle, then, the individual did not precede society – as Hobbes and Locke had it. People are born into an existing social compact and have obligations towards it that they do not necessarily choose…..This is an anti-liberal idea: it formally dispenses with the individual citizen as the primary political unit, and denies the rights of voting majorities – a basic premise of liberal democracy.’ (Above article)
and this:
‘In the Fascist conception of history, man is man only by virtue of the spiritual process to which he contributes as a member of the family, the social group, the nation……Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State’
(“The Doctrine of Fascism” (1932) by Benito Mussolini)
You are correct. There is no difference.
Blair’s Britain is a socialist fascist state and the conservative party, to its eternal shame, is complicit in this state of affairs, indeed has compounded it since 2010 and, particularly, since 2020.
The big mistake of the socialist fascist mayor of London is to have given the many discontented but disparate individuals in London a ‘sitting duck’ target in the shape of ulez cameras.
Transgression has, consequently, swiftly become organised.
But the vast majority of conservative politicians are far too dim, expedient, narcissistic, to tap into the zeitgeist; evidence that turkeys really do vote for Christmas
They are gambling on the population being submissive and too comfortable to rebel in any meaningful way. It put up with covid brutality after all.
They just need to appear to be marginally better than the Team B. Because those are your only 2 choices. Team A or Team B.
I think also they are waiting for the Online “Harms” Bill to come in, Trusted News to chock out real journalists like Assange (or Brand)! and the long awaited CBDCs. I also see clashes with the JSO World Oder useful idiots, and the freedom fighters who just want to pass on their wealth to their kids.
Excellent!
There’s a very important difference: The New Labour concept is based on communities transcending nations, ie, races, sexes, genders, world religions, generations and ultimatively the planet as supercommunitiy everybody belongs to and whose well-being, or rather, what’s assumed to further its well-being, trumping all other concerns. In contrast to this, the fascist concept ends with the nation as manifested in form of the nation state coexisting and – that’s very important – contraexisting, that is competing, with other nation states for the finite amounts of resources of the world.
Aside: Is there a reason why ultimatively communist/ Marxist ideas like that of a scientifically correct global/world order which is obviously underlying the New Labour ideology are never ascribed to communism but always to communism’s most dedicated enemies, namely, the fascists, and could this reason perhaps be a secret yearning for a return of the (neo-)bolshevist domination of eastern middle Europe as it was the The World™ was still properly ordered, ie, before 1990?
Fascism is totalitarian socialism.
‘The Fascist State organizes the nation, but it leaves the individual adequate elbow room. It has curtailed useless or harmful liberties while preserving those which are essential. In such matters the individual cannot be the judge, but the State only.’ Mussolini
Blairism is totalitarian socialism:
‘“Labour must replace competing existing structures with a single chain of command leading directly to the leader of the party.” Philip Gould
Totalitarian socialism is socialist fascism.
‘Never before have the peoples thirsted for authority, direction, order, as they do now. If each age has its doctrine, then innumerable symptoms indicate that the doctrine of our age is the Fascist.’ Mussolini
Blair’s Britain is a socialist fascist state.
‘New Labour has been characterised by two rhetorical moves found in this utterance.
First socialism is equated primarily with moral values, not policies or socio-economic arrangements.
Next the relevant values are held up as the enduring core of socialism so defined.’
(NEW LABOUR: A STUDY IN IDEOLOGY, Mark Bevir)
‘….many of the practical expressions of Fascism such as party organization, system of education, and discipline can only be understood when considered in relation to its general attitude toward life.
A spiritual attitude.’
‘Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State,’ (Mussolini)
‘“The ethical basis of socialism is the only one that has stood the test of time,” (T. Blair)
As I wrote here for upteempth times already: Socialism is a German term from the 19th century and it refers to forming societies, ie clubs, for the improvement of the living conditions of working class people. For example, their used to be something Christian socialism. The German socialist would eventually adopt what you don’t want to call out, namely, Marxism, at least pro forma, as ideology and national socialism called itself socialism because, it, too, wanted to address justified issues of the working class in a capitalist economy with the intent of winning back working class support for the central fascist entity, namely, the nation manifesting itself in form the nation state.
In contrast to this, Blairism (whatever) has no concept of nations/ peoples or nation states. It’s inherently globalist. You’d be able to make a better argument against it when all you so-called argueing wouldn’t be limited to pretty verbose variants of Don’t like it? Just call it fascism, that’ll work!
Socialism is, quite simply, a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that all means of production, distribution and exchange are owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
Mussolini, the inventor of fascism, claims that fascism is the ‘resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so called scientific and Marxian socialism’.
But what he means by that is that he ‘denies that the class struggle is the preponderating agent in social transformations’, he denies that ‘changes in the processes and instruments of production…..suffice to explain human history to the exclusion of other factors.’
In reality, of course, fascism became national socialism, that is, a nationalist form of totalitarian socialism.
What we witnessed in this country 2020-2022 was very much socialist fascism, red in tooth and claw:
‘Never before have the peoples thirsted for authority, direction, order, as they do now.’
A clear manifestation of totalitarian socialism enabled by Blair and expounded, enacted, by Bunter, the well named Hancock, the Gumby Brothers and all the other egregious creatures of the night that reared their ugly heads during that period; astonishingly few dissenters, to the eternal shame of parliament and the parliamentarians, functionaries, of that period.
One parallel that 19th century Britain had with the ancient Roman world was the common tendency to form associations.
In the Roman world, just as in Victorian Britain, there were free associations for every sort of business and social activity. Only the special products of the 19th century, natural science and social science, were absent.
None of the members of these Roman clubs or the Victorian societies were born into them. If they were Roman trade or dramatic guilds, a person joined by the choice of following that calling. Similarly for the friendly societies, the dining and debating clubs, and the literary and financial societies.
Being private associations, the emperors were suspicious of them, and they were subject to persecutions. Alexander Severus was the first emperor to see in these clubs a conservative rather than a revolutionary force.
Great article. Gave me lots to think about and I’ll have to mull it all over for a while. I really hate the modern Tory Party!
As ever, the state ruins everything. Individualism in the old days meant freedom to invent. Britain was once full of maverick individuals who triggered the likes of the Industrial Revolution. (The way things are going, a maverick trying out a new invention in his garage would get a visit from his power company and ordered to stop or have his smart meter reprogrammed!) Not so long ago, individuals would come together to be part of their community, but it was a voluntary basis. Different people attended different denominational churches, for example. Then along comes the leftist battering ram. The Church has been shattered and we’re told we belong to new ‘churches’ forced upon us based on ‘identities’ given to us and thus the state forces us to ‘attend’.
Some years ago, I got into an argument with a pair of leftist media types, who started on all this communitarian crap. I responded by saying that I don’t have any ‘civic duties’ – I don’t owe the state anything because I happened to be born here: I do things voluntarily (in fact my loyalty is to the Land, in the natural law sense, not any political structure – emphatically, I’m talking philosophically, not about eco-lunacy. And I believe in a health service where the state gets you to hospital after an accident and makes sure you stay alive and what happens next is worked out with your insurance company. One of them told me he wanted headbutt my teeth in. They both claimed Tony Blair was ‘right wing’, Jeremy Corbyn would be PM at the next election, and that we don’t have a corporatist society, but an evil capitalist one. My comment that we have a mixed economy that it’s far more socialist than capitalist got me shouted at. I ended up backing down, because this was all at a friend’s party! The one who wanted to smash my teeth in nevertheless stormed out of the party and went home because he refused to be in the same room as me. I had never raised my voice once!
Their biggest complaint was about my remark that if I give money to a charity (small and local always) I do it because it pleases me to and not because I feel a moral obligation to do it. I realised at this point I was having a conversation from Atlas Shrugged: Hank Reardon and his brother had the same argument – Hank volunteered to give a load of money to his brother’s charity, but his brother didn’t want the money, because he wanted Hank to be ashamed of his self-made wealth and feel morally obliged to give away his money, rather than just be benevolent! I run myself as a limited company (they were both PAYE staff working for corporations) and they thought I was a spiv stealing money from the state. Running your own business is actually damn hard, especially when you want to be honest.
All this can be brutally (over-)simplified: you go out with a friend is feeling depressed and you buy him a few drinks. That’s a benevolent thing to do and you want to help your friend feel better. In the the new era, the state tells you who your friends are, where you must take them and how much of your income you must spend on them. That’s just more state totalitarianism.
Good article and good comments.
I could have done without the shout-out to the tyrant Cromwell though. The descendants of the Puritans are very much in charge already, although now its not God, but climate, gender and covid. We need a Pinochet, not Cromwell, followed by a neo-Jeffersonian settlement.
The transgression does not need to be organised. This is the point. It is a natural reaction to the tyranny. Humans do not need systems imposed on them. Their actions are naturally determined by survival – financial or otherwise – and form a ‘system’ (if it has to be labelled). Politics, laws, the monetary system, movements & psychology, class, race and gender labeling are all layers of tyranny. Free will so long as it doesn’t harm another human (aka conscience). As the slave says ‘You cannot give back to me what was never yours to take away’.
“We are obliged to impoverish ourselves”. “OK, you first.”