Anyone who’s booked in a rental car in the U.S. in the last year or so might have spotted offers on electric vehicles (EVs). They might also have spotted the lack of charging facilities, especially in the western states outside cities. An EV with a flat battery is useless at the best of times but it’s a lot more useless in the middle of Nebraska than downtown Denver, just as it would be in the middle of Scotland or Dartmoor compared to Islington.
It seems the rental companies are going into reverse. Hertz has just announced it’s going to take a $245 million hit on 20,000 EVs it’s bought. The bottom line is that too few people want to rent them. Ross Clark in the Telegraph has the story.
The company in the U.S. is disposing of the 20,000 EVs it bought with great fanfare in recent years, and is replacing them with petrol models. Some of the Teslas, which are no more than two years old, have been listed for sale at $14,000 – little more than a third of their $40,000 price tag when new. The company says it will take a loss of $245 million but it seems to have little choice given the lack of demand from customers and the vehicles’ higher repair costs.
The implications over here are obvious. If fleets, which so far sales have depended on, are moving away from EVs, then…
It is all coming at a terrible time for the Government and the car industry in Britain. Since January 1st, when the Zero Emission Vehicle mandate came into effect, car manufacturers have been under an obligation to ensure that 22% of the vehicles they sell are pure electric (a proportion which will rise steadily by 80% by 2030). If they fail, they could be liable for huge fines.
Yet as is becoming increasingly clear in so many areas, the Government’s Net Zero ambitions are running well ahead of public appetite. People might tell opinion pollsters that they are all square behind Net Zero policies, but it is a different story when it comes to signing on the dotted line for a new EV or a heat pump (neither of which, by the way, will really get the country anywhere close to Net Zero emissions, even with universal take-up, because their manufacture involves significant carbon emissions, as generation of electricity still does).
Ross Clark though is happy to contemplate the day when EVs are fit for purpose. Until then:
Like everything to do with Net Zero, electric cars are being pushed at us too hard and too fast. One day, they may very well become ubiquitous, but as the Hertz experience shows, they are not yet even nearly ready.
Just like almost everything else being pushed on us for this unholy dash into a world we simply aren’t prepared for and for which the technology is woefully underdeveloped.
Sallust is a pseudonym.
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Chickens coming home to roost. Anyone with half a brain could see this coming from beyond the range of an EV.
No doubt they’ll soon claw it back, unless there are competitors that are immune to such losses.
These people at the top of massive organisations like Hertz, making such obviously stupid decisions (to buy loads of BEVs) are, in the main, stupid. The product of disastrously bad “education” systems. They aren’t even able to start thinking, never mind make sound decisions.
Then there are others at the top who are corrupt. But they’re in the minority.
Climate change on trial
Mann v Steyn in four days
I thought that was decided long ago when Steve McIntyre showed it to be statistically flawed. It was dropped from IPCC reports. So is this some trial pertaining to slander or some other issue? Because the Hockey Stick does not represent what it purports to do, ie show the global temperature (whatever that is supposed to be) of the last thousand years with a surge upwards in the 20th century.
Mann loves litigating against anyone who disagrees with him. No doubt he thinks that there’s a good chance a judge that’s fully signed up to AGW bollocks will find in his favour.
But in his favour regarding what? —-The Hockey Stick is a dead duck fraud.
Off Topic—Article about masking up by P. Hitchens in Wednesday’s D Mail. As a protest gesture against masking when they were mandatory, he bought a Polish Army surplus gas mask with filter. Hideously scary thing! Twenty quid from eBay. Just ordered one as a precautionary measure in case masking’s reintroduced here in sunny Spain. If you want something off the plot scary, the same firm does a Russian surplus number a la ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’. An excellent Shane Meadows film.
Meanwhile Rishi the robbing hoodie, and his band of merrie faux conservatives are doubling down on their ICE and Gas Boiler taxes. Robbing the masses to line the pockets of the elites whilst concreting over Sherwood Forest to build social housing for illegals.
If memory serves me right both Vaillant and Worcester Bosch put their prices of gas boilers up by £100 in the new year to cover fines imposed for not being able to sell enough heat pumps and fulfil their government quotas.
Soon we’ll have fines for malresponse to advertising, ie as the manufacturers are forced to push the advertising for these products, our not responding will be regarded as terrorism against humanity.
Sammy Davis Sunak. —–or actually I prefer Norman Wisdom.
As the Chuckle Brothers were fond of saying’ ‘oh dear, oh dear’.
“One day, they may very well become ubiquitous, but as the Hertz experience shows, they are not yet even nearly ready.”
It’ll never happen and they know it. There are not enough precious metals on Earth and the ones available are mostly controlled by the Chinese and mined by children.
This ‘rush to net zero’ has nothing to do with the environment or the health of the planet and everything to do with downsizing the hoi polloi into manageable bitesize drones.
Excellent news, the sooner governments twig that EVs aren’t wanted by the masses the better.
A person tried to argue with me that because I had never driven an electric car I should not have an opinion on them. ——–I was not arguing about electric cars though. I was arguing about government policy that wants to coerce me into one.