Born to lose

The EV market is clearly set up to fail and drag the whole private transport industry with it

Today’s mini essay focuses on battery electric vehicles.

I’m no expert on automotive manufacturing but I’ve always been a “petrol head” who tinkers mechanically with older vehicles.

Herewith my thoughts on what’s happening to BEV mass manufacturing in Europe. I have no insights on what is happening elsewhere such as southwest Asia and USA.

It was written as a response to a video suggesting Mercedes have made “mistakes”.

As in so many areas, contrary to the (engineered) belief of so many the truth is:

Mistakes Were Not Made

We are being driven somewhere. The driver’s seat is not an option for us. We are told.

Best wishes

Mike

The con

I don’t think there is an EV market of any great size. It’s possible that the limited, genuine market needs have already largely been satisfied.

In U.K. at least, virtually all BEV sales are to business customers, not private, because the tax breaks strongly favour this option.

Most company car drivers don’t want an EV but corporate has deemed that EV is their only option. As a result, there’s virtually no used demand and such vehicles go into free fall upon the ending of the lease.

They’re inherently such a poor fit to the normal lives of so many people that this cannot really much change, at least not for decades. Our entire civilisation is based on practical, affordable travel in private vehicles (exceptions: those who live and work inside large cities like London and Paris).

Promises of rapid, revolutionary progress are false. We already know a great deal about the various battery chemistry choices available. Many had their basic electrochemistry evaluated decades ago. Sure, there are designs which tolerate or accept faster charging rates, but these are inherently less stable and thus more likely to catch fire.

Batteries with very low risk of thermal runaway have lower maximum capacities for a given mass and also charge more slowly, as well as providing a lower range, both axiomatically.

The solution space is already known.

There isn’t ever going to be a fire risk (almost) free design, which also provides long range and fast charging capabilities. Those requirements are not simultaneously available in a BEV.

“You cannae change the laws of physics”,

or of chemistry.

Worse, even if fantasy advances in battery technology were to prove feasible, against my understanding from electrochemists working in automotive, the mains electricity grid is irredeemably inadequate to permit fast charging - or indeed charging at all - for a high proportion of car owners.

Even if that wasn’t the unfixable problem that it is, nations in any case are generating far too little electrical power to meet the implied very large increase. U.K. generates something like 15% less electricity now compared with its peak.

If you attempt to substitute even a small fraction of the energy currently met by liquid fuels, the requirements for electrical power generation are enormously greater than our recent numbers and especially our trajectory.

That’s yet another data point that proves they are absolutely aware of how this is all going to play out.

For several reasons, Mr Toyoda, chairman of Toyota, has several times stated that he sees the maximum proportion of cars being BEVs plateauing at around the 20% mark.

Permanently.

I think there’s a genuine use case for some small proportion of the “national fleet” of cars.

U.K. government policy however is set in such a way that, inevitably, the internal combustion car industrial sector in Europe is going to die, in the sense that multiple, huge corporate groups are going to have to enter administration and if they re-emerge, they will have annual unit capacity very much reduced compared with today.

Chinese manufacturers plus Tesla will probably eat the lunch of all the other company’s BEV divisions, because the latter cannot sell enough units at a high enough price point to be able to maintain anything like the capacity they’ve built of late. Volkswagen Audi Group has debts approaching a trillion Euros (I think....it’s the second biggest corporate debt on planet earth, not just in automotive but across all sectors).

The more conspiratorially-minded among us (I’m certainly a pattern recognitionist!) think that the boards of directors of these huge automotive corporations know exactly what they’re doing. It’s naive in my opinion to blame the outcomes on incompetence. Car companies have been around mass production and addressing every need, in balance, while just about remaining profitable, for many decades. If interested people like me, and several others who are close watchers of this important industrial sector, could easily see disasters that are many BEVs, years before they hit the bottom line, it’s wholly implausible that those at the heart of those companies didn’t know it, too.

I think the most likely explanation for the dire straits in which much of European automotive mass manufacturing finds itself is that those running these large groups made it happen.

Now, at least some of you will be incredulous and apt to dismiss even the possibility.

I do understand that response. However, if you knew, as I do, how influential the World Economic Forum is in shaping numerous, important aspects of our lives and that all the major corporations are partners & even sponsors of WEF, visible leaders of The Great Reset, it becomes easier to see some of the steps in the ballet.

Those running these companies are employees. They’re not the owners or persons of significant control. The wealthiest people in the world are engaged in establishing a new world order of digital, totalitarian control.

They don’t want us in BEVs. They don’t want us travelling at all, in the way we have for the last half century and more. If you take another look at the BEV push as less about transitioning to BEVs and more about depriving what they call “the useless eaters” of owning a liquid powered vehicle of any kind, you may find it more plausible that boards have taken their marching orders from WEF associated stakeholders.

Buy at least one, hyper reliable, manual, petrol engined car that was designed at latest in the early years of this century, leaning towards the newest examples of relatively uncomplicated technology, and choosing only from models made in their millions, and you contribute to frustrating that control agenda.

Or, just decide to ignore all the obvious contradictions and keep driving late models on finance.

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