The bloom is officially off the rose when it comes to the electric vehicle (EV) pipe dreams of people like Joe Biden, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). During their third-quarter earnings calls with investors last week, almost every CEO from the big auto companies delivered bleak news to their shareholders. The EV industry is a dog, and they are losing money hand-over-fist. If they don’t turn away from this pipe dream of a fake industry soon, they stand to lose everything.
GM’s Mary Barra is one of the most megalomaniacal CEOs in the entire automaking industry. If you get a couple of glasses of wine in her, she’ll tell you how EVs are going to take over the world. Everyone, according to Mary, will be driving an EV in just a few years and worshiping the way that she has transformed cars with the Chevy Volt, which she’ll claim is the best thing since Henry Ford’s first Model T rolled off the assembly line. “Electric vehicles are SO much better than your stupid gas-powered vehicles” could be Mary Barra’s motto.
Barra, however, was quite a bit humbler last week during her third quarter sales call with investors. She told investors that instead of producing an additional 100,000 Chevy Volts in the next three months, followed by another 400,000 EVs during the first six months of 2024, the production numbers were going to have to be lowered just a tiny bit.
Actually, GM will be producing ZERO Chevy Volts over the next nine months. Not a single one. Dealer lots across the country are already packed with Chevy Volts that are collecting dust and pigeon droppings because anyone who actually wants to buy an EV by this point already has one.
That’s bleak.
Mercedes-Benz has been chopping thousands of dollars off the top of the price for its EVs just to get people to buy them. CFO Harrold Wilheim said on an earnings call, “This is a pretty brutal space. I can hardly imagine the current status quo is fully sustainable for everybody.”
It’s not sustainable for any company!
Rivian, the leading electric pickup truck seller, is losing $33,000 per vehicle. The Ford Motor Company is losing a gob-stopping $70,000 on every electric vehicle it sells. Not even government subsidies can help prop up a failure like that, although Joe Biden is willing to try to do so with your tax dollars. Ford has completely abandoned its plans to build 2 million EVs by 2026.
According to a new report by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, recharging an electric vehicle right now costs the equivalent of paying $17.33 a gallon for gasoline. Read that number a second time and let it sink in. That’s the actual cost of refueling an EV when you add in all the government subsidies that are helping to prop this dead horse of an industry up.
Honda was trying to build an “affordable” electric vehicle in conjunction with GM, but the company pulled out of the deal this month. Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe says it’s simply not possible to make an affordable EV, so it’s abandoning that idea for now.
One person who is not surprised by this industry-wide pullback from electric vehicles is Toyota Motor Chairman Akio Toyoda. The company makes a pretty good hybrid (electric and gas-powered) vehicle, but Mr. Toyoda has seen the writing on the EV wall for a long time.
“People are finally seeing reality,” said Toyoda.
Yes, we are. And we’re laughing at all the fools who thought that they could force these unnecessary changes on the marketplace when people were already happy with their affordable gas-powered cars.
