In September, thousands pagers and walkie-talkies held by members of Hezbollah exploded. The incident appears to have been the result of explosives hidden within the batteries of the devices by Israel’s intelligence service, Mossad, and the Israeli military, then triggered remotely.
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Automakers have continued to backpedal on electric vehicle (EV) targets over the last year as a slackening of consumer demand has hampered growth despite the billions in subsidies lavished on the industry by the Biden-Harris administration.
A wide array of auto manufacturers have abandoned key EV goals since February, with Volvo, Ford and Mercedes-Benz all dialing back electric quotas or dropping previously planned product lines. The shifts in corporate strategy suggest the EV transition — once touted by auto executives like Ford CEO Jim Farley as the industry’s future — may not be as feasible as once thought due to consumer aversion to lower mileage ranges, a lack of charging infrastructure and higher prices, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Though the Biden administration’s emissions standards – often referred to as an electric vehicle mandate – don’t kick into 2032, the policy is already running into problems with charging station availability, declining consumer interest and automakers losing billions of dollars on their EV sales.
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The word charade has several meanings, and including an act or event that is clearly false (Cambridge Dictionary), something done just for show (Vocabulary.com), or a situation in which people pretend that something is true when it clearly is not (Oxford Leaner’s Dictionary).
The charade I refers to is President Biden’s $7.5 billion dollar investment to install 500,000 electric charging stations along America’s highways by 2030. A reliable and convenient public EV charging infrastructure is critical to achieve the President’s goal of meeting the recent EPA CO2 emission regulation that require nearly 72 percent of U.S. new light vehicle sales to be fully electric or plug-in hybrid by 2032. Without diving deeper into the announcement, one would likely assume that $7.5 billion is sufficient to construct the 500,000 charging stations, one every 50 miles along the nation’s highways.
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Nearly half of American electric vehicle (EV) owners want to buy an internal combustion engine model the next time they buy a car, according to a new study from McKinsey and Company, a leading consulting firm.
Approximately 46 percent of Americans who own an EV want to go back to a standard vehicle for their next purchase, citing issues like inadequate charging infrastructure and affordability, according to McKinsey’s study, which was obtained and reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The study’s findings further suggest that the Biden administration’s EV push is struggling to land with American consumers, after 46 percent of respondents indicated that they are unlikely or very unlikely to purchase an EV in a June poll conducted by The Associated Press and the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute.
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An electric vehicle (EV) producer that was once a splashy start-up company has filed for bankruptcy.
Fisker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Tuesday after trying and failing to secure more investment to stay afloat, the company announced. The company once attracted robust interest and hype, marketing itself as the Apple of vehicles, but it struggled to run as a public company and was stuck with thousands of EVs that it did not sell, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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Criminals are increasingly stealing cables from electric vehicle (EV) charging stations around the country, according to The Associated Press.
In a growing trend, thieves are targeting EV chargers to cut off their cables and take the valuable copper contained inside the wiring, often rendering the vandalized chargers useless until repairs can be made, according to the AP. Especially if they accelerate, the thefts could be another hurdle for the Biden administration’s major EV push, which has struggled to beat back consumers’ concerns about EV range and charger availability.
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President Joe Biden has pledged to install 500,000 public electric vehicle (EV) chargers around the U.S. by 2030, but logistical hurdles may be too much to overcome.
The Biden administration landed $7.5 billion to build out a network of public EV charging stations around the country in the bipartisan infrastructure package of 2021, but those funds have only led to a handful of operational charging stations to date. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg reaffirmed the administration’s goal to build 500,000 chargers with the money by 2030 during a May television appearance on CBS News, but challenges like adding transmission lines, navigating the permitting process and coordinating with utility companies figure to make the goal improbable.
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China’s largest electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer, BYD, announced Tuesday that two of its new hybrid models have ranges that far exceed those of American competitors, The Wall Street Journal reported.
BYD’s chairman Wang Chuanfu claimed at an event in Xian, China, that the company was launching two new hybrid models that could go 2,100 kilometers, or 1,306 miles, on a single tank of gas and a full charge, according to the WSJ. The range is almost double the range of global hybrid competitors, which is around 1,100 km, or 683 miles, at the upper limit, and far exceeds the 700-mile range achieved by America’s longest-driving hybrid in 2023, the Lexus ES 300h.
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Electric vehicle (EV) maker Lucid Motors announced that the company would be laying off staff in a bid to lower expenses amid a slowdown in the market.
The layoffs will affect 6% of its workforce, equating to around 400 employees, and will trim from all employee levels, including leadership and mid-level management, according to a filing submitted Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Lucid is one of several EV makers to announce layoffs in recent months as consumers decline to adopt the product at the rate expected.
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Shareholders at auto manufacturing giant Ford Motor Co. voted down a proposal Thursday requiring that a report be compiled on the use of child labor in its electric vehicle (EV) line.
The proposal, which was presented by the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) at Ford’s annual shareholder meeting, called for Ford to report to shareholders the extent to which the company’s EV supply chain involves, depends or relies on child labor outside of the U.S., according to Ford’s proxy statement. The NCPPR called for the report due to the prevalence of child labor in the harvesting of the components used to craft EVs, particularly cobalt, which is commonly sourced from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
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Top American automaker Ford hemorrhaged over a billion dollars on electric vehicles (EV) in the first quarter, leading to massive losses per vehicle.
Ford sold 10,000 vehicles in its EV Model e unit in the first three months of the year, losing $1.3 billion on the line altogether, equating to a loss of $130,000 per vehicle sold, according to data from the company’s first quarter earnings report. Despite the loss on EVs, Ford’s net income was $1.3 billion, selling over a million vehicles with $42.8 billion in revenue in the quarter.
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Tesla disclosed a shaky earnings report to the public on Tuesday in the latest sign of weakness in the U.S. electric vehicle (EV) market.
The EV maker’s revenue for the first quarter of this year came in nearly 10 percent below its revenue for the first quarter of 2023, marking the largest decline the company has seen since 2012, according to its quarterly report and CNBC. Tesla’s net income also fell by about 55 percent relative to 2023, and the company warned investors that “volume growth rate may be notably lower than the growth rate achieved in 2023.”
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Electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer Rivian announced its second round of layoffs just this year on Wednesday as consumer demand for EVs stalls.
The layoffs at Rivian will affect around 1 percent of the company’s staff as they continue to look for ways to cut costs to bolster struggling profits due to less-than-expected EV sales, the company confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation. Rivian announced in February that it was laying off 10 percent of its workforce after it released its 2024 production forecast, which was well below analyst expectations, according to Reuters.
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Electric vehicle (EV) maker Tesla sent an internal memo notifying staff that the company would be laying off more than 10 percent of its global workforce, Reuters reported Monday.
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The Biden administration’s well-funded push to build out a national network of electric vehicle (EV) chargers has so far resulted in only a handful of installations, according to The Washington Post.
The bipartisan infrastructure bill of 2021 allotted $7.5 billion to subsidize thousands of EV chargers to help the administration’s goal of having EVs constitute 50 percent of all new cars sold in 2030, but only seven stations in total have been built in four states to date, according to the Post. The slow rollout of the EV charger funding is unfolding as the Biden administration has recently issued stringent emissions standards for light-, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles that will result in significant increases of EV sales for all three classes of vehicle.
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The Biden administration unveiled its final tailpipe emissions standards for vehicles Wednesday, effectively requiring about 67 percent of all light-duty vehicles sold after model year 2032 to be electric vehicles (EVs) or hybrids.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) finalized standards rolled back some of the de facto EV production benchmarks for manufacturers proposed initially, but still require automakers to reach the final standards set forth in the agency’s April 2023 proposal. The agency finalized the standards as the American EV market is struggling: demand has not grown as quickly as expected, manufacturers are losing billions on their EV product lines, executives have backed away from near-term production targets and Biden administration subsidy programs to facilitate the creation of a nationwide EV charging network have so far failed to make much of an impact.
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British luxury carmaker Bentley Motors is pushing back its plans to have an all-electric vehicle (EV) offering by 2030, following other top vehicle manufacturers, according to CNBC.
Bentley had originally planned to transition all of its vehicle sales to EVs by 2030 but announced that it would be looking to delay that change by a couple of years, continuing to offer hybrids through that time, CEO Adrian Hallmark said in a media briefing following the company’s fourth quarter results, according to CNBC. General Motors, Ford, Mercedes-Benz and Honda have all backed off of previously made EV goals in the past year as low demand and high costs have stifled the commodity’s profitability compared to traditional vehicles.
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Apple Inc. has reportedly ended its electric car program.
Citing the company’s unnamed sources, Bloomberg reported Tuesday that the announcement surprised the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project.
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In a story that seems to be becoming increasingly common as time goes on, The Western Journal reported this week about a Canadian EV owner experiencing some massive sticker shock over the cost of replacing the damaged battery in his electric vehicle.
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Never before has so much ‘infrastructure’ been funded and so little built.
Unless, that is, you label Pete Buttegieg’s ‘paternity’ leave as ‘human infrastructure.’ Which, by the way, is exactly what the Biden administration did with its trillion dollar infrastructure boondoggle in 2021.
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New Internal Revenue Service (IRS) guidelines for the federal electric vehicle (EV) tax credit are a “recipe for fraud,” warns the head of the Tax Foundation.
Consumers will now be able to automatically claim the tax credit at the point of sale on new or used EV purchases, rather than wait to claim it on their tax return, according to the latest Treasury Department guidance.
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The complete costs of “fueling” an electric vehicle for 10 years are $17.33 per equivalent gallon of gasoline, a new analysis from the Texas Public Policy Foundation says.
The study authors say the $1.21 cost-per-gallon equivalent of charging a car cited by EV advocates excludes the real costs born by taxpayers for subsidies, utility ratepayers for energy investments, and non-electric vehicle owners for mandate-and-environmental-credit-driven higher vehicle costs, which they say total $48,698 per EV. Those costs must be included when comparing fueling costs of EVs and traditional gas-powered vehicles, TPPF maintains.
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Michigan is trailing Illinois and Minnesota in the Midwest race to register the most electric vehicles.
Illinois leads with nearly 80,000 EVs, while Minnesota has 41,417 and Michigan has 34,380.
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In order to facilitate electric vehicle (EV) production, the U.S. is seeking to spend taxpayer dollars to develop cobalt supply chains from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a country which is known for high prevalence of unsafe child labor in its mines, many of which are controlled by Chinese interests, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of Labor (DOL) are jointly committing $23 million in taxpayer funds to U.S. firms and other mining companies to integrate local Congolese operations and “artisanal” mines into their supply chains, as well as to improve labor standards for miners in the DRC, which are essentially non-existent in most cases, according to the WSJ. Chinese-controlled interests dominate the DRC’s cobalt industry, refining about 75% of the global cobalt supply and manufacturing approximately 70% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries, which are cobalt-intensive products that power EVs.
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The company responsible for a controversial electric vehicle battery plant in Michigan is registered under U.S. law as a foreign entity, filings show.
While the energy company Gotion, Inc. is based out of Fremont, Calif., Foreign Agents Registration Act documents filed by the corporation earlier this year show that it “is wholly owned and controlled” by Gotion High-Tech, which is based out of Hefei, a city in eastern China.
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United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain criticized President Joe Biden on Tuesday for pushing electric vehicle goals that UAW believes do not result in great enough compensation for workers, according to The Washington Post.
Fain is still withholding an endorsement for the president by UAW after criticizing Biden for low wages at the new Ultium Cells plant, General Motors’ electric vehicle battery project that is jointly owned with LG Energy Solutions, according to the Post. UAW is currently in negotiations with top automakers Ford, GM and Stellantis over a possible strike for the 150,000 U.S. hourly workers represented by the union.
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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) on Thursday announced a conditional loan of up to $9.2 billion to a joint electric vehicle venture between Ford and Korean battery maker SK On.
When combined with state subsidies offered to the joint venture, known as BlueOval SK, the record-breaking loan means that taxpayers will be financing nearly the entire $11.4 billion investment by Ford and SK, according to Blomberg. The loan is the latest in a series of increasingly large offers from the DOE’s Loan Program Office (LPO), which had its lending authority surge to $400 billion — more than 10 times the $33 billion it has issued since 2009 —following the passage of President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act.
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This list could be closer to 50 but let’s just stick to a handful of them. I literally live in this business every day, and I’m just so confused.
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The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday announced what is being considered its strongest-ever proposed pollution standards for gas-powered vehicles – which if enacted would effectively mandate that 67 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2032 must be zero-emission ones.
The rule has been expected for weeks and is a dramatic, proposed increase from President Biden’s stated goal of 50 percent zero-emission passenger car sales – including battery-powered electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids and fuel-cell vehicles – by 2030. It would also likely and dramatically increase EV sales, which accounted for just 5.6 percent of new car sales in the U.S. last year, according to Road & Track.com.
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Major U.S. automaker Ford blamed its sizable investment in electric vehicle (EV) company Rivian for its dramatic revenue decline in the first quarter of 2022.
Ford reported revenue of $34.5 billion between January and March, a 5% decline relative to the same period in 2021, and a net loss of $3.1 billion, according to the company’s earnings report released Wednesday. The Detroit automaker said its large investment in Rivian accounted for $5.4 billion in losses during the first quarter.
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