By P Gosselin
Like an abusive husband, who beats his wife to make her love him
Image: Freepik
Today, especially in Germany, the socialist-green movement is failing miserably and plummeting in the polls – to record low levels. Desperate, socialist-green governments in Europe are now resorting to heavy-handed tactics to force citizens to “like” them again.
Growing censorship, opposition bans
For example, the EU has just enacted the Digital Services Act (Regulation (EU), which is a regulation regarding “illegal content, transparent advertising, and disinformation”.
Meanwhile, Germany is pushing to enact a draconian Democracy Security Act, designed to seriously curb online speech and obliterate opposition.
Will backfire
As well-intentioned as these new laws may sound, they are all designed to distract for the huge problems the green movement is causing and to stifle opposition and free speech. It’s an abusive relationship that’s never going to work.
Like a husband who beats his wife, the beatings will probably just get worse the more he gets rejected by her. That’s how things are getting in Germany. Industry is headed to the intensive care unit and the green movement is failing. Some examples follow:
Electric vehicles being rejected
Blackout News here reports how German software giant SAP “no longer wants to use Tesla electric cars as company cars in future.” and is “removing the electric car manufacturer from its list of suppliers”.
Car rental companies Sixt and Hertz also no longer want Tesla, announcing “they would be significantly reducing the proportion of electric vehicles in their large fleets.”
Cuts at German Ford plant
In another article, Blackout News reports that Ford is cutting 3500 of 4500 jobs at its Saarloius, Germany plant, citing a “restructuring program.” Deindustrialization is accelerating in Germany.
Production slowdown at Opel
German car manufacturer Opel has announced reduced work-hours at its Eisenach plant “due to low demand” as a “direct response to falling demand for the Opel Grandland SUV, which is offered in variants including an innovative plug-in hybrid.”
e-vehicle market forecast to fall 14% in 2024!
Finally Blackout News reports that the German government’s target of selling 15 million vehicles by 2030 is “completely utopian”, citing experts who are in fact forecasting a 14% decline in the electric car market by 2024.”
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I was going to say, “Nothing wrong with hybrids, our ’21 Ford Escape gets ~40mpg compared to our 2010 Escape that got ~20mpg” But I thought maybe a Google Search on “battery fires hybrid cars” was in order and this came up:
A recent study by US insurer, AutoinsuranceEZ
found that hybrid cars had the worst fire
record, while EVs were the least likely type of
car to catch fire. Hybrid cars had 3474.5 fires
per 100,000 sale; petrol cars had 1,529.9 fires
per 100,000 sales and EVs had just 25.1 fires
per 100,000 sales.
EV numbers will grow as their numbers on the roads increase. Just saw a Wham Baam Teslacam video of a crash involving three Teslas, recorded on video from a fourth Tesla. No fire though.
“”EV numbers will grow as their numbers on the roads increase.””
Indeed, they will.
When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results. Calvin Coolidge
You’ve got to come first to win – (BBC sport) David Coleman – immortalised in Private Eye’s Colemanballs…
“David Coleman gave his name to a phenomenon common among sports commentators of allowing sentences to leave his mouth without letting his brain decide if they made sense.
Private Eye collected examples from other commentators in a column they called Colemanballs. Although David Coleman gave his name to the meme, he was by no means the only practitioner of the art.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/21/david-coleman-s-best-colemanballs
Now even game shows are in the mix, for example..
“Bradley Walsh: What French region was the site of Joan of Arc’s execution?
Contestant: New Orleans.
Walsh: What duke was played by Christopher Plummer in the film Waterloo?
Contestant: Duke Ellington.
Walsh: Which Frenchman called himself the Picasso of Mime?
Contestant: Charlie Chaplin.”
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/sections.php?section_link=colemanballs
Kevin Keegan – He’s probably the second best player in the world, and you can’t give him higher praise than that.
Jermaine Jenas – He didn’t just stand out – he was outstanding.
Early days of TV weather forecasts using a chart and magnetic symbols.
Possibly the inimitable Michael Fish, informing the country it was going to be misty and foggy when the magnetic letter “F” revealed itself = not magnetic enough and slid gracefully away and upside down.
Straight off without pause for breath on live TV we hear:
Sorry about the F in fog
Kevin Keegan – He’s probably the second best player in the world
Really??? By what metric? Curly hair?
There’s way more than just football to Colemanballs
Did you miss the rest of it — “you can’t give him higher praise than that”?
You would almost think there was a reason they were best at playing football.
Televised snooker:””For those of you watching in black & white, the pink ball is behind the green one”
THere’s nothing nonsensical about that. The announcer is describing something that can’t be discerned by anyone watching in black and white.
The advantage of being out in front in rallycross is that you can see where you are going. Oh, he has just gone straight on into the bank.
Who else but Murray Walker.
We had a sports commentator named Rex Mossop (colloquially Rox Messup) who was known for his “interesting” commentary as well. To be fair, this tended towards tautologies and malapropisms.
He was previously a Rugby Union and Rugby League dual international, and tended to give the English language the same treatment as opposing players.
Except for the ones that spontaneously combust.
That’ll be those three in the accident in several hours to days
That infamous video of the Tesla spontaneously combusting in the parking garage from China had driven over a small piece of road debris some 3 hours prior
I had a discussion about electric cars with my insurance broker the other day. He said that when an electric car is involved in an accident ut has to be isolated for 48 hours and if the battery needs replacing it must be returned to the manyfacturer. Also if it needed a paint job doing it had to be in a paint booth away from others. Also insurance premiums have gone from £800 last year to £2000 this year. I will not be buying one.
manyfacturer? I thought there was only a couple?
But the RATE of fires will not increase, which is the statistic that Steve Case quoted. EVs will still have drasticallly fewer fires per 100,000 vehicles than petrol engine cars. They are far less likely to catch fire than a petrol vehicle. Petrol is extremely flammable and gas vapors are explosive, but the fires are easier to quench than lithium ion battery fires. When an EV catches fire, it will burn longer and has a much higher risk of spreading, which is the reason they get so much attention and why they are more dangerous.
You just showed your complete lack of understanding of simple arithmetic concepts. Rate of fires per vehicle sold in a single year is a meaningless number. See my comment above.
There are two kinds of hybrids. One has to be plugged in, and one does not.
I wonder how the non-plug-in hybrids do with regard to fires?
Doubling one’s gas mileage driving the same kind of car, the way you did, is a pretty good incentive. Which kind of hybrid do you have?
It seems likely a non-plug in diesel hybrid was responsible for burning down an entire multi-story car park plus all its cars, at Luton Airport a couple of months back – £150 million damage.
The footage did show the inferno to be coming from where the battery is on that model.
double mileage, or even significantly increased, IS an incentive.
A disincentive is that it can be difficult to find mechanics who can fix them, even dealers. (Had this problem with my son’s hybrid)
Buying a vehicle with two propulsion systems and the controls to ensure they work together means you have more than twice as many potential problems, not to mention the initial cost.
But having just one propulsion system and a piston engine means having a gearbox/clutch and all the associated difficulties, which an hybrid doesn’t have.
Hybrids have a transmission and one or two clutches. They may not look like a conventional gear-shifting transmission but there are gears. Working the two systems together requires mechanical parts, not just electronics.
Petrol cars sitting by themselves without being impacted by something burst into flames? Or does your number include fires caused during accidents?
I have never heard of any petrol car just bursting into flame.
I have seen. heard and read of a lot of cars, petrol variety, being burned deliberately, appears in the national newspapers here almost every week with far more not being reported just left in the lay-by of the motorway and torched.
but then I did have a petrol car that spontaneously
combusted(as inreacted with oxygenand turned to rust as all older British cars used to do)It’s usually called arson.
Why would ANYONE use a metric of car fires to care SALES??
It MUST BE car fires to CARS ON THE ROAD!
But we here all know why the fires to sales meme is ongoing, to cover the truth of EV and hybrid fires. The propaganda is never ending.
He uses it because valid numbers don’t support the point he wants to make.
And over a similar period.
As has been pointed out previously, per sales is probably the worst possible method by which anything dealing with cars can be measured.
The reasons are many, but the biggest is that there is no relationship between current sales and the number of cars actually on the road.
Additionally, sales are counted as soon as a car is delivered to the dealer, not when someone buys it from the dealer.
Anyone who uses such a bogus statistic as per sales either doesn’t know what he is doing, or is deliberately trying to confuse the readers.
Actually there are only two* “denominators” for transportation efficiency. Both based on the purpose of the vehicle. For personal vehicles, it is people times distance, for commercial vehicles, it is value * distance. (Example: If you transport five people twenty miles for a cost of one gallon of gasoline, you are far more efficient than someone transporting just themselves the same twenty miles for a cost of a half gallon of gasoline.)
I don’t think that applies to spontaneous fires.
Two things this study ignores: The age of the cars; most EV’s are nearly new, hybrids are older, and ICE cars are even older. That is, they are comparing incidents over a year or two in service to five to ten years in service.
And all fires are not equal. Most fires in ICE cars are small fires involving leaking fluids under the hood. They burn themselves out without widespread damage or much risk of spreading beyond the car – or even the engine compartment. Most of the others are electrical fires, which may be of varying degrees of severity. In the one case I know about, defective wiring to the fuel pump started a fire in my wife’s car, and she didn’t even know it. It “just stopped running” (because the fuel had stopped pumping), was towed to the Ford dealership and eventually they told us the wires had burned and been replaced under warranty. A fire that involves the fuel tank is spectacular and intensely hot, but in the 70 years I have lived, I have only seen that once. (Hollywood “crash and burn” scenes are created by filling the back seat with gas cans and running det cord – plastic explosive rope – around each can to burst all the cans on demand.)
Almost every fire in an EV will involve the battery, which is a thousand pounds or more of high-energy chemicals and metals that will burn under water. This not only totals the car, it endangers everything within 30 feet or more. If in a building or on a ship, it will severely damage that building or ship. If other cars with fuel or batteries are parked nearby, they will burn and add to the conflagration. A ship loaded full of EV’s will be totally destroyed when one catches fire unless they manage to stop the spread from EV battery to EV battery by dumping hundreds of cars overboard. (The drowned batteries will burn underwater, but separately. I wince to think of the water pollution – but a sinking flaming ship is far more pollution.) A cargo ship with a few EV’s mixed in with thousands of ICE cars will survive since they always drain the fuel before loading, but it messes up the ship and the cargo – and this has happened more than once already.
A ferry where the cars drive on/drive off so they are fueled would be a disaster of fuel tanks exploding in a chain reaction after one EV battery fire. It would be just as bad if just one ICE car had a fire that involved the fuel tank. I’ve never heard of that happening in over a hundred years of operating such ferries, which says quite a lot about how fire-safe ICE cars are.
A hybrid would be in-between. It’s battery is much smaller, and contains much less energy. I think the risk of a battery fire is less proportionally to the size, and it might also be made with a safer but less energy-dense technology. I think that if the battery does burn, it will total the car, but the main risk of fire spreading is that the fire is likely to reach the fuel tank eventually. It gives more time to move other cars and flammable materials away and protect all flammable structural material.
This study is the equivalent of a study of diseases that counted both fatal influenza and mild hiccups as 1 case each.
The first EVs were built at about the time the vehicle of median age in the US fleet was produced.
2021 Escape was a completely different vehicle than 2010. I had a 2013 which was the first year of the model change for the Escape. Non hybrid would regularly get 34 mpg hwy, 30-31 overall. A coworker had the 2012 and would get 24 hwy and 22 overall. We got our vehicles 5 months apart from each other.
Unless you remove fires due to arson the numbers are complete rubbish. Many ICE fires are after a joyride. Per sale? Way to go if you want to make yourself look ignorant.
That’s the first time I’ve ever seen that phrased so you can see that the “study” was done by idiots. Their numbers are fires per sale, not fires per vehicle in the fleet. In the US there are 283 million registered vehicles. If you divide the number of fires by the number of vehicles in the fleet instead of vehicles sold in one year, you will see that EVs are at least 10 times more likely to burn than an ICEV. Unless, that is, if ICEVs only burn in the year of sale.
What about those catching fire during transport, BEFORE being sold?
Never heard about that happening to petrol cars!!!
Marxist central planning at its finest in Germany. /sarc
Good bye Germany, the last may switch off the light.
Soon there won’t be any light to switch off, but they can blow out the candle.
And if they’re really smart they’ll lick thumb and forefinger and put it out with no odour….
They’ll still need that candle for heat though so better leave it lit
Old joke.
Q. What did Socialists have before candles?
A. Electric lights.
Better joke: “Q. Why do Socialists go to bed at sundown? A. Because they have no light.”
Only those “Socialists” who are “more equal than others” will have light at night. Beeswax is expensive stuff. (No paraffin from evil oil, nor kerosene. Whale oil is obviously right out, as is tallow rendered from animal fat. CO2 producing fires will have you in the stocks, if you are one of the massive serf population.)
The “theme” – or more like the agenda – was set recently at the Davos-fest of the global elites:
“”This year’s theme is Rebuilding Trust””
https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/01/11/davos-2024-what-the-theme-rebuilding-trust-is-all-about
Which follows on from the previous year’s theme of “Restoring Trust”. A work in progress, as they say.
What was agreed in Davos is in many ways akin to EU directives – here’s the aim, how you get there is up to you just as long as you get there.
Progress review to be held privately at CoP 29…..
If you must hold meetings on restoring and rebuilding trust, chances are you’re doing untrustworthy things.
Would you trust them, Gregg?
Or your propaganda is not working so you need some that is different.
Note that ceasing the abuse of people’s trust was not a tactic considered a single time in a single one of all those meetings.
Lack of trust must be our fault, so the way to fix it must be to use some combination of more lies and more force on us.
Perhaps a good theme for their next gabfest would be: Losing trust.
Or losing their religion
From what I gathered, the theme of “rebuilding trust” was that they were trying to convince the attendees that you just need to trust in the plan. It wasn’t “what do we need to do so that the average person will trust us?” Essentially it was really, stay the course, we’ll win in the long term.
Thrashings will continue until morale improves.
No sympathy, for the EU car industry. They’ve arrogantly ignored, the threat, initially posed by Tesla, years ago. And have meekly submitted to the EU, to impose EV and decarbonization rhetoric.
But, I do sympathise with the workers who are losing their livelihood, thanks to weak ineffectual management.
You mean the workers with some of my money in their pockets purloined from me through tax plunder? I sympathise with me.
Your pockets, John, were plundered by the establishment for many things, most of which were corrupt. It’s the system that’s corrupt, not those workers. They like you are now a victim.
The story of the Blue LED is an object lesson in how dedicated individuals can still create game changing technologies and why politicians and civil servants can’t puck tomorrow’s technologies.
https://youtu.be/AF8d72mA41M?si=Uu_IlJaopXLdi-Yt
One extremely stubborn and dedicated individual, there. Not many who will persevere like that these days, when they know their hard work is just going to taken from them without compensation. (Whether by fascist corporation or communist government really makes no difference.)
Remember when Adolf Hitler forced everyone to like him? Yea, this will fail just like Adolf did, only question is how many millions of people they will kill before we actual human beings exterminate them.
A booster awaits you.
I think their target is about 7 billion… to save the Planet you understand, so it’s a worthy aim.
Well, if Stanley Johnson (Boris’ father), is anything to go by, he has openly admitted on TV, that he would like UK population down to 15M, better still ten. And he thinks that air travel should only be for the wealthy.
So your comment bears weight.
It’s horrible to watch Europe self-destruct, especially over unwarranted fears about the benign gas CO2.
CO2-phobia is destroying the Western world right before our eyes.
More like the rise of The Victim Class (endless Tribes) and imposition of self-loathing on those who make civilization possible.
Europe has self-destructed every one or two generations for the last 2 000 years. Plenty of practice you see, but more inventive about it nowadays – warfare is so last epoch. Economic self-harm is the new fashion.
It’s socialism that is destroying Europe, CO2 is just the latest club the socialists have been using.
Go woke go broke-
Vegan food fans left disappointed as popular burger chain is forced to close its doors (msn.com)
Leftys can’t survive without slushfunding and crony capitalism and their money printing just jacks up prices and interest rates that impact struggletown the most.
Those laws are not ‘well-intentioned’.
I wonder how long before some government decides to suspend elections to prevent some populist taking over. Maybe the EU will just try to take over.
Oh, like in Ukraine?
They won’t cancel the election, they’ll just rig the voting and vote counting to ensure that only they can win.
Like in Russia.
Stupid should hurt.
You’d think – with the vast tonnage of irrefutable, settled scientific evidence the Climatrons say they have, they’d bombard us with it daily. I wonder why they don’t?
True, and on GB News, Nana Akua, has been holding such a debate, between Jim Dale and Paul Burgess.
In every meeting, Dale spouted rhetoric, whilst Paul, presented real data. To which Dale denied it as rubbish.
I suspect Dale, has got fed up with losing, and so, they’ve replaced him with another piece of ‘cannon fodder’, Donnachadh McCarthy, a green activist. In his first show, he was losing as Paul, presented data and fact. So McCarthy, said Paul, had a reputation as erratic, eccentric.
It seems obvious to me and probably to most other sentient people with a modicum of critical thought that, when you have in your hands the levers of power, you should remind yourself that those levers are there only because the people governed allow you to hold them. Once you do those people harm they will reciprocate, if not by vote, then by force.
The iron fist in a green glove.
The blog Schnitzel Republic notes that there was a meeting yesterday at the EU where representatives of 73 large corporations said that the EU’s pursuit of Net Zero will result in significant economic harm to them. It says the term, “wipe out” was used.
The Greens’ record of climate/hysteria, exaggerations and outright lies have alienated most citizens who see them as just ploys to justify higher taxes and more laws and restrictions, all of which will lead to nothing more than higher living costs and more inconveniences. It’s the old story of crying wolf for too long until people realize there’s no more threat than a kitten.
“the EU has just enacted the Digital Services Act (Regulation (EU), which is a regulation regarding “illegal content, transparent advertising, and disinformation”.”
C’mon. That will cause just minor disagreements, like the Pope and Giordano Bruno.
A good friend had a Prius. He drove it nearly 200,000 miles. Trading it in for a new car, he bought an ICE Camry.
I asked him why not another hybrid. he replied that the Prius was troublesome. Two systems to break down instead of one.