By P Gosselin
91% of German e-car dealerships see current order situation as “poor” or “very poor” for the year.
Politicians in Germany had been racing to eliminate fossil fuel cars and replace them with e-cars. But then the technical and economic realities began to sink in – especially among private consumers, who are turning their backs on them in droves!
They should have listened to real science instead of all the activist funded rubbish.
Online German national daily ‘Welt’ here reports how electric car sales among private consumers in the first half of 2024 have fallen through the floor, dropping a whopping 47% compared to a year earlier. The massive drop is a major setback in the country’s rush to going “carbon neutral.”
Hat-tip: Blackout News
“Germans are becoming increasingly skeptical about electric cars. Current figures from car dealerships reveal an escalation in rejection,” reports ‘Welt‘. Especially private customers are rejecting e-vehicles. Hybrid cars are also seeing a massive drop, with sales plummeting 37% over the same period.
“Dealerships are not expecting any improvement for the second half of the year,” reports ‘Welt‘. “Of the car dealerships surveyed, 91% rate the order situation among private customers for purely electric cars as ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’ for the year as a whole.”
Meanwhile petrol and diesel engine car sales have risen 24% and 20% respectively.
Buyers have become turned off by the lousy national charging infrastructure, range limitations and high costs. Moreover, many consumers have begun to understand that e-cars are not that green after all and pose their own set of environmental challenges. Owning an e-car offers very few benefits, but come with high costs.
The problem for electric cars is that the target market is wealthy virtue signallers. This is a small market and once this market is saturated, who else is going to buy electric cars?
To all intents and purposes the market is saturated. Fleets and companies have already done their bit
””Rental giant Hertz dumps EVs, including Teslas, for gas cars””. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/hertz-sell-about-20000-evs-us-fleet-2024-01-11/
And regretted it.
Government agencies will- such as here in Wokeachusetts- that’s the plan.
There are a lot of people for whom EVs make good sense. My wife and I normally drive five or fewer miles a day. If I didn’t occasionally need to drive 1,000 miles in a weekend for work (with no advance notice) we’d definitely have an EV. I’d still be opposed to EV mandates, but just because they aren’t the right answer for everyone doesn’t mean they aren’t the right answer for anyone.
Also my town has a fleet of F150s. Streets, public works, codes, animal control, etc. It’s about 2 miles from one side of town to the other. It would probably be cheaper, in the long run, for them to be EVs.
“It would probably be cheaper, in the long run, for them to be EVs.”
It depends, based on plummeting resale value after battery is 7 years old and insurance requirements, plus other factors
Ideal I-dont-understanding-the-issues-from-outside-the-org test bed for public EVs would be the USPS. The LLV concept is old.
There are a lot of people for whom EVs make good sense
Bob – but you are not one of them- nor am I.
Here’s the contradiction. A EV would work because you drive 5 miles a day. But for an EV to become green you need to drive first X number of miles. With only 5 miles a day it will take 50 years or longer before becoming green. And if you drive many miles then an EV is inconvenient. It just doesn’t make sense to most people.
He never said it made sense because he wanted to be green. Just that his requirement of a few miles per day fitted the capability- but he also needs to drive a very long distance over a short time which doesn’t fit unless it’s a high end EV.
Sounds like the hybrid is best for the fuel savings on the short trips
So 1000 miles/year city driving. That means 2 refuelings/year. How long would it take before that more expensive EV pays for itself ? Remember you still need 2 cars.
Lately, you could argue that the weather driven climate, sorry climate change driven weather, is on nobody’s radar – save for the diehard jihadi-alarmist types. Certainly, I can attest that numbers of EVs in my part of the capital have not budged. But they can be amusing – standing in the rain with phone in hand reading the instructions on the lamp post.
But something caught my eye, somewhat off topic and yet relevant, nonetheless. Goebbels, eat your heart out.
“”Repeating climate denial claims makes them seem more credible, Australian-led study finds
Even those who are concerned about climate crisis were influenced by false claims, showing how ‘insidious’ repetition is, researcher says
“A single repetition is enough to nudge recipients towards acceptance of the repeated claim, even when their attitudes are aligned with climate science, and they can correctly identify the claim as being counter-attitudinal,” the paper states.
…
“Media are crucial in all of this because the science is settled … We know what the issues are and we know what needs to be done in response and we know the timeframe”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/08/repeating-climate-denial-claims-makes-them-seem-more-credible-australian-led-study-finds
So, why does repeating [their] climate [truth] claims not make them seem more credible?
“”Dr Jess Berentson-Shaw, co-director of The Workshop – an organisation that helps people use evidence to communicate complex issues, including climate change – said people were frequently being exposed to false climate information about climate.
“It is framed in ways that makes it easy for people to hear and share,” she said.””
Maybe there’s another lesson there for the alarmist fraternity? Either way this ‘paper’ is really a call for more censorship – A single repetition is enough…
The UK is (very) quietly getting ready for pay per mile driving
https://youtu.be/Mto5sXFQ744?si=VTBLkwGY6LHGHBxU
Dontcha jus’ lurv Ulez.
Coming soon tolls on Blackwall Tunnel… Just £8 per day can help keep Sadiq from running out of money.
The lesson here for all politicians is, you can take the drivers to the e-showroom, but you can’t make them buy.
The second hand car market is many times bigger than the new car portion of the fleet. Private buyers make up that entire car purchase segment of the market. They do not want to know about EVs and will not buy them, that is the situation here in the UK..
The lesson the politicians will take is, we’re not trying hard enough. Mayors in particular will impose measures to make ICE vehicles impractical: low-emission zones, parking surcharges, special routing, etc.
And the lesson for voters is: vote for idiots and idiocy is what you’ll get.
Unfortunately I want to use my car to go to cities where I don’t get a vote.
Don’t go their. They don’t wont you to spend your money there bring it to another place.
Then people will move out of those cities- the way people are moving out of Kalifornia.
The problem isn’t states or provinces. As you point out there are other states and provinces (though making yourself into a refugee from one and fleeing to another means abandoning family and social network). But if initiatives like C40 Cities take a real hold it means you have to give up on a type of living. You have to live remote from hospitals and advanced healthcare, from major sporting and cultural events, even large retail locations. And I would argue that mayors and municipal governments are a lot more eager to try limiting the use of ICE vehicles than regional or national governments because it looks like they’re being proactive.
For a similar example, in the last couple of years every footling little town and village around me has introduced a 20mph speed limit. They’re popping up like pox on a toddler. And I know—because a councillor told me—it’s an easy way to score points for “doing something”, to be appear to be proactive.
If the mayor of my town tried to limit the use of ICE vehicles he wouldn’t get re-elected. Let those people try their green fantasies and we’ll take their refugees.
39 million
The problems with EVs are vast, from short range to long fill-up times to self-ignition into inextinguishable fires to minor collisions becoming “total” losses to insurance premiums that will rapidly rise in response to these risks.
Throw in inadequate charging structure and electric “grids” being destroyed by addition of worse-than-useless wind and solar and it is clear that expensive, battery powered non-solutions to imaginary problems are are really bad choice for personal (or any other) transport needs.
Beyond those who could afford these useless vehicles; those of us who could not or could realized through rational thinking could see the limitations and the hypocrisy. I would not buy one if they gave it to me for free. I’ve always thought this direction was misguided and going to fail. The other thing, I felt was idiotic was car companies falling for this scam. Shareholders ought to sack these “woke” and imbecilic CEO’s for the colossal waste of investment for shareholders.
“Buyers have become turned off by the lousy national charging infrastructure, range limitations and high costs. Moreover, many consumers have begun to understand that e-cars are not that green after all and pose their own set of environmental challenges. Owning an e-car offers very few benefits, but come with high costs.”
“The other thing, I felt was idiotic was car companies falling for this scam.”
___________________________________________________________
When you’re in the hole, stop digging.
Maryland has banned new gasoline car sales starting in 2035.
The used car market is going to boom.
I’m just waiting to hear about one of these states banning gas cars from being registered
I’m sure it’s coming
they will ‘allow’ ‘registering’ them for a gigantic fee
$10k used ICE car? $30k fee to register it
It all depends on how the dollar will be printed into worthlessness.
It’s OK – the Biden Administration is going to install 50,000 charging stations (or is it 50,000 chargers) across the country. Real soon now. And to show how important this is, the Vice President was put in charge of it.
________________________________________________________________
Our 2010 Ford Escape got ~20 mpg.
Our 2022 Ford Hybrid Escape gets 40 mpg.
If we had bought a plug-in hybrid, buying gasoline would be a rare event.
I was surprised to see the drop in hybrid sales. I bought a hybrid (Hyundai Tucson) and have loved it. Mileage 75% better than previous similar-sized car. Not much of a difference in price between it and non-hybrid version, and at 50,000 miles I believe I’ve already recovered the extra cost in gas savings. .
The gas mileage improvement of a hybrid is in the YMMV category. If you are doing a lot of low-speed stop-and-go driving, the hybrid may score impressive gains. At steady-state highway driving, especially at or above 65 MPH, not as much if any.
I was told that someone bought a Prius because they had a long commute, and they took driving lessons on how to squeeze more mileage out of it. Careful driving may make a bigger difference in a hybrid, such as braking gently to make as much use of the regenerative braking and accelerating gently to not drain the battery are measures I can think of. If life circumstances place your job far from where you live, a hybrid car as well as driving it optimally could save a lot of money.
That said, there are straight gasoline cars offering high real-world mileage if you drive them gently. I rented a Hyundai Elantra that the inside-hood sticker stated had a 2 liter Atkinson-cycle engine (used usually only in hybrids because the hybrid drive can supplement its weak acceleration), drove it around Denver for 150 miles in mixed city, highway and mountain highway driving and pumped 3 gallons to top off just before returning it. The drive on the speed-limit restricted Boulder-Denver turnpike showed 60 MPG for that segment on the trip computer. There are many questions if these results would be representative of MPG over time, but I was impressed.
This is a car I wouldn’t be inclined to buy hearing reports of engine and transmission trouble (with a CVT) on Hyundais. The car was dog slow, even compared to my 1997 4-cyl Camry, but I was impressed as to what a non-hybrid could achieve by way of gas mileage. My research on EPA numbers of apples to apples comparisons (avoiding the “I traded in my big pickup truck for a Prius and I use hardly any gas”) suggests that a hybrid system saves about 20% in gas.
Another consideration with a hybrid is that like an EV, it has a high-voltage electric system that is “touch it if you don’t know what you are doing working on your own car, and you die.” There are accounts of Prius owners getting 150,000 to 200,000 or more miles on their hybrid battery, but the sense I get is that the wall-calendar lifetime of a hybrid battery is 10 years, maybe 15. My daily driver gasoline-powered Camry is 27 years old.
Were I in a life situation where I planned to run off 200,000 miles in 10 years, especially if much of those miles were not highway on long trips from home, I would seriously consider a hybrid or even an EV. Given that I have averaged 6,000 miles a year, half city half highway in the 22 years I have operated the Camry, I can’t see myself benefiting from an electric car.
That is the whole thing about mandating non-straight-gas-powered cars. Many people benefit from hybrids and even straight EVs, but the use cases for cars are all over the place. Requiring motorists putting low yearly mileage on a car or driving mainly highway miles to go electric is a poor allocation of social and environmental resources, which is not a surprising outcome of one-size-fits-all regulations.
The US better get off its ass then, or we will get left behind.
/s.
The IEA in their ‘Global EV Outlook 2024’ (April 2024) estimates global sales of EVs could reach 17m in 2024 but acknowledges that “more than 68 non EVs will sold for every EV sold”
There are already over 1.4bn non EV vehicles world wide. EVs are going nowhere slowly.
many consumers have begun to understand that e-cars are not that green after all and pose their own set of environmental challenges.
The brains trust have just begun working on the e-mobility sustainability challenges-
New battery crackdown after a huge rise in fires in Australia (msn.com)
Took a few unsustainable users before they really woke up (leftys don’t do irony).
Let’s not forget to include the need for hazardous waste disposal for those LiPO batteries.
Speaking of woke you too can join the beautiful people playing the speculation game-
Electric car owner slammed over selfish act in charging bay (msn.com)
Let me guess . . . Germany reduced/eliminated government subsidies given to buyers of EVs at the end of 2023?
Supply and demand markets are the only true democracy. People want, they buy. People don’t want, the don’t buy.
The microsecond after a government issues a mandate, individual freedom is lost and totalitarian/authoritarian/socialism rises.
Where oh where are the EV enthusiasts? We might be misled by disinformation (negative EV news must be false). Richard Greene, isn’t NTZ a misinfo site in your cracked outlook?
The only difference between EVs and Joe Biden is, Biden knows it’s over (even diminished capacity couldn’t hide it from his own head).
We have a lot of EV enthusiasts here in central Orange County, California.
Mr. Jim: My condolences. None of them are commenting here in defense of their rich boy toys.
“Owning an e-car offers very few benefits”
It offers only perceived benefits, the biggest of which are green virtue signaling, showing off as an early adopter, and showing off as being able to spend more on luxury.
Yoo-hoo, myusername, come out, come out wherever you are.
To comment on a small setback? Enjoy it while it lasts 😀
A 47% fall in sales of EV’s is a small setback? What makes you think sales will recover?
…… yeah and from a guy who constantly tries to peddle numbers that are too small to measure !!!!!
European car makers screaming for tariffs on chinese EVs. They know what is coming, and they try to delay as long as possible.
Ever heard of the Sunk Cost Fallacy? Western car firms have “invested” billions in EV’s and are desperate to offload their production.
Oh, perhaps you could answer my question – what makes you think EV sales will recover?
If you think for a minute, that was the answer – cheap evs coming from china will outperform ice sales. And european car companies admitted it by screaming for tariffs,
No, EV sales are ALREADY declining, hence the 47% fall. Why should they suddenly start to increase?
Enjoy it while you can.
I think it’s a Monty Python reference. He’s down to his stumps, threatening to bite our legs off.
Ha ha yes – “Just a flesh wound” “I’ve had worse”.
Don’t think it is just a small setback. You need to have had the experience of shopping for a replacement car – maybe because you are helping someone else shop for one. I think what’s happening to the market in the UK is that lots of EVs are coming off company leases onto the used market, and the people who are traditional buyers of used off-lease cars don’t want them. Or not at current prices.
They may be moved if prices fall below the cost of equivalent ICE or mild hybrids. But that is a ways to go yet. One of the discouraging things is that prices for used EVs have fallen so far, and show no signs of stopping, that people hesitate to buy. It will probably get worse before it gets better, as more and more of them come off company leases onto the used market.
Its interesting that if you do a shopping exercise like this in the local dealerships, you find very few pure EVs. In lots of places, none at all. Plenty of hybrids, both mild and plug-in, but not the pure EV.
My older friend ended up with a mild hybrid – which is basically ICE with improved mileage. I suspect a lot of other people are following the same path. The pure EV will still come onto the market because of the favorable lease tax treatment, benefit in kind. But prices will probably continue to fall because of consumer resistance at a retail used level.
Ha! Your appearances here are more predictable than those of a shark following a chum line.
‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight? And you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery is now underwater and there’s a MyUsername that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’”
LOL…. Poor Luser has gone totally gibberish style incoherence !
He must be off his meds…..
Certainly
“Just a flesh wound”
Tesla stock down 20.3% YTD . . . but hey, it’s only a “small setback”, right?
Meanwhile, the DJIA is up 4.5% YTD, the NASDAQ is up 19.3% YTD, and the S&P 500 is up 12.1% YTD.
TSLA has a chance to recover in the next, oh, 20 years or so.
Musk is hell-bent on destroying himself. And he never bothered developing cheaper EVs for more market segments. Same with european developers – they have a few overpriced models with no clue / plan to capture most of the market. You should look at companies like BYD. Because the chinese will be there, and if western companies don’t get their shit together, it will be a bloodbath.
There is no market for cheaper EV in western countries.
They are universally USELESS to anyone except as golf-carts.
You, not being old enough to get a licence and incapable of doing so, even if you were, would realise that.
Stick to your 15 minute ghetto, Luser.. It is where you belong.
And Teslas are hardly luxury cars, they are bare-bones from what I’ve heard.
Those little Tesla’s are compact cars. Sub compacts don’t do well in US. Meanwhile, I love my battery powered golf cart but only on the golf course.
The shine is off EVs as reality sets in. Going from reliable transportation that can be recharged quickly anywhere at a moments notice to having to plan trips meticulously, and sometimes failing due to unforeseen circumstances and taking more time, is my bet to the real problem. Having lived in Germany for two years I know part of the problem is many/most people can’t have personal charging stations for overnight charging. That’s a big Achilles heel for EVs. In the USA owning a home is more prevalent but the commutes and trips are usually longer so home charging is a must have.
Our neighbors were going to go camping in the mountains, and use their Tesla. They did plan ahead, and found that there was only one, non-supercharger, charger near their destination. They would have had to wait around for hours while the Tesla recharged enough to get to a super charger, assuming that the solitary charger was available. So they packed their camping gear and the kids into the Prius and had a great holiday.
Wow. Who could have seen this coming? Bwahahahahahahahaha.
When EV’s fail in the marketplace, the next government push will be for E-Fuels, which is just as bad or even worse than EV’s. Just on an Energy Returned on Energy Invested basis, E-Fuels are about 30% efficient with ICE’s being about 30-40% efficient for a net efficiency of 10-15%. Not exactly a good use of energy. And to make it Green, it must be 100% renewable energy which doesn’t exist in either quantity or quality (reliability).
More good news. It’s like I used to tell my boss, who owned the company. You are the owner, you have lots of power, you are the boss but none of those things mean you are right. Governments are much worse than my old boss at least I could talk to her. Governments are blind and stupid yet still powerful.
Here is an interesting one by contrast: In Australia, the #1 selling car to priivate, as opposed to company, government, and rental fleet buyers is Tesla Model Y. Of course, private sales are only about 51% of all car sales in Australia. The link below is for 2023 but 2024 I think is similar. The big overall upward trend is plug-in hybrid small SUVs (e.g. RAV4). I think what is happening is that private buyers are mostly priced out of the new car market and buy used (Australia doesn’t have snow/ice much so cars last well) and among those private buyers wealthy enough to buy new, Teslas are neat. The article points out that a Ford Ranger is the #1 selling vehicle.
Company cars (both private sector and government) far more common than in the US due to the tax structure – in simplistic terms a business pays less tax on the “company” car they give you than tax you would pay on the equivalent income. And of course, many vehicles, especially in small business, are work vehicles.
Also note that while Australia has crazy expensive electricity due to green religion, their petrol is also expensive due to tax – it’s a major form of government income (*).
https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/vfacts-2023-tesla-model-y-was-australias-best-selling-new-car-with-private-buyers
(*) Back in the 70’s, Australian petrol was mostly domestic and quite affordable. Someone came up with the idea to tax it as if it were all imported to encourage conservation. This was a bonanza for the government as crude prices went up and and up and up – the tax went up and up and up. Then when crude prices fell in the 80’s, the government said ,”oops, can’t drop the tax”. Down to today, their tax on petrol is expensive – something like over 4 US dollars a gallon (A$1.73/litre).