By P Gosselin
VW teeters on disaster. Germany’s socialists, greens propose solving the problem that they themselves have caused.
AI generated image.
By Klimanachrichten here.
(Translated/edited by P. Gosselin)
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The bad news about Volkswagen never ends, but neither do the clever tips from politicians. The strangest things come to light. Lower Saxony’s Economics Minister, of the SPD socialists, Mr. Olaf Lies, (the state has a 12% stake in VW) had no idea about the events and problems at the manufacturer until the press release.
He was not on the supervisory board. The state’s Minister of Economic Affairs once sat on the board, but he was replaced by a Green Minister of Culture. Not for reasons of competence, but rather because she is a member of the Green Party and Lower Saxony Vice Prime Minister. Do they talk to each other? Hard to say.
So Mr. Lies was caught unprepared and also stated in the media that energy prices in Germany were causing Volkswagen problems. It’s hard to imagine what would have happened if the country had allowed the two nuclear power plants there to continue operating, though this is a federal decision. It is also somewhat crazy that energy prices are rising due to the green energies transition and grid restructuring. A self-fulfilling prophecy, except for Mr. Lies, who proposes solving the problem with new subsidies.
So the consumer is failing, and is buying too few electric cars, for whatever reason. The slump in registration figures is not only affecting Volkswagen, but are also falling for combustion cars, which says a lot about the economic situation in Germany. According to the Federal Motor Transport Authority, the number of registrations fell by 28% compared to the same month last year. The number of e-car registrations even fell by almost 70%. Yet Volkswagen has been told quite clearly that there is only one way forward and that is e-mobility.
Surprisingly, the plants that still produce combustion cars are doing very well.
We are increasingly reading that the current Federal Minister of Economics, Robert Habeck (Greens Party), stated back in 2019 that VW would only survive if it produced an e-car model for under 20,000 euros. The biggest proportionate cost factor for an e-car is likely to be the car’s battery. In a small car, it has a greater impact on the price than in a mid-range car. The battery can account for between 30-40% of a vehicle’s price. If even a small car like a Fiat 500 in the e-version is 30% more expensive than the combustion version, then the dilemma becomes clear. Battery prices will only fall with mass production and manufacturers are still a long way from achieving this. So it’s the chicken and egg problem. The manufacturer Volvo, which has Chinese owners, has put aside its plans for 100% electric by 2030, according to T-Online.
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No one can destroy an economy like a well meaning (read ignorant) government.
Smart government is an oxymoron.
Smart people in politics are not ”allowed” in positions of power.
Definitely not – they scare all the ignorant simpletons.
Meanwhile, back in China…
They have over 400,000,000 EVs (cars, motorcycles, bikes) on the road and are now experiencing power rationing at charging stations. Much like the gas rationing of the early 1970s but with zero availability.
To err is human, but to really screw things up requires government.
There is the party of stupid and the party of evil; but to do something really stupid and evil takes bipartisanship.
I don’t think well meaning and ignorant are synonymous. I think self serving and ignorant might be more appropriate.
Well meaning and ignorant do go together. Your replacement might be better stated
Self serving and Willfully Ignorant
Ignorant? Malignant in my view.
Hmmm, I wonder why those marvelous E-cars aren’t doing so well?
Perhaps the public is hesitant to put self immolating Li-Ion powered bombs in their garages.
Maybe they don’t trust the autonomous driving perk to remove accident potential.
Or it could be the refueling issues caused by cold weather.
Possibly the limited range and long refueling times.
Or the extremely limited range when towing additional weight.
Could also be the expense caused by the limited tire range (about 20,000 miles 32,000 kilometers)
Or the expense of vastly increased insurance premiums for vehicles that tend to be “Totaled” for minor damage because the battery “May have been involved”.
Another possibility would be … Mmm …
Perhaps the actual answer is…
E) All of the above!
It’s always, “All of the above!”
Except when it’s the government in which case it’s “None of the above!”
Plus, the very high initial purchase price you are asked to pay just for all those ‘benefits’ you have listed.
It’s penance – to atone for all your carbon sins and the carbon sins of your fathers.
Exactly – the religious-like fervor is coming from the cult-like social structure of the greens.
And the very low resale values because of the extreme cost of battery replacements and all of the other listed problems with EV ownership.
You wonder what car immigrants living in Germany use on their yearly trip to the motherland in some part of Northern Africa or Turkey crossing most of Europe ?
A trip of 5000 km or more. Normally with a more than fully loaded vehicle.
If they had any sense, they’d fly to North Africa. Ditto Turkey. But how many of them ever go back to visit the country they came from?
Way more than you’d think, given their claimed reasons for leaving.
The killer for me is lifespan.
As a rough guess, half of all the cars I see on the road are >10 years old, a fair proportion are more like 20 years old, I regularly see stuff from the mid to late 90’s, so pushing 30, I saw an early 80s Ford yesterday, and see sixties stuff fairly regularly.
So the question I have to ask is, how many of today’s Teslas, etc, are going to be on the road 20 years from now? How about 30-40-50-60 years from now?
Until I see a BEV that might last 20+ years, I’m not interested.
I have a 2003 Toyota 4runner (20+ years old) with over 360,000 miles on it. Let’s see an e-car do that.
My 1997 Ford F150 4X4 is still a workhorse at over 200,000 miles. Almost time for another paint job (2nd).
“The average age of cars and light trucks in the United States is 12.6 years, which is a record high and up two months from 2023.”
There will probably be many older BEVs on the roads a decade or more from now, but tow trucks will eventually remove them.
I’m driving a 2009 Ford Escape Hybrid (mfg’d Sept 2008 = 16 years) with it’s factory original Sanyo Ni-MH 330V. battery pack. It is coming up of 220,000 miles. It is still returning 34 – 40 mpg in rural/suburban driving. (above EPA rating) Full CANBUS electronics. No computer control or Hybrid drivetrain components have been replaced.
It is an amazingly satisfying and practical vehicle. I bought it used based on research indicating that these compact SUVs are proven reliable during early Taxi Fleet service. Many exceeded 300,000 miles service life.
Don’t forget the pitiful resale value.
I had to leave room for a “Few” additional disadvantages unlisted so others could have something to add
See videos by a YouTuber who calls himself the MacMaster. He purchased a Porsche Taycan for £120 000 two years ago. Current resale value is a mere £32 000.
Modern German cars are kind of a love-hate thing. Love it while driving it; hating it every time you take it to the shop.
What resale value?! You can almost smell the insurance scams coming…
Selfish people! Think of the Planet! The trees, the poor little fishies in the sea…
But we are thinking of the trees, they NEED CO2 to survive
Here in NZ the forestry companies are threatening to walk away because of impossible regulation from the Gisborne council on the east coat of the north island(story tip ?) looks like VW is thinking the same good on them companies are starting to grow a pair
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350404783/forestry-industry-says-companies-may-leave-gisborne-due-absolutely-impossiblehttps://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350404783/forestry-industry-says-companies-may-leave-gisborne-due-absolutely-impossible
here’s that link without the double up
Forestry industry says companies may leave Gisborne due to ‘absolutely impossible’ consent conditions | Stuff
Logging companies don’t have to make a mess. They did it here in New England too- for decades- but now do much better work. It doesn’t really cost that much to do it right. It takes better planning.
Joseph It’s steep country, yarder country fairly dry but gets heavy rain on occasion
They complain about the eagle’s nest (the one the thunderbird sits in ) but ban burning. The use a direct sawlog regime (thin to waste) so the branches are quite large. and most get smashed of during felling and extraction .
The soils are recent uplift marine sediments highly erodiable but regain fertility quickly
The whole issue could be solved by burning
The Volkswagen Group has plants all over Europe and the world with cheaper power than Germany including 17 in China and has had for many years either as Volkswagen or as plants acquired through other brands, Audi Bentley Ducati Lamborghini Škoda etc.
The headquarters Wolfsberg plant remains by far the largest and generates its own power and heat recently switched from coal to gas, no mention of ‘renewables’.
Running out of other people’s money everywhere-
SNP budget in trouble as Greens ‘unlikely’ to give it their support (msn.com)
the reality is this government is focused on the First Minister’s four missions: growing the economy, providing excellent public services, tackling climate change and the move towards net zero, and tackling child poverty
What about world peace?
Whatever happened to “economic growth”.”Growing the economy” sounds like something you do on a farm.
The reality is that the First Minister is not achieving any of his missions.
Growing the economy these days is done on a subsidy farm.
Billions and billions of public money being ‘invested’ in the future.
More like Billions and billions of public money being squandered, guaranteeing economic shrinkage in the future when most taxpayers will be paying for the wealth transfer to the wealthy.
You don’t say Sherlock! The madness continues. Not just with cars either. Scottish parents who disagree if a school says their child can change gender, will be jailed for up to 7 years. I kid you not.
Scotland, Wales and Eire are busy trying to outwoke each other.
Sounds like Wokeachusetts! 🙂
That’s the Celts/Gaels for you.
Thats why we Anglo-Saxons (the Angelcynn) gave them their own reservations, and kept the large bit. They even have their own languages so we can easily ignore them because – honestly, we don’t know what they are going on about.
What are you talking about??? The transgender mind cancer is all over the world, especially in Anglo-Saxon type countries – England, USA, Canada, etc.
They have thankfully dropped that one, unless the Greens force it back onto the planned list as payment for supporting the Finance Bill. As a minority Govt the SNP need help from other parties, the Greens had been them and its hard to see any other party taking their place.
The irony is it’s lefties making cuts-
Labour plans to strip 10M of winter fuel payments could kill 4,000 (msn.com)
Perhaps they really do believe in global boiling keeping struggletown warm.
Zerstörung durch Fortschritte der Technologie (ZFT)
Destruction through Advances in Technology or Destruction through Technological Progress
Alleged progress…
Advance by voluntary adoption of new tech to replace current tech, not enforced replacement of current tech with old.
I don’t understand why people would want to buy something that is much more expensive yet doesn’t do the job so well.
They don’t and that’s the problem.
No mandate was needed to flog a Ford Mustang etc etc etc. People wanted them.
Understanding of economics is not a econazi trait. The various Tesla and eco-wind/solar, EV blogs are full of total hate towards VW and other automakers who can’t sell the EVs – seems like they are to blame if buyers aren’t buying. However consumers weren’t demanding EVs, a fact that econazi brains simply cannot absorb.
Oh but they do. It is called command economics, socialist ownership rather than private ownership, full econazi.
The utter disaster of electric cars has been triggered, if not actually caused, by the nonsensical emphasis on so called ‘green-thinking’. Electric traction is fine but not one manufacturer properly checked the safety of the only available batteries. The world must revert to petrol/gasoline/hydrogen/ammonia for the next fifty or more years – especially since now we know that global warming is much less than at first supposed..
Safety — hydrogen or ammonia?
Hydrogen is pointless anyway, since producing it takes more energy (all of which will likely come, directly or indirectly, from fossil fuels anyway.
Not sure about ammonia but I expect that’s the same tail-chasing stupidity.
Talking of things German, what happened to that girl who was the sort of climate realist answer to Greta Thunberg?
Devoured by the crickets? They are chirping very loudly for some reason.
Either way, symmetrical answers in wildly asymmetrical situations are stupid, and often dangerous when it’s wildly asymmetrical not in your favour (such as when the powers that be indulge in astroturfing, be it Civil Disobedience™ or gretinism, and then some bright bulb decides it goes both ways). How it’s not obvious?
“Lobbyists are only interested in money. Activists are only interested in power. Sometimes a great nexus of corruption thrusts forth a figure of genius, such as Al Gore, who dazzles us with a talent for both.”
……. were the only three sentences I understood in your first reference. Made it worth the severe brain-hurt.
In this case, you may want to start with “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives”.
Title is somewhat incorrect…..
Socialists/Greens Insist The Way Forward Is No Mobility !
Think…ULEZ, 15 minute ghettos… just wait for “climate lockdowns”
Climate lockdowns seems insane, but after the plandemic and the demonstrated fealty of the masses to their “elite” masters ruling from SCIENCE!, it is somewhat believable. Sadly.
Well, duh. Then all peasants caught more than 10 miles from their residence without a writ from the Good and Great are obviously vagrants or brigands and ought to be hanged summarily. It’s same old… only less literate.
Attacking peasants for dying for their freedom is extremely lowlife! Beware of the Ents
Sorry about the milk floats but they have a yen for our hybrids among other things and we’re busy working on the queues-
Toyota, the world’s biggest car maker, revises electric car targets – report (msn.com)
Second to last line in the above article:
“So it’s the chicken and egg problem.”
Especially in this case of the German government’s infatuation with EVs, where the “chicken” is sterile and the “egg” is unfertilized.
The chicken is a zombie. The entire chicken coop are zombies. They are still capable of going through a sad parody of running around or looking for worms, but that’s due to having strings tied to their wings and heads, and a rubber glove deeply embedded in the other end. By now the strings are rotten, and the gloves are worn through. The latter is not a serious sanitary issue in itself, since their puppeteer, of course, is a zombie to begin with — who else would want to perform in a zombie muppet theatre and suffer its smell, if not another member of the shambling dead?
Successfully solving problems that don’t exist elsewhere is a hallmark of socialism.
“So Mr. Lies was caught unprepared…”
Are we to believe him?
“So the consumer is failing, and is buying too few electric cars, for whatever reason.”
We need to put consumer market into receivership and start up a new one.
Typical Socialist thinking: “We can dictate markets.”
Or in one phrase: «fake zealots always double down».
Obviously, they all are bobble-heads — otherwise they would not be allowed anywhere near those chairs. So who cares?
“Battery prices will only fall with mass production and manufacturers are still a long way from achieving this. So it’s the chicken and egg problem. “
Mass production of batteries does not significantly reduce production costs without huge sacrifices in their fire safety. Making them less of a fire hazard (not 100% safe, but safer than typical) is somewhat possible, but it adds to the cost even more than they cost now. To reduce costs, manufacturers cut a lot of corners, making them more of a fire hazard.
But EV’s being a fire hazard cannot be fully adopted. This exacerbates the chicken and egg problem.
Chemistry happens. Insurance companies are just beginning to realize this. No one will insure an unmitigated fire hazard. Refer to the latest events with California property insurance for example.
You assume more risk, You are on your own.
Ignorance is bliss. Stupidity is catastrophic,
I don’t want to buy a battery powered car. Period.
I don’t need to explain why. It’s the only reason necessary.
Hammer high, no one should ask me why! :]
Ditto. More to the point, the vast majority feel the same way. Over 90% of new cars sold in the US are still ICE.
While the government can force auto makers to sell nothing but worse-than-useless EVs, they can’t force consumers to buy EVs.
All they will accomplish with such dictatorial policies is to destroy what is left of the auto industry and have the US looking like Cuba. Maybe those union types should be thinking about that before they vote.
The Beatings will continue until morale improves, the diktats will continue until the state has total control.
…or the revolution begins.
“Olaf Lies”. What a fitting name for a politician. Although I suspect “lies” does not mean the same thing in German as it does in English.
The German meaning is “read!” in its imperative meaning. The German word you are thinking of is “lügt”.
My daughter works in marketing for one of the big 3. She said the company was forced by government to make a huge investment in EVs and now they’re stuck with thousands of vehicles no one wants.
Olaf Lies. What a priceless and 100% accurate name for any “green.”
Almost as good as the name of the NY politician who used to send text messages to (I believe it was underage) girls with pictures of his privates – his last name being WEINER. 🤣😂
Had the same thought! Sometimes the truth is literally spelled out, right in front of your eyes.
His name in German is an exhortation to read, not about him playing loose with the facts. 🙂 Except for being a member of the Social Democrats there is nothing negative I can see in his CV. He is an electrical engineer who came up the hard-scrabble way, married with two kids, and he has served in the German Navy, plus he has worked his way up the hard way to his engineering degree coming from a scholastically disadvantaged background. Frankly, as a Conservative I find much to admire about the way he has been conducting his life, the blemish 🙂 of him being a Social Democrat notwithstanding. I believe he was only a member of the VW supervisory board between 2013 – 2017. After the coalition between the Conservatives and the Social Democrats a Conservative would have been Minister of Economic Affairs and member of the VW Supervisory Board. So most likely the last time he was privy to VW internal affairs was in 2017. After that it would have violated shareholder laws. Therefor I believe that he is telling the truth.
The issue is a bit more complex and some details merit attention.
VW – There are two classes of shares, preferred shares (Vorzugsaktien) and ordinary shares (Stammaktien). Only the Stammaktien have voting rights and of those the State of Lower Saxony is holding 20% plus 1 so-called Golden Share. There is a law known as the Volkswagen Gesetz that is only applicable to this company and it requires an 80% majority for certain important decisions at the shareholders meeting. That means the state has a blocking minority. Decisions affecting production sites require a ⅔ majority in the supervisory board. The supervisory board is split 50/50 in Germany between shareholders and employees but the State of Lower Saxony has the right to name two board members, usually the Prime Minister and the Minister of Economics. In this case the minister of Economics, Mr. Lies, had to step back in favor of the Deputy Prime Minister who is the leader of the Green Party.
In other words, VW cannot close superfluous production sites unless the state and the unions agree. VW employs about 680,000 workers. Not quite one fifth of those are located in Lower Saxony. VW represents about 50% of the added value produced by companies in Lower Saxony and many of those are suppliers of VW. VW produces about 9+ million cars with 680,000 employees at a manufacturing depth of roughly 50%. Toyota produces about 11 million cars with 380,000 employees and a manufacturing depth of roughly 70%, the highest among all car manufacturers I believe. In other words, VW has way too many employees and no way to get rid of them. Abolishing ICE in favor of BEV, which are less complex to manufacture, is making the situation worse.
VW is hugely important for the German car industry. They are what is keeping all the major Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers in business. Without VW they will die or have life altering experiences, and the other car makers not belonging to VW (BMW & Daimler Benz) most likely could not go on as they currently are as the domestic industrial base would collapse, not to mention the entire economy.
The switch to BEVs forced on us by the EU Commission with the support of German governments has significantly eroded Germany’s competitiveness and industrial base. Cheap car imports from China are rising and German car exports and German car production in China have taken big hits. The „Energiewende“ is making everything more expensive and less reliable.
You have to go back to Gerhard Schröder, a friend of the Russian President, to see the last Chancellor of Germany who understood the needs of German business and who was highly successful in reforming the German economy. He was from the Social Democrats and had to ride roughshod over the left wing of the party to get things done. Merkel, a Conservative in name only but a Green in her heart, was a disaster in more ways than can be told in this post and the same is true of the current government.
The current situation reminds me more and more of Weimar Germany every day.
“You have to go back to Gerhard Schröder, a friend of the Russian President, to see the last Chancellor of Germany who understood the needs of German business and who was highly successful in reforming the German economy.”
A German politician who understands the needs of German business will recognize the inevitability of dealing with Russia with its natural resources, sizable consumer market and opportunities for German investments.
For this, one does not have to be friend of Putin.
It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.