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Fisker Ocean

It’s time for your regular EV update.  This will come as no surprise to regular readers: 

Fisker, a US electric vehicle startup, said Tuesday it had filed for bankruptcy.

The company had already warned it was in trouble. When it published quarterly earnings in February, it said it might not have enough money to survive another year. Fisker added then that it was in discussions with an existing investor about possibly putting more money into the company.

On Tuesday, a Fisker spokesperson said in a statement: ‘Like other companies in the electric vehicle industry, we have faced various market and macroeconomic headwinds that have impacted our ability to operate efficiently.’

Translation: our prices are too high, no one wants to buy our products, and our quality sucks.  That sort of thing tends to matter in a free market.  In the meantime, VW is wising up—sort of:

Volkswagen hasn’t given up on its electrification plans, but it plans to shift some of its EV-designated funds to continue developing gas engines. Company Chief Financial Officer Arno Antlitz said the automaker would spend around $65 billion to ‘keep our combustion cars competitive.’

Gee, $65 billion seems like a lot…

The executive acknowledged that EVs are the future but also said that ‘the past is not over.’ His announcement that VW would invest a third of its planned EV funds in ICE tech is a reversal of previous statements and the company’s stated goal to only sell EVs in Europe by 2033. It’s also a change from the automaker’s estimates last year, which pegged EVs at 80 percent of its overall sales by the end of the 2020s.

We’re seeing this kind of mealy-mouthed PR release from pretty much every manufacturer.  They’re keeping a close eye on the American presidential election, because if Trump wins, EV mandates are going to disappear and they can go back to making a profit, but just in case Biden is able to cheat past the margin of fraud, they don’t want to upset his handlers.  In effect, they have to live in the real world of economics, but simultaneously keep a foot in the Bizarro World of Bidenomics.  An example is Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer:

Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s multi-billion dollar effort to lure electric vehicle (EV)-related factories to the state has not produced the thousands of jobs she promised, according to an analysis conducted by Bridge Michigan.

Whitmer and the state government have already spent $1 billion of the $2 billion pledged to five different projects to build EV battery factories or expand EV production, but only about 200 jobs have been created, a far cry from the 12,000 jobs Whitmer has stated the companies will ultimately provide for Michiganders, according to Bridge Michigan, a Michigan-focused nonprofit publication of the Center for Michigan. Two years after the subsidies were extended in 2022, only 2% of the jobs promised have been delivered while the state-backed projects have downsized relative to original plans or faced delays.

Well, at least Democrat/Socialist/Communist fellow travelers have raked in plenty of taxpayer dough, which is the point.  And they never, ever, learn:

General Motors is trimming its expected sales and production of all-electric vehicles this year, as U.S. adoption of EVs occurs slower than expected.

GM Chief Financial Officer Paul Jacobson said the company now expects production of its all-electric vehicles to range from 200,000 to 250,000 this year, down from a previously announced range of 200,000 to 300,000. The company has recently said it will produce volume to match demand, which is growing more slowly than had been forecast.

‘So at the lower end of that, and I think it reflects the momentum that we have in the business,’ Jacobson said Tuesday during a Deutsche Bank investor event.

“Momentum?!”  No one wants to buy EVs, they’re rusting, unsold, on dealer lots, and that constitutes “momentum?”

Jacobson said GM expects EVs to make up 8% of U.S. sales industrywide this year. That’s lower than many other auto analyst forecasts, which expect EVs to represent around 10% of industry sales in 2024.

GM expects its EVs to be profitable on a production, or contribution-margin basis, once it reaches production of 200,000 units. That milestone is still expected in the fourth quarter of this year, he said.

Translation: we’re losing huge amounts of money on every EV we build, but that’s going to change, honest.  Trust us.  Here’s some more EV logic:

As California pushes consumers to drive electric vehicles, the state is also moving away from fossil fuels, making electricity—and charging those vehicles—more expensive.

California has ushered in a nearly 70 percent spike in electricity costs since 2010 when the state began its big break from fossil fuels due to its cap-and-trade regulations, mandates on utilities to procure higher-cost renewable energy, crackdowns on oil and gas, and taxpayer subsidies for solar panels. And while Californian households use less electricity than residents of other states, their rates are nearly 63 percent higher than the national average.

Now the price hikes are hitting EV owners, in some cases nearly doubling the charging costs since 2022, even as regulators ready a 2035 ban on the sale of gas-fueled autos. EVs still represent just a fraction of the cars on the road—just over 903,000 of California’s 14.3 million registered automobiles were electric as of 2022. The soaring costs come as President Joe Biden models his own administration’s green energy policies on California’s, with an aggressive target to cut carbon emissions, and push for electric freight trucks and EV sales. But critics of California’s renewable energy push say it’s ultimately an example of the state’s myriad climate policies undermining one another.

So, force everyone to drive EVs, but make charging them impossibly expensive, to say nothing of California’s lunatic drive to do away with reliable electric power.  That’s green/EV/climate change logic in a nutshell.  It appears sanity yet maintains a foothold in America:

A coalition of 25 attorneys general led by Kentucky’s Russell Coleman filed a lawsuit against an economy-commandeering Biden administration electric vehicle mandate Thursday.

In March, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced new emissions demands for carmakers to reduce ‘fleetwide average carbon emissions’ by 56 percent in eight years. The regulations would require car manufacturers to sell more electric vehicles.

Daren Bakst, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center on Energy and Environment, called the new emissions rules ‘one of the most extreme rules ever finalized by a federal agency.’

‘The EPA’s rule would restrict the ability of Americans to buy gas-powered vehicles, a chilling abuse of power and a wanton disregard for individual freedom,’ Bakst said when the regulations were unveiled.

Now, attorneys general in half of U.S. states are suing to block the administration from forcing high-cost, low-energy electric cars on American consumers.

‘The Biden Administration is willing to sacrifice the American auto industry and its workers in service of its radical green agenda,’ the Kentucky attorney general said in a statement. ‘We just aren’t buying it. Demand for EVs continues to fall, and even those who want to buy one can’t afford it amid historic inflation.’

So much for the D/S/C Party being the party of working Americans.  Is it possible the Mummified Meat Puppet Administration (MMPA), or at least some small elements within it, are getting a clue about reality?

About two weeks ago President Biden’s Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm made an announcement that did not receive much notice given the enormous underlying concession and major potential policy shift it contained. Granholm said matter-of-factly that if the United States is going to meet it ambitious Net-Zero emissions by 2050 target, ‘we have to at least triple our current nuclear capacity in this country. That means we’ve got to add 200 more gigawatts by 2050.’ Granholm then doubled down with the suggestion that we might need to consider restarting nuclear plants that have been shut down in recent years.

This declaration, which Granholm has repeated at subsequent appearances since she first said this on June 7, represents a decisive break with longstanding environmental orthodoxy in at least two ways. First, it implicitly acknowledges that wind, solar, grid-scale batteries, and other “renewables” will be insufficient to supply America’s electricity needs, despite the massive subsidies and relentless cheerleading for these inherently limited sources of power.

Second, opposition to nuclear power has been a central principle of the environmental movement going back to the 1970s, and while a few environmentalists have quietly and grudgingly dropped their opposition to nuclear power, it still remains taboo for many leading environmentalists and environmental organizations, especially overseas. Killing nuclear power has been the foremost political objective of the various Green Parties around the world, who make anti-nuclearism the main condition for joining the incoherent coalition governments that fractious parliamentary electoral systems keep throwing up.

Secretary Granholm’s about-face on nuclear power is likely the result of a heretic inside the Biden administration doing serious mathematical calculations about future electricity needs for the U.S. After several years of flat demand, the rapid rise of energy-hungry AI data centers along with the huge electricity demand from an expanding fleet of electric cars and trucks will require a substantial expansion of electricity production over the next 25 years. Renewable sources aren’t going to cut it. The growing demand for reliable baseload power could be met cheaply with new natural gas plants (and keeping existing coal plants), but that would require abandoning the sacred Net-Zero emissions goal.

Is it possible the MMPA is actually turning toward sanity?  Nah.  What’s most likely is with the election rapidly approaching, Joe Biden’s approval rating tanking, and the economy remaining awful, the MMPA is, just as they’re doing with the border, pretending to move toward the sane center.  Should they keep power, they’ll continue to double down on lunacy and punish anyone who made them pretend otherwise.

As regular readers know, Car and Driver has been a consistent EV cheerleader, but even they seem to have been whacked with the reality stick:

Dedicated electric vehicle platforms are not the future, even if EVs designed from the ground up are cheaper to build than those adapted from internal-combustion-powered vehicles.

And major automakers with separate EV marketing channels, like Mercedes-Benz’s EQ, BMW’s i Series and Toyota’s BZ are about to give up those subbrands, says AutoForecast Solutions in its monthly newsletter.

‘Manufacturers around the world are developing more dynamic platforms for their future products,’ Sam Fiorani, vice president for Global Vehicle Forecasting for AFS and co-author of AFS Monthly‘s special report on the auto industry’s EV transition, told Autoweek via email.

‘As with Stellantis’s STLA platforms, these modern architectures allow more freedom between powertrains so that automakers can adapt to consumer demand. Dedicating platforms and plants to one type of powertrain ties up so much cost that can’t be properly utilized if demand shifts away from that particular drivetrain,’ Fiorani says.

‘This will be especially important over the next 10 to 15 years as ICE continues to dominate but battery-electric powertrains will be necessarily phased in over time.’

“Necessarily phased in over time.”  See what I mean about EV cheerleading?  Every indicator shows the public, with the exception of a small portion of the greenie virtue signaling wealthy, are absolutely rejecting EVs, yet they continue to call EVs inevitable.  The rest of the article talks about manufacturers redesigning EVs to use common platforms and to make them much less expensive.  The date we’re all going to be driving EVs and loving them is now pushed back to 2040.  Those dates, like the dates certain of absolute climate change doom, are going to be continually pushed into the future.  The article ends with this:

When NBC News’s Tom Costello asked [GM CEO Mary] Barra, ‘Will you be just as committed to EVs if there’s a Trump administration?’ Barra responded, ‘We’ll be just as committed because we think in the long term they’re better.’ GOP presidential frontrunner Donald J. Trump has promised to kill off all federal EV incentives.

It doesn’t hurt that GM has already committed $35 billion to EV development from 2020 to 2025. That’s a lot of cash to throw away for a four-year presidential term.

“Better?”  How is that, exactly?  Better range, easier on tires?  Less expensive?  Cheaper to insure?  Cheaper to repair?  More reliable in winter?  Were I a GM shareholder, I’d be a bit concerned about a delusional CEO suppressing my dividends.

And now we have a more informed view of why Secretary Gay Pete has had such difficulty building that 500,000-strong national EV charger network:

Last month, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—who administers the funds apportioned for EV charger construction in the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Act—said Americans should not be surprised at the time it takes to stand up ‘a new category of federal investment.’

Investment: government funneling truckloads of taxpayer cash to D/S/C cronies.

‘It’s more than just plunking a small device into the ground,’ Buttigieg said in an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation

But internal memos from the Department of Transportation obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, as well as interviews with those who are responsible for overseeing the implementation of the electric vehicle charging station project, say the delay is in large part a result of the White House’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

‘These requirements are screwing everything up,’ said one senior Department of Transportation staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity. ‘It’s all a mess.’

The Federal government screwing things up?  Impossible…er, maybe not.  After all, Pete is so bad at his job, Americans actually know who the Transportation Secretary is.

Shortly after taking office, the president signed an executive order mandating that the beneficiaries of 40 percent of all federal climate and environmental programs should come from ‘underserved communities.’ The order also established the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, which monitors agencies such as the Department of Transportation to ensure the ‘voices, perspectives, and lived realities of communities with environmental justice concerns are heard in the White House and reflected in federal policies, investments, and decisions.’

Do you, gentle readers, believe Biden wanted this or even knew what he was signing?

In order to qualify for a grant, applicants must ‘demonstrate how meaningful public involvement, inclusive of disadvantaged communities, will occur throughout a project’s life cycle.’ What ‘public involvement’ means is unclear. But the Department of Transportation notes it should involve ‘intentional outreach to underserved communities.’

So, chargers have to be built in “disadvantaged communities,” which can’t afford EVs, or home chargers, in the first place.  That’s government thinking for you, gentle readers.  This is good:

That outreach, the Department of Transportation states, can take the form of ‘games and contests,’ ‘visual preference surveys,’ or ‘neighborhood block parties’ so long as the grant recipient provides ‘multilingual staff or interpreters to interact with community members who use languages other than English.’

So, block parties to try to convince people who can’t afford EVs they have to buy EVs, and they’ll provide public chargers for the EVs they can’t afford and won’t buy, and they have to provide interpreters too?  Riiiiight.  It gets worse:

‘This all just slows down construction,’ says Jim Meigs, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who focuses on federal regulation.

‘These ‘public involvement’ requirements are impossible to quantify and even open builders up to lawsuits by members of the community where an electric vehicle charging station is set to be constructed.

How these equity requirements are relevant to the construction of a single electric vehicle charging station is unclear,’ Meigs said. But all applicants for federal funding must in many cases submit reports that can total hundreds of pages about how they will pursue ‘equity’ every step along the way.

This leads to delays and increases costs throughout the construction process, one senior Department of Transportation official told the Free Beacon. ‘Highly Qualified’ applications, internal memos state, must ‘promote local inclusive economic development and entrepreneurship such as the use of minority-owned businesses.’

Uh-huh.  About seven chargers built thus far at a cost of more than a billion each.  Not much promotion of “local inclusive economic development” happening.

But the propensity for a local population to actually use an electric vehicle charging station appears to be an afterthought for the Biden administration, Meigs said. Instead the various regulations seem to serve more as a way to pay off Democratic constituencies—in the form of minority-focused contracting and hiring—at the expense of completing any projects in a timely or cost-effective manner.

‘At a certain point you have to ask, is the point of these programs to reduce emissions or is the point to spread taxpayer money around and support groups that vote for the Democratic Party?’

Final Thoughts:  That “certain point” has long since come and gone.  It’s hard to imagine a more obvious answer to a more obvious question.

Under electoral pressure, the MMPA is pretending to be sane, but that will last only until the election results are in.  If they lose they’ll push, in the time they have left, all manner of EV and green mandates in ways they think will make it hard for Trump to rescind.  If they win, they’ll go full totalitarian, and try to eliminate the market for conventionally powered vehicles, regardless of the economic harm it causes Americans.

After all, when you’re saving the planet from Deplorables determined to destroy it, how can you possibly limit yourself?  Isn’t any tactic, any punishment, in play to preserve the human race?  A human race ruled by D/S/Cs, of course.