Guest Post by Eric Peters
Something’s got to give – and will, soon.
Odds are it will be us. Giving more money, that is. Our punishment for not buying an electric car. Or put another way – to make it just as expensive for us to continue driving a non-electric car as it is to buy an electric car.
In order to “level the playing field.” Get ready – it’s coming.
It’ll be done in any of several ways. In China, people are allowed to drive non-electric cars, provided they pay an exorbitant fee – $14,000 – for the privilege. After winning a license plate lottery that allows them to pay the fee.
Winning the lottery can take years. But EVs can be registered immediately . . . and without the punitive fee. You just pay the punitive expense . . . for the EV.
In Western European countries, so-called “polluter pays” taxes are being applied to non-electric cars.
Bans on the use of non-electric cars in certain areas have also been enacted, transforming people’s non-EVs into UVs . . .
useless vehicles.
Such nudging is going to be necessary here, too – absent some sort of developmental miracle, because EVs as they are – as opposed to how we’re promised they will be – can’t compete on the economic merits.
It’s not a debatable point.
Put aside haggling over the electric car’s functional merits – or the lack thereof. Forget about their supposedly “zero emissions.” These are separate considerations.
The hard deck reality is that most people simply cannot afford electric cars – the least expensive of which (Nissan’s Leaf, reviewed here) starts at $30,000. The rest begin around $35,000 – and ascend from there.
Most people can’t afford a luxury car – which is what EVs are, in terms of what they cost. Which is at least twice as much as a current non-electric economy car.
But enormous numbers of these electrified luxury cars are going to be manufactured regardless of people’s ability to buy them – because of the willful refusal of the car industry to acknowledge the economic hard deck.
What will happen to all of these unaffordable EVs?
Tesla has already mopped-up most of the virtue-signaling affluent who can afford to virtue signal. Electric or not, the market for cars that cost more than $40,000 (the price of the least expensive Tesla, the Model 3) is much smaller than the market for cars that cost $20,000.
And the market for cars that cost more than $40,000 – which is most EVs – is even smaller. Especially when you take into account the peripheral but effectively unavoidable costs of EV ownership – including the $1,000 it costs to install a “fast” charger in one’s home and the certainty of having to spend thousands on a replacement battery at some point.
IC cars may require a new engine or transmission; but it isn’t a certainty and many will never need either over the course of their useful life of 15-20 years or longer.
But the artificially mandated market for inherently small-market EVs is about to get a lot larger because almost every major car company has “committed” to building EVs en masse; several have “committed” to building nothing but EVs and within the next five years or even sooner.
The problem will be finding buyers for these EVs.
At least, so long as buyers have a choice.
Even with subsidies to offset the cost of their manufacture – and government kickbacks to the buyer – EVs have been a hard sell and a no-profit. 
The media image of EVs being both everywhere and inevitable for everyone runs up hard against the brick wall fact that in spite of all the hard-selling and subsidizing, EVs only constitute about 1 percent of all cars on the road.
This isn’t likely to change unless millions of average people find the means to spend 30-50 percent more for their next new (electric) car or the cost of electric cars goes down by 30-50 percent.
Is there any indication of either thing happening?
Most people have less buying power today than they did twenty years ago because of stagnant or regressive wages and lower discretionary income due to rising costs (especially for health insurance) and inflation. They can barely afford non-electric cars. Most new car loans have been pushed out to six or seven years in order to reduce the monthly payment but the problem is the principle – which continues to increase.
EVs will cause the principle to increase by the aforesaid 30-50 percent.
Loans can’t be pushed out much beyond eight years to make that more palatable because of depreciation – and electric cars depreciate faster than non-electric cars because of their built-in shorter economically viable lives. Their batteries will need to be replaced at least once for sure and probably before 10 years – again, assuming electric cars as they are and not as we are promised they will be … eventually.
But EV batteries are proportionately too expensive to be worth replacing after ten years or so for the same reason that it’s usually not worth putting a new engine in a ten-year-old non-electric car.
The only way this EVs-uber-alles regime works is if people – average people – suddenly have 30-50 percent more money available to spend on a new EV. Or if people are forced to give up their non-EVs via exorbitant fines designed to make them just as expensive as EVs; probably more so – to overcome the inconveniences of owning an EV.
Failing that, the EVs will sit.
And the car business – having committed to the EV business – will go out of business.
Grab a seat; the show’s going to be fun.
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I always like that ‘they’ paint road markings / crosswalks green. Because green is sooo good.
“Sustainable” is the big catch-word of the century.
You can have my combustion engine vehicle if you can pry it from my cold, dead garage. Come and take, baby!
Two Words.
Ruby Ridge.
Two More.
Waco. McVeigh.
The globalists are at least consistent. They are 100 % idiotic in their policies and desires/demands for us. Like 2 articles already posted today, they show the ineptness and/or logical fallacies of their positions. There is no way we can move to all electric vehicles. There isn’t enough raw materials and their fabrication is just as bad or even more polluting. They have a 100% failure rate in leading us yet, there are many followers.
And the sheep are always constant as well. How do the elites continue pushing this stupid? That’s right, the average American keeps falling for the con. The globalists are just doing what they can get away with, just as any other CRIMINAL does. When are Americans going to grow a pair? Not until their government check quits coming, that’s when.
They have to find a way to get us to (mostly, sort of) voluntarily give up the IC transport we currently have. This can be easily accomplished by mandating a replacement of airbags and sensors in all cars over 10 years. Cash for clunkers for everyone that can’t afford the replacements, and no regular plates or insurance for any non-airbag auto. You can keep it, but not drive it. If you get caught driving it, you will lose it.
What to do about all the debt that people are rolling over on auto buys and leases? Way too many people are in permanent debt for vehicles, owing more every day. There will have to be some sort of EV debt holiday shenanigans pulled so that GMAC, FMCC and all the other finance companies to cleanse their books of bad paper. Think of it as helicopter money.
Then there is the massive investment needed to charge EVs. Gas stations run on tiny fuel margins, and NO WAY can they afford to give away electric fuel, nor provide enough parking for the time it takes to charge. That will be a tough nut. Many Americans simply don’t have the room or money for a dedicated charger, let alone one for Dad, one for Mom, one for Muffy, and one for the slacker 25 year old gamer in the basement. Is your employer going to install and maintain charge units for you, fr free? The grocer? Whay do you think Amazon is delivering groceries? Bezos want to literally be the only car on the road, and he might just get there.
We did not talk about winter yet. EVs just do not work in the winter. too cold, too dark, too much snow and ice and road salt. This is just a mess, a real trainwreck right before our eyes. All the car companies, all the politicians (both parties) all the bureaucrats and cops are going to support it. Get some comfortable walking shoes, you are going to need them.
I’m fortunate – I have a 3 car, heated garage. But it’s detached from the house. For two vehicles, I’d need two 220v – 20 amp circuits. I would imagine it would cost $5,000 to do it correctly (sawing the drive, burying the cable, routing the cable in the garage). And what about the people who don’t have a garage and park on the street? I can see it coming now: Minorities that don’t have garages are being discriminated.
Were you about to say minorities in California?
No, it is as simple as Eric states. Simply hike up registration cost. Then all those additional cops on the street all you “we need more cops on the street” sheep voted for, you know cuz cops are heroes and all, can enforce the elites mandates. We are all paying for our own oppression.
What do you suppose would happen if voters, for once, when a school wants more money, or a cop shop wanted to hire more bullies voted no. No more. Oh, but noone would come when I dial 911…. Who cares, buy a gun. Oh, that’s right, you are not supposed to have those either. And who enforces that? Same people the sheep vote for more of.
We, as a society chronically vote, and work against our own interest everyday, and then are surprised that the thieves and criminals continue to prosper.
Get out of debt, and check out of the system completely. Quit paying and working for your own distruction. Going Galt is literally the only answer, but that means inconvenience and sacrifice, and not one in 100 is interested in that. Thus the continued March toward a completely totalitarian future.
The electric grid cant take millions of plugged-in cars. 35000 buys a lot of gas for my paid-for truck.
millions are happy with their paid-for vehicles also. There’s plenty of oil out there. We are using other peoples oil up first and then we use ours. The Russians are swimming in oil also. Try buying their oil instead of using them as a prop for more arms production/sales.
I can remember a time when people who couldn’t afford car insurance didn’t have to own any as long as they could pay for any damage they caused to someone else’s property.
Then, Medical costs soared.
Then, there was a time when you could have a medical savings account in lieu of insurance.
Then, ObamaCare.
They can mandate the purchase of anything they deem necessary to Interstate Commerce. That’s the clause that killed all our civil liberties.
That and the general welfare clause.
Well the general welfare is accessible via interstate commerce ONLY.
Otherwise, there would be a wall of separation.