JoNova

By Jo Nova

So many great companies fell into the climate sink hole

Such was the cultural vibe that giant corporations all collectively jumped off a cliff together hoping to invent a new technology fast enough to be able to land.

In the case of Honda, after 70 years of endless profits, they burnt at least $9 billion dollars, and have given up the idea of trying to get EVs to make up one fifth of their sales by 2030. The demand just isn’t there. They also thought they could shift their whole fleet to electric or fuel cells by 2030. That’s gone too.

Honda posts first annual loss on $9 billion EV writedown, scraps EV sales goals TOKYO, May 14 (Reuters) – Honda Motor (7267.T), opens new tab posted its ​first annual loss in nearly 70 years as a listed company on Thursday, hit by more than $9 billion in costs ‌to restructure its electric-vehicle business, and the firm scrapped its long-term EV sales target. Revealing its worst financial report since Honda listed on the stock market in 1957 underscores how risky an aggressive bet on EVs can be for a legacy automaker when it slams into weaker-than-expected […]

By Jo Nova

At some point, Western governments decided to pick winners, and set deadlines for inventions and discoveries and most car manufacturers clapped quietly. They didn’t speak up, presumably because they didn’t want to look like a climate denier. But it’s been a disastrous choice for the auto makers that jumped onto the EV bandwagon with both feet.

A few days ago the corporate mothership for Fiat Peugeot and Chrysler, announced a $26 billion US dollar loss and shares fell 27%. This ignominiously follows the brutal $20 billion dollar Ford write down. The CEO of Stellantis has announced a reset of the company and in a radical plan, decided to “make our customers and their preferences our guiding star.” Crikey — they will try making cars that customers actually want, rather than ones that change the weather.

Robert Bryce estimates the known losses add up to $140 billion in the last 4 years. And that’s only the money burned by Ford, Stellantis, GM, Mercedes, Volkswagon, Rivian, and Lucid.

Other companies have signed and bragged about big deals that they later backed away from. But they haven’t necessarily announced their EV specific losses. So who knows how much Honda, […]

By Jo Nova

No one saw this car crash coming?

EV’s represent just 0.9% of all cars on the road in Australia but plans to install fast chargers are already grinding to a crawl. Last year, Ampol was planning to build 180 EV charging bays by the end of the year. Instead it’s proved difficult to even reach half that target. Eight months after they were supposed to have 180 in action they’ve reached 92.

Just throw money…

A mere 3 weeks ago Ampol announced that thanks to a $100 million dollar grant from the Australian government they would install more than 200 new fast chargers at Ampol’s national network of petrol stations this year. But presumably after making a few phone calls they’ve realized it’s not going to happen. (You’d think they might have made the calls before putting out the press release? Or the Minister might have phoned a friend before tossing $100 million to the wind?)

Power grid foils Ampol’s big EV charger plans

Ben Potter and Simon Evans, Australian Financial Review

Ampol, one of the country’s largest petrol retailers, has dialled back plans to triple the number of electric vehicle chargers […]

By Jo Nova

It could have been so much worse

A Mercedes Benz EV started smoking in an underground carpark in Incheon, South Korea last Thursday at 6:15am. After the immolation, 40 other cars were burnt and another hundred suffered some damage. At least 16 people were taken to hospital for smoke inhalation. Some 48o households lost electricity, and later 121 people had to be relocated. It apparently burned for eight hours. Allegedly, eighty fire engines (or pieces of equipment) turned up with 177 firefighters. Some 209 residents were in the apartment at the time, and “nearly half” were rescued by firefighters from stairs and balconies.

The investigation is ongoing… but there are many puzzles. It wasn’t a cheap car, it wasn’t charging and had been sitting in that spot for 59 hours and nothing apparently triggered the blaze.

Not surprisingly, there are reports that residents in other Seoul apartment blocks are moving to ban electric vehicles from their basement carparks.

EV-phobia spreads, as police investigate cause of electric car explosion

The Nation

Incheon police on Tuesday said it is investigating what caused the mysterious explosion of an electric car last week, but some […]

By Jo Nova

The government has this hope that homeowners can be tricked into paying for the batteries (in the form of EVs) that the wind and solar industry need to make their useless random energy into something reliable. Now comes the news that not only are batteries hazardous fire risks and expensive themselves, but to connect to our grid in a two way arrangement we need to spend $3,000 dollars per household (or maybe $10,000) to buy the bit of equipment that makes this work. Not to mention adding another million gigawatts of generation so the cars can be charged in the first place.

Remember in the end, we are not buying EV’s because they go further, cost less, or are more convenient, we’re buying them because we want to stop storms in 100 years.

How many nice weather days will I get in 2100AD for that $3,000 inverter?

Household EV infrastructure could cost as much as $10bn, inquiry told

By Natasha Schmidt, The Australian

Interim Director of Monash Energy Institute, Roger Dargaville, said powering EVs in just one million households could cost as much as $10bn in power inverters.

Professor Dargaville […]

By Jo Nova Saving the world with silent killers

A new study shows electric cars are twice as likely to hit pedestrians compared to petrol and diesel cars. Presumably this is because EVs are so quiet. Though it’s also possible the dash interfaces are hideous, and some menu options are more deadly and distracting than others. Or perhaps EV drivers are more stressed or feeling nauseous? The study didn’t investigate that.

Amazingly the data was from six to ten years ago in the UK, so countless people have died in the interim, and if it is just a noise issue, it could have been fixed, or at least investigated. Where is the precautionary principle when you need it?

And if electric cars are killing more people in cities, we would presume that Fido and Spot would be a part of the carnage too. But who would know what the car-pet-kill tally was? Well, manufacturers might — they own the camera footage, but no one is even asking that question. Animals have rights you know, but they don’t donate to Greenpeace.

The Greens are rushing headlong to roll out the auto-weather-saving-machines across the countryside, and they might be killing wallabies […]