It turns out that the speed-obsessed petrolheads, along with the status-obsessed playboys, who made up the bulk of its customers are not really interested in a souped up lawnmower after all. The sports and luxury car manufacturer Porsche has this week announced that it is giving up making its own batteries for electric cars because the demand isn’t there.
Meanwhile, the European automobile and suppliers associations have recently written to the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen arguing the 2035 ban on combustion engines is no longer feasible. One by one, the EV dominos are falling. It can’t be much longer before the whole catastrophic experiment is cancelled – but unfortunately not before it has done huge damage to Europe’s largest industry.
It has been another disappointing week for the cheerleaders of Europe’s electric vehicle industry. Porsche has just announced it will be winding down production of its own EV batteries, with the likely loss of 200 of the 300 jobs. The reason? There is not enough demand from drivers, according to the chief executive Oliver Blume.
That comes after Northvolt, the Swedish battery start-up that was meant to be the largest in Europe, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Likewise, in a recent letter to von der Leyen, the Mercedes-Benz chief executive Ola Kaellenius and Matthias Zink, the CEO of the auto parts supplier Schaeffler, warned on behalf of the European auto industry that the 2035 ban on the sale of petrol cars was no longer feasible. Europe, they added, risked becoming completely dependent on China for its supply of batteries.
EVs were meant to lead an industrial renaissance, creating hundreds of thousands of “well-paid green jobs”, re-booting the economy, re-establishing industrial leadership, and saving the planet at the same time. But it is not looking as if any of that will happen right now.
In reality, the ideologically-driven obsession with imposing EVs on a reluctant European market is collapsing. There were three big problems. To start with, the infrastructure wasn’t in place. In most of Europe, people live in apartments, making it very hard to install home chargers, while even in countries such as the UK where more of us live in houses it is often impossible to slot a giant plug into a suburban driveway.
Likewise, chargers along main roads were hopelessly inadequate, and the cost of electricity was far too high to make it affordable to run an electric car. Next, the manufacturers were in no state to invest the hundreds of billions that were needed to switch from one technology to another.
Indeed, as the success of the Chinese brands, along with Tesla, has shown, it is probably easier to start from scratch than to convert a combustion engine giant to electricity. Finally, customers don’t really like them, nor do they trust an EV to get them to their destination in time. Add it all up, and one point is clear: they have been a colossal flop.
There is a catch, however. Europe’s largest industry is now facing full-scale collapse. The major manufacturers can’t compete in EV’s, and yet their existing products will be banned in just ten years for now.
Autos account for 6 per cent of German GDP, and are estimated to account for 7 per cent of the EU’s entire output, with 13.8 million jobs dependent on the sector. If the companies can’t compete in EVs, and petrol cars are banned, they are simply going to disappear. It will be a fatal blow for the European economy, and one that may well plunge it into a full scale recession.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with EVs themselves. Many of them, and especially Tesla’s and many of the new Chinese brands, are stylish cars that are very practical to drive. They are often better for the environment, even when the metals that go into making them are taken into account.
If people want to buy them, that’s fine. The problem is that the market has been twisted by top-down quotas and targets imposed by bureaucrats and virtue-signalling politicians who don’t have a clue what they are doing. One by one, the dominos are now collapsing. In reality, it won’t be long before the whole insane scheme will have to be scrapped – it is just a shame that one of Europe’s largest and most important industries might be destroyed in the process.