That’s a variation on an old joke about BMW’s, but it’s turning out to be even more true of EV’s:
iSeeCars reported in January that, on average, “electric cars have a five-year depreciation rate of 49.1%… compared to an overall industry average of a 38.8% five-year depreciation rate.” Executive analyst Karl Brauer added, “This pattern will continue until electric vehicles don’t require heavy incentives to sell and consumers gain confidence in their long-term ownership costs.”
Yeah, about those costs. That article contains a story about a guy who got a great deal on a 2022 Long Range Tesla Model 3 with 70,000 miles on it that costed him about $25,000 when they’re almost $50k new. Except than then he found a small hole underneath that led to other concerns and cost him another $13k.
All this has made it even harder for Hertz’s to dump its fleet of 30,000 EV’s. They had boasted of having 100,000 but it turned out that few customers wanted to rent them. Now people are not keen even on buying them cheap!
Meanwhile there are many other EV industry problems:
- Another manufacturer, Rivian, continuing to layoff workers and having fires at two of its factories, not something you want with EV’s especially.
- Ford’s EV losses now running at $132,000 per vehicle and with plummeting sales now that the early adopters already bought their EVs. New product launches are being delayed, EV factory construction suspended and workers re-assigned to the parts of Ford that are making money.
- Volkswagen’s year-over-year Q1 electric vehicle sales in the U.S. were down 16%.
- Unsold cars are piling up in Europe’s ports, including Chinese EV imports, which is not surprising since EV sales have plummetted across the entire EU.
- And even Greenies like St Greta Of The Carbon Apocalypse are starting to protest about all those little kids slaving away in the mines of Congo just “so that the rest of the world can buy electric cars and other electronic devices.”
All this has led banking and auto industry analyst, Buck Throckmorton, after looking at all this, to bluntly state that EV’s have entered a doom loop, and takes a detailed look at all the cash these outfits are burning through, much of it from taxpayers – including ones from GOP states like Tennessee. One of the cash burners is even from Australia, Tritium, which got lots of tongue baths from the MSM and a mention by America’s Vegetable In Chief a couple of years ago for all its grand plans of building factories and networks of chargers in the US. It was worth $2 billion on the stock market in 2023 ($300 per share). Now:
At its fiscal year end at 6/30/2023, Tritium had a loss of $118 million against revenue of just $184 million… The gullible appropriators in Tennessee state government apparently couldn’t read financial statements, or the writing on the wall, with the announcement in February 2024 that $10.5 million more of taxpayer money was being handed to Tritium to deploy a few dozen fast chargers across the state. But by then Tritium was already a zombie company. On April 22, news broke that the company was insolvent and seeking buyers.
As with the cars themselves no buyers were to be found. But they’ll be some Aussie grifters who did well and bailed early so it’s not all bad news.
No Minister 
Ever since Mr Musk started happily accepting Seppo tax dollars all those years ago so he could build a car that would, could, never work, the EV has been on a downward curve.
Then add the half-witted idea that removing electricity-producing equipment without replacement while adding to demand via cars and catastrophe was the only outcome possible.
I’d add a third layer that at the same time the World started listening to the uneducated but opinionated-without-study-or-thought slime who have never solved their own problems, let alone life’s and the perfect catastrophe scenario presents itself.
We let this happen therefore we will pay the price of the stupidity.
I hope the next lot to gain supremacy (probably the lot found now from Siberia to the Western shores of Alaska) will learn from our mistakes.
If not Earth will need Mars (as Earth II).
We are told that after “X” number of miles/Kms EV’s have compensated for their carbon creation cost and become more environmentally friendly than the ICE vehicle they are comparing to.
Problem is, “X” number of miles gets reset at around the 14 year mark with a battery “refresh” which is in no way financially or environmentally comparable to an ICE engine overhaul, and furthermore is likely to happen much earlier in the life cycle of an EV than in the life cycle of an ICE vehicle.
However, given current trends I doubt very much that anyone is going to actually replace their battery at that mark. I also doubt whether the vast majority of EV’s will ever reach their magic “X” mileage, given that the capacity (literally) to do so reduces with each passing year.
I am told that there is an urban use case for EV’s, home charging, short commutes etc, but I submit there already exists a class of vehicle that will be difficult to displace from middle class households: The humble hatchback.
The humble hatchback is the Swiss Army Knife of vehicles, it can do almost everything any other class of vehicle can do, not as well, but “Well enough”, and certainly better than entry level EVs.
If this is really about saving the planet, than discouraging SUV’s and encouraging hatchbacks would do a far better job.