United Auto Workers (UAW) is delaying its endorsement of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, according to a May 2 union memo.
The Detroit-based union is holding back out of concern for recent Biden administration policies that encourage the transition to electric vehicles (EVs).
The UAW is in for a rude awakening I suspect.
… And he cited the specific example of Li-Cycle, a Toronto-based lithium battery recycling operation that’s building a new plant in Rochester, N.Y., with more than US$370 million worth of help from the U.S. Department of Energy, thanks to the IRA.
“They don’t feel like they’re being hurt by Buy American,” said Cohen, who said he met Li-Cycle executives at a recent conference in D.C.
“Buy American didn’t stop them from getting a $370-million grant from the United States government. And they’re not discouraged at all in applying for additional funding to support their lithium recycling business.”
But the fact they are building the plant in the U.S. and not in Canada speaks volumes, said Scotty Greenwood, CEO of the Canadian American Business Council.
“Competition makes us each better and our ultimate competitors and adversaries are in other places in the world — that’s true,” Greenwood said.
“But to say that there’s zero protectionism, and then to give an example of U.S. government money going to a Canadian firm to open a facility in the U.S., it’s precisely the point — the incentives work.”
… After one trucking company tried to electrify just 30 trucks at a terminal in Joliet, Illinois, local officials shut those plans down, saying they would draw more electricity than is needed to power the entire city.
A California company tried to electrify 12 forklifts. Not trucks, but forklifts. Local power utilities told them that’s not possible.
And it gets worse…
Via Lorrie Goldstein
Electric cars are losing their value at twice the rate of petrol vehicles, in the case of some models, meaning drivers have lost thousands of pounds to depreciating prices.
Electric vehicles (EVs) lost roughly half their value between 2020 and 2023, while petrol car prices fell by 37pc in the same period, according to used car finance specialists Choose My Car.
Its study found electric cars lost £15,000 of their value on average over the three-year period, compared with £9,000 for petrol vehicles. In some cases the gap was far wider.
The Trudeau government recently announced it will spend an estimated $13 billion on subsidies for Volkswagen’s Ontario battery plant and offer $700 million to help with construction, in addition to another $500 million from the Ontario government. Federal Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne argues that the economic value from this corporate welfare — funded by taxpayer money — will be worth it. But Trudeau’s spending spree hasn’t spurred economic growth yet, so why should we expect it to now?
As the North American auto industry’s transition toward electric vehicles shifts into higher gear, amid a subsidy war whose long-term consequences remain unknown, there are big questions about whether the move to EVs will eliminate more jobs than it creates.
There are also questions about whether legacy automakers that have relied on boosting sales of gasoline-powered SUVs and pick-ups to generate record profits in recent years can successfully navigate the biggest disruption they have faced yet.
EV’s like wind and solar are not a practical solution, ICE vehicles should remain dominant assuming the lunatics currently at the wheel in Ottawa are ousted.
The choice of either heating your home or driving your EV is likely to be on your future personal agenda.
Assuming you can afford a home or a car and that’s doubtful given the grandiose highschool theatrics of the con artists guiding our nation.
These Toronto folks aren’t lining up to purchase one of Justin’s “Magical EV’s”
The line this morning at the Fort York food bank
The struggle is real in Toronto pic.twitter.com/TRgHkhehro
— Ashleigh Stewart (@Ash_Stewart_) May 2, 2023
An Ontario couple says they’ve been hit with unexpected costs after their new electric vehicle’s ability to sustain a charge is ‘nowhere near’ what was advertised.
“My wife took a job up in Barrie, Ont., and she has to commute 100 kilometers each way and we were paying over $1,000 in gas,” Jack Fleming, of Etobicoke, Ont., told CTV News Toronto Monday.
Fleming said before buying an all-electric Volvo C40 Recharge, he checked the vehicle’s range, which was advertised as 364 km on a full charge.
This is a very common introduction to EV’s for unfortunate buyers. Volvo replies with the standard set of excuses blaming a host of factors but never the technology for clients being shortchanged on advertised performance, the weather, driver habits, woodland elves etc.
A new paper published by SAE International uses Car and Driver‘s real-world highway test data to show that electric vehicles underperform on real-world efficiency and range relative to the EPA figures by a much greater margin than internal-combustion vehicles. While the latter typically meet or exceed the EPA-estimated highway fuel economy numbers, EVs tend to fall considerably short of the range number on the window sticker. The paper, written by Car and Driver’s testing director, Dave VanderWerp, and Gregory Pannone, was presented this week at SAE International’s annual WCX conference. It points to a need for revised testing and labeling standards for EVs moving forward.
h/t Mauser
