Why Not? Any Excuse Will Do. EV sales falling flat. No wonder.
Sales in electrical vehicles (EVs) are plummeting in the UK and the Green Alliance think tank is not happy. According to them, the culprit is comedian Rowan Atkinson, aka Mr Bean. Atkinson’s crime, according to the climate cultists, is that he wrote an article in the Guardian in June.
The Guardian is the bible of carbon catastrophists so it’s hard to imagine that they would publish anything that deviated from the climate orthodoxy, but they did publish Atkinson’s article titled, ‘I love electric vehicles and was an early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped’. Oh dear.
Atkinson has a degree in electrical and electronic engineering and a master’s degree in control systems. He has owned both a hybrid and a full EV so if he no longer loves his EVs he knows whereof he speaks. Not only did he describe EVs as wonderful if ‘soulless’ but concluded that ‘our honeymoon with electric cars is coming to an end, and that’s no bad thing’.
That incensed the Green Alliance who wrote that ‘the level of debate in the press has been extremely poor when it comes to discussing the EV transition’ but Atkinson’s account of the end of his affair with EVs was ‘one of the most damaging articles’ and even though it had been promptly and ‘roundly debunked’ only days later in the Guardian by true-believer Simon Evans of Carbon Brief, the damage had been done because ‘unfortunately, fact checks never reach the same breadth of audience as the original false claim, emphasising the need to ensure high editorial standards around the net zero transition’.
It seems odd that Atkinson was singled out since as the Green Alliance admitted, the Daily Mail ran a whole campaign against EVs and the 2030 phase-out, and ‘many of the Mail’s claims have hit home with consumers and policy makers. Even the London School of Economics that duly did its best to debunk the campaign, admitted that it ‘does raise some legitimate questions about the current costs and infrastructure for electric vehicles’.
If Green Alliance really wanted to identify damaging articles it could start with a Wall Street Journal article entitled ‘I Rented an Electric Car for a Four-Day Road Trip. I Spent More Time Charging It Than I Did Sleeping’.
An article by a self-confessed ‘smug EV evangelist and self-proclaimed EV expert’ responded that when he read the WSJ article, ‘I rolled my eyes. “They just didn’t plan well enough,” I thought to myself, not realising I was merely hoisting myself on my own petard.’ A few weeks later, he drove from DC to New York, in a BMW iX and despite plenty of planning, ‘spent almost as much time stationary, arguing with charging machinery’ as driving reporting that… At each charging stop… I ran into problems… Frustration often got the better of me and I berated the white monoliths, channelling the spirit of Basil Fawlty to summon down all manner of ills upon them and their circuitry, to my shame. (But seriously, it’s all just so opaque. Why don’t they just bloody work?) Then there was the problem of whether or not all of the chargers at a given location were even functional… If you’re lucky, you get to the charger when no one else is around, and maybe you’re recharging your battery before the third anxious EV arrives on the scene and joins the wait.
More likely, you’re on the phone with tech support. Hopefully, you’re not shouting at the gizmos.’
The hilarious Tim Blair reported in the Daily Telegraph on a woman who tweeted, ‘Have just driven from Qld to Vic and back and found trip horrendous! … A usually 16-hour drive ended up being 46 hours including being stuck ‘with 1 per cent battery left, stranded at 3.30 am and having to get towed to Barnawartha’.
Despite these horror stories, demand for electric company cars in the UK actually grew by 42 per cent, presumably because the people who purchase them don’t end up stranded in Barnawatha at 3:30 am. The slump in electric vehicles of 25 per cent is in the private car market.
The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders blamed the lack of government subsidies calling for VAT (ie. GST) on EVs to be halved. The trouble with government subsidies is sooner or later you run out of other peoples’ money. In Europe, the EV market is ‘sputtering’ with sales plunging in Germany after taxpayer-funded incentives ran out. New Zealand also saw a large drop with just 244 EVs sold in January, just 3 per cent of the market, the lowest level since 2020 because the new conservative government ended a taxpayer-funded discount.
Generous tax credits in the US didn’t stop EV sales from slumping in 2023. According to money.com, the reason Americans switched off buying EVs had nothing to do with Atkinson and everything to do with the fact that EVs are too expensive, public charging costs are the same as gasoline, but gas stations are a lot easier to find, most charging is slow, fast chargers are rare, EVs don’t hold their value depreciating 20 per cent in the last year, and the owners suffer range anxiety. ‘Nuff said.
In China, the fall in EV sales in 2023 was 37 per cent.
In the face of cratering global demand, Tesla and Mercedes slashed their prices, with Mercedes’ CFO describing the EV market as a ‘brutal space’. Ford, GM, Honda, and Toyota halted EV production and Volvo is seeking to get rid of its luxury EV brand Polestar.
Then there are exploding batteries. Last September a Tesla Model 3 electric car caught fire in NSW after its battery pack was punctured by debris on the road. The driver and passenger escaped the inferno but it took fire crews more than half an hour to extinguish the blaze because lithium-ion batteries burn more fiercely than petrol-fuelled flames and can’t be extinguished by ordinary fire suppressants. They also release toxic gases that create exploding clouds of vapour.
The Tesla wasn’t the only car carbonated by its battery in NSW that week. The battery of an electric MG stored in a holding yard at Sydney Airport destroyed not just itself but four other innocent petrol-powered cars.
It’s not just batteries in EVs that are going up in smoke. An explosion at the Callide coal-fired power station that stripped off 10 per cent of Queensland’s generating capacity was caused by a backup battery. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is contemplating a compulsory recall of 5,000 LG solar storage batteries after 13 incidents including a fire that destroyed a house in Victoria and caused a smoke inhalation injury.
In 2021, Atkinson described cancel culture as the ‘digital equivalent of the medieval mob roaming the streets looking for someone to burn’ saying it filled him with fear. The Green Alliance may be out to cancel Atkinson but a car bursting into flaming clouds of toxic vapour conjures up biblical images of Moses and the burning bush. Maybe the Lord is sending us a message.
