As with so many of their articles, this one at American Thinker does an admirable job of delving deep into the minutiae — this time of the European car manufacturing malaise — and comes up with the inevitable conclusion. First, though the writer tees up the argument with a statement that is obvious to most of us:
Looking at the global automotive market, one conclusion is unavoidable: the end of the combustion engine is nowhere in sight.
When I say it’s obvious, I mean that anyone with a brain could see that the constraints of the combustion engine’s purported replacements — electricity especially, and ditto hydrogen power — had just too many negatives to make any replacement a lengthy (and super-costly) affair.
So why, then, did the Big Brains in the German automotive industry go so hard after electric cars, devoting billions of dollars into the creation of manufacturing facilities dedicated to the Big New Thing? Here’s AT‘s take:
But one thing is clear: an energy policy detached from economic reality, driven by climate-apocalyptic ambitions, has harmed the industry at least as much as strategic mistakes at the management level.
We’ve looked at the climate-apocalyptics many times before on these pages, and once again, we all knew that the Watermelons had an agenda that, to be charitable, wasn’t just about Global Cooling Climate Warming Change©, but also about crippling Western capitalism to “level the playing field” with Third World nations.
We also know that when it comes to that kind of neo-socialist government mindset of the German government — and most of the other Euro governments — the idea of central control is seductive, nay imperative. So it would be logical, in their eyes, to mandate that electric cars constitute a large majority of the auto market by x date (2030), and therefore it had to happen.
Of course, when you set yourself against market forces — especially one as entrenched as automotive power — you’re going to fail utterly absent some massive and ummm super-costly infrastructure creation, even assuming that any government had the cash and resources to actually implement such a construction project inside that timeline (and none do, not even the U.S.).
Which leads to the question: if this scenario is so glaringly obvious, why did German car manufacturers not stand up to their government and say, “No.”?
Well, all corporations are lickspittles to their respective governments in the end, so such resistance is of course unthinkable. But Thomas Kolbe supplies another factor:
The tragedy of Germany’s automotive industry is not that it failed to recognize technological change. On the contrary: few industries have invested more resources over recent decades into researching new drive technologies.
The deeper problem is German overconfidence: a hidden statism and an arrogance cultivated by decades of undeniable success — the belief that Germany could not only identify the technology of the future but also predict its entire development path.
A mixture of technological hubris and a belief in unlimited manageability — a character flaw that prepares the ground for failure.
To believe one can outsmart the market, to know more than millions of economic actors operating through decentralized information networks: Is this the German disease?
If so, it’s a disease that has infected Germany since Bismarck’s time — the auto manufacturing industry being just the latest manifestation (the earlier one was militarism).
I guess they should have just stuck to doing brilliant engineering — except that their political class (like most political classes) are just as wedded to the concept of social engineering as Mercedes is to automotive engineering.
There’s a broader lesson to be learned here, but I’m not at all sanguine of anyone actually learning it.
Not to worry, turbines will save us all.
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oil, natural gas and coal are just too easy to extract from the earth and getting easier to extract and refine all the time. These areas of energy production should be pursued. Wind and solar simply are not reliable enough to be cost effective alternatives.
Nuclear could be cost competitive with oil and coal if the bureaucracy was relaxed and reasonable. Now that Harry Reid, may he rot in hell, is gone, who is obstructing the use of Yucca mountain as a storage facility for used nuclear fuel? Why hasn’t that moved forward?
Any (realistic) EV owner will tell you that they’re not a universal replacement for ICE vehicles. There are huge swathes of the US where distance and use-case are completely incompatible with EV use outside of urban enclaves. Ditto Canada, Australia, Russia, most South American countries, and probably the entirety of Africa. EVs require a certain level of economic advancement, business clustering, and infrastructure to make any sense at all. Much of Europe, Japan, and Korea could probably get away with government focus on EVs for ->consumer<- use but commercial areas such as farming and long-haul trucking will, short of exponential leaps in battery technology, never electrify.
I’m going with theory that Hybrid technology is the way to go. So my latest vehicle purchase is along those lines. I traded in my last Hybrid – a Lexus SUV – that provided 4 years and 150,000 trouble free miles despite the much feared CVT Transmission.
My ( new to me ) CPO Cayenne Turbo S Hybrid is proving to work just as intended. During the week it runs in E-Power mode ( Electric Only ). It will easily do the 20 – 30 miles a day of errands and around town appointments, and then connect to my home level 2 Charger for a 2+ hour recharge overnight. I’m getting around 1 1/2 miles per KWH so lets say $ 0.10 a mile. ( not counting what it costs to install the charger – New Panel , New Meter, Permits, Delays, Inspections etc. etc. )
Then for trips, On weekends, …. and any other time my inner Hoonagan shows up, I can move the selector switch to Sport Plus and unleash the full power of the 4.0 liter Twin Turbo V8 PLUS the electric motor for a combined 750 HP worth of fun. Let’s not think about the cost per mile in Premium only that runs.
Porsche may have been a little too enthusiastic to embrace Electric Cars, But they are not known for doing things half way. They have slowly backed away from the commitment to go fully electric across the model range. I expect they will start to focus more on the Hybrid side.
Ooh… and none of this is new; the first car Porsche designed was a Hybrid electric car in 1893.
https://www.porsche.com/stories/innovation/gamechanger-how-ferdinand-porsche-designed-first-hybrid-car/
This is a universal problem. Not just a Kraut one.
It comes down to Executive diktat believing the world will change its rotation, because I said so that’s why. The problem comes down to shitty learship (Somali spelling).
I was a true believer once that corporate and .gov leadership were higher caliber individuals who had proved themselves through competence and results. HOOOBOY was I wrong. For every one genius there are 10000 unqualified, petty, brittle wankers out there. That does not even touch the hordes of supine, cowardly, junior executives out there. Don’t rock the boat.
If you study US Civil War & WW1 battles and I’m sure thousands of others, there seems to be an ustated principle of “Better 10,000 dead troops than a General gets dismissed.” The same is true in any corporate environment, “Better Mercedes wastes billions and ends up in a smoking pile, than a C-level executive get exposed as an idiot.”
“This is a universal problem. Not just a Kraut one.”…
I worked with British, Italian and German machinery for many years, and while they all had pride in their creations, by far the worst case of “if not invented here, it’s no good” was the haughty attitude of the Germans.
Over a few years we bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of their machinery, billions in today’s dollars, for one factory, located in a semi rural area where many of the techs and operators had never been out of the county. The documentation ran to many hundreds of pages, and when we reviewed it for acceptance, we found they used British English to translate from the German, which would have been difficult for our operators and techs to follow easily; e.g., spanner – wrench, anticlockwise – counterclockwise, crosshead for Phillips screwdriver, etc. After discussing, pleading, arguing with the hardheaded documentation manager for two and one half days over just the table of contents page, we gave up, took it all home, and regenerated it ourselves.
At every meeting, they never distributed themselves around the table, but clustered in a bunch together and prefaced every statement with “Our side believes..” “Our side declares…” Everything had the tone of us against them.
Like I said, the Germans were the most arrogant bastards I ever had to work with, always our way or the highway. There were no win-win solutions, but instead, it always had to be a win for them and you don’t know anything, even though at the time we were the largest and most profitable company in our industry in the world.
I don’t disagree. The times when I had to work with the Krauts in the past was very much so. And I share the ethnicity, so I kind of understand it.
But all over the US you will find shitty executives, double-down on shitty decisions, because they think gravity will stop, because they insist it will, in spite of all contra evidence. Abetted by junior level sycophants, and protected by senior level people who don’t want to admit a mistake. Better to run the org into the ground than admit to a bad decision.
I agree with that wholeheartedly. For the most part, if not all, refreshingly, it seems the higher they rise the more they like the smell of the ass above them.
But that is an individual thing, whereas the Kraut mentality I encountered was more of a group thing where “All of us Chermans always know bettah than you!”
Vee did not luze zer vor, vee kem second.
I’m just back from the Orkneys (small islands off NE Scotland) and apparently electric vehicles are increasingly popular there, for obvious reasons (small islands, no range anxiety, etc). However, they are not popular with the ferry operators.
On the same trip I spoke to the head of the Northern Lighthouse Board about their new ship and I asked about the propulsion: when the current engine needs replacing, they are looking at methanol, not nuclear, for the way forward.
I’m absolutely down with EVs.
WHEN the battery technology gets me 450 miles on a “tank” of fuel. WHEN the next “tank” of fuel costs me 5 minutes of my time. WHEN that “tank” of fuel doesn’t make me wait 30 or more minutes for the people in front of me in line to get their “tank” of fuel. WHEN I can rely on a “gas station” to be there when I need it. WHEN I can get 300,000 miles out of my “fuel tank” without having to pay $5,000 or more to replace it. WHEN the grid resources can reliably “fuel” me up without going dark on me and my neighbors using wind and solar resources to regenerate my “fuel” and the same “fuel” I need to run my home and business — because that’s where the bureaucrats, politicians and activists (much overlap in the Venn Diagram there) want it.
As it stands at the moment, every EV on the road now is a wildly inefficient Stanley Steamer, especially given transmission line-loss limitations. Without HUGE public (meaning, ultimately taxpayer) investments in infrastructure, there’s no way in hell it could ever happen. Since nukes are off the table in the Green Agenda, that option’s a nonstarter as well, notwithstanding that 50 years ago it was an article of faith, particularly in the Engineering community, that nuclear power would eventually be too cheap to meter. Prior to the backlash over “The China Syndrome” and Three Mile Island, that is.
Here is my read on this. The Euro administration had a quiet but firm word to some representative group of auto makers and made it very, very clear to them that moving away from ICE to “renewables” was non negotiable. Eg: do it or we will legislate it. The car makers would have pushed back saying “no demand” and “infrastructure” and the government types would have gone we will sort those obstacles.
Other markets (US, Asia, Aus & NZ) saw the signs and said yippee.
Of course only Europe and the US had car industries to consider.
Now the Euro government didn’t care who supplied the cars and were ecstatic when the Chinese automakers started delivering the goods at viable prices. I suspect the California Government would have been pushing exactly the same message because they have zero interest in the needs of Detroit.
I’m pretty sure the next phase in this game will be to incrementally but relentlessly push up the prices of ICE cars, both at the manufacturing/ delivery end and the operating end with fuel charges.
The Euro and California governments have fuck all interest in the preferences of the proletariat, sorry. I also don’t think they would lose one minute of sleep if China became the dominant provider of cars.
Repeat, this has nothing to do with consumer demand, you can like your gas guzzling petrol or diesel vehicles as much as you like but it’s not what our betters want for us.
The fact that Euro or US makers can’t make money out of it is of no concern to them.
I confidently predict it will never be easier to own a ICE car than it is today. Make the most of it – I am.
Along the lines of “God causes shortages, man causes famine?”
You vill drive our cars, und you vill like it.
15 years ago, I took a crate Isuzu 240 4 cylinder direct injection marine engine (hardened for saltwater exposure) I got for a song and mounted to a ’75 Jeep frame. Jeep exported this configuration in the early/mid 80’s in the CJ7 to the Philippines and getting drivetrain parts was a cinch. I mounted a removable flatbed/stakebed, added a monster winch and that has been my farm truck since. That engine is rated for 250,000 hours before overhaul and even that is inexpensive.
My nephew, then a mechanical engineering student at University of Missouri-Rolla, helped me with the build. He liked it so much he built his own, sold it, then built another one with an regenerative electric motor assist for highway cruising. A stump pulling, low speed hybrid that if built at scale, would be less than $12,000. His school is renowned for their auto engineering program, but he couldn’t get them interested because they were all hot on solar at the time.
Yeah, it’s ugly and doesn’t have any luxury features (like A/C, electric windows or 18 speaker surround sound), but my neighbor and I drove it from Vail, AZ to San Diego and back hauling 800 lbs of furniture and still got 38mpg. Granted, top end is 59mph, but it will pull a load and then some at 55mph.