While GM’s Mary Barra signals virtue, the grandson of the founder of Toyota speaks an inconvenient truth.
“The current business model of the car industry is going to collapse,” warns Akio Toyoda – if the virtue-signaling (and mandating and subsidizing) of electric cars isn’t dialed back. Because there’s no mass market for electric cars, which are too expensive to be mass-market cars.
It’s the math, man.
This idea that people who can barely manage a six-year-loan on a $25,000 car will somehow manage a loan on a $32,000 electric car (the lowest-priced electric car currently available) is as ridiculous as the idea that everyone will eat steak and lobster twice a week if the government so orders.
Unless someone else pays for it. Who will that be?
If from subsidies, then the people will pay that way – via taxes – and have even less ability to afford to replace their $25,000 non-electric car with a $32,000 electric car.
It can be printed, of course. Or hey! presto!’d into digitized existence. But then the people pay via inflation – the depreciated buying power of the money they have available. This is why the car industry will “collapse” if Electric Car Dementia isn’t treated somehow.
You cannot sell cars that people can’t afford to buy.
Toyoda – who knows numbers – did the math. And not just the MSRP math.
He added up the volts and watts that would be needed to power the replacement of the existing fleet of non-electric cars in Japan with electric cars and found there isn’t enough electricity to power an all-electric car fleet in Japan and power everything else that runs on electricity in Japan – like electric lights and electric ovens and electric washers and dryers and AC/heat pumps and all the other things which are powered by volts and watts in Japan.
As pretty much everywhere.
Something will have to give.
Or go dark.
Unless a sum on the order of several hundred billion dollars – just for Japan – is conjured to finance the building of the additional generating capacity needed to cover the additional demand.
Where will that money come from?
It gets better.
“Climate change” – the virtue-signaling reason for all the mandating and subsidizing – will worsen, Toyoda says, on account of electric cars.
Because even if the money could be found to subsidize a mass-fleet of electric cars and pay for the additional generating capacity needed to power them, that additional generating capacity would result in an increase in the amount of the dread inert gas, C02, being ”emitted” – because the additional generating capacity that would be needed to support the powering of a fleet of electric cars and everything else cannot be met using solar, wind or hydro-electric power, which barely accounts for 10 percent of the “grid” in most areas.
Solar/wind isn’t just not there; it is also less potent. Absent some miracle Great Leap Forward, it isn’t capable of generating the necessary megawattage.
Which leaves coal/oil natural gas (which together account for about 80 percent of grid power) to meet the need and these large-scale industrial emitters already emit a great deal more C02 than individual non-electric cars, combined.
To meet the increased demand, it will be necessary to build more coal/oil/natural-gas burning utility plants.
“The more EVs we build,” he explains, “the worse carbon dioxide gets.” More C02 – or more blackouts.
This being a two-fer right up there with paying 50 percent more for a roof that leaks.
“When politicians are out there (are) saying, ‘let’s get rid of all cars using gasoline,’ do they understand this”?
Yes, they do.
Toyoda is a very smart man but in this case, a naive man. His comments reveal an almost childlike inability to understand evil motives. That there are malignant people afoot who mean to cause harm.
These people know, in the first place, that electric cars are not economically viable.
It doesn’t take an MBA to understand that a person who can just barely manage a six-year-loan on a $20,000 car cannot afford a $32,000 electric car – the least expensive electric car on the market. That the loan term cannot be extended to compensate, not only because of depreciation but also because electric cars depreciate faster than non-electric cars, on account of their shorter useful service lives. Which is due to the shorter life of their very-expensive-to-replace battery packs, which are the equivalent in cost-to-replace of a non-electric car’s engine.
But the non-electric car’s engine will usually last the life of the car – 15-20 years or even longer. It is certain – barring the endlessly promised “breakthrough” in battery technology – that every actually existing electric car’s battery pack will have to be replaced at a much sooner interval, due to the physical/chemical facts about batteries and the degradation of charge capacity that inevitably takes place.
An EV with a battery that can’t hold a charge – or only half its original charge – isn’t just a useless car. It is a worthless car. Few will spend the $4,000-plus it takes to replace a tired EV battery when the EV itself isn’t worth $10k anymore.
This built-in shorter useful lifespan is why EVs can’t be financed for longer, as might be feasible with a non-electric car.
It is not sustainable.
Precisely the point.
Toyota – under the leadership of Toyoda – is the only major car company that hasn’t bear-hugged the EV tar baby. Instead, it is the leader in hybrid technology, which is problematic because it works – and because it is affordable – and thus keeps people driving.
Expect Toyota to get VW’d sometime soon for this act of heresy.
. . . .
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That’s great that the Toyota boss said that!!! But, the company is still partly investing in electrics, so a little bit hypocritical.
Shut the government down, and lock THEM down, and put muzzles on THEM.
Ive been wondering about this for a couple days now – why this guy isn’t afraid of being VW’d. But I think the reason hes done this is hes in a very tight spot – unlike VW which mostly sells upmarket cars in developed countries – Toyota sells a lot to developing countries. Places like that you still get a reasonably well equipped sedan for about 10-12K usd. And even that in most cases is a luxury purchase, and is expected to last at lease a couple decades (indeed you still have cars from the 70s/80s regularly used).
A more expensive, less long life electric car just cant work there. At all. And this is before the power issues. And therefore Toyota has to walk a very thin line between virtue signalling in the west, while making and selling sensible cars in the developing world….
Hyundai sells a car in Mexico for about $9K. That’s cheaper than a golf cart in the USA.
Once the dildos realize they can’t charge their precious smart gadgets due to the rolling blackouts, only then will they most likely revolt. The only upside to the EV (and other) agendas, is that the globalists plan to implement them less than a decade from now. I’m hoping that the transition would be SO abrupt, that it’ll backfire horrifically.
They plan on murdering at least half of us so the blackouts won’t happen.
Electricity production will have to increase by 5X to fuel electric cars. Current Long-haul power cable do not have the capacity to carry the current. An estimated 5000 additional “neighborhood” power plants will need to be added in the USA with short-haul cabling. Lets not even talk about how stupid it is to store huge amounts of electron energy in a chemical goo under your seat. Mary Berra has a government gun to her head so lighten up a bit.
I wouldn’t consider lightening up a bit. Nobody has a gun to her head. She could retire and live the life of Riley.
Agreed….She chooses to be among the political elitist terrorists so…eh.
I have a customer with a fleet of 72 electric forklifts. They are installing a hydrogen tank and infrastructure to replace all of the batteries with hydrogen power cells. I don’t know much about it but it was very interesting to me.
72?! They must be practically selling their souls to the power company by now. lol
Hydrogen is actually a better idea than maintaining batteries. Fuel cell tech has come a long way in the last 15 years.
A commendable statement of fact by Mr Toyoda. Too bad facts have become completely irrelevant. After all, if you are insane, of what use are facts? The Psychopaths In Charge have no need of them, and spend a great deal of effort concealing or denigrating them. The plandemic, global warming, racism, Russian interference, transgenderism, hate speech, modern monetary theory, ad infinitum, have no facts involved whatsoever. All that’s needed is for one “expert”, “scientist”, or leader, or the CIA infiltrated Mockingbird Media to proclaim a certain pile of male bovine fecal matter is a “fact”, and off we go. Never mind these “facts” are continuously changing, a thing real facts simply cannot do. Theories, however delusional, are proclaimed as facts, while facts are censored as misinformation. A far too large portion of the population is living in a cult of lies based on the enforcement of fairy tales, with no facts present. Which requires belief or faith, as in religion or cult. The state is well on its way to replacing religion, as it has done with men.
Give me a central bank, control of schools, and the mass media and I will own everyone.
“Make them stupid – Make them poor” – Bill Clinton
I am glad he said it but it’s clear he thinks he’s dealing with people who are mistaken. No these people are not mistaken. They never intend to build the electric generation capacity required for battery electric vehicles. They intend for people to live very differently, the way they want them to live.
Toyoda is clearly still viewing this as an engineering problem when it is not. Engineers were never meant to achieve what they have over the last several decades. If Mr. Toyoda comes around to understand and fight we may just win this battle yet. The lower levels at VW tried subversion but that failed when they got too good and the executives rolled over when the government had to do away with them.
On another front resurrecting a ghost fleet of vehicles is growing in popularity. All sorts of cars and trucks from the 1930s through the 1990s are being pulled from their graves. Some driven out under their own power. Maybe just maybe, we can pull off a Cuba if things get bad, but Cuban communists are different than american ones. Communism plus american puritanism and busybodyism is far more vile.
The ultimate plan is to only have the wealthy drive.
If you need a gas vehicle, you will apply for a special license.
They don’t need a gas vehicle. An EV will be just fine for getting them to the nearest airstrip where their private jet will be waiting for them.
Mazda seems to be pushing ahead with advanced engine designs despite the grubberments threats about banning ICE within the next few decades. I hope they triumph when the bootlickers flop with their idiotic full electric fleets. Always loved mazda and their willingness to engineer zoom-zoom into all their vehicles.
I hope you’re right about the flop. I grew up with Chevy and have owned several. But now I’d love to see Marry Barra’s GM die for lack of sales.
GM is part of the wuhan everything. It has 7 plants there and they’re huge. They say 6 are for the Chinese military. I’d bet they all are. And that right there is what the un-American politicians do to this country and have been since NAFTA. Knocking NAFTA back is one of the main things they hate about Trump.
If Toyota gets VW’d hopefully they will have the good sense to fight back instead of rolling over and playing dead like Volkswagen did.
Japan needs us for physical security. They will bow to the psycho-terrorists in DC.
‘Toyota – under the leadership of Toyoda – hasn’t embraced the EV tar baby.’ — EP
But Wall Street has — big time. And not just Typhoid Mary California of Government Motors. No, we’re talkin’ the Big Kahuna: Tesla.
As of next Monday morning, Tesla joins the blue-chip S&P 500 index as the sixth-largest company in the index, exceeded only by the immortal Fab Five (Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google [Alphabet] and Microsoft).
This means that hundreds of institutional portfolios and tracking funds must buy Tesla, willy-nilly, regardless of price. Most of them cannonballed into the pool on yesterday’s market close.
Let’s turn the mic over to Jesse Felder to document for posterity this harebrained lemming riot:
‘The top nine auto makers, whose combined market capitalization equals that of Tesla, produce 121 times as many cars as Tesla.
‘Tesla, however, is capitalized at a valuation larger than [the sum of] these Nifty Nine, who produce just over 70% of global auto production.
‘Tesla’s $608 billion market cap could buy the nine largest car manufacturers — with $15 billion left over!’
In graphic form:
https://ibb.co/DRFPTdX
‘Bred en bawn in a brier-patch, Brer Elon — bred en bawn in a brier-patch!’
En wid dat Brer Rabbit skip out des ez lively as a cricket in de embers.”
Arghh, that stinks to high heaven. I’m heavily invested in a S&P 500 index fund and it pains me to say that Tesla will now be a part of said fund.
I posted a comment several months back on how the index basically bitch-slapped Tesla and wasn’t allowing them into the index, based on sound investing principles. They main one being it was highly over-valued (which it still is). I’m wondering why they changed their tune all of a sudden…
Probably the knowledge that the elites will be pushing the EV agenda under the new statist administration.
Jumping in the deep doesn’t mean you survive. I just watched a SpaceX takeoff. In a big ball of flame(electrical flame no doubt)it DID take off and a few hundred feet off the ground it turned into something that could have produced a great deal of usable power but alas, it was just a huge ball of bright energy that produced a great amount of wind but alas, there was no wind generators near to capture a few percent of that energy.
Oh well, not to worry. The govt. will wring more money from us till we only have the means to steal fuel and take our semi-automatic pitchforks to DC and demand a stop to the madness.
Hopefully a crowd will make a side trip to NYC and pick up Wilhelm Warren Jr. and Andrew Cuomo and hang them as their hero leader Mussolini was hung, by his feet, and left there to spin in the wind.
I’d rather Rand Paul didn’t suffer the same fate as all the rest of the rats that occupy DC but people tend to suffer the same fate as those they “hang around” with. Nancy can be stuffed in her freezer with Nadler and Schiff. AOC with her presidential plans can be send back to Iran Elliot Abrams and other Persian natives residing in Congress.
I couldn’t find one with Mitch but I’m sure the people the people of Kentucky will know what to do.
https://youtu.be/6jXYVjjpI3E?t=200
The stock market is a casino, owned by the bank cartel. The house always wins.
JWK, you nailed that one.
Wall Street either believes Tesla will increase it’s earnings 100X, it’s production 100X or it’s margins significantly. Of course, Wall Street also is pricing in the idea that the conventional auto makers may see
their margins decrease, their volumes decrease or their earnings decrease.
Given that TSLA is now part of the S&P 500 it’s probably a little of both. Guess what company left the
S&P500? Exxon.
TSLA is probably over-valued, that P/E of 1000 is really startling, but, the stock market is betting that TSLA is more likely right then wrong.
Pat,
The only reason Tesla is on the S&P is because it is known the government – under the senile pedophile – will mandate the purchase of its products. There is no natural market for EVs.
This whole idea is ludicrous.
Let’s ignore the load an all electric fleet would place on the grid. Simply moving heating energy sources from natural gas / heating oil to electric would crash the grid before you’ve even converted 20%. This is also part of “zero emissions” mandates.
Here’s how they’ll “pay” for it.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1
The MMTers are in full control, and they’re just getting started. The next round of “Stimulus” is coming, and it will be monetized exactly the same way.
What could possibly go wrong?
If you aren’t long commodities at this point, what the hell is it going to take?
What do you use to replace gasoline? Uranium of course. Exponentially greater energy density. The hard part is finding some way of transferring that energy without destroying the container, but we’ve had 80 years now to mess around with the stuff. Roughly 80 years after Carl Benz’ creation we had Eric’s Great Pumpkin TransAm.
I subscribe to Jay Leno’s garage on YouTube, this week the algorithm has been putting up steam cars. They’re somewhat interesting in that they evolved up until the 1920s when they were finally overtaken by the higher output of internal combustion. But what if you could build a steam boiler using a micro-sized reactor? Even with shielding it probably wouldn’t need to be much larger than a basketball, and the uranium core wouldn’t really need much refinement to produce enough steam to run a vehicle. Combine that with a condensing steam turbine and you have the mythical car that runs on water, emits no pollution and would only need to be fueled once. Never happen, of course, because Uncle wanted the world to fear us after World War II, and no better way than to make the energy that runs the terror weapons mysterious and scary.
Instead we get “renewables,” because scientists tell politicians that energy density doesn’t matter, and politicians want the easy answer. Tell the engineer in the back of the room to shut up! No one wants a negative Nancy to spoil the party! Why, if the engineer was so smart he’d figure out how to harness all that “free energy” from renewables and we’d have plenty for all!
Readykilowwatt,
I agree with you that their are technologies on the table that, if a breakthrough in science occurs, will make energy cheap and abundant. Fusion reactors and production of Hydrogen could power our grid and run our cars on water with near zero pollution. These efforts will free man. But Eric is right; this has nothing to do with *good* but everything to do with *evil*. That is why these technologies will be politically demagogued as evil, if there is an inconvenient breakthrough in the future. Ideology is running the show. The political class is amazingly shrewd in deploying any means to get their ends. The Pandemic; released from the CCP in China to get Trump the political class used fear to create voting by mail and mass fraud. Win-win. Vaccines; the political class is going to dole these out based on race (not risk or need). This is shrewd in that they win to curry favor to a favored separate class of people and continuing to drive the false notion other races are now not worthy. As the Soviets divided people by class the pols divide people by race. Then….if it happens to not work and people who got favored get hurt by the vaccine, then they can blame their political enemies and the pharmaceutical industry as racist exploiters of a victim class. Win-win.
Ideology is the evil.
Interesting. Solzhenitsyn wrote that the USSR purged all of the engineers, then wondered why nothing worked. Perhaps this is why they did that. Reality bites…ignore it at your peril.
Pubilus,
As Solzhenitsyn wrote; the Soviets also purged anybody who had a sense of doing anything productive on their own accord: *The Kulaks*. The Kulaks were peasant farmers who did a little better that the average. They were targeted by the communists by playing on human envy and jealousy by going to the people who weren’t doing as well and selling them on *zero sum economics* that the Kulaks gain was at their expense. Millions were outright killed, shipped to wastelands, or starved. Lenin and Stalin knew they can create a class divide to have a society based on loyalty and obedience, rather than freedom and liberty. Hitler took their lessons and used the same in his own way against the Jews, gypsies and any other undesirables he concocted. The American Left is now the new students of Marxism and zero sum economics, and are dividing our country in the same way and purging those who take a stand.
OT:
Hey Eric, here’s the latest example of how the U.S. has degenerated into a nation of infantile idiots. Michigan governor Whitmer makes a propaganda video with Santa telling us to “mask up”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKhRt8HP2Bo
Listen to Governor Mommy, little kids…
That ol’scratch sure looks evil! Even her voice is grating and infantile! I am from Michigan and I am so glad my parents left in 1963… If I had lived there you might have seen my name with the first governor being capped in office….
I grew up in Michigan and my parents still live in the state. I’m here now for Christmas. What amazes me is that people are almost unanimously following the self proclaimed ruler’s orders even though they were deemed unconstitutional by the state supreme court.
Hi Mattacks,
That Whitmer thing is even more repellent than the Coonman… and that is saying something!
This right here is why lovers of liberty shouldn’t avoid politics.
I have another example from my work. Yesterday morning I was at “a local chain grocery store” doing work for my retail data collection job – basically, spying on the store on behalf of the major beverage manufacturer that hired my employer. I had to speak to the manager on duty to get permission to do my spying, and also to sign some stupid health check BS saying that I didn’t have any symptoms of a mild cold or flu.
Now, I have kind of a personal beef with this store chain because, after months of being a mask-optional zone for pretty much everyone, they suddenly started spamming mask signs everywhere. Still don’t enforce, as far as I can tell, but the signs are infuriating.
I took a big risk and told the manager “I think I liked it better when this place didn’t even make employees wear masks!” He told me that he thought a lot of people preferred it that way. I said “So it was corporate’s idea then?” He told me that apparently it had to do with some statement the governor made a couple of months back, and that corporate heard it and “decided to get on board”.
In other words, one statement from our fence rider of a governor was enough to make the laxest large-format store in the entire state start falling all over itself to tell people to wear masks. ONE statement – without any force or threat of force to back it up, as far as I know. You can practically hear the screams of old-growth forests dying as they tape “PLEASE wear a mask” signs to every available surface. It’s as if they never had any willpower or brains of their own, and were just waiting for an authority figure to tell them masks were a good idea so they could go whole hog on it.
So even in a society where laws are kept minimal, the character and quality of leadership matters. One word, or lack thereof, from a ranked & titled “leader” can completely shift the power dynamic around an issue.
Video will make your skin crawl, EVIL.
I can only bring myself to watch so much. The incessant propaganda makes me want to puke
I could only take a FEW SECONDS of that! That woman is EVIL…
Lets entertain this Santa thing real quick: Why do they all wear masks at the north pole? How the hell would the virus even get there when they are thousands of miles away from the nearest settlement? This video is the product of corona-induced mental retardation.