In a 2016 interview with photographer Steven Edson, CNN asked, “What makes a car sexy?”
Edson replied, “It’s because a lot of the parts of those cars are, in fact, sexy.” He cited the taillights on the 1959 Cadillac Series 62, which he described as “like rare ruby earrings.”
Most of today’s cars, however, Edson lamented, are “homogenous” and offer little of interest to the photographer.
Enter Elon Musk. In 2019, the Tesla Model Y completed the company’s long-awaited “S3XY” family of models – the S3Xyest cars on the road today. That’s one major reason they sold well. Even so, Carscoops admitted that whether Tesla’s S3XY family was sexy remained up for debate.
Maybe the sex appeal of the electric vehicle is wearing off. Tesla is slashing prices, Ford cut back production of its electric pickup and cut the price of its Mustang Mach-E, and General Motors is looking at bringing back plug-in hybrids. Even the EPA is toying with extending the timetable for the total phaseout of non-electric vehicles.
CNN has scrambled to explain why, or rather, “How EVs became such a massive disappointment” even as they assured their fragile readership that “the American market for EVs is not collapsing.”
They tell us that industry experts blame vehicle prices, lack of charging capacity, and confusing tax credit rules as the reasons for the 15 percent gap between Bloomberg’s 2023 projected sales and actual sales.
But that’s not the whole story.
Chinese automakers have major advantages in manufacturing electric vehicles, thanks to that nation’s virtual monopoly on many components of EV batteries. In 2023 alone, Chinese motorists bought 8.4 million electric vehicles, 59 percent of global EV sales.
The Chinese are also busy marketing their cheaper EVs to Europe and other nations. Jo Nova reports that China shipped 1.3 million EVs to European Union nations in the last quarter – yet many remain unsold and sitting idle in car lots even though EU nations are offering huge subsidies. EV sales fell by 11 percent across the EU, by 29 percent in Germany alone.
Bad as the market has been for battery-electric passenger vehicles, the market for electric vans is even worse, The British government’s ZEV mandate demanded that 10 percent of van sales in 2023 be EVs, but actual sales accounted for less than 5 percent of the market.
Association of Fleet Professionals chair Paul Hollick explained that, “some fleets just don’t have a role for these electric vans within their business. Their payload and range requirements mean there is no operational profile for which the electric van can be practically used, or there is no suitable charging infrastructure.”
Even Elon Musk is having trouble selling the once-SeXY Teslas – enough that he just laid off 6,000 employees. Tesla produced nearly 47,000 vehicles than it delivered to customers in the first quarter of 2024. And Hertz is not only not buying more Teslas but selling the ones it has.
Biden Administration EV mandates are causing auto dealers problems, as most buyers still want a gasoline- or diesel-powered vehicle. So few by comparison want an EV that dealers (and manufacturers) are falling short of their mandated target ratios. How long before dealers have to institute lotteries or some other scheme to determine just who is allowed to buy a new car?
And that’s not all.
British journalists have found another shocking – and odd – fact about EVs. Researchers found that drivers of electric vehicles were twice as likely to be involved in a road accident with a pedestrian than drivers of petrol or diesel vehicles over the same number of miles driven. The report suggested that the vehicle’s quiet engines were a significant factor in higher fatality rates.
On top of that, quiet engines are just not sexy.
Then there is the story that a battery fire at a lithium-ion battery storage facility in Otay Mesa, California, had continued for six days despite 40 firefighters working to bring it under control. Firefighters noted that overheated lithium-ion batteries can trigger “thermal runaway,” a chain reaction that spreads from one battery to another.
While these batteries were stacked in a storage facility, the fire brings to mind the July 2023 cargo ship fire in the North Sea that destroyed hundreds of vehicles. Even though only 25 were electric vehicles, the fire reportedly started when one of their batteries caught fire.
Electric vehicle battery fires are just not sexy.
Neither are several of the other flaws in these “perfect zero emission vehicles.”
Then we learned that the so-called “all-electric fire truck,” like the one Bernalillo County, New Mexico, bought for $1.8 million (thanks in part to a state grant), relies on a diesel engine to pump water to put out fires and even run the truck when the huge battery dies. An all-electric fire truck cannot run for the long periods needed to extinguish some fires (including EV fires).
But perhaps the most important reason for eschewing electric vehicles is the growing threat of widespread power outages as the electric grid is stressed by the power demands of artificial intelligence, Big Tech – and EVs. Californians have recently experienced days without power, and Michael Spence notes that, “If power systems fail, it’s lights out for the entire economy.”
One final note. Clean Technica actually boasted that U.S. plug-in EVs consumed more electricity than the entire nation of Uganda in 2023. The Energy Information Administration reported that it took about 7,600 gigawatt-hours of electricity to keep U.S. EVs running in 2023 – almost five times the consumption in 2018. Imagine the drain on the electric grid with even more EVs.
And the arrogant West still demands that even Ugandans buy only EVs by 2030?
Is it really sexy to force developing nations (let alone the rest of us) into committing more electricity to electric vehicles than their grid can generate?
Duggan Flanakin (duggan@duggansdugout.com) is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.