Demand for Cars Faces Test With Rising Rates (VIDEO)

I bought a brand new Toyota pickup when I was in my early twenties, in the early 1980s, and interest raters were astronomical. What did I know back then? (*Eye-roll.) Double-digits, sheesh.

At the Wall Street Journal, "As More Cars Hit Dealership Lots, Buyers Feel Pinch of Rising Interest Rates":

Improved supply chain lifted dealer inventory and sales, but economic obstacles are weighing on customers.

More new cars and trucks are finally trickling into dealerships as supply-chain troubles ease and auto makers increase factory output. Now, rising interest rates and other economic pressures are starting to put a damper on the car-buying mood.

Several major auto makers reported U.S. sales declines in the third quarter as inventory levels remained pressured, despite some improvement in recent months. General Motors Co. posted a 24% jump in third-quarter U.S. sales as its vehicle availability increased after it was disproportionately hit last year by supply-chain constraints resulting from Covid-related shutdowns in Asia.

The auto industry has grappled for nearly two years with choppy factory schedules and thin dealership stocks, stemming from semiconductor shortages and other supply problems. Those troubles are easing and vehicle availability is slowly improving, the car companies say.

Auto executives continue to express confidence they will be able to fill a big backlog in consumer demand as production normalizes. But a worsening economic picture and higher interest rates are raising questions about whether consumers will still keep snapping up cars and trucks at the same pace once stock levels improve.

“There’s a lot of negative consumer sentiment in the marketplace. So we’re obviously concerned about that,” Hyundai Motor America Chief Executive Randy Parker said Monday, citing rising rates and stock-market declines. Hyundai’s third-quarter sales rose 3%.

Still, Mr. Parker said it was too early to say whether demand is weakening significantly and said he is cautiously optimistic that it will hold up. He said sales slowed last week partly because of Hurricane Ian’s impact on the Southeast, making it more difficult to gauge underlying consumer demand. Auto makers pointed to continued low vehicle inventories as the reason for weaker third-quarter sales. Toyota Motor Corp. said sales fell 7% in the July-to-September period. Stellantis NV’s dropped 6%, with the Jeep maker citing continued supply constraints, and Nissan Motor Co. reported a nearly 23% drop in U.S. sales for the third quarter.

Overall, industrywide sales in the U.S. for the third quarter were about 3.36 million, roughly flat over the prior-year period, according to Wards Intelligence. Ford Motor Co. is set to report U.S. sales results on Tuesday.

Electric-vehicle leader Tesla Inc. on Sunday said global vehicle deliveries in the third quarter rose about 42% to a record 343,830, but were hampered by vehicle-shipping capacity. The deliveries total fell short of Wall Street estimates.

EV startup Rivian Automotive Inc. also reported on Monday that it had produced 7,363 vehicles at its factory in Illinois and delivered 6,584 to customers during that same period. The figure remains in line with Rivian’s target of producing 25,000 vehicles this year, the company said. Rivian’s stock was up more than 6% in after-hours trading Monday.

Rising interest rates are making it harder for U.S. buyers to afford record-high pricing on new vehicles, a byproduct of the scant inventory at dealership lots. Gone are the days of 0% financing on new vehicles, which car companies and dealers have long used as a staple promotion to sell cars.

The average interest rate on a new-car loan in the U.S. hit 5.7% in the third quarter, the highest in three years, according to research site Edmunds.com.

Americans also are financing more of the purchase price than ever, reflecting record-high car prices. The average amount financed per vehicle in the third quarter was $41,347, compared with $38,315 a year earlier, according Edmunds.com. And 14% of auto-loan customers during that same period took on a monthly payment of $1,000 or more, up from 8% a year earlier, the firm found. “It seems likely that much of the pent-up demand from limited supply is quickly disappearing as high interest rates eat away at vehicle buyers’ willingness and ability to purchase,” said Charlie Chesbrough, senior economist with research firm Cox Automotive.

The firm last week lowered its 2022 U.S. sales forecast to 13.7 million new vehicles, which would be down 9% from last year. In the five years leading up to the pandemic-plagued year of 2020, the industry sold more than 17 million vehicles annually.

So far, though, car companies and dealers say that most new vehicles that get shipped from the factory are quickly snapped up by buyers.

There were nearly 1.3 million vehicles on dealership lots or en route to stores in August, up 10% from July and 19% higher than a year earlier, according to research firm Wards Intelligence. That represented a 29-day supply, the highest in months but still roughly half historical norms.

“There is still really strong consumer demand, and huge replacement demand,” said Duncan Aldred, head of GM’s Buick and GMC brands, during an interview at the Detroit auto show last month. “I think that will probably overcome a lot of the economic headwinds.”

GM said Monday that semiconductor availability has improved and output has stabilized, allowing it to stock more cars and increase sales. The number of vehicles on dealership lots or en route to stores at the end of the third quarter rose 45% from a year earlier, GM said.

Auto executives have said the semiconductor shortage that has plagued output for nearly two years is gradually easing. Still, shortages continue, and the impact tends to be felt unevenly across regions and companies...

 

California's EV Push Hinges on More Power — and Help From Drivers

At the Wall Street Journal, "Flexibility among electric-vehicle owners in how and when they charge their cars is seen as key to avoiding stress on the electrical grid":

Our idiot governor, @GavinNewsom, is pushing the chimera of an all-electric future. Why buy an electric car if you can't charge it because you have to save electricity? The ridicule writes itself. "Global warming" "climate change" is a false religion resting on blind faith. #EVs

— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) September 25, 2022

California aims to add millions of new electric vehicles in the coming years. Charging them without impairing an aging grid will require more power generation and help from EV drivers.

The state’s plan to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars and trucks by 2035 means more EVs will be using California’s power supplies to fuel up, adding pressure to the grid.

This summer, the state faced the threat of rolling blackouts during an extended heat wave and asked people to avoid charging and using major appliances during critical hours, raising questions of whether its electrical grid can handle the added demand from charging EVs.

The state’s success depends on a range of factors, which include influencing the behavior of many consumers who are used to accessing gasoline at any time and unaccustomed to thinking about curtailing electricity use outside of weather emergencies.

“Are people going to top off every night? Are people going to wait every few days and then charge up all at once?” asked Dan Bowermaster, senior program manager for electric transportation at EPRI, a nonprofit research group. “There are a lot of questions about customer behavior.”

To help manage the demand on the electrical grid, utilities and auto makers are offering incentives for owners to charge up at certain times and in different ways. Charging usually takes place at home over several hours, with similar kinds of chargers available at places like offices where people are parked for long periods.

Ultimately, vehicle-to-grid technology that can use EV batteries to back up power to homes or send electricity back to the grid will be adopted, analysts say.

In California, managing the stresses on the grid is important because of the expected demand added by charging. The state’s energy commission estimates that in 2030, California will have 5.4 million passenger EVs and 193,000 medium- and heavy-duty EVs, resulting in charging approaching 5% of the electric load during peak hours from less than 1% currently.

California’s strategy includes adding renewable energy supplies and limiting power demand, such as asking people not to charge EVs during critical hours, as it did this month amid the heat wave, said Liane Randolph, chair of the California Air Resources Board, the agency that sets air quality and vehicle emissions standards.

Ms. Randolph said EV charging isn’t going to break the grid because consumers can control when they charge and avoid busier times. “The reality is the grid is only stressed in a limited period, a few hours in the early evening on certain types of days. Most of the time it’s fine.”

A Stanford University study published Thursday found daytime public or workplace EV charging, instead of the more common at-home charging, would be the least stressful for the grid in Western states. With current electricity rate designs, the study also found the grid could face problems late at night—when EV drivers typically charge in home garages—because too many cars could start charging at once and create a demand spike.

“If everyone were doing that, it would cause really big problems,” said Siobhan Powell, the study’s lead author.

California is rapidly overhauling its electricity supplies, retiring older fossil fuel plants and adding more renewable resources such as solar, wind and battery projects, but the addition of new power isn’t coming fast enough to avoid potential problems.

Heat waves, drought and the slow pace to site and permit projects have made setting a target to decarbonize the power grid challenging. A crunchtime arrives on hot evenings when the West’s abundant solar power drops but demand for air conditioning remains high. California lawmakers voted in August to keep the state’s last nuclear plant online in a bid to ease anticipated electricity supply shortages.

“There’s some energy challenges in how we’re bringing on new resources to meet this new growth of electricity demand,” said John Moura, director of reliability assessment and performance analysis at the North American Electric Reliability Corp., a nonprofit that develops standards for utilities and power producers.

Mr. Moura said at-home charging sessions draw about the power of 2.5 air conditioners. He doesn’t expect the increased demand to create a problem with delivering reliable power to homes and businesses, mainly because utilities will manage the connection of new EV chargers. If they had to, utilities would delay charger connections until they could make grid reliability improvements to provide more power. It is an outcome to avoid, Mr. Moura said, because it would anger and inconvenience customers who would have EVs as their only new-car option.

“The disaster kind of comes from the rally cries from the public that utilities aren’t connecting their EVs fast enough,” Mr. Moura said. “And now that bumps up against EV mandates. That’s the train-crash scenario.”

EVs won’t arrive all at once, or even by 2035. Cars typically last more than 15 years, which means the fleet turnover in California will take place over many years, analysts say...

 

Policies Pushing Electric Vehicles Show Why Few People Want One

From Bjorn Lomborg, at the Wall Street Journal, "They wouldn’t need huge subsidies to sell if they really were a good choice, and consumers know that":

We constantly hear that electric cars are the future—cleaner, cheaper and better. But if they’re so good, why does California need to ban gasoline-powered cars? Why does the world spend $30 billion a year subsidizing electric ones?

In reality, electric cars are only sometimes and somewhat better than the alternatives, they’re often much costlier, and they aren’t necessarily all that much cleaner. Over its lifetime, an electric car does emit less CO2 than a gasoline car, but the difference can range considerably depending on how the electricity is generated. Making batteries for electric cars also requires a massive amount of energy, mostly from burning coal in China. Add it all up and the International Energy Agency estimates that an electric car emits a little less than half as much CO2 as a gasoline-powered one.

The climate effect of our electric-car efforts in the 2020s will be trivial. If every country achieved its stated ambitious electric-vehicle targets by 2030, the world would save 231 million tons of CO2 emissions. Plugging these savings into the standard United Nations Climate Panel model, that comes to a reduction of 0.0002 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century.

Electric cars’ impact on air pollution isn’t as straightforward as you might think. The vehicles themselves pollute only slightly less than a gasoline car because their massive batteries and consequent weight leads to more particulate pollution from greater wear on brakes, tires and roads. On top of that, the additional electricity they require can throw up large amounts of air pollution depending on how it’s generated. One recent study found that electric cars put out more of the most dangerous particulate air pollution than gasoline-powered cars in 70% of U.S. states. An American Economic Association study found that rather than lowering air pollution, on average each additional electric car in the U.S. causes additional air-pollution damage worth $1,100 over its lifetime.

The minerals required for those batteries also present an ethical problem, as many are mined in areas with dismal human-rights records. Most cobalt, for instance, is dug out in Congo, where child labor is not uncommon, specifically in mining. There are security risks too, given that mineral processing is concentrated in China.

Increased demand for already-prized minerals is likely to drive up the price of electric cars significantly. The International Energy Agency projects that if electric cars became as prevalent as they would have to be for the world to reach net zero by 2050, the annual total demand for lithium for automobile batteries alone that year would be almost 28 times as much as current annual global lithium production. The material prices for batteries this year are more than three times what they were in 2021, and electricity isn’t getting cheaper either.

Even if rising costs weren’t an issue, electric cars wouldn’t be much of a bargain. Proponents argue that though they’re more expensive to purchase, electric cars are cheaper to drive. But a new report from a U.S. Energy Department laboratory found that even in 2025 the agency’s default electric car’s total lifetime cost will be 9% higher than a gasoline car’s, and the study relied on the very generous assumption that electric cars are driven as much as regular ones. In reality, electric cars are driven less than half as much, which means they’re much costlier per mile....

Electric vehicles will take over the market only if innovation makes them actually better and cheaper than gasoline-powered cars. Politicians are spending hundreds of billions of dollars and keeping consumers from the cars they want for virtually no climate benefit.

Don't Try This at Home

Unbelievably wild. 

And it's a Hoonigan.

WoW so good! 👌 pic.twitter.com/wRtQGGOqn3

— Figen (@_TheFigen) September 10, 2022

McLaren Speedtail: A $3 Million Zoom With a View (VIDEO)

Well, one can dream.

At the Wall Street Journal, "With a top speed of 250 mph, the Speedtail is the fastest McLaren ever built, but Dan Neil is most impressed by the sightlines from the center driver’s seat":

Go ahead, yank. Give a squeeze. Imagine yourself strapped into this belt-high, $3-million hybrid hypercar, looking down the middle of that steep hood at your immediate and onrushing destiny. It’s a weathery June day in the south of England, with veils of rain and patchy sun along the M3 from the company’s headquarters in Woking, Surrey, to your lunch stop, near Portsmouth.

Fluffy sheep and fluffier clouds, green hills, stone walls. While you’re at it, imagine you weigh what you did in high school. The Speedtail’s steeply bolstered driver’s couch fits like ’70s-era Calvin Kleins.

This go-kart of the gods is officially the fastest McLaren yet (top speed 250 mph), and the most powerful (1,055 hp), hosting an AI-enhanced, twin-turbo 4.0-liter V8 mated to a hybrid KERS system, seven-speed dual-clutch transmission and a torque-vectoring rear axle. The factory, usually conservative in these matters, says the Speedtail can accelerate from naught to 124 mph in 6.6 seconds and to 186 mph in 13 seconds—about the time it takes to read this sentence aloud.

Can you feel that?

Yet this is a case where the absurdity of performance—on what planet will anyone be driving at 250 mph?—takes itself out of critical consideration. Besides, if you go shopping among elite car builders, you (or your goony intermediaries) can acquire all sorts of instantly collectible, money-laundering hypercars with unbearable performance, including the Mercedes-AMG Project One, Aston Martin Valkyrie and Bugatti Chiron. But no other car can compete with this view.

The Speedtail completes a generational quartet of limited-edition, science-on-a-rampage hybrid hypercars from McLaren—the Ultimate Series—including the Senna, the Elva, and the P1. For enthusiasts, these cars represent the proverbial best of times. Each has its inimitable and historic bits for which collectors will pay handsomely in years to come.

The Speedtail’s immortal flex begins with the cockpit layout: the driver’s couch is in the center, flanked by two smaller seats, molded into the carbon-fiber/aluminum monocoque. The three-seat layout is a homage to the essential McLaren F1 sports racer of the 1990s. A way more comfortable homage, I might add.

As with the F1, the company limited Speedtail production to 106 examples—all built and delivered in 2020 and 2021. I’m sorry I’m only getting around to it now.

The center-seat experience is singular—solipsistic, even. In this car the driver’s perceptions sit in the middle of a spherical transparency, around which reality warps like the backgrounds of a first-person videogame. Fanning kinescopes of passing forests, hectic kaleidoscopes of council-owned agriculture, all lens around your POV in perfect symmetry.

The center-seat driver experience is singular—solipsistic, even

That. Is. Awesome! Having spent my driving life slightly askew, it seems, this sudden alignment of my somatic graviception and momentum vector-space was practically euphoric. This is the saddled symmetry of riding horseback, or on a motorcycle, or piloting a single-seat race car or fighter jet. Oh Maverick! Take me to the hangar!

Then there’s the way it looks. I’ve studied the matter closely: The Speedtail is the most beautiful of a generation of very, very fast cars built in the hyper-hybrid era, the sweetest and most lyrical derivation of Navier-Stokes since perhaps the 1930s—”beauty” here being aesthetic satisfaction uncompromised by extreme speed.

Generally, the faster a car is, the uglier. That collects the much-adored Aston Martin Valkyrie and Bugatti Chiron, among others. If not ugly then more cluttered with edges, blades, scoops and splitters, necessary to ensure stability at speeds where the angels fear to tread. And to look cool.

The Speedtail’s form is like a glass javelin, long and balanced and piercing at both ends. Much of the downforce is generated by the unseen underbody and (pressure) diffuser. Instead of a rear wing waggling on pneumatic pylons, movable aero elements are integrated into flexible sections of trailing-edge body work that bend up and down, reacting to control-loop calls for downforce and braking.

The flexi-bendy ailerons were not easy, said Andy Palmer, Vehicle Line Director, Ultimate Series. But to do otherwise would have been like spoiling the line of a good suit.

The plan was to race Mr. Palmer to lunch near Southampton—he in the second validation prototype (XP2) of the Speedtail and I in the XP5. If that wasn’t the plan, nobody told him. Soon the XP2’s exquisite, filamentary taillights disappeared in a towering gray rooster tail, boiling up from the car’s mighty underbody diffuser. Crikey, he’s leaving me.

But put your foot down and the Speedtail represents. Totes. In the time it took to zing the turbos three times—bu-bah-tweee, bu-bahhh-tweeee, bu-bahhhh-tweeeee—the Speedtail had closed in on the XP2 and I was flirting with extradition. It all happened so fast, officer. And so swimmingly.

Why aren’t there more such delightful cars, ask the rest of us? According to the feds, the Speedtail isn’t even road legal, on account of its center controls, camera-based wing mirrors and, I’m sure, other homologation issues. About one-third of Speedtails produced have been imported to the U.S. under what’s known as the show or display rule, which restricts annual odometer-registered mileage to 2,500 miles...

I Rented an Electric Car for a Four-Day Road Trip. I Spent More Time Charging It Than I Did Sleeping

Any person with a brain knows this. Electric vehicles are for driving around town, not built for the road: 😎

At WSJ, "Our writer drove from New Orleans to Chicago and back to test the feasibility of taking a road trip in an EV. She wouldn’t soon do it again":

I thought it would be fun.

That’s what I told my friend Mack when I asked her to drive with me from New Orleans to Chicago and back in an electric car.

I’d made long road trips before, surviving popped tires, blown headlights and shredded wheel-well liners in my 2008 Volkswagen Jetta. I figured driving the brand-new Kia EV6 I’d rented would be a piece of cake.

If, that is, the public-charging infrastructure cooperated. We wouldn’t be the first to test it. Sales of pure and hybrid plug-ins doubled in the U.S. last year to 656,866—over 4% of the total market, according to database EV-volumes. More than half of car buyers say they want their next car to be an EV, according to recent Ernst & Young Global Ltd. data.

Oh—and we aimed to make the 2,000-mile trip in just under four days so Mack could make her Thursday-afternoon shift as a restaurant server.

Less money, more time

Given our battery range of up to 310 miles, I plotted a meticulous route, splitting our days into four chunks of roughly 7½-hours each. We’d need to charge once or twice each day and plug in near our hotel overnight.

The PlugShare app—a user-generated map of public chargers—showed thousands of charging options between New Orleans and Chicago. But most were classified as Level 2, requiring around 8 hours for a full charge.

While we’d be fine overnight, we required fast chargers during the days. ChargePoint Holdings Inc., which manufactures and maintains many fast-charging stations, promises an 80% charge in 20 to 30 minutes. Longer than stopping for gas—but good for a bite or bathroom break.

The government is spending $5 billion to build a nationwide network of fast chargers, which means thousands more should soon dot major highways. For now, though, fast chargers tend to be located in parking lots of suburban shopping malls, or tethered to gas stations or car dealerships.

Cost varies widely based on factors such as local electricity prices and charger brands. Charging at home tends to be cheaper than using a public charger, though some businesses offer free juice as a perk to existing customers or to entice drivers to come inside while they wait.

Over four days, we spent $175 on charging. We estimated the equivalent cost for gas in a Kia Forte would have been $275, based on the AAA average national gas price for May 19. That $100 savings cost us many hours in waiting time.

But that’s not the whole story.

Charging nuances

New Orleans, our starting point, has exactly zero fast chargers, according to PlugShare. As we set out, one of the closest is at a Harley-Davidson dealership in Slidell, La., about 40 minutes away. So we use our Monday-morning breakfast stop to top off there on the way out of town.

But when we tick down 15% over 35 miles? Disconcerting. And the estimated charging time after plugging in? Even more so. This “quick charge” should take 5 minutes, based on our calculations. So why does the dashboard tell us it will take an hour?

“Maybe it’s just warming up,” I say to Mack. “Maybe it’s broken?” she says.

Over Egg McMuffins at McDonald’s, we check Google. Chargers slow down when the battery is 80% full, the State of Charge YouTube channel tells us.

Worried about time, we decide to unplug once we return to the car, despite gaining a measly 13% in 40 minutes.

When ‘fast’ isn’t fast Our real troubles begin when we can’t find the wall-mounted charger at the Kia dealership in Meridian, Miss., the state’s seventh-largest city and hometown of country-music legend Jimmie Rodgers.

When I ask a mechanic working on an SUV a few feet away for help, he says he doesn’t know anything about the machine and points us inside. At the front desk, the receptionist asks if we’ve checked with a technician and sends us back outside.

Not many people use the charger, the mechanic tells us when we return. We soon see why. Once up and running, our dashboard tells us a full charge, from 18% to 100%, will take 3-plus hours.

It turns out not all “fast chargers” live up to the name. The biggest variable, according to State of Charge, is how many kilowatts a unit can churn out in an hour. To be considered “fast,” a charger must be capable of about 24 kW. The fastest chargers can pump out up to 350. Our charger in Meridian claims to meet that standard, but it has trouble cracking 20.

“Even among DC fast chargers, there are different level chargers with different charging speeds,” a ChargePoint spokeswoman says.

Worse, it is a 30-minute walk to downtown restaurants. We set off on foot, passing warehouses with shattered windows and an overgrown lot filled with rusted fuel pumps and gas-station signs. Clambering over a flatcar of a stalled freight train, we half-wish we could hop a boxcar to Chicago.

Missed reservations

By the time we reach our next station, at a Mercedes-Benz dealership outside Birmingham, Ala., we’ve already missed our dinner reservations in Nashville—still 200 miles away.

Here, at least, the estimated charging time is only an hour—and we get to make use of two automatic massage chairs while we wait.

Salesman Kurt Long tells us the dealership upgraded its chargers to 54-kW models a few weeks earlier when the 2022 Mercedes EQS-Class arrived.

“Everyone’s concern is how far can the cars go on a charge,” he says. He adds that he would trade in his car for an EV tomorrow if he could afford the $102,000 price tag. “Just because it would be convenient for me because I work here,” he says. “Otherwise, I don’t know if I would just yet.”

A customer who has just bought a new BMW says he’d consider an EV one day—if the price drops.

“You remember when the microwave came out? Or DVD players?” says Dennis Boatwright, a 58-year-old tree surgeon. “When you first get them the prices were real high, but the older they are, the cheaper they get.”

When we tell him about our trip, he asks if we’ll make it to Chicago.

“We’re hoping,” I say.

“I’m hoping, too,” he says.

 

Flying Tesla in Echo Park, Los Angeles (VIDEO)

Pretty sensational. 

The stunt totaled the Tesla's front-end. Brand new car too, apparently. 

At ABC Eyewitness News Los Angeles, "The LAPD is searching for the driver responsible for a dangerous stunt. Videos have been posted on social media showing a Tesla going airborne before crashing into vehicles in #EchoPark."

And, "Dangerous Tesla stunt caught on video ends in crash in Echo Park neighborhood, driver on the loose."

Line Lock

This feature is available on the Dodge Hellcat and the R/T Scat Pack. 

Strange

It's just one car, so you can't extrapolate to the entire EV industry.

This is strange, though. Very fucking strange.

Yeah, but they’re good for the planet… https://t.co/xA9ERhQQil

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) October 2, 2021

Revology

This is the coolest thing.

The firm offers 100 percent newly refurbished, zero miles vintage Mustangs. They use the same V-8 485HP in all their models. 

There's a waiting list and they're not cheap --- varying around $200,000.

This one's a 1966 Mustang GT Convertible in Porsche Jet Black Metallic with Mercedes Porcellan White Leather.

So, Electric Cars Are Destroying the Planet. Uh, Okay

*Shrug.*

Wind power doesn't even come close to providing enough energy to charge America, and it's bad for the environment, especially eagles (and don't mention Third World exploitation).

Leftists are despicable ghouls. 

At LAT, "California’s electric car revolution, designed to save the planet, also unleashes a toll on it":

SAN DIEGO — The precious cargo on the ship docked in San Diego Bay was strikingly small for a vessel built to drag oil rigs out to sea. Machines tethered to this hulking ship had plucked rocks the size of a child’s fist from the ocean floor thousands of miles into the Pacific.

The mission was delicate and controversial — with broad implications for the planet.

Investors are betting tens of millions of dollars that these black nodules packed with metals used in electric car batteries are the ticket for the United States to recapture supremacy over the green economy — and to keep up with a global transportation revolution started by California.

Alongside his docked ship, Gerard Barron, chief executive of the Metals Co., held in his hand one of the nodules he argues can help save the planet. “We have to be bold and we have to be prepared to look at new frontiers,” he said. “Climate change isn’t something that’s waiting around for us to figure it out.”

The urgency with which his company and a few others are moving to start scraping the seabed for these materials alarms oceanographers and advocates, who warn they are literally in uncharted waters. Much is unknown about life on the deep sea floor, and vacuuming swaths of it clean threatens to have unintended and far-reaching consequences.

The drama playing out in the deep sea is just one act in a fast unfolding, ethically challenging and economically complex debate that stretches around the world, from the cobalt mines of Congo to the corridors of the Biden White House to fragile desert habitats throughout the West where vast deposits of lithium lay beneath the ground.

The state of California is inexorably intertwined in this drama. Not just because extraction companies are aggressively surveying the state’s landscapes for opportunities to mine and process the materials. But because California is leading the drive toward electric cars.

No state has exported more policy innovations — including on climate, equality, the economy — than California, a trend accelerating under the Biden administration. The state relishes its role as the nation’s think tank, though the course it charts for the country has, at times, veered in unanticipated directions.

“The ocean is the place on the planet where we know least about what species exist and how they function,” Douglas McCauley, a marine science professor at UC Santa Barbara, said of plans to scrape the seafloor. “This is like opening a Pandora’s box.... We’re concerned this won’t do much good for climate change, but it will do irreversible harm to the ocean.”

The sprint to supply automakers with heavy-duty lithium batteries is propelled by climate-conscious countries like the United States that aspire to abandon gas-powered cars and SUVs. They are racing to secure the materials needed to go electric, and the Biden administration is under pressure to fast-track mammoth extraction projects that threaten to unleash their own environmental fallout.

In far-flung patches of the ocean floor, at Native American ancestral sites, and on some of the most pristine federal lands, extraction and mining companies are branding themselves stewards of sustainability, warning the planet will suffer if digging and scraping are delayed. All the prospecting is giving pause to some of the environmental groups championing climate action, as they assess whether the sacrifice needed to curb warming is being shared fairly...

Keep reading.

 

Toyota Bet on Hydrogen Power. Now It's Fallen Desperately Behind

A very interesting and informative piece.

There's a bit of muh for me though. 

I haven't driven a Toyota since the mid-1980s, when I drove a maroon little Toyota pickup. Once that thing wore out, my wife and switched to Honda, and we only recently switched makes: My wife now drives a KIA, and I'm cruising all cool and macho (and old) in my Dodge Challenger. *Wink.*

At NYT, "Toyota Led on Clean Cars. Now Critics Say It Works to Delay Them":

The Toyota Prius hybrid was a milestone in the history of clean cars, attracting millions of buyers worldwide who could do their part for the environment while saving money on gasoline.

But in recent months, Toyota, one of the world’s largest automakers, has quietly become the industry’s strongest voice opposing an all-out transition to electric vehicles — which proponents say is critical to fighting climate change.

Last month, Chris Reynolds, a senior executive who oversees government affairs for the company, traveled to Washington for closed-door meetings with congressional staff members and outlined Toyota’s opposition to an aggressive transition to all-electric cars. He argued that gas-electric hybrids like the Prius and hydrogen-powered cars should play a bigger role, according to four people familiar with the talks.

Behind that position is a business quandary: Even as other automakers have embraced electric cars, Toyota bet its future on the development of hydrogen fuel cells — a costlier technology that has fallen far behind electric batteries — with greater use of hybrids in the near term. That means a rapid shift from gasoline to electric on the roads could be devastating for the company’s market share and bottom line.

The recent push in Washington follows Toyota’s worldwide efforts — in markets including the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and Australia — to oppose stricter car emissions standards or fight electric vehicle mandates. For example, executives at Toyota’s Indian subsidiary publicly criticized India’s target for 100 percent electric vehicle sales by 2030, saying it was not practical.

Together with other automakers, Toyota also sided with the Trump administration in a battle with California over the Clean Air Act and sued Mexico over fuel efficiency rules. In Japan, Toyota officials argued against carbon taxes.

“Toyota has gone from a leading position to an industry laggard” in clean-car policy even as other automakers push ahead with ambitious electric vehicle plans, said Danny Magill, an analyst at InfluenceMap, a London-based think tank that tracks corporate climate lobbying. InfluenceMap gives Toyota a “D-” grade, the worst among automakers, saying it exerts policy influence to undermine public climate goals.

In statements, Toyota said that it was in no way opposed to electric vehicles. “We agree and embrace the fact that all-electric vehicles are the future,” Eric Booth, a Toyota spokesman, said. But Toyota thinks that “too little attention is being paid to what happens between today, when 98 percent of the cars and trucks sold are powered at least in part by gasoline, and that fully electrified future,” he said.

Until then, Mr. Booth said, it makes sense for Toyota to lean on its existing hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles to reduce emissions. Hydrogen fuel cell technology should also play a role. And any efficiency standards should “be informed by what technology can realistically deliver and help keep vehicles affordable,” the company said in a statement. Last year in the United States, a group of leading automakers reached a compromise on tailpipe emissions standards with California, which sought to impose tougher emissions standards than the Trump administration wanted. Toyota didn’t join that compromise agreement.

More recently, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an industry lobby group, argued in closed-door meetings in Washington that the California compromise, which is expected to be a model for new standards from the Biden administration, is in fact not feasible for all of its members, according to two of the people with direct knowledge of the discussions. The chairman of the alliance is Mr. Reynolds, the Toyota executive.

The Biden administration wants to use tougher emissions rules to rapidly increase sales of electric vehicles. Congress could also approve billions of dollars for construction of charging stations as well as tax incentives for electric cars and trucks.

 

2021 C8 Corvette Z51 (REVIEW)

This 'Vette at the video is actually a 2020.

I saw one on the freeway the other day and I thought it was an Italian car, a Ferrari or a Lambo.

Very slick:

Whoa!

This is unreal.

Via KCBS 2 Los Angeles:

A pursuit suspect in a BMW hit speeds of over 160 miles per hour in the Inland Empire. The suspect is wanted for a burglary out of Fairfax. https://t.co/4MwB1JtR1a pic.twitter.com/uWgHI0CkBT

— CBS Los Angeles (@CBSLA) July 21, 2021

Ford's New 2021 Mustang Mach 1 (VIDEO)

The car gets a fabulous review from this Edmunds guy:

Tested: 2021 Mazda 3 2.5 Turbo vs. Audi A4 45

 From Glenn Reynolds, at Instapundit, "MAZDA’S LUXURY-BRAND AMBITIONS":

Bottom line: “As it stands now, the Mazda 3 2.5 Turbo offers a hell of a lot of car for the money, while the Audi A4 offers an appropriate amount of car for the money.”

 

British Couple Take 9 Hours to Drive from Bournemouth to Kent in Their New 'Fully Electric' Porsche Taycan 4S

It takes carbons to fuel an automobile. Electricity is most effectively generated for industrial-scale use by fossil fuels, especially coal. But coal's out if you're a leftist. These idiots don't understand that wind, solar, and hydro will never provide enough energy to meet current demand, not in Britain, not in the U.S, and certainly not worldwide, where poor countries are still decades if not centuries behind the West in terms of their political-economic (especially industrial and scientific) modernization.

But these are the times in which we live, and we've got mountains to move before we can finally crush the left and save Western civilization. We'll do it. But it takes time. (More about that later.)

In any case, at Dana Pico's Journal 14, "Out of juice: What happens when you can't find a working charging station for your plug in electric vehicle?":

If you have a plug-in electric car, you'd better have a fossil fueled second car if you want to go further than just tooling around town. https://t.co/A6VHIolJU1 British couple takes nine hours to make 130 mile trip because they can't find a working charging station. pic.twitter.com/aANkxEVOo7

— Dana Pico (@Dana19707 on Parler.com) (@Dana_TFSJ) November 29, 2020

BONUS: At London's Daily Mail, "‘Bet they wish they had gas!’ Chaos in California as Tesla drivers are stranded for hours in a half-a-mile-long line to charge their cars on Black Friday: Shanon Stellini was travelling through Kettleman City on November 30 when she stumbled across around 50 of the electric cars waiting in line for a recharge."

Total Badass

Unbelievable.

I mean, the need to waive any tickets for this badassery... pic.twitter.com/iwZsAhbfBE

— DannyTypo (@DanPariah) July 30, 2020

Rally Car Driver Ken Block 'Hoons' the 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E (VIDEO)

Ken Block is the CEO of Hoonigan's.

This car supposedly pulls off 1,400 horsepower, all electric.

Listen to the discussion at the video about adding torque, etc. This is hardcore.

Tesla Utterly Dominates Electric Vehicle Market

It's seems blatantly obvious, but it's only when you get down to the data and history of the EV market do you see how dominant Tesla is.

At NYT, "In Electric Car Market, It’s Tesla and a Jumbled Field of Also-Rans":

“Obviously from the numbers we’re seeing, these cars aren’t setting the world on fire,” an auto analyst said https://t.co/qpuGRg86RG

— NYT Business (@nytimesbusiness) July 22, 2020

Although it has develop into the world’s most beneficial automaker, Tesla nonetheless has to determine tips on how to develop into persistently worthwhile, cut back high quality issues in its luxurious vehicles and extra rapidly flip alluring prototypes into mass-produced autos.

One space the place it hasn’t had a lot to worry about: competitors.

Over the final 12 months or so, a number of automakers, together with Audi, Jaguar and Porsche, have added heralded new fashions supposed to chop into Tesla’s electrical dominance. But they’ve barely made a dent, at the least within the United States. Sales of the Jaguar I-Pace, an electrical sport utility car much like the Tesla Model Y, have totaled simply over 1,000 this 12 months. Porsche has reported related gross sales for its electrical sedan, the Taycan.

Audi, which has grown steadily within the United States over the past decade, launched an electrical S.U.V., the E-tron, final 12 months, and gross sales have sputtered. So far this 12 months, Audi has bought just below 2,900. In many states, the automotive is marketed at costs 13 % or extra under its record value — uncommon for an Audi.

“Obviously from the numbers we’re seeing, these cars aren’t setting the world on fire,” stated Karl Brauer, an unbiased auto analyst. “It was a mistake to think that just because these cars were on the market that people were going to buy them.”

General Motors has fared considerably higher with its Chevrolet Bolt, which the corporate launched in 2016. The firm has bought over 8,000 Bolts this 12 months. Sales of the Nissan Leaf have topped 3,000.

Tesla, which doesn’t escape gross sales by nation, is clearly working at a completely different degree. State information analyzed by Cross-Sell exhibits that 56,000 new Teslas have been registered this 12 months in 23 states, together with California, Florida, New York and Texas. Analysts stated Tesla’s 50-state gross sales whole most likely exceeded 70,000 vehicles. Globally, the corporate delivered about 180,000 vehicles within the first six months of the 12 months.

Of course, electrical autos, together with Tesla’s, characterize a tiny proportion of auto gross sales, which totaled greater than 17 million within the United States final 12 months. Electrics are a larger half of the new-car market in Europe, and Tesla faces extra competitors there than within the United States, however not a lot extra. China has many homegrown electrical carmakers, however they have a tendency to make cheaper autos that don’t immediately compete with Tesla’s choices. Regardless of the market, although, E.V.s are the fastest-growing section of the auto trade.

Tesla’s dominance could be defined partially by its head begin. It has been promoting electrical vehicles in important numbers since 2012. The firm and its chief government, Elon Musk, have additionally constructed a fervent fan base that few different automakers, save maybe high-end sports activities automotive manufacturers like Porsche or Ferrari, can declare. Tesla has lengthy supplied improvements different firms are solely now attempting to match, comparable to wi-fi software program updates that may add options or repair glitches with out journeys to dealerships.

One of the largest shortcomings of competing fashions is vary — the gap an electrical automotive can go earlier than needing to be recharged. The most for the E-tron and Taycan is about 200 miles. The I-Pace and Bolt go about 235 to 260 miles. The least costly Tesla Model Three has a vary of 250 miles, and most of the corporate’s vehicles go 300 miles or extra on a single cost.

Sam Abuelsamid, an analyst at Guidehouse Insights, stated that the Audi, Jaguar and Porsche autos had been superior to Teslas in some methods, comparable to look, really feel and end, however that their restricted vary had postpone many patrons.

“The difference is too great for a lot of consumers to ignore,” he stated.

Mercedes-Benz and BMW have been slower to introduce electrical autos within the United States, the place each firms plan to begin promoting new electrical S.U.V.s subsequent 12 months. Mercedes late final 12 months delayed the introduction of its mannequin, the EQC. And BMW, which launched its i3 in 2014, has not constructed on that early begin.

That has left the sector open for Tesla, and traders have taken observe. The firm’s inventory has soared this 12 months, climbing from $510 in early January to about $1,600. The opening of a second meeting plant in China and the introduction of the Model Y have lifted optimism that Tesla will lead a international transition from gasoline-powered vehicles and vehicles to zero-emission electrical autos.

Of course, Tesla’s success is just not assured. It hasn’t reported an annual revenue since its founding in 2003. The firm has struggled to match the standard ranges of conventional automakers, and it’s spending closely on Model Y manufacturing and creating a pickup truck, a semi truck and different autos. It can be constructing a third manufacturing facility in Germany, and planning a fourth.

Its Autopilot driver-assistance system has gained widespread consideration, however its shortcomings have come below scrutiny after deadly accidents throughout its use. This month, a German courtroom dominated that Tesla had exaggerated the system’s skills and created the misunderstanding that Tesla vehicles with Autopilot may drive themselves. The firm has lengthy claimed that the information collected by its vehicles exhibits that the system makes its vehicles safer than others on the street.

Officials at Tesla didn’t reply to requests for remark.

Moreover, a stronger aggressive push might come quickly. By the top of this 12 months, Ford Motor expects to begin promoting an electrical S.U.V., the Mustang Mach-E, that’s styled to appear to be the corporate’s well-known sports activities automotive. It is promising a model of the automotive with a vary of 300 miles or extra. G.M. has stated it would provide a new Bolt with longer vary by the top of this 12 months, adopted by greater than 20 different electrical fashions over the subsequent three years.

Volkswagen subsequent 12 months will start promoting an electrical S.U.V., the ID4, which may also have a vary of 300 miles. The firm on Monday began taking orders in Europe for the ID3, a hatchback that can promote for about 10,000 euros lower than the Model 3; the automotive is just not anticipated to be bought within the United States.

And varied start-ups are elevating billions of {dollars} to problem Tesla...

Here's the Polestar: