Friday, August 06, 2021

Is This a Serious Country? Nope. Look at "Electric Cars"

At one time, GM was run by strong, serious, men.

Not today.  Now it's a former HR type who is utterly un-serious.

At one time, GM led the world in auto sales, too.  Not any more.

Toyota, currently #1 in auto sales, refuses to bend over and kiss the ass of Biden* when he demands all-electric vehicles.

...Toyota understands both the car market and the infrastructure that supports it perhaps better than any other manufacturer on the planet. It hasn’t grown its footprint through acquisitions, as Volkswagen has, and it hasn’t undergone bankruptcy and bailout as GM has. Toyota has grown by building reliable cars for decades.

When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it’s probably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered before. That opinion is straightforward: The world is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet....

 There are a lot of reasons:

...Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simply aren’t there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 U.S. government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That’s about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM and stop making ICE cars....

Oh.  300 million.  Hmmmm.....

 ...We will need much more generation capacity to power about 300 million cars if we’re all going to be forced to drive electric cars. Whether we’re charging them at home or charging them on the road, we will be charging them frequently. Every gas station you see on the roadside today will have to be wired to charge electric cars, and charge speeds will have to be greatly increased....

Want to sit at a 'gas' station for about a half-hour to charge up?  No??  Too bad.

... Electrifying the auto fleet will require a massive overhaul of the power grid and an enormous increase in power generation. Elon Musk recently said we might need double the amount of power we’re currently generating if we go electric. He’s not saying this from a position of opposing electric cars. His Tesla dominates that market and he presumably wants to sell even more of them....

Then comes the line that rings bells:

Toyota isn’t saying none of this can be done, by the way. It’s just saying that so far, the conversation isn’t anywhere near serious enough to get things done.

A couple of nights ago, Tucker told us that while he was visiting the Hungarian border and noting that Hungary simply caught illegals and threw them out--no questions asked--a Hungarian official told Tucker that they do that 'because we are a serious country.'

The US, under Biden*, is not.

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