Comments by "Nicolae Crefelean" (@kneekoo) on "Hillsdale College"
channel.
-
2
-
1
-
This week in Chasing the Tail: Guy is set out to combat bad politics with a different kind of bad politics.
11:29 You tell any manager that 10% of their business goes away, potentially up to 20%, and see if they like it - existential or not. See what their investors think about a 10-20% decline in profit. See how ICE car manufacturers go bankrupt because they were too complacent or incompetent in making decent EVs for a good price. Millions of jobs lost to being too stubborn to put in an actually good effort.
ICE is a lost bet at this point, there's plenty of proof how EVs can be done cheaper and cheaper in time, thanks to battery price going lower and lower with better energy density, and thanks to many improvements in manufacturing and engineering - something that cannot be optimized much further in ICE cars.
Trump is right about the choice in buying cars - whatever you want to buy, the government shouldn't get in the way of car makers by banning the sales of ICE cars. The mandates were a temporary helping hand for the manufacturers to switch over to making EVs, but instead of making good use of that, they wasted it and aren't anywhere near to making profitable EVs without incentives. So the mandates are nothing but a failure of the car makers. The oil and gas industry has received plenty of subsidies for a long time and, for better or worse, they're still up and running. Meanwhile, ICE cars sales have kept going down for half a decade now, and the "big three" in the US are not doing great. Even the big three in Germany are also not doing great, and it's also their fault.
The climate science deals with both predictions and politics, which is why it's bound to get it wrong. Despite that, and leaving politics aside, I'm sure most people would like to breathe cleaner air, with less harmful particles. I'm sure most people would like to be able to charge/fill their cars at home, so they don't have to go anywhere for that. Surely most people understand how burning fuel causes pollution everywhere you go with your car, on top of the pollution it generates everywhere the raw materials come from.
Some people love to point out how EVs "pollute somewhere else", as if ICE cars only pollute where the driver is. The same people are also unaware of, or ignore, the studies showing that at the current level of technology EVs are already better than ICE cars in terms of pollution, after only 5 years. A lot of people aren't rich and they would like to use their cars for longer than that. And those studies will account for new data in the future, when the old EVs will become a source of raw materials for batteries, which means less mining. People like Mark P. Mills here don't like to point out the fact that even today we can recycle over 95% of a battery cell, which is a great source of resources that are already well refined. That makes the manufacturing of new battery cells cheaper than using mined materials. So in the future, we'll have to mine a lot less materials for batteries.
This guy claims that going to 50% EVs won't happen in the foreseeable future. China is already at 54% plugins for passenger cars. 31% of the new car sales are BEVs. China is the world's biggest car market and they keep growing their sales on other continents too. So Mark's claim will be turned upside down by the end of this decade. Even the US is close to 10% at this point in time, whereas 5 years ago it was below 2%, and below 5% in China. The two biggest BEV makers - Tesla and BYD -, have been profitable for years, and they keep growing their sales. Looking at the trends, with ICE shrinking and EV growing, we're actually witnessing the EV disruption of ICE, it's not a slow linear growth.
1
-
18:10 Back in 2021, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess mentioned how he wanted to reduce the production time of their vehicles from 30 hours to 20 hours. He also compared their time to Tesla's 10 hours per vehicle. So there you have authoritative data from a CEO. Two years later, in 2023, Tesla announced during their Investor Day that they had developed a new "unboxed process" that makes manufacturing more efficient in both time and cost. The complexity of an EV not being the same as an ICE vehicle doesn't mean the manufacturing processes are similar enough.
There's a lot less manual labor involved in making a battery pack, compared to part assembly. Additionally, Tesla has removed a lot of parts by introducing front and back castings. Those also require a lot less time to manufacture, which includes manual labor, thanks to reduced complexity. You might forgive Mark P. Mills for not being specific to a single manufacturer, since not all BEVs are equal, but ignoring Tesla is akin to a certain president's EV Summit where he didn't invite the leading company that also happened to make the most American cars. So what we see here, too, is more politics at play.
1
-
1
-
@billurban1581 My dreams? Nah... I don't care about cars at all - I never owned one and I will most likely never will. But I'm lucky that I live in Europe and we have great public transportation here. What I care about is cleaner air, because ICE cars both stink and the exhaust is nasty to breathe in.
The EV incentives were a lifeline for the ICE car makers, to help them make EVs profitably, but it turns out that they needed better management to make the most out of it. When the incentives go away, it's probably going to be only Tesla and BYD who will make profit from EVs for a while longer. By that time, who knows how many ICE car makers will still be around.
EVs have quite a few advantages, and they only get better because there's a lot of new technology that still allows for optimization. You can see Tesla pushing this industry forward with heat pumps, castings, better electrical architectures, and better production methods. The batteries themselves will have better energy density and charge faster, for a lower price, so the range anxiety will be a thing of the past quite soon.
All in all, this is great news for the average buyer who doesn't care about politics but rather a car that does its job and is cheaper to maintain.
1
-
@billurban1581 The unpleasant reality is that hybrids only exist because they're easier to make with the existing ICE car factories. Basically the ICE car makers were lazy and took the easy way to "new energy vehicles." They would need some major changes to the production lines to make BEVs. (big expenses + new hires = headaches)
The main problem with hybrids is that they're more complex and more expensive to make than both ICE and BEV, because they obviously have both power trains. That's why I don't think hybrids have much of a future, because when BEVs will overtake them in manufacturing cost, those who don't care about the underlying technology will just look at the features and price, and get a BEV. The US is especially fit for charging at home, with so many suburbs, and that's a great selling point to many.
But just like there are gas stations everywhere, there will be EV chargers everywhere for those who can't charge at home. The energy companies will happily sell more power - it will be their turn to rack in profits after the oil industry will have taken some loss due to lower fuel sales. Just business, after all.
I think the ICE and BEV sales will cross and go in opposite directions before 2030. ICE sales have consistently gone down in the past 5-6 years in the US, meaning that there's a growing interest in a different technology. BEV sales are already close to 10% in the US, and 31% in China. Just 5 years ago, BEVs barely registered on the radar.
In 5 more years, more people will realize how nice it is to have cheaper maintenance, or to no longer have to care about oil changes, or how you can no longer put in the wrong fuel by mistake. It will happen organically, despite ads, incentives, etc. Even the suburbs will he happier when there will be less petrol heads revving their engines down the road. At least that's how I see the next 5 years.
Happy New Year to you, too! :)
1