Motor Mouth: New year’s predictions for electric vehicles – Driving
2024: More federal subsidies for used EVs, and the Liberals’ new EV mandate almost guarantees invasion by cheap Chinese imports
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According to The Times of India, Nostradmus actually predicted, among his many other prognostications, our current climate crisis. According to the newspaper’s editorial board, the 16th-century French astrologer’s famed quatrains foretelling of “parched earth” could actually be references to the heat waves that plagued 2023 while the “very great famine through pestiferous wave” he envisaged prophesied the tsunamis that seem to get ever more potent in their destruction. “If Nostradamus’ visions hold any accuracy,” says the Times, ”the implication might be a forewarning of even more calamitous climate-related events looming on the horizon.”
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Or, it could have been that, like the wars he was constantly predicting, his prophecies were nothing more than a reflection of the conflagrations and famines that were endemic to medieval Europe. In other words, Michel de Nostredame — the prophet’s real name — was actually practicing the ruse that keeps all supposed seekers of truth in business, keeping his predictions so vague that they could mean anything the reader wanted them to.
The far greater trick, then, is to make your predictions both accurate and specific. And, while I will not make claim to Nostradamic prophecies, my New Year’s predictions for 2022 and 2023 were pretty much spot-on. Accurate enough, in fact, that I will risk yet more ridicule in making more predictions for 2024. And, yes they will be a lot more precise that some vague references to plague and pestilence.
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Used EVs will become eligible for subsidies
The CBC recently reported that federal consumer subsidies will be extended to used EVs. On the plus side, the added subvention, if realized, should further reduce the price differential between battery-powered vehicles and traditional ICEs, which is essential if electric vehicles sales are to extend beyond the luxury segment that now dominates ZEV sales.
On the other hand, it doesn’t solve the biggest anomaly in the electric-vehicle world: namely that out of one side of their mouth, EV proponents claim that price parity with ICEs is right around the corner; and out of the other, that, without green-car subsidies, the world will perish in a cloud of tailpipe emissions. Considering that President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act — some of whose subventions Canada is trying to match — is slated to run until 2032, I suspect that price parity is a lot further down the road than we’re being promised.
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Electric-vehicle sales growth will slow
Before I continue with the rationale behind this one, I need to clarify that I am not saying that a) Canadian EVs sales will actually decrease; or b) that our EV market will crater like it did south of the border. That said, meeting our EV targets — 20 per cent of all new-car sales in 2026, increasing to 60 per cent by 2030 — requires an ever-escalating penetration.
Making that problematic is the narrow focus of who is buying electrics. As I pointed out in An open letter to Pierre Poilievre on EVS, S&P Global’s data shows that the number-one buyers of electric vehicles are suburbanite commuters. Of the top 40 districts for EV-market penetration so far, 38 are suburban communities of the two major markets in Canada — Vancouver and Montreal. Essentially, bedroom-community commuters in Quebec and British Columbia have done figured out that with their generous provincial subsidizes and the savings offered by Canada’s unusually cheap electricity, they can save a ton of money on their daily slog to the big city.
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The problem with this model Is twofold. The first is that the suburban market is quickly becoming saturated: the Montreal suburb of Saint-Lambert is already running at 42.6 per cent, Vancouver’s Port Moody not far behind at 40 per cent. More significantly, the perfect trifecta of conditions — generous subsidization and long, predictable daily commutes using cheap home-charged electrons that don’t require any anxiety-inducting fast-charging — are pretty much unique to suburbia and are not necessarily a model for the rest of the country. Indeed, it’s worth noting that, at least measured by market penetration, suburbanites are almost twice as likely to buy an EV as the “downtown elite” that constituted the first wave of early adopters. Once there’s one EV in every suburban two-car garage, who will be the next converts?
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The politics of electric vehicles will become even more divisive
Alas, again led by our cousins south of the border, EVs are quickly becoming a political hot-button issue right up there with abortion and the Second Amendment. Trump is promising to scrap incentives for electric vehicles and will, no doubt, try once again to rescind the waiver that allows California — and the states that copy its regulations — to outlaw internal combustion by 2035. President Biden, meanwhile, is quickly turning his IRA subsidies — which are supposed to be all about promoting the transition to battery-electrics — into a China-bashing tariff, the latest “minefield,” says Politico, being rules that “disqualify a vehicle from receiving the credit if even one of its suppliers has loose ties to Beijing.” The confusion — for dealers and consumers alike — as to which vehicles are eligible for the USD$7,500 subsidies is at least one of the reasons that American EV sales are lagging.
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Closer to home, poll-leader Pierre Poilievre is reputedly looking at scrapping the recently introduced federal EV mandates, and when not threatening secession from the Canadian Pension Plan or calling federal carbon taxes “unconstitutional,” Alberta Premier Daniel Smith is busy bashing Prime Minister Trudeau’s Electric Vehicle Availability Standard as “bananas.” That such rhetoric has become smart politics — many of Smith’s and Poilievre’s loyal constituents are anti-EV and all are against mandates in principle — is a sad reflection how everything in today’s politics has become polemicized. Look for car manufacturing to become a major election issue for the first time since the Auto Pact.
Elon Musk may finally lose one
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The list of grievances piling up in Elon Musk’s mailbox is unprecedented. And so far, he’s skated on pretty much all of them; take the SEC “funding is secured” kerfuffle and the “pedo guy” lawsuit, to name but a few of the many. Nonetheless, even by Musk’s management-by-chaos standards, 2023 was an eventful year. He’s basically destroyed Twitter; pretty much every Tesla has been recalled for software fixes because of his ‘industry-revolutionizing’ Autopilot system; and now it seems he may be blaming his own customers for their cars’ inferior reliability. Nonetheless, if precedent proves prescient, none of the above will be a telling blow to Musk’s goal of world domination.
Taking on Swedish mechanics, however, just might be. As it turns out, the only thing Scandinavians love more than the environment is collective bargaining. What started out as just 130 mechanics at 10 Tesla garages asking for the right to unionize has turned into a blossoming anti-Tesla movement of unprecedented proportions. Suppliers are refusing to deliver parts, cleaners are refusing to sweep offices, and the transport union won’t collect the dealerships’ garbage. What started with, again, just a few mechanics has spread to Denmark, where dockworkers are refusing to unload Teslas arriving in the country, while Norwegian and Finnish unions are calling for the same treatment.
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So, a few predictions. First, unlike their American counterparts, European workers are less interested in their hourly wage than the concept of collective agreement, so I suspect it will be a lot harder to stave off their unionization drive by just tossing them a couple of extra Euros an hour. Second, if this movement gathers steam, Musk will be stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place: Either acquiesce to union demands and empower — not to mention enlighten — their American brethren to similar action, or accept reduced sales in the Nordic region. For the first time in Tesla’s history, Elon Musk may have to back down from a fight.
The Chinese are coming
If Justin Trudeau and his Liberals somehow, God forbid, manage to get themselves re-elected in the next federal election, a number of Chinese brands — BYD and Nio almost assuredly, but also others are surely girding up for the fight — will announce plans to start building a dealer network here in Canada, in advance of a full-scale invasion in 2026. As I stated in “The Consequences of Canada’s EV mandate,” the main reason we haven’t yet been flooded with cheap Chinese electrics is because the United States has a 25-per-cent tariff on Chinese cars.
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But while the American administration is amping up its protectionism against Chinese-made imports, Canada will be in desperate need of huge numbers of inexpensive ZEVs over the next few years, at least if it wants to meet the ambitious quotas demanded by the Liberals’ new Electric Vehicle Availability Standard. Since there is no indication that domestic — or European — automakers can make a low-cost battery-electric vehicle in the timeframe the EVAS demands, that would seem to leave China as the only source of electric vehicles at a price-point affordable to the average Canadian household (median family income; CDN$64,000). I’ll put this even more succinctly: Come 2030, we can either meet our EV targets or we can maintain our bustling domestic auto industry. Choose one.
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We’re ignoring the greatest rip-off in automotive history
I probably should feel bad for decrying my fellow Canadians’, well, let’s call it “nonchalance” so loudly, but the fact is the automotive public is ignoring the perhaps most-pressing issue facing the automotive world that doesn’t involve lithium-ions: data security and privacy. Our cars, as we are repeatedly told, are nothing if not mobile phones on wheels. Well, it turns out that, with their connectivity and our willingness to share our data indiscriminately, cars are the most porous keepers of our personal secrets in the world.
Or so wrote the Mozilla Foundation a little earlier this year, when it declared “Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy”. According to the researchers — Jen Caltrider, Misha Rykov, and Zoë MacDonald — Nissan’s privacy policy allows them to collect information about “your sexual activity”; more than half of the automakers surveyed claim they can share your information with the government or law enforcement in response to a simple “request” (i.e. not a court order); and more than three-quarters say they can sell your personal data!
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And don’t even get me started on the security ramifications of our ’round-the-clock connectivity. Actually, you can find out all about the latest in automotive data security firsthand from the experts, since I’m hosting our latest Driving into the Future webinar on Wednesday January 17 at 11:00 AM, and laying out all the truly horrific pitfalls that could befall us if we don’t demand better securitization of our cars and their numerous networks. But don’t believe me — register here and get it explained directly by Sam Curry, the world’s leading car hacker; Yoav Levy, CEO of Upstream; and Sebastian Fischmeister, a professor at the University of Waterloo’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
New battery technologies will solve some — but not all — EV issues
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New battery chemistries will (hopefully) soon alleviate the issues that continue to hold back electric vehicles: high costs, low ranges, and slow charging.
The most obvious of these new technologies are, of course, the solid-state batteries we’ve long been promised will usher in a new era of worry-free EV-ing. Essentially the same chemistry formulation with a solid rather than liquid electrolyte — the filling in a battery cell’s cathode-anode sandwich – its more efficient and robust design has Toyota, for one, promising 1,000 kilometres of range, coupled with faster charging.
Meanwhile, sodium-ion batteries promise to dramatically reduce the cost of batteries, the major stumbling block to affordable EVs. Far more plentiful than lithium, sodium is also more easily processed, which experts far more knowledgeable than myself say will reduce battery costs even more than the lithium-iron phosphate cells that currently power entry-level EVs. It also helps, says The Economist, when their electrodes are made of inexpensive iron and manganese rather than nickel and cobalt. By way of example, China’s JAC recently-announced that it will build sodium-powered vehicles with about 240 kilometres of range for less than USD$10,000.
Unfortunately, sodium batteries aren’t nearly as efficient as current lithium versions — its ions are both larger and heavier, which means energy density is much reduced — and solid-state batteries will be, for the foreseeable future at least, significantly more expensive. In other words, EVs of the future will indeed be cheaper, faster charging, and boast greater range. You’ll just have to choose two out of the three.