Tag: electric cars

EV Pollution: Converting the World to EVs Would Be an Environmental Disaster

In 2024, President Biden said he wanted 56% of all new cars sold in the United States to be electric vehicles by 2032. California Governor Gavin Newsom similarly mandated that 35% of new 2026 model cars sold in the state be zero-emissions vehicles, rising to 68% in 2030 and 100% in 2035.

The European Union announced in 2023 that, from 2035 onward, all new cars coming onto the market could not emit any CO2. The United Kingdom similarly announced a 2030 ban on the sale of new diesel and petrol cars.

The reaction from the U.S. auto industry was blunt. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation said it “will take a miracle” for all states following California’s rules to reach 100% new zero-emission vehicle sales by 2035.

They are correct. The environmental impact would be devastating. The people claiming to save the world with electric cars could end up destroying it.

Replacing every vehicle on Earth with an EV, all 1.5 to 1.6 billion of them, would be effectively impossible. There are not enough minerals to manufacture all of the batteries required. In addition, there is not enough global processing capacity, and such a transition would require incredible amounts of labor. Many of these minerals are already being mined by children and by workers laboring under hazardous and toxic conditions that amount to modern slavery.

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Honda’s Costly EV Fiasco Drives First-Ever Annual Loss

Honda announced a 423.9 billion yen ($2.7 billion) loss Thursday in a first-ever negative result for the fabled Japanese automaker, reportedly driven by heavy costs for its electric-vehicle plans underscored by President Donald Trump’s pro-U.S. manufacturing policies.

AP reports the longstanding automaker – established in 1948 by Soichiro Honda – conceded the dire losses related to its EV operations are estimated to total 2.5 trillion yen ($16 billion), incurred mostly in the fiscal year just ended and the current fiscal year.

Analysts cited by the outlet detailed Honda Motor Co. plunged into an EV-dominant strategy when the market simply was not interested.

As a result, the Japanese carmaker has now abandoned many of its plans for EV models including those in the works in a joint venture with Sony Corp. as it seeks to find a way out of the financial hole it has dug for itself.

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NASA Helped Ferrari Fix The Luce EV’s “Disturbing” Acceleration

The high-end EV market is facing some struggles, but despite this, Ferrari is plowing ahead with its first-ever electric car, the aptly named Luce. While the brand is perhaps the last you’d ever expect to enter the EV world, it’s confident the model will offer all the driving thrills expected of a Prancing Horse.

During a recent interview, Ferrari chief executive Benedetto Vigna insisted that the Luce will deliver each of the five key drivers of driving thrills, ensuring it is befitting of the brand’s badge and can succeed where some EVs have failed: to tug at the emotional heartstrings.

Speaking with Autocar India, Vigna said one element “is longitudinal acceleration,” agreeing with the interviewer that perhaps this acceleration in EVs is too linear, and also “too much, because sometimes it’s disturbing our brain.” He went on to reveal that Ferrari has worked with NASA to “understand what is the level of acceleration that is disturbing people,” and that too much acceleration is not a good thing.

Another important contributor to driving thrills is “transversal acceleration, followed by the braking experience, the gearshift, and the sound. As recent images of the Luce’s interior revealed, it will include paddle shifters, and unlike some EVs, these won’t be used to adjust the level of brake regeneration but instead to adjust the level of torque engagement.

Vigna stopped short of confirming that the system will mimic traditional shifts, as in the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N, but it certainly sounds like that is what Ferrari is aiming for. Then there’s the all-important sound.

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UK Government Secretly Tracked 25 Million People as Potential EV Owners

The UK government spent two years tracking 25 million mobile devices to build a picture of who drives electric cars. Not suspects or criminals. Just ordinary people whose browsing history mentioned EVs often enough to flag them as worth following.

The Department for Transport paid telecoms company O2 £600,000 ($809,000) to run the operation. According to the Telegraph, O2 trawled through its customers’ web browsing histories and app records, flagging anyone who visited an EV-related site at least once a month across two or more months.

That pool extended beyond O2’s own customers to include people on Tesco Mobile, GiffGaff, and Virgin Mobile, networks that run on O2’s infrastructure and whose users had no idea their data was being packaged and sold to a government agency.

Once flagged as a “potential EV owner,” your physical movements were traced across the country. London, the North-West, and the East of England received particular attention.

The techniques are standard in serious organized crime investigations. The DfT applied them to people buying environmentally friendly cars.

Andy Palmer, former executive at Nissan and Aston Martin, put it plainly: “I’m told it’s anonymized and aggregated, and that may well satisfy legal thresholds. But legality and legitimacy are not the same thing.” He added: “If you erode public trust in how that data is gathered, you undermine the very transition you are trying to accelerate.”

The idea of “anonymized” data means very little.

The surveillance ran for two years before the DfT quietly admitted defeat in April 2024, conceding that “mobile data cannot directly be used to provide information around charging behaviour or travel time.”

The program ended not because anyone questioned whether mass tracking of innocent people was appropriate, but because the data turned out to be useless for its stated purpose.

Civil servants from the DfT and Treasury were simultaneously exploring new EV taxes to replace fuel duty revenue. The people being surveilled were doing exactly what government policy encouraged them to do.

Conservative MP Sir David Davis drew the obvious conclusion: “It’s an object lesson in why you can’t trust the state with unfettered access to people’s information, because they’ve obviously taken this information without people’s permission with the objective of disadvantaging them, either by tax or other policy matters. If they’ll do it on this, with people who are doing what the government wants in policy terms, namely, pursuing green policies, what on Earth will they do elsewhere?”

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GENIUS: Vermont Spent Millions on Electric Buses That Turned Out to be ‘Unreliable’ in Cold Weather

Behold the genius of liberalism.

Like so many blue states, Vermont decided to ‘go green’ and spent millions on electric buses. There’s just one little problem. It turns out that they’re not reliable in cold weather.

It’s a good thing they never get cold weather in Vermont, right? Except for maybe just six months out of the year, of course.

The Vermont Daily Chronicle reports:

Vermont EV buses prove unreliable for transportation this winter

Electric buses are proving unreliable this winter for Vermont’s Green Mountain Transit, as it needs to be over 41 degrees for the buses to charge, but due to a battery recall the buses are a fire hazard and can’t be charged in a garage.

Spokesman for energy workers advocacy group Power the Future Larry Behrens told the Center Square: “Taxpayers were sold an $8 million ‘solution’ that can’t operate in cold weather when the home for these buses is in New England.”

“We’re beyond the point where this looks like incompetence and starts to smell like fraud,” Behrens said.

“When government rushes money out the door to satisfy green mandates, basic questions about performance, safety, and value for taxpayers are always pushed aside,” Behrens said. “Americans deserve to know who approved this purchase and why the red flags were ignored.”

General manager at Green Mountain Transit (GMT) Clayton Clark told The Center Square that “the federal government provides public transit agencies with new buses through a competitive grant application process, and success is not a given.”

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The Postal Service’s ‘Next Generation’ Electric Delivery Vehicles Cost $22,000 More Than Other Electric Vans

In 2014, the United States Postal Service (USPS) began replacing its fleet of delivery vehicles. In the almost 12 years since, only about 6 percent of its 51,500 custom-built delivery vehicles have been delivered. The Postal Service says the rollout will last at least two more years.

The signature USPS delivery truck is the Grumman Life Long Vehicle (LLV), which first entered service in 1986. Designed to last over 20 years, some have now been in service for twice as long, and don’t include many modern amenities, like air conditioning and airbags. Maintaining the LLVs beyond their best-by date involved reverse-engineering the 130,000-strong fleet for discontinued parts, according to The Washington Post. In 2014, the USPS began its $9.6 billion fleet upgrade by announcing the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle (NGDV) program.

Oshkosh Defense, which produces rather mean-looking tactical vehicles for the American military (and has never before produced a delivery van), was awarded a multibillion-dollar contract in February 2021 to produce the NGDV for the Postal Service over 10 years. The Post details the production nightmare that ensued. After repeated delays, setbacks, and quadrupling the minimum number of electric NGDVs, thanks to a generous $3 billion subsidy from the Inflation Reduction Act, Oshkosh had only delivered 612 of 35,000 e-NGDVs by November 2025, and only 2,600 of the 16,500 internal combustion engine NGDVs.

The Postal Service agreed to pay Oshkosh $77,692 per e-NGDV and $54,584 per NGDV in March 2023. To put these numbers in context, FedEx’s fleet of Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans is considerably cheaper, costing $50,830 for the baseline 2026 Sprinter and $61,180 for the 2026 eSprinter. (The Sprinter debuted in 1995 and the eSprinter rolled out in 2019, two years before the USPS awarded its Next Generation Delivery Vehicle contract to Oshkosh.)

Paying almost $80,000 per vehicle should have rung alarm bells, but what makes this situation worse is that the USPS knows cheaper alternatives exist. 21,000 of the Postal Service’s new fleet are commercial off-the-shelf vans like the Ford E-Transit (whose 2026 model starts at $54,855). In 2023, there were nearly 40,000 Mercedes-Benz Metris vans (which start at $41,495) in its fleet. It’s unclear why the agency decided to get bogged down with Oshkosh at all. Whatever the reasons may be, price is not one of them.

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New York Parents Furious as State-Mandated Electric Buses Leave Kids Without Heat in Frigid Temperatures

And the (electrical vehicle) hits just keep on coming.

Just a day after car manufacturing giant Ford Motors announced that it was eating a sizable $19.5 billion bullet for putting too many of its eggs into the EV basket, a WIVB-TV report is pouring even more cold water on the left’s EV craze.

As New York shifts to meet a new statewide mandate requiring all purchased school buses to be electric, parents have already identified a significant issue — especially in the rather chilly Empire State.

According to WIVB, parents “in the Lake Shore Central School District are speaking out, claiming some bus drivers are turning the heat down, or off completely, in an attempt to conserve battery life on their electric school buses.”

The report adds: “The kids are coming home saying their bus is freezing cold and the parents are giving them hand warmers.”

The key issue at hand is that the heating system in the buses draws from the same electrical power source the bus itself relies on.

Apparently, every single furious parent that WIVB spoke to was able to cite at least one report of the buses breaking down.

“The bus broke down on route,” one parent told the outlet. “They deployed a substitute bus, and the bus was more than 30 minutes late. My son stood outside for over 35 minutes waiting for a bus that wasn’t coming. Some of those kids are on there for upwards of a half hour or more while the bus makes its route.

“There’s no reason that the kids should freeze for all that time.”

And that parent is 100 percent correct. There is no reason kids should freeze en route to school.

But there is a reason why these kids are freezing: the EV-obsessed left and Democrats.

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EU to Scrap 2035 Combustion-Engine Cars Prohibition, as Even Brussels Establishment Begins to Covertly Adopt Rightwing Policies

EU Commission walks back some suicidal ‘green’ policies.

The measure of the success by the right-wingers in Europe expresses itself not only by the high popularity numbers that the anti-Globalist parties are showing – leading in Germany, France and the UK.

There’s also the fact that leftist-liberal-Globalist politicians all over the continent are rushing to present some semblance of policy changes that mimic the successful right-wing ideas that deeply resonate with the voters.

The two most relevant examples deal with unchecked mass migration and ‘climate change/Net zero’ lunatic policies.

This basically demonstrates that patriotic forces come armed with better ideas and more effective policies.

To see the EU now defending the creation of ‘return hubs’ for illegal migrants – a clear copy of UK’s former PM Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda plan – is very significant.

And then, we have the promised EU ban on new combustion-engine cars starting in 2035, which has just been ditched, in one of the EU’s biggest walk-backs from its ‘green’ policies in recent years.

Reuters reported:

“The move, which still needs approval from EU governments and the European Parliament, would allow continued sales of some non-electric vehicles. Carmakers in regional industrial powerhouse Germany and in Italy had sought easing of the rules.”

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Australian cyber warfare expert makes a chilling claim about Chinese EVs that every driver should read

China could detonate or disable electric vehicles sold in Australia, a top cybersecurity expert has warned. 

Alastair MacGibbon, former cybersecurity adviser to then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, sounded the alarm at the Financial Review’s Cyber Summit on Tuesday.

He depicted Australia’s policy towards Chinese EV’s as a security failure, adding the situation was so dire public officials ought to be banned from riding in them. 

‘The last decision of the National Security Committee of the Turnbull government was to take high-risk vendors out of 5G networks,’ he said. 

‘Fast-forward seven years and… potentially millions of [the Internet of Things] or connected devices – not made in China, but controlled by China – are all through our systems.

‘Those cars that we talk about, whether they’re electric or not, are listening devices, and they’re surveillance devices in terms of cameras.’

Mr MacGibbon, who now serves as the chief strategy officer at CyberCX, said the risks went beyond just EV’s to smart devices made or controlled in China.

‘Let’s talk potential scenarios, take off the safety features of household batteries so that they overcharge. Take off those same safety features for electric vehicles,’ he said. 

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A Dodge Charger EV Driver Got a Ticket for a Loud Exhaust

he Dodge Charger EV does not have an exhaust; it is an electric car. It may sometimes make noises like it does, but it doesn’t, and that can make it awkward when a police officer pulls you over for allegedly creating a public nuisance with a “super loud” muffler—just as one state trooper did to a Charger EV owner named Mike earlier this summer in Minnesota.

We got in touch with Mike, who posted part of the incident on Instagram. He told us that he was driving through Stillwater, a city that has a strict noise ordinance, with a group of car enthusiasts. He stopped at an intersection, “about eight cars deep,” and when the light turned green, he said the lead car “peeled away loud as hell.”

“I was left at the stoplight with a red light,” Mike told The Drive. “I looked to my left, and there was a state trooper across the street from me. He passed me and whipped a U-turn. Came up behind me as the light turned green and followed me into a gas station and lit me up. Initiated a traffic stop.”

“The trooper stepped up and immediately told me my car’s exhaust was way too loud and was disturbing the peace,” Mike continued. “I tried telling him it’s an EV and doesn’t have an exhaust or an engine, and he stated he’s not gonna argue with me.”

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