UK Telegraph on EV mandates: ‘The European electric car market is collapsing’ – ‘Green zealots will come to regret their war on motorists’

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/11/green-zealots-will-come-to-regret-their-war-on-motorists/

If Aesop were alive today, perhaps he would create a fable where everything is turned on its head because of a misplaced belief that going green will be mankind’s salvation. Perhaps, also, he would be sitting down to rewrite The boy who cried wolf

Because that’s where we are. For the past 10 years we have been told that electric cars are definitely the way forward, while diesel and petrol are old and unfashionable. Successive Tory governments dragged us towards the EV revolution. There was simply no other way – this despite Ed Miliband telling us all when he was Secretary of State for the Environment under Gordon Brown that diesel was the future back in 2009.

Today we live in a nation where bureaucrats attempt to coerce our choice of car purchase, shame us into driving less, and shake us down with fines and levies that would seek to change our behaviour. The war on the petrol motorist is unrelenting. A two-tiered system has developed, as with Sadiq Khan’s unreasonable Ulez zone and the actions of some local councils charging diesel driving citizens more to park than their electric car driving brethren.

The miserable reality of the green agenda has diverged from optimistic government predictions. Take the pro-EV arguments, which attempted to convince people that driving cars built with components mined in African cobalt mines was somehow more ethical than petrol cars.

Only this week we saw the collapse of a project by Swedish based electric battery maker Northvolt – who will now cut a large number of the 7,000 people they employ and sell their energy storage and materials businesses.

Simply put, the demand for electric car batteries in Europe has collapsed. Northvolt’s gigafactory in Sweden is producing one sixteenth of its target after having BMW cancel a contract with them in favour of cheaper alternatives in China.

Meanwhile Volkswagen is moving away from electric car factories and Volvo has announced just this week that they will be cancelling their deadline of 2030 for the ending of non-electric car production.

All in all, it is very clear that the electric car bubble has burst. My viewers and listeners constantly regale me with tales of their inability to find charge points up and down the country. They tell me why they’ve decided to trade in the Tesla for a more reliable hybrid or petrol model. And those are the people that can afford to buy electric.

Let’s face it. When the government was offering a tax incentive to buy electric cars, savvy fleet managers saw an opportunity. Now that it looks like it’s all over demand has actually collapsed. And if this new Labour government starts charging people per mile that they drive, even the virtue signallers won’t be safe.

The war on motorists goes on. More clean air legislation is affecting cities and towns up and down the country. Fuel duty is likely to rise in Rachel Reeves’ budget, as is road tax, and now AI cameras tower over our roads hoping to catch us out doing something wrong.

But there is one small crumb of comfort. You can feel relatively relieved that if you didn’t buy an electric car you were in the right lane.

The fact remains that technology has not yet caught up with the future. In order to do away with petrol and diesel vehicles, the authorities need to be a little more generous and a lot more friendly. Car drivers will explore hydrogen cell cars. They will be happily persuaded of the need to go green if they are not bashed over the head every five minutes.

Motorists cannot continue to be the whipping boy of every green zealot and government official that walks the Earth. I, for one, have had enough.

 

 

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