Brussels wants to kill off the combustion engine. Instead, it’s supercharging Europe’s populists.
Right-wing parties are running hard against the EU’s law that bans the sale of new gasoline and diesel cars from 2035. It’s happening in the Czech Republic, Italy, Germany, France, Poland and elsewhere. In response, centrist parties with a more established voice in Brussels are turning against the law to avoid losing traction to their far-right rivals.
In Prague, the far-right Motorist for Themselves party denounced “green fanatics” and made a breakthrough in the national election last month with almost 7 percent of the vote.
The vote-winner populist ANO party on Monday struck a coalition agreement with the Motorists and the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy. That means the Czech Republic, which has one of the EU’s largest car industries as a percentage of the economy, will continue being one of the leading opponents of the 2035 measure, as the outgoing centrist government was also skeptical of the law.
*“Stop the climate fanatics!” screams a poster from Poland’s fast-rising far-right Confederation party. *
*In Italy, League leader and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini denounced the 2035 measure as “ideological fundamentalism” and called it economic suicide that will hand over the bloc’s car industry to Chinese rivals. The Italian government is pressing hard for opt-outs from the 2035 biofuels law. *
Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party campaigns strongly against 2035, but in the country with the continent’s largest car sector, the issue is also splitting the ruling coalition led by the conservative Christian Democrats in alliance with the center-left Social Democrats.
Don’t tell mostlylong. From June…
“You are ignoring the reality of electrified vehicles growing US market share because the market, producers and consumers, are making it a priority”
I expect the above is due to Slate & Telo small pick ups due out around 2026.
Also the Ford Maverick small pick up is selling well.
2022-~74K units
2023-~94K units
2024-~121K units
In 2024, hybrid Mavericks were roughly 50% of those sold. The remaining had IC engines.
It predates the present administration. For example, a Reuters article from two years ago titled US EV market struggles with price cuts and rising inventories:
Disbelieving of the slowdown in the US EV rollout. Go back and read the thread I linked. For example, when GM decided to not spent $300 million on EV engine manufacturing at their Tonawanda plant and instead spend $800 million on making V-8 ICE engines, you thought that was cherry picked data.
Here you cite one OEM just like in the other thread.
I cited US and global market data over all producers.
So yeah, you’re sounding kind of “selective” again.
Anyone can go back and read that thread for what evidence was and was not given, so I won’t repeat the facts again here.
We all know why the US market for EVs might be less active in the near term, but I’m pretty sure the global, secular trend remains that is supported by the comprehensive data already given.
I think there will be slow growth. What is not happening, as noted by albaby, is what happened in Norway – once sales reached 10% then they would follow an s-curve rapidly up to 80%. It is worth noting that in California EV sales have plateaued at around 20% over the last two years.
I’m not sure most people thought the world would follow Norway’s path. They had significant monetary incentives (no VAT, no registration fees, discounts on toll roads and ferries, free public parking) as well as non-monetary incentives (access to bus lanes, public charging infrastructure, incentives for businesses and apartment buildings to install chargers).
Likewise in the monetary section should be “higher taxes on ICE cars, higher fuel taxes on gas and diesel” and even reduced taxation of company cars for an extended period.
Finally there’s the political dimension. Norway has no domestic automobile manufacturers, so there was no organized effort to disable the push to EV’s. In many other countries: (i.e. US, Germany, France, Canada, Mexico, etc.) there are potent lobbying organizations which would necessarily try to push back on any/all such efforts - as we have seen with the huge contributions from the oil lobby to the incumbent President.
So no, EVs will have to grow naturally in the US. It’s worth pointing out that while the sales curve has flattened (not reversed, I note), the percentage of EV cars on the road continues to climb, as older cars being retired are almost exclusively ICE, and newer cars are 20-25% EV. That growth will continue to provide incentives to install charging infrastructure, research into better batteries, more knowledgable service centers, and so on.
Personally I think it would be cool if we would lead in this category - as we did in ICE cars a century ago - but that seems destined to be a dream. So we will let a major industry flow elsewhere, even as we watch the technology and dollars flow outside our borders. Not a very good strategy, methinks, but there’s not much I can do about it.
Higher, but not by a lot. If EV sales are 7-8% of current sales, then that puts a limit on the growth and the average age of US cars being around 13 years puts a limit on the growth rate.
I think a fair number did. I recall a lot of optimism about “S-curves” - that once adoption reached a certain level of penetration (10% sticks in my head), there would be a snowball effect that quickly led to near-full penetration in a very short time period. That the virtuous cycle of more EV’s leading to more chargers/fewer gas stations leading to more convenience leading to more EV’s would just inexorably lead to a very fast pace of adoption. They genuinely thought every country would follow an S-curve - and that the global market would do so as well. Here’s an example:
I think a fair number of those folks underestimated the degree to which countries like Norway and similar fast adopters had very atypical incentive and policy frameworks that caused their adoption rates to look like that. There was a lot of optimism that the s-curve was just how EV adoption worked, and once you reached the tipping point of more than 5-10% or so, the rest would just follow.
Or taxes petrol and “neutralizes” the economic impact by rebating all such taxes to all USAian taxpayers equally, like was proposed waaaay back in the 1980’s — by neo-liberal think tanks — as the most sane way to deal with the problems of petrol energy.
