"We may be entering an era that is more feudal in its economic and social structure."
—Joel Kotkin, "The Coming of Neo-Feudalism"
Germany’s leading car parts supplier ZF has recently been forced to cut one-fifth to one-quarter of its workforce, owing in part to Chinese competition and in part to “weak demand for electric vehicles.” Other firms like Bosch, Continental, and Webasto have also been forced to “restructure.” Yet the CEOs of these companies continue absurdly to believe in the future of “electromobility,” since the European Union plans to outlaw fossil fuel-powered vehicles as of 2035. The short-sightedness of EU bureaucrats will lead inevitably to market implosion and an economic collapse, and the car-makers have no option, it seems, but to comply with government fiat.
Fewer and fewer people want these cars. As I’ve written in meticulous detail, they comprise a technical hazard, a convenience disaster, an energy cannibal, a financial liability, and a moral ignominy. The defects associated with the industry are effectively insurmountable for the indefinite future. Cost is prohibitive. EVs are overall polluters. There is not nearly enough available electric power to fuel them. They are not eco-friendly, despite what the propaganda industry would have us believe. The lithium-ion battery is an IED waiting to detonate, flammable, corrosive, and toxic. My neighbor, a Director of Engineering for a major tech firm, cautions: “Never park an EV in an enclosed garage. Not if you value your house.”
A test driver for a German EV manufacturer in a comment to the above-linked article reports: “The vehicle's range was too low [and] charging station connectors failed to communicate with the onboard computer.” EVs tend to stall during a downpour. Charging times can run up to an hour and a quarter for an 80% fill compared to a few minutes for an ICE vehicle.
I've spoken to people at my dealership who regret ever having been roped into the EV boondoggle. I have one friend who likes his Tesla, but I know two other people who have horror stories galore. I've researched dozens of others who swear they'll never buy an EV again. The EV-owning guests I met at a hotel in Penticton B.C. complained bitterly since the few charging stations were occupied overnight and they had to wait hours the next day for access and more time still for an 80% charge.
Detractors may dispute my facts, but aside from months of dedicated research, I have the advantage of a scientist son who runs the nanotechnology lab at a major university and whose experimental knowledge and expertise I am privy to. His analysis of the hazards associated with the lithium-ion battery is devastating. One can't get around the potentially lethal technological issues relating to these batteries and stay honest.
EV drivers, whether they know it or not, seem to have a suicidal impulse and must be talked off the ledge. The EV will never be a savvy consumer’s choice. It is only through the tyrannical fiat that the EV, suitable only for a circumscribed urban environment, can become an automotive staple. The imposition of such monstrosities on the market eliminates the democratic option of mobile freedom.
The obvious question has to do with the reason governments have invested so heavily and at such expense in forcing so radical and risky a policy as the complete transformation of the auto sector and the introduction of EVs known to be unreliable, dangerous, and inefficient. After all, the automotive industry is a key element in national prosperity. According to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the standard vehicle manufacturing automotive ecosystem “drives $1 trillion into the U.S. economy each year—nearly 5 percent of GDP— and creates 9.6 million jobs coast to coast and $105 billion in exports. Every direct job in vehicle manufacturing supports 10.5 additional American jobs. More than $220 billion in federal and state revenue is generated annually by the manufacturing, sale, and maintenance of automobiles in the U.S.”
Why tinker with the golden goose, the cash cow, or any other theriomorphic image one might wish to use? Why sell one’s birthright for a mess of pottage, which is what the EV industry actually is? Todd Lewis, a commenter on my previous article on PJ Media, put it succinctly. “It is a way for governments to advance totalitarian control of the populace, wreck the economy, and disempower the middle class.” His thesis is backed up in Joel Kotkin’s masterpiece "The Coming of Neo-Feudalism." Kotkin chronicles how the once-numerous and thriving middle class is relentlessly being phased out of existence by a power elite intent on re-medievalizing society while advancing their own social, political, and economic supremacy. Like the serf who lacked freedom of movement and was bound to the lord’s estate, the enfiefed EV owner for various reasons is tethered to a sort of manorial orbit.
The fact is that EV obsession has nothing to do with “saving the earth,” replacing fossil energy with presumably “clean” alternatives, or reducing across-the-board costs involving transportation and maintenance — all of which reasons are contra-indicated by the facts. They are delusions, mere fetishes, or outright lies that a modicum of sober research would render null and void. The real issue has to do with the ongoing battle between a market economy and a command economy, between a business-oriented system and a centripetal Marxist political organization, and between an individualistic political economy and oligarchic socialism.
The EV project is a major strategy in a political program that envisages replacing not simply fossil fuel propulsion with electrical power, which is neither feasible nor even conceivable, but swapping a free market economy, in which the law of supply and demand determines output and prices, for a centralized government authority that dictates production, prices, and distribution. Top-down control supersedes private enterprise.
In a command economy, the managerial class and state officials control the means of production, set prices, determine production goals, and limit or prohibit competition — as opposed to private individuals and joint-stock companies freely transacting business for personal profit or in the interest of stockholders, their decisions based on consumer demand.
You buy the car you want to drive, not the car the central planners have forced you to drive. You live the life you want to live within the structure of an ordered society governed by the ballot — that is, the unperverted ballot — not the life pre-determined for you by the administrative state. For, as Aristotle writes in Book I of Politics, “that man who would be a citizen in a republic would very often not be one in an oligarchy.”
Tax theft continues as governments issue vast subsidies to corporations and handouts to individuals to glut the market with unsustainable electric vehicles, whose real purpose is to consolidate power in the hands of the managerial class at the expense of the coerced and impoverished taxpayer whose mobility rights have been abridged. Citizens have no alternative but to mount strong communal resistance and should certainly refuse to purchase an EV despite the disingenuousness of government propaganda and the abnormality of government incentives.
EVs see to it that your power source is limited, your time and expense prohibitively exploited, your safety insecure, and your automotive range severely curtailed. It should be obvious that if your freedom is restricted in one dimension, you can be sure it will be limited in others.