New Hampshire has at least ten proposed bills related to Electric Vehicles for the upcoming 2024 Session. We’ve also got legislation to prohibit parking gas vehicles in EV charging spaces or parking EVs in a parking garage, infrastructure, rebates, and state fleet use (or prohibition).
There are bills for EV scooters and bike rules, smart meters, grid resiliency, recovering lost gas tax revenue, and my favorite: phasing out the renewable portfolio standard. That last one is not an EV bill but is related to “renewable” electricity mandates I’ve wanted gone for ages.
Whatever your Net-Zero poison, the legislature likely has a bill for you to be for or against. Time permitting, we’ll take a closer look at some of these, but before the session starts and fence-sitters pick a side, does this inform the debate?
Nearly 1000 (soon to be former) US Buick Dealerships have taken a buyout from GM in exchange for dropping the brand. They had to choose between spending 300K for site upgrades to sell and repairing Buick EVs or giving up their right to sell them, and nearly half of US Dealers said, take it back; we don’t want the hassle. That’s a stunning gut punch as auto-makers decide how to meet Biden-Era EV mandates (or not).
The move comes as U.S. car dealers are so concerned with EV sales that they are urging Biden to abandon his EV mandates and carbon emission regulations that would effectively force all-electric cars on consumers.
“The reality, however, is that electric vehicle demand today is not keeping up with the large influx of [EVs] arriving at our dealerships prompted by the current regulations. [EVs] are stacking up on our lots,” the car dealers write:
With each passing day, it becomes more apparent that this attempted electric vehicle mandate is unrealistic based on current and forecasted customer demand. Already, electric vehicles are stacking up on our lots which is our best indicator of customer demand in the marketplace. [Emphasis added]
Another nail in the coffin?
We’ve noted the decline in EV car commercials for the holiday season, an alarming shift given how frequent they were in the months prior. We still saw plenty of car commercials, but they were for conventional vehicles. Car makers needed or wanted to sell cars people want and need.
Christmas 2023 has passed us by, but not the buying season, so we’ll keep seeing those car commercials, but will the EV ads make their way back, or have dealers sent a message that they can’t take anymore? If you ask the media, they’ll tell you how excited they are about the US breaking a million EVs sold in 2023. This represented 9% of all cars purchased. But how many of those are virtue signal mobiles?
The used EV Car Market is Collapsing.
Used EV car sales are further down the toilet than new EV sales. In China, where they made people buy them, the landscape has acquired a new feature. EV graveyards. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Electric Vehicles are piling up in fields across China. Metal, rubber, glass, technology, and lithium firetraps rusting away over no longer unusable land. And it makes sense. The only thing less desirable than a new EV is a used one. Those aged-out fleets of EV rentals to leases to government EV fleet vehicles will all need to go somewhere.
We can expect some enterprising individuals, propped up by taxpayers, will claim they can recycle these for a “small” handling fee, but more than likely – just like solar panels (or unrecyclable wind turbine blades – they will get buried somewhere so no one has to think about how bad an idea this was (or that you can’t crush a lithium power pack).
Cold Shoulder
From New York City to Oslo, to Duluth, Minneapolis, and St Paul, EVs continue to be an expensive failure. One could almost make the case that there was a conspiracy to mislead in the interest of hoovering up available tax dollars for Garbage Trucks and public buses that won’t run, get half the range, can’t climb hills, or are always broken down. Vehicles hampered by these green exercises in futility don’t run on time or at all, leaving cities with expensive paperweights they should not park indoors for fear of fire taking out the whole fleet.
Closer to home, Maine was expected to vote on a statewide EV mandate this past week, but it was canceled due to widespread power outages.
Green, they said.
New Hampshire doesn’t have any bills to address that, but neither has it addressed the more pressing matter of Solar Panel waste. Perhaps the unwanted EVs and scrapped solar can poison the earth together for eternity. Side by side. A new generation of superfund sites with lines of rusting cars framed behind a close-up photo of a sign that says, do not play on or around (written in whatever language is spoken by the local Africans who live nearby)
What, you don’t think they’ll offshore this mess, too?
