Tag Archives: economics

You’ve Formed Your Opinion on EVs. Now Let Me Change It.

Posted on by
Reply

That’s the headline on Dan Neil’s Wall Street Journal paeon to the battery-powered car. In his piece, he acknowledges the past and current shortcomings of Electric Vehicles, but he lays those off to car company marketing rather than to actual performance.

My mind isn’t as made up as Neil’s headline implies; nevertheless, challenge accepted.

I drove a Ford Fusion Hybrid for a number of years, and it was a fine car. However, the battery price premium was enormous, and the reduction in trunk capacity to make room for the battery was just as enormous.

I replaced it with an ICE Fusion, and that car was just as peppy and responsive as the Hybrid (peppiness and responsiveness was one of Neil’s touts regarding battery-powered cars), and I had decent trunk capacity.

I’d get a Hybrid again, were the battery premium actually to come down decently.

I won’t buy a purely battery-powered car until a number of criteria are met:

  • the battery has to be chargeable to a 400-mile range in the same minimal time that I can fill my ICE gasoline tank to a 400-mile range
  • the battery premium must come down. The 14% reduction Neil claims is from a hugely high price
  • the battery’s lifetime must be at least as many years as I drive my cars, and as many miles
  • the battery must stop suffering so significantly from cold temperatures. The battery in my ICE that powers my car’s starter motor also suffers, but it only needs to crank the engine. If needs be, I can get a jump start. The EV’s battery is its motive source, and that motor can’t be jump-started; its power source must be “refueled”
  • the battery must be disposable/recyclable with far less environmental damage done or risk of damage done than is the case today

EV prices are coming down, as Neil claims? Show that after EV subsidies are stopped, and EV buyers pay actual market prices. No one should have to pay tax money because someone else bought an EV.

Probably Won’t Be Invited Back

Posted on by
Reply

Newly elected Argentina President Javier Milei was invited to the World Economic Forum. He had some things to say while he was there.

Today I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have defended the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inevitably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty[.]

And

Unfortunately, in recent decades, motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others, and others motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism. We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world, rather they are the root cause.
Do believe me, no one [is] in a better place than us Argentines to testify to these two points[.]

And this:

The case of Argentina is an empirical demonstration that—no matter how rich you may be, or how much you may have in terms of natural resources…or how many bars of gold you may have in the central bank—if measures are adopted that hinder the free function of markets, free competition, free price systems, if you hinder trade, if you attack private property, the only possible fate is poverty.

And this, moving in a slightly different direction:

I would like to leave a message for all businesspeople here…you are social benefactors, you’re heroes[.]
Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral. If you make money, it’s because you offer a better product at a better price.

The WEF persons probably won’t have him in to any more of their assemblages.

Frank Fleming added this regarding our own administrations’ [sic] failures at successive WEF confabs:

Why can’t we get a guy like this in America? This is supposed to be our thing[.]

Unfortunately, those motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste vastly outnumber those well-meaning individuals willing to help others, and so the damage that flows from gatherings like the WEF will continue.

A complete transcript of Milei’s speech can be read here. A video of his speech can be viewed here on Disclose.tv’s X account (@disclosetv).

Western Battery-Car Adoption Anxiety

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal ran an article centered on how “western anxiety about Chinese EVs could prove self-defeating,” with a subheadline that summarized the thesis:

The US and Europe risk slowing electric-vehicle adoption by excluding Chinese suppliers from subsidies and raising tariffs

I have a hard time seeing the downside to slowing battery car adoption. Leave aside the tremendous drain that charging all those battery cars (assuming widespread adoption) would have on our already near or at capacity electric power grid and generating capacity for that grid.

Battery cars are tremendously polluting and damaging to our environment, from dirt in the ground to end-of-life battery disposal. Mining the metals—lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, and on and on, metals that are used in far greater quantity in battery cars than in gasoline- diesel- or natural gas-powered vehicles—is extremely damaging, both from the toxicity of the metals themselves and from the toxicity of the tailings from the mining operations.

Processing those metals into battery-car-usable components is intensely energy demanding (have I mentioned the strains on anyone’s electricity grid?).

Disposing of those so-far unrecyclable dead batteries at their end of life is enormously polluting as they leach out of even the most well-kept landfills.

The risk is that the West cuts off its nose to spite its face. Slow down the shift to EVs too much to build local supply chains and give domestic manufacturers time to adapt, and Chinese technology might simply pull farther ahead….

Meh.

The technologies involved are useful, they should be pursued apace, and the supply chain problems need to be worked for a host of different reasons. However, it’s a Good Thing that battery cars are not being rapidly incorporated into our transportation systems.

Punishing Success

Posted on by
Reply

Los Angeles has decided that the successful are too successful, and they must be knocked down. To that end, the city’s government has decided to tax the sales proceeds of the wealthy’s homes at 4% on homes sold for $5-$10 million and at 5.5% on homes sold for more than $10 million. This is on top of the real estate brokers’ ordinary 6% fee, and it’s paid by the buyer. Not that that will have any impact on the seller’s ability to sell at a fair price, or anything.

LA isn’t alone in this “mansion tax” move, either. Other jurisdictions, mostly at the State level (it won’t be long before California broadens LA’s move), are doing this, also. They’re all Progressive-Democrat-run, too, all but one of them exclusively so.

  • Connecticut: 2.25% on properties surpassing $2.5 million. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House
  • District of Columbia: 1.45% on properties sold for $400,000 or more. Progressive-Democrat Governor, City Council
  • Hawaii: Marginal rates ranging from 10% to 20% for estates valued over $5.49 million. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House
  • New Jersey: 1% on real estate transactions exceeding $1 million. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House
  • New York: 1% to 3.9% on residential acquisitions of $1 million or more. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House
  • Vermont: 16% on properties valued over $5 million. Republican Governor, Progressive-Democrat Senate, House
  • Washington: Graduated rates starting at 1.28% for properties sold at a minimum of $500,000. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House

And, to repeat,

  • Los Angeles: 4% on homes sold for more than $5-$10 million and 5.5% on homes sold for more than $10 million. Progressive-Democrat Mayor, City Council

This is behavior of the green-eyed jealous politicians of the Progressive-Democratic Party: seizing the produce of success and redistributing it for their own political gain. It’s also just one more incentive for the successful to leave these jurisdictions altogether.

Nanny State in Automobiles

Posted on by
Reply

Tesla is recalling a double potful of its cars over autopilot performance.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of dashcam footage and data from a crash in Texas in 2021 shows Tesla’s Autopilot system failed to recognize stopped emergency vehicles.

That sort of thing wants correction, certainly.

However, the larger problem is this:

Tesla will recall more than two million vehicles over concerns its Autopilot system can be misused by drivers[.]
…
Tesla’s Autopilot system may not have sufficient controls in place to prevent driver misuse, [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] said.

Failures of the autopilot system need to be corrected, and that’s on Tesla. Driver misuse, though, is on the driver, not the manufacturer. Trying to shift that responsibility away from the user/driver is rank nanny state-ism.