“Car manufacturers wanted to make big profits with electric vehicles right away and did not accept that the transition phase would generate fewer dividends and profits,” Hillal Sor, a trade unionist at Metallos FGTB, told Euronews. “So they bet everything on large, very luxurious, very expensive models that European citizens cannot afford.”
Sales figures back this up: The first eight months of this year, some 902,000 electric cars were purchased in the European Union, representing only 12.6% of the total number sold. To support the EV transition, unions say that are pushing for more public funds. The European Parliament agreed last month to consider tariffs on Chinese EVs and other protectionist measures are on the table.
Meanwhile, VW’s massive production overcapacity at its German sites is forcing the company to consider, for the first time ever, closing a factory on its own home turf.
Top comment in the article, from “XXX XXX”:
The factory is not state-of-the-art. It was founded 55 years ago, when labour and ground in Brussels were cheap. The inexpensive variants of the Rabbit (Golf) were assembled there from delivered parts, there is no pressing plant. But times have changed. Belgium is now rich and especially Brussels as the headquarters of the EU. In Brussels, labor is scarce and land is very expensive. There is no such large contiguous area in the middle of Brussels again. It is obvious to close this factory and sell the property expensively.
Other commenters in the article explain that the inability to press parts like body panels mean this location is an assembly line only, and seem to imply this is not how most modern auto factories operate.
It seems like there are more factors at play here than just the vehicles being too expensive to have a broad market. The headline in a lot of places seems like it’s just going to be that EVs are too expensive and will kill the auto industry.
I find it annoying how many car manufacturers seemed to look at Tesla’s early success with the Model S and seemed to only find the lesson as, “oh, we can sell $80k+ cars to people when they’re electric?”, like they could just charge people more by selling electric cars instead of considering how large the market is for expensive cars. I might pay a little more for an electric car than a gasoline car, but it looks like my savings by charging at home would only be ~$1,000/year, so figuring I’d keep a purchased car 6-8 years I’d probably only increase my budget by $5k just to be conservative on the savings, or less if I have a shorter loan.
EDIT: clarified that fuel savings are per year, since I forgot to include the time frame.
$1,000 in fuel costs? Over the lifetime of the vehicle? Per month? Per year?
About $1,000/year, based on a rough comparison of cost-per-mile when my wife’s Kia Soul had a warranty engine replacement and Kia paid for a rental which wound up being a Chevy Bolt EUV for 6 weeks, which I figured was fairly equal in size. The Bolt got about 4.5 mi/kWh city and 3 mi/kWh highway. Our electricity at home was 9.94¢/kWh at the time so the cost per mile wound up being $0.02/mi city and $0.03/mi highway. We don’t keep close numbers on the Soul but it’s rated for 25 mpg city and 30 mpg highway. When the car was in the shop unleaded gas was about $3.39/gal so the cost per mile was $0.14/mi city and $0.11/mi highway.
Of course, the numbers fluctuate as gas prices and electric rates change, and if you drive more the fuel savings become more pronounced, with the flip side being increased wear and tear on the car reducing its value faster. If I bought an electric car I would probably switch our electricity to peak/off-peak rates and try to charge exclusively in off-peak times because the savings would be even higher.
This has all the hallmarks of bean counters making decisions over engineers and market analysts.
