Anyone with a functioning brain cell could see this coming.
Britain’s car industry is in crisis due to a lack of demand for electric cars, the boss of Ford’s UK arm has warned.
Lisa Brankin, the chairman and managing director of Ford UK, called for the Government to urgently introduce ‘incentives’ such as tax breaks to convince drivers to switch away from petrol and diesel.
She said Ford has invested ‘significantly’ in the production and development of EVs, with ‘well over’ £350million invested around electrification in the UK, adding: ‘So we kind of need to make it work.’
If you wish to sup with the Devil, you need a long spoon. No amount of incentives will persuade me – and many like me – to buy one of these godawful white elephants. I’m sticking to my current car. I can wait out the chaos. Ford – along with the rest of the industry – should have told the government to do one with their stupid, insane targets. As one voice, they would have had some clout. Instead they chose the milquetoast option and jumped onto the EV bandwagon only to find that those in the driving seat – the consumer – said ‘no.’
Oh dear, how sad, never mind.
But she added: ‘As an industry we have repeatedly said that we support the Government’s trajectory and we support the ambition that the Government has set out, it’s just that there isn’t customer demand.’
Your product is so bad, you have to force people to buy them? No thanks. That lack of demand is telling you something. With your attitude you deserve to fail and good riddance to you.
Today, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds signalled an overhaul of the government’s EV targets after Vauxhall announced plans to close its factory in Luton.
There is is. The first crack.
There’s going to be a premium price for good quality secondhand petrol cars once the ban on production of new ones is fully enforced. Expect them to be good investments.
My Megane Sport was desirable at purchase. It’s no longer mad as Renault leapt feet first into the EV market. I’m keeping it, so expect a point where it will rise in value.
“Lisa Brankin, the chairman and managing director of Ford UK, called for the Government to urgently introduce ‘incentives’ such as tax breaks to convince drivers to switch away from petrol and diesel.”
Has she not noticed that EVs are being heavily subsidised by the government already? The thing that she is calling for is already happening and it isn’t working.
She’s not very bright.
The biggest incentive, not currently on offer, would a massive rollout of chargers. Of course that would need substantial infrastructure expenditure and the exploitation of fossil fuels to produce the electricity.
The government is in a bit of a cleft stick, of its own making.
As has been previously mentioned, without the government starting work on infrastructure, sales of EV’s will NEVER reach the level they want. There still more houses that don’t have drives and garages than do have them, and, despite what one prick in Oldham thought, you can’t simply run a cable from your house, across a pavement and to your car. And let’s face it, with a government that currently seems obsessed with giving our money away to foreigners, I very doubt they have any plans to roll out charging points around the country. Odd really, since they’d could be a decent money spinner. But in any case, I’ll be sticking with my ICE car for as long as possible.
It’s not just about charging, it’s about the physics of EVs. After the huge capital cost, any private owners would soon become aware of the additional secondary costs of brakes, tyres and suspension on all those over-weighty machines. Then there’s the issue of cold weather’s effect on charging time, performance and range, all of which suffer abysmally.
Add to that the Damoclean Sword of impending battery replacement rendering any EV more than 5 years old as unsellable and the whole edifice tumbles down.
Until EV’s ditch the batteries and work like Scalextric, picking up power from the road-surface, the basic physics will remain completely wrong, just like the cost-benefit equation.
My modest fleet of ICE vehicles will remain unpolluted by any EV milk-float frauds.
I find it difficult to say whether her stupidity or her arrogance is the greater. She seems to have lost sight of the obvious fact that the job of any manufacturer is to make and sell what their customers want. The Government is not Ford’s customer and if the company bows to the Government’s wish that it should attempt to sell their customers a product they don’t want, then the company deserves to fail.
https://youtu.be/Jk6slmJuhhg?si=nJexSrc5l0_9Do9C
Since much of the charging infrastructure that does exist is powered by diesel generators, the dubious claim that EVs are saving the planet takes a bit of a hit. In any case, most of the electricity to power them comes from fossil fuels anyway and the environmental impact of the batteries just isn’t to be mentioned.
O/T
Parliament is set to debate the general election petition.
At least they’re pretending to care what we think.
The parliamentary debate is purely performative and unserious.
No Returns, No Refunds.
At least the Tories have the 1922 Committee to backstab a useless leader. Getting rid of a useless Labour leader is nye on impossible as the Labour MP’s found out when trying to unseat the useless Gordon Brown as PM.
It’s real use is for the opposition parties as they have a guide on which constituencies to target.
But the government doesn’t have any functioning brain cells.
They just expect us all to fall into line and do as we’re told.
EVs are shit.
For some people, they make sense.
When people choose a car or vehicle, they look at their situation and requirements and decide to get something that fulfills their requirements all the time.
Inevitably that leads to trade offs. Want something quick and sporty? So you want to Buy a Ferrari. But unfortunately you also have to take the kids to school and on trips. So instead you decide to buy a Skoda Octavia vRS. But then you realise you need seven seats so you end up getting a big discovery.
It doesn’t fulfill all your wants all the time – it’s not as quick as a Ferrari, you don’t always need seven seats and it isn’t as good for willy waving. But it works all the time for all your needs, just sometimes other things would be better at what you’re doing.
I drive a pickup. A car would suit my needs 90% of the time. It’s the 10% when I need to lug lots around or go green laning that it shines. i could get an electric car, it would work on my daily commute, but I don’t see a Dacia Spring or iD3 surviving Strata Florida, which my truck shrugs off with ease. There’s a reason you never see a Model Y on the lanes.
The problem with electric cars is that they barely fill any of the needs. Low range, long charge times, expensive, no pickups available, van ranges are hilariously short.
For some people who just use it to commute and with off street parking, they make sense and they should be free to buy their EV of choice.
For the rest of us, we will stick to our vehicles that work.
“As one voice, they would have had some clout”
See also, smoking ban, carrier bag charge, plastic straws, etc. We are a nation that bends over when the government speaks
It’s because they have all the guns and have shown that they are willing to use them.
This is why they removed our rights because they knew they were traitors and wanted to reduce the risk.
And we’re now trending towards clients of the generous (benefit) state with people thinking the gravy train can last forever if only the rich “paid their fair share”.
I seem to remember Ford attacking the last Tory government when they relaxed the 2030 deadline for ending ICE vehicle production to 2035.
These are the rules they wanted. These are the rules they should get. And no subsidies.
Presumably that is because they have already invested crippling amounts of cash on developing EVs which they will only be able to sell if the government actually bans ICE cars. If they are reliant on such forms of coercion for their sales they deserve to go out of business.
The Edsel didn’t bankrupt Ford, perhaps the Evsel will.
Totally correct.
I probably have my last car. At the end of next year I have to renew my driving licence, and perhaps that will be that. Currently I estimate my car (petrol driven) costs me far more than it’s worth. The insurance annually goes through the roof, I pay numerous taxes for the ‘pleasure’ of driving on roads the government can’t mend and I am repeatedly told not changing to a golf cart makes me a bad person because I clearly don’t care about saving the planet by consuming rare earth metals and draining an overworked electricity grid.
I am grateful there was a time in my life—probably forty years ago before the lunatics took over the asylum—that owning a car was liberating and pleasurable. But nothing can last, apart from the infinite stupidity and greed of our elected rulers.
I buy Ford Fiesta’s with petrol engines. I have owned about 5. They are perfect for me and fit in my garage. Fords stopped making them and also the Focus. They clearly don’t want my business. My local Ford dealer is in despair. Apart from the Puma mostly everything he has to sell from Ford is an electric tank nobody wants. Probably Toyota for me next.
Ford stopped selling the Ford Fiesta because after the Government’s penalty payment for selling a car with an ICE engine, they’d have made a loss on every sale.
Seems to work for GM in the US, but doesn’t work for Ford in the UK.
No idea why /sarc
On our staff Yammer today, a tale of woe about using one of the new EV fleet made rather amusing reading!