This is extremely generalized falsely concluding from “American” to be the same as “Western”, when the reality the difference is HUGE between Europe and USA.
In USA Ford and GM have discontinued some of their more popular EV models. This is NOT happening in EU.
On the contrary EU manufacturers continue to expand their EV product lines.
The headline is a very big false equivalence.
Obviously Chinese brands have more success in EU, with about 13% tariffs than in USA with 150% tariffs.
Still European makers continue to compete on EV.You can’t lump USA and Europe together on EV, they are very different markets, and Trump is specifically undermining EV production now!
You also can’t lump in South Korea, that have been very active making good electric cars, Japan is behind, and especially Honda seems to be pulling back on EV, but Toyota is finally beginning to show some decent offerings, and Nissan has been in the EV market for years now.
The article seems to think USA is “the west”, when it is nothing like it.
It’s the short term profits that they’re chasing. It’s unbelievable
short them profits over being able to make profit at all in the future. capitalism doesnt work even on standards of capitalism
While I think we agree on it being shitty as hell, I don’t think your statement is true. Capitalism is working just fine and as defined in theory.
Old companies that don’t innovate are being replaced by newer, more innovative companies. It’s working exactly as advertised. The part you and me don’t like is that millions of people are going to be thrown into poverty by those lunatics at the helm of the companies for their own short term gain instead of the well-being of everyone. But that is not contradicting capitalism itself.
but isnt idea of capitalism to make money for the people with capital? Any benefit like innovation is just coincidental, not the reason. If the ones with capital could prosper more through eternal stagnation, they definitely would. They couldn’t care less about other people than themselves.
So by driving these people into this, it demonstrates its own faultiness. Capitalism is as dysfunctional as communism, though for different reasons and it seems to have longer “shelflife”.
No, capitalism is that the idea that brings the most money will succeed. And not investing in the future of your product for sure doesn’t bring the most money after a certain time. The problem is that the current Epstein class values money now higher than money in ten years.
Capitalism isn’t about caring about others and (at least in theory) not about giving those with most money even more money. That is just the reality and logic if you think about it more than 5 minutes. But again: in theory the self correcting hand of the market is exactly how it should work.
but if you are smart and sustainable and think for long term, you get way more money than with short term profits?
Yes, but they aren’t smart and especially don’t think long-term.
And while in ‘true’ unregulated capitalsm, this would be heavily discouraged and punished, in our system they will just call for the governments to protect them and bail them out, as they are ‘too important to fail’.
You need the profits now to invest them …
Yes and when it ultimately fails the governments will bail them out, smart.
At a time when less people than ever can afford new cars and they’ll have nothing to fill them with
dooming American car drivers to irrelevance at the same time
Trump will bomb the iran as long it take to make electrical cars great again.
Who cares about their irrelevance in 5 or ten years if you get giant boni for the bottom line in 6 months and are already somewhere else destroying another company 2 years down the line?
Here’s a hot take you won’t find elsewhere: battery-based EVs are not a good solution to our problems - they require extraction of rare earth minerals often in areas with slavery and conflict mining, and strain on the energy grid. A far better solution is green hydrogen fuel cell based EVs and more investment in public transport, but it’s too hard to generate profits from either of those under capitalism, because the infrastructure costs required would be too great to be privately funded and public services are basically non-existent these days.
Hydrogen waste way more energy than batteries.
Also the infrastructure for EV is built on the electric grid, and is way easier to expand, than building a universally accessible hydrogen infrastructure.
Finally you can charge your EV at home, no such chance with hydrogen.Hydrogen may have a place in the future, but I don’t think it’s in personal cars.
Maybe in planes, trucks, and ships. That all have more specialized infrastructure. But probably not until we have very cheap renewable and surplus energy, so the wasteful method isn’t as much an issue.
But storage remains an issue, because you can’t contain hydrogen, which has a nucleus of only 1 proton, making it able to permeate every material in existence.I honestly don’t think you’re going to move the aviation industry from hydrocarbons.
Unless there is some MASSIVE breakthrough in battery technology in terms of power density, you’re not going to see battery electric aircraft. There are a few hilariously pathetic ones in development or small volume sale, I saw James May fly one, it had an endurance of less than an hour. Maybe you’ll get a BEA to match the performance of a Skyhawk and those will be suitable for personal aircraft or primary trainers. Maybe.
In the transport category? Not a chance. Aircraft much larger than a Beech C90 and maybe even then, the max takeoff weight is greater than the max landing weight. For shorter hops, they load less fuel, for longer hops they assume the plane will burn enough fuel to be below max landing weight on arrival. Batteries don’t get lighter as they are discharged.
Another thing: liquid fuel is extremely convenient for airplanes, because the fuel tanks are just…the inside volume of the wings. They seal the internal volume of the structure and there you go, fuel tank. Who cares exactly what shape it is, liquid conforms to the shape of its container. Gaseous fuels require pressure tanks, which are going to add significant empty weight, and offer less internal volume. And we’re just not going to deal with cryogenic fuels in civilian aviation; they only put up with that shit in rocketry because they outright have to.
So…airliners are going to run on kerosene.
A far better solution is green hydrogen fuel cell based EVs
No. Hydrogen cells and hydrogen economy have been investigated since decades. I remember reading about it in a yearbook from Germany’s Jülich nuclear research center when I was visiting my uncle. He was doing his training as chemical engineer there and still living with my grandmother. This must have been in 1978 or so. He also had an interesting mechanical computation machine. He is long retired now.
I also did a talk abput fuel cells in my physics study, around 1993. My university was researching them. They were still far too expensive - a fuel cell for a car would have cost millions. Also requiring really expensive catalytic materials like platinum.
But the death knell for them is physics. They simply can’t be as effective as batteries, and also the process to generate hydrogen by electrolysis is energetically very expensive.
It is possible that fuel cells in some far future might become relevant for things like planes. But they won’t be powered by hydrogen because hydrogen can’t be stored efficiently - you can compress hydrocarbons like butan but hydrogen would require very heavy high-pressure tanks, and compressing gas to high pressure is energy-intensive again. And so on, and so on.
At that point, using hydrogon where batteries work well ist just another distraction from the step to just use tech great technology we have, to get away from fossil fuels. As fast as possible, before their use kills us.
You are very outdated on your understanding on fuel cell cars. We already have fuel cell vehicles with > 600km of range. Cost will soon be cheaper than fossil fuels.
fuels cells don’t and can never be made to work unless they invalidate the laws of nature somehow
electrified public transport and cycling / escooter and walking are the only solutions
ecars provide us paranoid few with a degree of energy resilience while civilisation continue to collapse but are in no way environmentally sustainable or green, the IPCC has fir devades said we need to move away from all cars.
as an aside lots of chinese cars (I have one, i cycle as much as I can but here in Australia we’re car brained fools and it’s hard to live in rural areas sans cars, it was easy when we lived in the city) The chinese ecars often use LFP batteries and don’t need the cobalt used in NMC batteries. Still a shit load of other stuff like 100- 120kg of Cu for the wiring harness and toones of fossil fuels needed for the plastics etc etc
The silicon carbon battery in my Motorola phone is good, they may be useful, solid state has issues over vibration that engineering may overcome.
None of that matters as were to far along to change course let alone reveres, inevitably well cross too many topping points in the next decade or two and the collapse of civilization will be set in stone.
…there are literally fuel cell electric vehicles already in production…?
to tell you the truth, I think public transport is the real long term solution, I put fuel cells in there too because some individuals will need a car, e.g. disabled people, and I think it’s a big improvement to ICE and battery-based EVs both in terms of environmental/social impact and safety
public transport is the real long term solution
Plus bicycles. They can replace and connect public transport in a great way for mid-range distances. Myself, I never had a car. I am mid-fifty now and cycle to work 14 kilometers, or 8.7 miles. And the only thing you need for a bicycle revolution in a city to happen are adequate safe ways - Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, even Bogotá with its Sunday ciclovía are great examples.
