Post by alf on Oct 30, 2024 11:51:22 GMT
I'll put this in here as its car related, and while also a little political, on a grand scale not "my party's better than your party". And, more importantly to people who (if you are anything like me) spend an innordinate amount of time thinking about what you drive, why, and what you might drive next - we are having that choice taken from our hands.
Taking the emotion out of the way we feel about EV's - which feel as polarising as any big topic these days, with a semi religious following opposing an often irrational hatred - do we think Europe specifically has messed this right up, on a grand economic strategic level? I'm writing this on the back of two big industry stories in recent days:
movemnt.net/eu-slaps-definitive-tariffs-on-imported-chinese-evs/
www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/30/volkswagen-hit-by-fall-in-profits-sales-in-china-slump
Also the other stories linked to the latter, suggesting VW is planning a 10% reduction of wages and the closure of three major factories - in Germany! This is something I have worried about for a while, and sitting in a recent vehicle leasing conference I realised it could be bigger than I ever realised. Combustion engines and their drivetrains are a huge part of what makes European vehicles stand out. I'm one of many people that has bought European cars because of the engine/gearbox combination. People like BMW have majored on having characterful engines with excellent efficiency, it takes huge investment and European OEM's have generally been well ahead in this field, and on the style and quality front, producing premium vehicles that retain their value and still look good and drive well decades later.
All of this employs a huge number of people in Europe, I don't know the national breakdown specifically but suspect Germany, France and Italy are all very exposed because of the enforced move to new technology that is so different, its like starting again in a powertrain sense. OEM's are not reacting to market pressiure, this is artificial. As an example, in the UK the ZEV mandate (unchanged when the date for full electrification was put back) requires half of all new cars and vans sold in just three years time to be BEV. Or they pay a fine of £15,000 per ICE vehicle sold in failing to meet those numbers. Very, very heavy handed enforcement that has given a massive instant advantage to countries like China and Korea that already specialised in making batteries at scale.
Modern EV's aren not just a bit different - European and Japanese OEM's are generations behind the likes of Tesla and BYD in having fully integrated BEV's made very simply from fewer, much larger parts, with control over the end to end supply chain. They're even starting to control repairs - Tesla can tell if a car was repaired elsewhere and shut it down for being "not safe". The whole ecosystem not only of car creation, but repairs and servicing, as we know it, is at risk from OEMs controlling the whole thing and being able to simply refuse to allow the parts to be coded to each other and the car to run, if not sent the repair job directly.
What this is effectively doing, is risking our leadership in an industry that is extremely important to Europe as a whole for jobs, income, and technological leadership - plus arguably the global projection of soft-power. The impact on us Europeans, is massively more expensive vehicles to buy, and greater taxation across the board to replace the national-level income being lost. Our standards of living will decline as a result, and this was all a choice that we (at a national/EU level) made. While handing that money to other parties who often have very different values to us.
I haven't mentioned the environment yet. I'm not a climate change denier, indeed I get far more exercised about habitat and species loss than many people who pray solely to the gods of CO2 reduction. We do need to reduce our CO2 output, but we also need to do that in a proportionate way. We are being hugely penalised and forced to pay for cars made (largely) in a country with abysmal environmental credentials, destroying unique habitats to set up huge factories powered by coal generated electricity, to make them. In so doing, China creates 31% of global CO2 emissions and I can't see the explosion of BEV manufacturing reducing that any time soon. Is this helping, overall?
When it comes to proportionality, why does the airline industry always seem to get away without sufficient green taxation? If heating our homes creates more CO2 than the transport sector, why are we not incentivised to use less energy this way - I see so many people (of all income levels bar the lowest) heat their homes to a level where they can wear a T Shirt indoors comfortably in winter. That's BS surely?
I don't claim to have the answer (though huge subsidies to EU-only OEM's to build better EV's years ago, rather than effectively making us buy non-EU EV's through taxation now, would have been an option - once). But I suspect in time that, just like the opening of Western markets to China without addressing ecological and human rights concerns, this will be seen as a massive mistake in years to come, that set Europe's collective living standards back a long way, and gave untold billions to countries that in some cases are our moral and strategic adversaries.....
Taking the emotion out of the way we feel about EV's - which feel as polarising as any big topic these days, with a semi religious following opposing an often irrational hatred - do we think Europe specifically has messed this right up, on a grand economic strategic level? I'm writing this on the back of two big industry stories in recent days:
movemnt.net/eu-slaps-definitive-tariffs-on-imported-chinese-evs/
www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/30/volkswagen-hit-by-fall-in-profits-sales-in-china-slump
Also the other stories linked to the latter, suggesting VW is planning a 10% reduction of wages and the closure of three major factories - in Germany! This is something I have worried about for a while, and sitting in a recent vehicle leasing conference I realised it could be bigger than I ever realised. Combustion engines and their drivetrains are a huge part of what makes European vehicles stand out. I'm one of many people that has bought European cars because of the engine/gearbox combination. People like BMW have majored on having characterful engines with excellent efficiency, it takes huge investment and European OEM's have generally been well ahead in this field, and on the style and quality front, producing premium vehicles that retain their value and still look good and drive well decades later.
All of this employs a huge number of people in Europe, I don't know the national breakdown specifically but suspect Germany, France and Italy are all very exposed because of the enforced move to new technology that is so different, its like starting again in a powertrain sense. OEM's are not reacting to market pressiure, this is artificial. As an example, in the UK the ZEV mandate (unchanged when the date for full electrification was put back) requires half of all new cars and vans sold in just three years time to be BEV. Or they pay a fine of £15,000 per ICE vehicle sold in failing to meet those numbers. Very, very heavy handed enforcement that has given a massive instant advantage to countries like China and Korea that already specialised in making batteries at scale.
Modern EV's aren not just a bit different - European and Japanese OEM's are generations behind the likes of Tesla and BYD in having fully integrated BEV's made very simply from fewer, much larger parts, with control over the end to end supply chain. They're even starting to control repairs - Tesla can tell if a car was repaired elsewhere and shut it down for being "not safe". The whole ecosystem not only of car creation, but repairs and servicing, as we know it, is at risk from OEMs controlling the whole thing and being able to simply refuse to allow the parts to be coded to each other and the car to run, if not sent the repair job directly.
What this is effectively doing, is risking our leadership in an industry that is extremely important to Europe as a whole for jobs, income, and technological leadership - plus arguably the global projection of soft-power. The impact on us Europeans, is massively more expensive vehicles to buy, and greater taxation across the board to replace the national-level income being lost. Our standards of living will decline as a result, and this was all a choice that we (at a national/EU level) made. While handing that money to other parties who often have very different values to us.
I haven't mentioned the environment yet. I'm not a climate change denier, indeed I get far more exercised about habitat and species loss than many people who pray solely to the gods of CO2 reduction. We do need to reduce our CO2 output, but we also need to do that in a proportionate way. We are being hugely penalised and forced to pay for cars made (largely) in a country with abysmal environmental credentials, destroying unique habitats to set up huge factories powered by coal generated electricity, to make them. In so doing, China creates 31% of global CO2 emissions and I can't see the explosion of BEV manufacturing reducing that any time soon. Is this helping, overall?
When it comes to proportionality, why does the airline industry always seem to get away without sufficient green taxation? If heating our homes creates more CO2 than the transport sector, why are we not incentivised to use less energy this way - I see so many people (of all income levels bar the lowest) heat their homes to a level where they can wear a T Shirt indoors comfortably in winter. That's BS surely?
I don't claim to have the answer (though huge subsidies to EU-only OEM's to build better EV's years ago, rather than effectively making us buy non-EU EV's through taxation now, would have been an option - once). But I suspect in time that, just like the opening of Western markets to China without addressing ecological and human rights concerns, this will be seen as a massive mistake in years to come, that set Europe's collective living standards back a long way, and gave untold billions to countries that in some cases are our moral and strategic adversaries.....
