Tesla: ‘There’s almost no reason to have a gas car’

[Onkel Neal]

https://jalopnik.com/ford-lost-100-0...ear-1851472325

It’s tough breaking into the electric vehicle game these days. Startups like Rivian and Lucid have posted massive losses while launching their lineups, General Motors has been slow to ramp up production of EVs and now Ford has shared some truly eye-watering losses from its own electric arm at the start of this year.

The blue oval reportedly lost more than $100,000 for every electric car it delivered in the first quarter of 2024, according to a report from Bloomberg. The sky-high loses forced the American automaker to rethink its EV targets and even cut battery orders for future models. As the site explains:

Ford Motor Co. has begun cutting orders from battery suppliers to stem growing electric-vehicle losses, according to people familiar with the matter, as it throttles back ambitions in a rapidly decelerating market for plug-in models.

The move is part a retrenchment of Ford’s EV strategy, which includes reducing spending by $12 billion on battery-powered models, delaying new EVs, cutting prices, and postponing and shrinking planned battery plants. Ford has forecast EV losses of up to $5.5 billion this year and Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley recently said its EV unit, Model e, “is the main drag on the whole company right now.”

The EV unit’s “drag” on the rest of the company is growing. In the first three months of 2024, Bloomberg reports that losses on every EV sold by Ford doubled to $100,000. In fact, the losses on EV sales are so great at Ford that Bloomberg predicts that over the course of this year they could wipe out all profits made by the Blue division, which is the company’s gas-powered car side.

Losses like this are staggering to see, and just go to show how important it is for EV production costs to start falling, quickly. Thankfully, Ford at least appears to be workin on this, with the company announcing earlier this year that it has an electric model in the pipeline that will be both affordable and profitable. Imagine that!

Affordable and profitable usually share an inverse relationship. If they cannot make a profit from $60,00 e-cars and $80,000 e-trucks, how are they going to wring a profit out of a $28,000 budget e-car?

[Platapus]

Dropped my car off at the dealer for servicing and was able to get an EV as a loaner. Subaru Solterra. I will see how it is on my daily crappy commute.



The Solterra is one of the EV's I am thinking of getting in late 2025. It is not at the top of my list, but it seems like a nice vehicle.



There is a learning curve though so we will see if this old dog can learn some new tricks.

[August]

I just bought a 2019 Pathfinder. I'm hoping this one will last me at least until the 2030's.

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by August

I just bought a 2019 Pathfinder. I'm hoping this one will last me at least until the 2030's.

Why year 2030 why not longer ?

As I understand this new anti-combustion law it only say that production of these type of cars are forbidden after Jan 1st 2030/35. It's not forbidden to buy a new car in 2027 and drive it for an another 30 years if one would love to.

Markus

[Skybird]

The EU wise persons' board wants to release legislation that makes it illegal to operate combustion engine cars a la Cuba style. They want to prohibit even ownership already just a few years after the sales ban.



Worse and worse.


I just wonder whether that sales ban will ever come true. Reality may not submit to ideology. It will get extended, and maybe even more than just once.

[August]

Originally Posted by mapuc

Why year 2030 why not longer ?

As I understand this new anti-combustion law it only say that production of these type of cars are forbidden after Jan 1st 2030/35. It's not forbidden to buy a new car in 2027 and drive it for an another 30 years if one would love to.

Markus

I guess it will mainly depend on how well it holds up. I figure that once I retire in 2030 I will not need to have reliable long distance ground transportation and instead will probably get a old pickup truck made before the advent of vehicle computers so I can work on it myself.

[Oubaas]

I don't think electric cars are going to make it. They're expensive. And if everybody gets one, it will probably collapse our rickety old grid here in the US.

We should go back to steam. With modern technology, bringing one up to pressure would be a matter of seconds instead of minutes. And they'd be much lighter than they used to be.

I wonder why the automakers don't offer a model powered by something like the Cyclone Engine from Cyclone Technologies? It would be better than electric or hydrogen or any of that other stuff.

There's some company trying to get started selling mini-reactors to power homes and remote sites and things. I was reading about them the other day.

Why not pair a mini-reactor with the Cyclone Engine in automoobiles? Zero carbon cars.

[Skybird]

No, we need horses, but a special breed of horses with anti-burp systems and fart filters.

Ah, damn, animal wellbeing. No horses then. Bicycles. Thats the German way. China builds 240 new airports until 2032 or 2033. Germany puts its money on bicycles. Or as EVP-head Manfred Weber (CDU) of the EU said: "We must convince the world that our way is the only right one."

[Oubaas]

Convincing me to believe that anything "they" say is valid became impossible quite a few years ago. Manfred must still be wet behind the ears if he truly believes that anyone with more than four functioning brain cells still believes anything promulgated by the people who labor under the delusion that they run things. Sorry Manfred, automatically rejected as untrue. You'll have to sell that idea to the folks of whom P. T. Barnum spoke.

The name of the mini reactor is the NuScale Modular Reactor. It was just recently approved by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Meanwhile, they're assembling ITER in France, a fusion reactor that I think uses molten salt.

Now, if NuScale could shrink their reactor down to automobile size, with consumer pricing, and the automakers paired it with the Cyclone Engine, we'd have zero carbon cars that don't need gas stations! So much the better if NuScale could shrink and modularize the ITER technology and use fusion.

As for electric cars, think of poor Texas with their grid.

"What happened? Why did the power go off?"

"The people in Austin just got home from work and plugged in their cars."

[Shadowblade]

unluckily EU plans to ban classic cars,
so we can enjoy overexpensive electrocars,
stupid EU

[mapuc]

What's the correct information regarding banning combustion engine from 2030 ?

'Cause here it is said it is the Production and import of these type of cars who will be forbidden after Jan. 1st 2030. It will not be forbidden to drive these cars after this day.

Markus

[Skybird]

There is move ment behind the curtain of th eoffiocial stage. They want to ban ownership of combustion engine cars some years after the ban of selling them, because they fear - propably correctly - that else we see the phenomenon that you have inCuba. In Cuba, people do not get their hands on new cars,a nd sop they stick to the old, antioque ones, which are decades old, they polsih them as best as they cna and keep them gopong, so to slow down their rotting. And so you have cars from the 50s and 60s still rolling in Cuba. This is the nightmare scenario of the EU bosses.



If the sales ban really gets realsied - and I dohbt it can be sustained - then the ban of owenerhsip will coem much earlier afterwardfs, too. Of this I am sure. But I am not sure that the sales ban can indeed be enforced according to the current timetable. Practical reality more and more mercilessly points against it.

[mapuc]

Found this wiki page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-...European_Union

Markus

[Oubaas]

Maybe I'll keep an eye out for an old Volkswagen Beetle with the 1600cc Dual Port, do a ground up restoration on it, buy some spares, and keep it around just in case.

Which brings to mind the question, how will these bans affect availability of spares for old ICE powered vehicles? If manufacture of spare parts for them is banned, you'll need your own machine shop to keep them going.

I think when the towering geniuses who make up the rules see what it does to work force mobility, supply chains, and the electrical grid, they'll repent. Once the S & P 500 tanks, they'll see the light.

As for horses, I already have horses. I just came in from the barn. If we went to horses, I could look forward to years of hilarious entertainment as people whose ancestors last rode horses in colonial days tried to come to grips with riding a horse. The poor horses!

Modular reactors and steam engines, that's the ticket. Eventually we could make them self-driving with AI. Imagine thousands of AI-controlled vehicles on the road, each with a fission reactor onboard. What could go wrong?

[Otto Harkaman]

We need biologically altered insects with cybernetic parts to be used as vehicles