EV Utopia: The Greens have a 'plan' for Electric Vehicles
It must be election time. A politician has a $6b dollar brainwave, tells the mainstream media about it, then calls it a policy. Problem is, it's preposterously unrealistic…
Yet another Australian politician wants to pretend they understand the car industry, and yet again, it’s about EVs.
The media, of course, wouldn’t understand the first thing about electric vehicles, technical subjects or the car industry, generally, so naturally they report on the brainwave verbatim and unchallenged.
Let’s suck it up, say the Greens, because electric cars are mankind’s salvation. Here’s what happened.
Yet another Australian politician wants to pretend they understand the car industry, and yet again, it’s about those so-called ‘zero-emission’ EVs.
Chief among which, recently, was this:
Adam Bandt being quite positive there, colouring the world green like a three-year-old. It just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? The whole country, driving Aussie-made EVs. And he’s saying it with a straight face.
I’m going to be extremely generous here, and assume that ‘a few years’ is 10 years. For “the whole country” to be driving those South-Australian-made electric cars. He really, passionately believes in what he’s saying. Unfortunately, it’s a fantasy.
Just looking at the supply side of this ‘novel’ proposal, there are currently 12 million passenger vehicles on Australian roads today. So, we’d need 1.2 million of these awesome, but as yet non-existent, Australian EVs every year for a decade. And we’d need to recycle the same number of combustion cars in sync.
And of course, we’d need a reason to stop buying cars from any of the established carmakers. And how would we do this? Perhaps we could just give them away. The new Australian EVs might be free, or nearly free, certainly affordable to everyone. Or I suppose we could just make selling foreign cars here illegal. It’s ‘Aussie EV’ or nothing.
Neither option seems all that feasible, frankly.
Still, 1.2 million cars is not unlike the number of cars currently being sold here, annually. Which is roughly 3300 cars a day, every day, 365 days a year - for a decade. Let’s call it 140 cars an hour, that’s if the plant runs three eight-hour shifts and there’s no down time, ever.
A factory, smoothly churning out over two cars a minute, in Australia. That’s obscenely preposterous, Mr Bandt. And here’s why.
Having been to the same factory that made 1.35 million cars in 2020, in Ulsan in South Korea, I produced a documentary there in 2010 - 12 years ago. That joint is manufacturing on a scale we have never seen in Australia. $6 billion wouldn’t be enough for the concrete and the Christmas parties.
Ulsan is important because it is the world’s largest integrated car manufacturing facility. Parts go in one end, and at the other end, endless teams of South Korean workers drive freshly minted cars straight onto massive cargo ships.
So, in order to achieve Mr Bandt’s bold claim, we just have to build the world’s second-largest (by a narrow margin) fully integrated car factory, producing only EVs purely for onshore consumption. And we need to suspend the sale of all other cars.
So I call on Mr Bandt to show us all how this seemingly divorced-from-reality claim actually works:
As for “the whole country”, what about the variety of driving, especially the things EVs either cannot do, or which they do badly? Such as off-roading, heavy towing and long-distance driving?
This EV-promoting bullshit sounds great at a press conference, but even two minutes of aimless doodling on a napkin, and 30 seconds with a calculator can show you how inherently unworkable this kind of suggestion really is.
At this point, if you’re considering buying an EV, I recommend the Hyundai Kona EV, the Ioniq 5, or actually have a serious look at a plug-in hybrid like Eclipse Cross or maybe step up to a BMW 330e.
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THE INCONVENIENT FACTS
While I don’t disagree with Mr Bandt - that we do need to solve the self-inflicted climate crisis bearing down on our species - the solutions lie in respecting the facts and science.
Without these two critical factors, we cannot survive this future catastrophe we’ve built for ourselves:
Really? Electric cars run on electricity, so we really need to tackle supply. A network of fast chargers will require upgrading the grid, especially the local grid, because currently the poles and wires outside your house do not support millions of people coming home in the evening and plugging in. The grid’s not up to that.
And we need to consider the source of that electricity. The claim of cutting pollution does not coexist with a predominately coal-fired grid. It just does not. Remember, ‘zero-emission vehicles’ are a myth >>
Nor does it coexist with scrapping a bunch of serviceable combustion cars, considering their remaining life and the inherent pollution and CO2/energy wrapped up in their manufacture. Recycling, which is a joke in Australia, is not an energy/pollution free kick, thanks very much, second law of thermodynamics. Recycling is still quite energy intensive, just to be clear.
So, on Planet Greens, where Adam Bandt is PM, all we need, in order to all drive a fleet of non-existent Aussie-made EVs, is arrange the design/s, magic-up the second largest integrated automotive manufacturing super-hub in the world, run it around the clock for 10 years, comprehensively upgrade the grid, divorce coal, and solve fundamental EV limitations such as payload capacity and range, while also closing or refranchising every dealership in the country, and lastly, prevent people from buying anything that’s not an Aussie-made EV.
Utopia.
And nobody in the media is calling them out on the breathtaking un-workability of this dipshit proposal. Go figure.
There’s no chance in hell Adelaide could compete with Hyundai’s Ulsan factory. Source: Hyundai Motor Company
Meanwhile, Scott Morrison’s ‘commitment’ to EVs is lip service, pretending he never said they’d end the weekend, yet is continuing to befriend and subsidise the fossil fuel industry for as long as possible.
And by ‘befriend’ I mean give them $12 billion in tax you paid, every year, having worked your arse off cutting tiles or building homes, counselling people suffering depression during lockdown or simply helping us medically fight the pandemic the Federal government made worse by not replying to Pfizer. Because they’re such awesome chaps, clearly.
And Labor, they’re complete cocks on this as well. ‘Each-way’ Albo’s cunning plan is to discount EVs by eliminating the five per cent import tariff and removing the luxury car tax from EVs.
Sounds pretty good, huh? But there are two fundamental problems with that:
First up, the import tariff is only paid if the car is made in a country with which we do not have a free-trade agreement. And we have FTAs with Japan, South Korea and Thailand, the top three car-supplying nations to Australia, plus, of course, America and China.
You’re already not paying a tariff on any car that comes from those places. Pretty much the only common countries where tariffs on cars are still applicable are the EU or the UK. And they tend to be expensive cars bought by rich people who, in my view at least, do not deserve a taxpayer-funded financial freebie - there’s already more than enough of that going on, thanks mainly to the PM.
And luxury car tax on fuel efficient vehicles is only paid over the $69,152 threshold. So if you want to buy a cheap EV from Hyundai, Kia, etc., Albo's plan won’t help, basically. Luxury Car Tax is unjust because no other aspect of luxury is subjected to a tax inherently. No luxury handbag tax, no luxury watches tax, no luxury yacht tax. It was emplaced to protect the local car industry, dead for five years.
As if we really needed any more evidence about how spectacularly out of touch politics is, and politicians are, with one of the most prevalent and highly regulated and taxed activities in the modern world - driving.
These chumps all get zero points. They always choose soundbites and appeal to uninformed voters while the nodding media corp sing their praises without even the slightest rebuttal.
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