Electric cars?

Electric cars are creating a new economy — and leaving some towns behind​

BELVIDERE, Ill. — Early last year, workers at a Jeep factory here hoped their plant would be converted to an electric vehicle facility as the auto industry revamps for a green-energy future. Engineers came to take measurements for a possible retooling, and rumors spread that electric sports cars were on the agenda.

But those hopes crumbled last month when the corporate parent company, Stellantis, ended production at the 58-year-old plant and laid off roughly 1,200 workers, ripping the heart out of this small town 70 miles northwest of Chicago.
The decision, now causing knock-on layoffs and lost business at local auto-parts suppliers, restaurants and shops, shows the dark side of the zero-emissions economy the Biden administration is championing with tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded subsidies. Even as many communities will be transformed by the federally backed push to produce electric cars, batteries and solar panels, some will get left behind.

“Whenever you turn the ship ... you’re going to have casualties. Unfortunately the casualties are going to be our employees and our community,” Belvidere Mayor Clinton Morris said in an interview.

Federal subsidies for electric vehicles aren’t the only reason automakers are going green. But since federal officials have “put their finger on the scale” in favor of EVs, they should be doing more to lessen collateral damage for towns like Belvidere, Morris added. “If they’re going to weigh in on that, they should weigh in on how they’re going to help employees here and keep them in the community.”

As it embarks on its biggest retooling in a century, the auto industry has announced more than $70 billion of EV investments in the United States alone. That spending is already creating new pockets of prosperity in many parts of the country — and apprehension in the long-standing auto-manufacturing communities whose fates aren’t yet certain.

Protecting jobs in the EV transition will be a top concern for the United Auto Workers union as it enters negotiations with Ford, General Motors and Stellantis this year for new multiyear labor contracts. Particularly vulnerable are the jobs and Midwestern communities that manufacture the gas-powered engines and transmissions not needed in an EV.

White-collar workers also face uncertainty. General Motors in recent weeks began offering buyouts to its U.S. salaried employees as it trims costs to pay for the EV transition.

In a recent meeting with Stellantis chief executive Carlos Tavares, Biden’s climate adviser, Ali Zaidi, encouraged the auto company to apply for federal funds to help repurpose the Belvidere factory, according to a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private meeting. Stellantis spokeswoman Jodi Tinson declined to comment.

“The president foresaw that this inevitable transition is going to pose challenges for some firms, workers and communities and that is why his agenda has specific programs to help communities,” Celeste Drake, deputy director of the National Economic Council, said by email. The programs include $2 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act for retooling auto factories and Department of Energy loans for clean-energy projects, she said.

Earlier this month, signs of the unease to come were on display in the UAW parking lot in Belvidere, where laid-off workers filed in and out of meetings to decipher their fate. Some with enough seniority can retire early with their pension benefits. Others can request a transfer to another plant out of state. Most complained that Stellantis was providing minimal information about their options.


“They ain’t telling us nothing,” Alex Lerma, a 26-year veteran with the company, said as he hurried into the building to fill out forms. “I’m going to have to move to Ohio or Michigan — it’s not clear.”

“We got passed over,” another worker muttered as he rushed by.

Aaron and Sonja Penrod, a married couple, face the possibility of being split up as Sonja pursues early retirement and Aaron considers seeking a transfer to Detroit. Sonja has enough years under her belt to get her pension, but Aaron needs three more before he’s eligible.

Sonja moved to Indiana and then Illinois to keep her job after Stellantis’s predecessor company, Chrysler, closed a factory in St. Louis more than a decade ago, and she says she doesn’t want to move to a new place again. So if Aaron heads to Detroit, she will probably retire to the farmhouse they own south of St. Louis.

“I will go visit [Aaron]. I will be in a different state, possibly 10 hours away,” she said over chips and salsa at a local restaurant.

“I’ll just go live in a little studio apartment somewhere till I get my time,” Aaron said. It’s not certain he will get a transfer, though — some of his friends who were laid off during an earlier downsizing at the factory two years ago still haven’t been offered a job at another Stellantis plant, he said.

For now, they are part of a skeleton crew still working at the Belvidere factory, disassembling and boxing up equipment, a temporary gig that they expect will end soon. Stellantis has said it is “working to identify other opportunities to repurpose the Belvidere facility,” but the Penrods see the dismantling of the machinery as a bad sign.

Also on the skeleton crew is Elise Smelser, a pipe fitter who grew up near the factory and began working there in 1999, training under the supervision of her father. Her parents, siblings and 17 nieces and nephews still live in the area and she doesn’t want to leave, but at 50 she’s too young to retire.

“I started grinding my teeth after they told us — like, during the day, not just at night when I sleep,” said Smelser, who is dreading a transfer out of state. “All my family’s here, and I have a house ... plus I would go to a place where I’d be lucky to know, like, two or three people.”

Sipping a drink at the Wild Cherries bar a day after attaching his last Jeep bumper, laid-off worker Jerome Davis said he was putting in for a transfer to Detroit, where he has family and even a house that his mother left him. He worries he’ll get sent to Toledo instead, and overall he has “no desire to leave” Belvidere, he said.


Thanks to their union, the autoworkers have strong protections during layoffs, including months of severance pay and options for those with enough seniority to retire early with a pension. But the rest of Belvidere has far less of a safety net.

Wrapping up a slow lunch hour at their Mexican restaurant in Belvidere’s quaint downtown, siblings Victor Hernandez Jr. and Iveeth Dominguez worried about losing their weekly lunch order from the factory. Every Friday they would deliver $500 or $600 worth of burritos to the plant: a good chunk of their revenue. Autoworkers have also been regular visitors to the restaurant, El Molcajete, since their father opened it in 1994.

Victor said their cousin worked at the auto factory until the last round of downsizing, when he got transferred to Detroit. He left his family behind at their house in Belvidere so his kids could stay in school, and he rents an apartment in Detroit.

“I think that’s what a lot of people are doing. They still have their family here because this is where they grew up, this is where they are based. And then they’re renting and they come back and forth,” he said. The factory closing didn’t just eliminate jobs, Victor added. “They’re also taking the people away.”

Around the corner at Buchanan Street Pub, bartender Toni Stumpf said she recently got a second job in a town half an hour away because business has slowed to a crawl in Belvidere. Lately she’s been earning $60 to $80 in tips from an 11 a.m.-to-7 p.m. shift compared with $1oo to $200 in better times.

Her usual customers “don’t have that spending money,” she said. “They’ve got enough money from unemployment to pay their bills, hopefully, you know, but they don’t have fun money.”

Across the street from a giant mural of Belvidere’s most famous daughter, the Chicago architect and MacArthur Fellow Jeanne Gang, a local barbershop stood empty on a recent afternoon. Owner James Emanuel said the town has other employers to fall back on, including General Mills, which manufactures granola bars and other foods in Belvidere and recently opened a giant distribution center.

Still, the Stellantis shutdown is “definitely going to have an effect on the community, and not just Belvidere,” he said. “It’s going to be Rockford. It’s going to be southern Wisconsin.”

After days of back-to-back meetings with union members, Kevin Logan, president of UAW Local 1268, spoke with The Washington Post about the shutdown and the “mixed emotions” he has about the electric transition.

“We’ve got to do something to reduce the emissions and everything for the environment,” he said from the empty union hall as night fell outside. But the job losses worry him, along with the lack of charging infrastructure. “I wish that we would, as a company or as a country, slowly go into it. ... I just think it’s happening so quickly.”

Logan, who worked at the factory for more than 10 years before switching to union work, said he plans to pursue early retirement to keep his family rooted in the Belvidere area. But for the past several days he’d heard story after story of workers who faced tougher decisions — spouses who didn’t know whether they could get transferred to the same city, parents worried about leaving high school kids behind in Belvidere, and workers who are caring for an elderly parent.

He also worries about the town’s tax base and ability to maintain services.

“Is the school going to start laying off teachers? You know, enrollment is probably going to go down in schools if people are moving away,” he said. “Could that be a trickledown where police start laying people off? And then does crime pick back up? It’s just a ripple effect throughout the whole community and it’s going to devastate this area.”

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This Midwestern factory was dead. Electric vehicles revived it.​

qldfrog said:

Ford finally solved the mileage angst issue for EV owners

Ford draws up a portable charging trailer to power up your EV

Ford wants to give you extra battery power while out and about. The automaker filed a patent for a portable...

electrek.co

Poor decadent society...

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How Japan is losing the global electric-vehicle race​

Toyota, Honda and Nissan, innovators of yesteryear, are playing catch-up

The green floors of JATCO’s Fuji Area 2 factory hum with quiet confidence. Diligent inspectors appraise the gears and pulleys that make up the Japanese car-parts maker’s transmission systems. Robots stamp parts and flip them onto production lines. For decades, jatco, like the rest of Japan’s vaunted auto industry, has perfected carmaking. Japan has been at the forefront of the industry, pioneering just-in-time manufacturing and leading the development of hybrid cars. But the next big evolution—the shift to electric vehicles (evs)—has become a source of angst. “The ev shift will be a big transformation, there’s no denying that,” says Sato Tomoyoshi, jatco’s ceo. “Our company will have to change drastically.”

So far, Japan and its carmakers are lagging in the race towards evs, the industry’s fastest-growing product area. Battery-powered electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids (phevs) accounted for around 13% of all cars sold globally in 2022, up from 2.6% in 2019. In some markets, including China, the share is some 20%. But in Japan, it was just 2%. The firms pulling ahead in the ev race include newcomers, such as Tesla and China’s byd, and established giants such as Germany’s Volkswagen.


Japanese carmakers are not among them. None is in the top 20 for global ev sales, even though Nissan and Mitsubishi released some of the world’s first evs more than a decade ago. Toyota, the world’s largest car company, sold just 24,000 evs out of its 10.5m in total sales in 2022. (Tesla sold 1.3m.) Sales of Toyota’s first fully electric model, an suv called the bz4x, had to be paused last summer due to defects that caused the wheels to fall off.

Critics worry that this early stalling on evs could cause the wheels to fall off the Japanese auto industry at large. Some see parallels with semiconductors and consumer electronics, industries which Japanese firms initially dominated, then missed important trends abroad and ultimately lost out to nimbler competitors. A similar decline in the auto industry, which accounts for nearly 20% of Japan’s exports and some 8% of Japanese jobs, would have huge economic and social implications.

Japanese carmakers are revving to catch up. Toyota has a new ceo, Sato Koji, tapped in part to lead the company’s push for electrification. At his first press conference on April 7th, Toyota announced plans to release ten new ev models and boost annual ev sales to 1.5m by 2026. “We will thoroughly implement electrification, which we can do immediately,” said Mr Sato.

Honda has plans to launch 30 ev models by 2030 and set up an ev joint venture with Sony last year. The company pitched a corporate reorganisation taking effect this month as an “electrification acceleration”. In February Nissan said it would release 19 new ev models by 2030; it now calls electrification the “core of our strategy”.

Japan’s slow start on evs stems in part from its earlier successes—or as Mr Sato of jatco puts it, it is a classic case of the innovator’s dilemma. Industry leaders hesitated to embrace a new technology that might undermine areas in which Japan leads, such as standard hybrid vehicles, which combine an internal combustion engine (ice) and an electric motor powered by batteries that capture energy from regenerative braking (rather than charging with outside electricity, as with phevs). Engineers at Japanese firms that fine-tuned complex hybrids were also unimpressed by evs, which are simpler mechanically. “Within the industry, there are still a lot of people attached to the engine,” Mr Sato says. Executives worried about the implications of the ev shift on their network of suppliers such as jatco, given that evs require fewer parts and widgets than ices. Carmakers assumed eventually switching gears to evs would be a cinch: “The logic was that when the time comes, we can easily shift from hybrids to evs,” says a former executive at a large Japanese car company.

Japan also made an early wrong turn with hydrogen, another emergent auto technology with the potential to be carbon-free. Toyota, Japan’s most influential carmaker, bet that using hydrogen fuel-cells would become the leading way to electrify cars. Abe Shinzo, Japan’s prime minister from 2012 to 2020, championed policies to make Japan a “hydrogen society”; in 2015, Toyota delivered its first hydrogen fuel-cell sedan, the Mirai, to Abe himself. While hydrogen may come to play a big role in decarbonising hard-to-electrify sectors, such as steel production or fuelling long-haul trucks, it has so far turned out to make little sense as a technology to electrify light consumer vehicles. Even in Japan, which has built a fair amount of hydrogen-refuelling infrastructure, Toyota has struggled to peddle the pricey Mirai: the company has sold a total of just 7,500 fuel-cell vehicles in its home market.

While governments in China, Europe and America have increasingly subsidised evs as part of their climate policies, Japan has done less to incentivise their adoption. The government has called for 100% of vehicles sold by 2035 to be electrified. But that would include hybrid vehicles, in contrast to other governments which have defined the next generation of vehicles more narrowly. Subsidies for fuel-cell vehicles remain much larger in Japan than those for evs. Strict regulation has hampered the expansion of ev charging infrastructure: Japan has roughly one-quarter as many public ev chargers as South Korea, its much smaller neighbour.

Nagging scepticism about ev technology explains some of Japan’s wariness. Japanese carmakers and officials are “still questioning”, says Tsuruhara Yoshiro of AutoInsight, an industry journal: “Are evs what consumers want? Do they provide value to them? Are they the best way to reduce co2?” Toyoda Akio, the previous Toyota ceo and grandson of the company’s founder, liked to say that “carbon is the enemy, not the internal combustion engine.” Even under Mr Sato, a protégé of Mr Toyoda, the company is sticking to what it calls a “multi-pathway” strategy that sees evs as one part of a diverse fleet. “We think that the way to get the most carbon-dioxide emissions reductions net overall throughout the world is to tune the solution for each part of the world,” says Gill Pratt, Toyota’s chief scientist. For example, in developing countries, where renewable energy uptake has generally been slower than in the West, traditional hybrids might offer a more practical and economical way to reduce emissions in the interim.

But some think Japan’s carmakers are moving too late to catch up with the changing times in more developed markets. “They are like the Tokugawa shogun-era closed country—they refused to see what is happening in the world,” says Murasawa Yoshihisa, a management consultant. While Japanese cars were once synonymous with fuel efficiency and therefore environmentalism, they risk coming to stand for climate denialism. Japan’s three biggest carmakers—Toyota, Honda and Nissan—rank lowest among the top ten global auto companies on decarbonisation efforts, according to a recent study by Greenpeace, an environmental group.

As Toyota’s experience with the bz4x suggests, designing and building top-of-the-line evs may not be as simple as the Japanese firms assumed. “They were so overconfident that once they decide to do it, they will dominate the ev market,” Mr Murasawa says. “But their offerings have turned out to be old-fashioned.” Creating evs that appeal to consumers requires putting more focus on software, while Japanese firms traditionally prioritise hardware. Even as they at last start gearing up, Japanese companies are already losing loyal customers. Japanese brands that “built a legacy” in America have been “caught flat-footed in the context of 2022”, concludes s&p Global Mobility, an American research outfit. As the study notes, consumers switching to evs in 2022 were largely moving away from Toyota and Honda. ■

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JohnDe said:

“The ev shift will be a big transformation, there’s no denying that,” says Sato Tomoyoshi, JATCO’s ceo. “Our company will have to change drastically.”​

So far, Japan and its carmakers are lagging in the race towards evs, the industry’s fastest-growing product area. Battery-powered electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids (phevs) accounted for around 13% of all cars sold globally in 2022, up from 2.6% in 2019. The firms pulling ahead in the ev race include newcomers, such as Tesla and China’s BYD, and established giants such as Germany’s Volkswagen.​

Japan also made an early wrong turn with hydrogen.. While hydrogen may come to play a big role in decarbonising hard-to-electrify sectors, such as steel production or fuelling long-haul trucks, it has so far turned out to make little sense as a technology to electrify light consumer vehicles.​

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When deflation eventually hits, other auto makers will cut prices—but, in contrast, they won’t enjoy any benefits from the margin pressure that will come with it.​

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Elon Musk Braces for ‘Turbulent Times.’ Markets Seem to Be in Denial.​

The CEOs of America’s biggest banks have all taken a stab at providing a snapshot of where the economy’s headed so far in earnings season.
Elon Musk was more to the point. “One day, it seems like the world’s economy is falling apart and the next day everything’s fine. I don’t know what the hell is going on,” the Tesla CEO said on the company’s second-quarter earnings call.

The one thing Musk can be sure of, though, is that it’s tough out there in the autos sector.

But Tesla has taken some initiative in these challenging times. The electric-vehicle maker has aggressively cut prices in an intense inflationary environment. Its play was to grow volume and market share, accepting that margins would take a hit.

When deflation eventually hits, other auto makers will cut prices—but, in contrast, they won’t enjoy any benefits from the margin pressure that will come with it. When the dust settles, Tesla will be in a stronger position.

While Musk warned of “turbulent times,” stock market investors don’t seem to be as concerned. The S&P 500 continued its run higher Wednesday and now sits less than 5% off its record closing high.

The index is up 18% so far in 2023, and has climbed 27% from its low point in October.

Granted, those gains have been driven by a handful of the largest mega-cap stocks—including Tesla, which is up more than 135%. However, the S&P 500 Equal Weighted Index, which gives all stocks a 0.2% weighting, is up 9% so far this year. That’s not exactly representative of turbulent times, either.

In the absence of economic answers, the stock market is drifting gently along. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
—Callum Keown

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sptrawler said:

Collie Shire president Sarah Stanley said the current demand for EV chargers was not enough to justify support for the proposal.

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• Battery-electric passenger-car sales jumped 55% in June
• Tesla doubles number of EVs sold in Europe from last year

macca said:

I think we will be all driving EV soon because we won't be able to buy anything else but we do have unique problems here in Oz

I saw this photo on another forum, taken at Sandfire Roadhouse WA yesterday, the queue extended in both directions from the roadhouse, north and south

At present each car would take maybe 10 mins to fill, imagine when each takes 90mins to charge and only 3 or 4 at a time as it is solar and diesel generators for power
View attachment 160050
They will fill their camping area every night while people charge up

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macca said:

I think we will be all driving EV soon because we won't be able to buy anything else but we do have unique problems here in Oz

I saw this photo on another forum, taken at Sandfire Roadhouse WA yesterday, the queue extended in both directions from the roadhouse, north and south

At present each car would take maybe 10 mins to fill, imagine when each takes 90mins to charge and only 3 or 4 at a time as it is solar and diesel generators for power
View attachment 160050
They will fill their camping area every night while people charge up

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sptrawler said:

When asked whether the UK would stick with its commitment to ban new petrol and diesel-only powered cars from showrooms by 2030, British prime minister Rishi Sunak reportedly side-stepped the question.

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macca said:

I think we will be all driving EV soon because we won't be able to buy anything else but we do have unique problems here in Oz

I saw this photo on another forum, taken at Sandfire Roadhouse WA yesterday, the queue extended in both directions from the roadhouse, north and south

At present each car would take maybe 10 mins to fill, imagine when each takes 90mins to charge and only 3 or 4 at a time as it is solar and diesel generators for power
View attachment 160050
They will fill their camping area every night while people charge up

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JohnDe said:

Looks like the problem you have found will ensure that you will not own or invest in EVs and battery technology for the short to medium term. And the possibility of you investing in Uranium must be near zero, given all the environmental issues that it causes.

I'm not sure how your concern of the environment affects your view on oil and gas, seeing as both contribute to all sorts of environmental and health issues, but maybe it is because they have been around for so long, we tend to miss the damage to the planet and our own health. Cancers have increased exponentially during the past few decades, not many seem to understand that vehicle exhaust is a huge contributor and that it doesn't just disappear but ends up in our water, land, food, homes, schools, and everywhere that the wind takes it.

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Sdajii said:

Far out. I spent a few months at Sandfire earlier this year, including Easter, their busiest time of year, and saw nothing like this. Very surprising.

While there I did ponder the logistics of electric vehicles and it's a struggle to imagine anything working, but perhaps with a large number of charging stations (there's no shortage of space) it might be possible.

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