By Jo Nova
Call it an anti-subsidy to kill the product the customers want, and call it an anti-tariff to help foreign manufacturers
The Suicide of The West continues apace.
All around the West governments are concocting rules that force car manufacturers to sell a certain ratio of EV’s to petrol cars. In the UK if they breach the ratio they’ll be fined a savage £15,000 for every petrol car. In other words, if customers don’t voluntarily want to buy as many EV’s as the government thinks they should, the rules will force the car manufacturers to restrict the petrol car sales. Obviously, what’s left of the free market will pay big money for the rare and desirable petrol cars that are permitted to be sold. Soon only the wealthy will be able to afford them, while the riff raff have to catch a bus.
One Ford manager is helpfully telling the world what these rules mean:
Ford threatens to restrict petrol car sales to meet the UK’s EV targets
By Tom Jervis, Auto Express
Introduced at the start of this year, the ZEV mandate requires manufacturers to ensure that a minimum percentage of their overall sales are battery-powered, or face fines of up to £15,000 for every ICE car sold over the limit. This year, the target is set at 22 per cent, however, while EV sales continue to grow due to fleet demand, private buyers are proving reluctant to make the transition and EV targets are looking hard to meet. According to the latest industry figures, fewer than 17 per cent of models registered in April boasted zero-emissions powertrains.
Martin Sander, told the Financial Times’ Future of the Car Summit: “We can’t push EVs into the market against demand. We’re not going to pay penalties. We are not going to sell EVs at huge losses just to buy compliance. The only alternative is to take our shipments of [engine-powered] vehicles to the UK down, and sell these vehicles somewhere else”.
It’s so Soviet:
The electric car carnage has only just begun
Matthew Lynn, The Telegraph
The fear must now be that the electric car carnage has only just begun – with Net Zero turning into a sledgehammer for the deindustrialisation of the West, and China the only clear winner.
The trouble is, quotas don’t work any better in Britain than they did in communist Russia.
In effect, Ford will limit its sales of cars in the UK. If you had your eye on a new model, forget it. You will have to put your name on a waiting list, just as East Germans had to wait years for a Trabant. Heck, we may even see a black market in off-the-books Transit vans. Ford is the first to spell it out in public, but we can be confident all the other manufacturers are thinking the same thing. They can’t absorb huge fines. The only alternative is to limit the sales of petrol cars.
It’s worse than Soviet, it’s not helping the motherland, its serving China
Paul Homewood explains the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) scheme in the UK decrees that this year 22% of all cars sold need to be electric vehicles (and hybrid ones don’t count). But last year EV’s only made up 16% of all sales, and at that rate car manufacturers will be 113,000 electric car sales short of the target this year. That works out to be a very expensive £1.7 billion fine. Worse, foreign companies like Tesla and BYD (the Chinese EV company) won’t have to pay the fine, but they will score an “allowance” credit for every EV sold in the UK. In turn, they’ll theoretically be able to sell those credits to the hapless local car producers, meaning effectively people buying petrol cars in the UK will be subsidizing foreign EV manufacturers.
Just to recap, this is how the scheme works, as set out by the government:
‘Each year, vehicle manufacturers are set a target as a percentage of their total annual sales that must be zero emission. The regulation will require that for each non-ZEV sold, the manufacturer must have a ZEV allowance, the unit in which compliance will be measured. Manufacturers will receive enough allowances that if they meet their target, they will not need additional allowances. If a manufacturer sells more ZEVs than their target, they will have a surplus of allowances they can sell, bank, or convert their excess allowances. If a manufacturer sells fewer ZEVs than their target, they can buy, borrow, use banked allowances or convert CO2 emissions allowances to meet their obligation or make a final compliance payment.’
This means, for example, that Tesla and all the Chinese companies selling EVs here will be given allowances, which they can then sell at a profit. Based on last year’s sales, these surplus allowances could be worth £570million for Tesla and £400million for Chinese-owned MG and Polestar.
With China’s BYD, who are already challenging Tesla in global EV sales, ready to invade the UK market, more and more subsidies will end up being sent to China.
If somebody had suggested a few years ago that the UK would be paying billions in subsidies to China so they could undercut our own car industry, they would have been laughed at. — Read it all The Conservative Woman
Ford possibly recognises that selling too many petrol cars could send dollars to rivals in China.
It’s almost like the CCP had two million sympathetic communist party members helping them out throughout the West to create the policies they wanted.
Paul Homewood blogs at Notalotofpeopleknowthat.
Image by brands amon from Pixabay