GM’s CEO, Mary Barra, predicted it would be producing (and presumably, selling) one meeeeeellion – cue Dr. Evil voice – battery powered devices by the end of next year. How many devices has GM emitted so far?
75,386 during all of last year.
Only about 925,000 devices to go!
Barra has scaled back her one meeeeeellion prediction somewhat. “We won’t get (there) just because the market’s not developing, but it will get there,” she explains. Or rather, doesn’t.
How does a market “get there”?
There either is – or there isn’t – a market.
It is clear there is very little market for battery powered devices as even Tesla is having trouble selling them. The reason for that also ought to be obvious. It is that the market for Tesla’s devices is close to tapped out. The “mainstream” press – as it likes to think of itself – touted how many Teslas were selling, while they were selling. Very much of a piece with the cases! the CASES! that the same “mainstream” press liked to tout. It was important to covey the impression – in both cases – that something was spreading.
In the case of Teslas, it was – for a time.
There was a certain demographic that liked the idea of owning – and paying for – a Tesla device. It was – and is – concentrated in affluent (and temperate, weather-wise) urban areas such as those in Southern California, where the lion’s share of Tesla’s devices have been sold. But it is a relatively small demographic, similar to the one – in terms of its ability to pay – that limits how many vehicles Mercedes-Benz or any other luxury-car brand can sell.
That market reached saturation sometime last year. The people who wanted – and could afford – one of Tesla’s devices already own one. They are no longer in the market for another one. That’s why unsold Teslas are piling up. There is now a disconnect between what the market wants – and Tesla is manufacturing.
GM entered the “market” for battery powered devices thinking it could sell them like Teslas, not grasping that Tesla had already hoovered up most of the “market” for devices. Other vehicle manufacturers did the same, not appreciating that they’d just embraced the EV tar baby until after they’d embraced it.
It wasn’t just the limited “market” for devices they’d embraced – in the old school sense of their being only so many buyers for expensive cars. Bad enough that GM actually thought it could sell the equivalent of one meeeeeellion devices that cost as much as Cadillacs. GM only sold about 147,000 of them last year. That’s all Cadillac models, of which there are eight.
And GM has only managed to sell about half as many devices as that during the same time period.
It is unlikely to sell many more – ever – and not only because there are only so many people who are in a position, financially, to buy a Cadillac-priced device. The more serious impediment – for GM and Tesla and everyone else now trying to sell devices – is that people who can afford to buy a Cadillac-priced vehicle are people who do not like to be inconvenienced.
Much less to pay for the inconvenience.
It is why those who can afford to pay to fly first-class buy a first-class ticket. The seats are larger and the food is better, certainly. But the main reason for paying extra is for the convenience of boarding faster and sooner than the cattle in steerage, who board last and are allowed off last. What do you suppose would happen to sales of first-class tickets – which cost twice as much as steerage tickets – if those who paid extra for first got off the plane last? If they had to wait while the cattle in steerage got off first?
Sure, the seats are nicer. But who wants to sit in them any longer than necessary?
Now think of the person who bought a device – effectively, because the seats are nicer – who finds himself waiting for 30 minutes or longer at a Sheetz while proletarians in 13-year-old vehicles (the average age of a daily driver as of last year) come and go . . . .
No matter how much virtue a device may signal, virtue-signaling people do not like being inconvenienced. And there is no getting around the inconvenience of owning a battery-powered device. You wait – at home. Or you wait – at Sheetz. Or wherever the not-so-fast charger happens to be located, which is almost never in a place where people who can (and have) spent Cadillac money like to wait.
This includes the waiting room at Cadillac and other high-end brand dealerships. They are typically very nice; complimentary Keurig coffee and nice chairs to sit in. People still don’t like waiting there. They want to get out of there. Just the same as they want to get off the plane, sooner rather than later.
GM thus faces a kind of double-whammy in that Tesla already soaked up most of the market for devices and word has gotten out about the inconvenience of owning a device. So much so that about half of the people who bought a device say they don’t want another one and are going to get a vehicle instead.
Consider the implications of that.
Whatever market there was for EVs is even less than it was.
Ordinarily, there would be a scaling back of the production of devices – just as there was a scaling back of the production of vehicles like the Edsel. But GM – the industry – bear-hugged the EV tar baby and once you do that, it’s very difficult to un-hug it.
. . .
If you like what you’ve found here please consider supporting EPautos.
We depend on you to keep the wheels turning!
Our donate button is here.
If you prefer not to use PayPal, our mailing address is:
EPautos
721 Hummingbird Lane SE
Copper Hill, VA 24079
PS: Get an EPautos magnet or sticker or coaster in return for a $20 or more one-time donation or a $10 or more monthly recurring donation. (Please be sure to tell us you want a magnet or sticker or coaster – and also, provide an address, so we know where to mail the thing!)
If you like items like the Baaaaaa! baseball cap pictured below, you can find that and more at the EPautos store!
Soothing goo goo baby talk from Veloz, the consortium of California clowns pushing EeeVees:
The EV Industry Is a Teenager — Let’s Power Past This Phase Together
‘Media headlines over the last six months questioning the future of the electric vehicle (EV) industry, while provocative, are not painting the full picture of the transition to electrified transportation.
‘The transition to EVs is just reaching its adolescence. Sales continue to rise globally and second-quarter U.S. sales climbed 11.3% from last year. Curious next-generation consumers are asking more questions about how an EV might fit into their lives and watching the early adopters’ experiences play out in their communities and the media.
‘Mark Phelan at the Detroit Free Press responded to the “sky is falling” rhetoric in a recent column writing, “Are EVs doomed? Have automakers wasted precious time and resources rushing them into cul-de-sacs? Not a chance.”
‘However, just like when people first started to adopt cell phones on a large scale, consumers are experiencing real frustrations and the EV sector is overcoming real consumer challenges.
‘Many of us remember going out of range with our new cell phones or having a call dropped due to bad service — “Can you hear me now?” Regardless, cellular carriers pushed forward, responding to early user frustrations by building out networks. We only need to consider the history of how we got from 1 to 5G (G = generation) to understand the scope of a new technology’s maturation.’ — Josh D Boone, veloz.org, via email
GREAT STRATEGY, Josh — admonish your customers like moody teenagers when they fail to belly up and buy. Surely your superior adult wisdom will straighten out their confused adolescent emotions during this awkward ‘phase.’ Papa knows best!
The teenager analogy is a weird one. On the one hand, EVs are more like babies that are able to crawl but perennially discouraged from learning to walk and stand on their own two feet, so to speak. On the other hand, EVs have been around in one form or another since the 1800s, and so they should have been well past the teenager phase by now.
Perhaps a dead horse would be a better analogy…
Devil’s Ride – Rockabilly Song About Going To Hell In An EV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDymuyQ6Sec
Pretty simple economics, if there is no demand for a product and you choose to produce the said product. You are going to lose. But if the gov teat is available, you are all fucking in.
How does a market “get there”?
If Woke Mary were the CEO of a competent EV automaker, she could have created such a market by manufacturing EVs that had price and performance parity with ICE-powered cars and hence were competitive and desirable in the marketplace.
In the world of Woke Mary and her peers, however, the market is simply supposed to “get there” by government fiat, they just don’t want to say that quiet part out loud (yet).
Here’s another way EV mandates become annoying.
Where I live in Commiefornia, when an office building is built, the county or city asks for predicted parking spots needed, and authorizes something like 60% of what’s needed ,causing a parking shortage, thinking that people will take public transit or whatever, but we don’t have functional public transit so we have a giant parking problem (often, valets just double park everything).
The state is requiring a significant percentage of these parking spots to be EV-only with chargers installed. So at my workplace, we’re now in this situation where all the gas cars are double and triple parked relying on valets, while there are 100’s of open EV-only parking spots.
‘all the gas cars are double and triple parked relying on valets’ — OppositeLock
Jobs promised; jobs created! — Gov Hairdo
Just wait till the valets unionize and go on strike.
I won’t be affected, as they don’t know how to drive stick and always point me to a place where I can park myself. It’s usually an EV spot, haha.
An appointment set me on a two hour drive to the destination.
Arrived before 8:00 am, got done what had to be done, back home dancing a jig.
You need a vehicle to get that far down the road, you’re alive, you are required to stay that way, living is a pretty good feeling.
Mary gets all that money and she is happy. She has everything and everything she has is basically free. Five years on the job, 140 million dollars. Mary has been at GM for 10 years, so the total is near or more than 280,000,000 dollars.
That’s about 2000 times the devices sold to date for the 2024 sales year.
The math:
280,000,000/140,000=2000
I can round down the 147,000 to make it simple.
7000 of them might be already cooked.
Could be.
Not a good return on a 280,000,000 employee expense.
There is a bottom line, she ain’t worth squat.
EeeVee fanboi Al Roooooot presents the dismal math of electric pickups:
‘Tesla sold 8,755 Cybertrucks in the second quarter, according to Cox Automotive. That was enough to eclipse the Ford F-150 Lightning’s 7,902 units. Rivian sold 3,309 R1T all-electric pickup trucks.
‘Being number one is great, but the overall EV truck numbers aren’t all that impressive. The 20,000 or so all-electric trucks sold in the second quarter amount to roughly 2.5% of all pickup trucks sold in the U.S.’
https://www.marketwatch.com/articles/tesla-cybertruck-best-selling-rivian-ford-gm-3973d196
Twenty thousand electric trucks: pathetic. Lightning Jim Farley is mortified that in its second full quarter of deliveries, Tesla’s bizarre creation blew past his F-150 electric version. But both together amount to mere dribble of sales.
These sobering stats don’t deter Al Root from catapulting the EeeVee Kool-Aid: ‘Eventually, Tesla’s goal is to sell 250,000 Cybertrucks a year.’
Yeah, right! Dude … share the blotter acid.
20,000 electric trucks isn’t pathetic, it is horrifying. Hopefully 19000 of them went to truth defying government agencies. Otherwise a lot of people were defrauded of a lot of money.
Cybernetics is a term coined by Norbert Weiner, the principles of which are set forward in his famous work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics:_Or_Control_and_Communication_in_the_Animal_and_the_Machine
If you have not read it, I can highly recommend it to your attention.
eLoon calling his uniquely stupid motor veehickle “cyber” is simply a failed marketing ploy, as is readily apparent.
If it is not possible to fit a cross bed toolbox and a lumber rack, it is not a proper pickup.
And pickups are not “trucks.”
Barra is the face for the early adopters of DEI. And what an ugly face it has become. Funny, how much DEI and milk have in common.
At the root level, the Federal Reserve is the one responsible for all this nefarious EV BS. Those who control the money creation don’t care who writes what LAW, they succeed without effort in their mandate of creative destruction. I read that Trump is considering Jamie Dimon for Treasury secretary. After such a traumatic head wound, I’m glad he’s still able to pick such ‘Good People.’
The crash that Trump will usher in could be epic. If it is, maybe we get a brief chance to end all the team gurl favoritism the Fed is so enamored with. We should all stand ready to Make Meritocracy Great Again.
“McKinley made this country rich. He was the most underrated president. I can’t believe how many people are negative on tariffs that are actually smart.” — Donald ‘Tariff King’ Trump
During the 2016 presidential race, one commentator mocked the ‘McKinley wing’ of the Republican party — 19th century throwbacks sporting top hats, monocles, and gold pocket-watch chains outside their ample vests.
Now the McKinley wing IS the Republican party. If people thought “Biden’s” social policies were bizarre, just wait till they get a taste of Trump’s Looney-Tunes economics. Winter is coming.
“75,386 during all of last year.
Only about 925,000 devices to go!”
>Way ahead of Pete Bootyjuice’s charging infrastructure
“the EV tar baby” – Good one!
While reading the article I was reminded of the saying, “Sell the sizzle, not the steak”.
Only, in this case, the steak is one of those perfect looking plastic imitation models of food the Japanese display in cases in front of restaurants to entice passer-by’s, or the perfect Burger King hamburger pictured on the billboard at the drive through.
Whatchya get, ain’t nothing like it’s advertised.
It’s not the real thing, baby.
GM’s prediction of a million EVs sold by the end of 2025 sounds a little like the Biden Thing’s & Tony Fauci’s goal of (IIRC) “90% of Americans vaxxed” by the end of the summer that year. Corporations and governments even used incentives for people to get vaxxed, such as free donuts or a chance to win a jackpot in a state “vaccine lottery”. Corporate media even ran a HEAVY propaganda campaign involving the jabs.
I’m surprised the automotive industry, corporate media, and even the Biden Thing hasn’t done something similar to get MORE people to buy EVs.
Consumer Reports just ran an article saying that it’s a good time to get a deal on a used EV. Channeling P.T. Barnum, there’s a sucker born every minute.
The city of New Haven, Connecticut, just proudly bought it’s first electric trash collection (read: “garbage”) truck. It cost over $600,000, but with government subsidies the price dropped to $336,000. Of course the powers that be in the city aren’t reporting that or factoring in the cost of electricity and the waiting time for it to charge after use. And it seems they’ve forgotten about the MASSIVE electric bus fire that idled the state’s entire fleet over safety concerns two years ago.
https://www.wtnh.com/video/new-haven-shows-off-connecticuts-first-electric-garbage-truck/9871852/
Wait until they have to replace the battery on something that large. Yeah that’ll be another $185,000, whoops, maybe that wasn’t such a good investment after all! Considering you could buy ANOTHER TRUCK entirely, brand new, for that price. But economics, math, and reality are not subjects that lefty climate change retards understand.
I had to stop by my city hall recently and noticed a fire department employee charging his vehicle at one of the rarely used stations in the city hall lot. It struck me as odd that a fire fighter was essentially enabling a fire hazard he may later have to fight.
Some of the most profligate pyromaniac have been firemen.
It’s hard enough to pay for cars with actual utility much less significantly more for cars with minimal utility.
If you think driving an EV car is bad just try driving an EV truck and tow with it. The Flying Wheels YouTube channel shows on a regular basis what happens with EV’s when you tow with them and even funnier the charging stations are not set up for trailer use so you either block half the chargers or have to drop the trailer, charge then reconnect and do that maybe every 85 miles.
Craig over at Flying Wheels seems to buy them and loses his shirt when he resells them a year later but he keeps doing it. There might be a lesson there somewhere.
Powered travel trailer for EV towing. The trailer is basically an EV with its own battery, drivetrain and control system.
https://pebblelife.com/pebble-flow
When it works I imagine it’s fine. But when things go sideways… whoo hoo!
Begs the question though. Why not just add another set of wheels and a steering column?
Hi Ready. I saw a video on that a while back; the catch seems to be you’re still going to have to wait to charge it, whether it’s 30 minutes at a time or an hour or more you will still be waiting. Like Craig pointed out, EV charging stations are not built around the drive through method for gas sales and because of that you’re screwed if you have a trailer.
Even if you fitted a gasoline generator into a trailer Tesla’s are not designed to be driven when charging although I saw a video where a guy built a gasoline generator into the back of his Tesla and modified it work. It almost but not quite made the car practical but he still had to charge it at the end of the day.
As for fitting a steering wheel to the trailer how about “Full Self Driving” and the trailer can drive itself to the campsite!!!!!!
Having trailer brakes lock on me once or twice I can’t imagine what might happen if those driven wheels aren’t perfectly matching the speed of the tow vehicle. The pucker factor!
May the ghost of Roger Smith (former GM CEO) haunt Mary Barra every time she sleeps! The winch took a company that made autos that you could get excited about and shoved it down the toilet!
Mary Barra holds a degree in electrical engineering.
When the tool you are trained to use is a hammer, you look for nails to pound.
The real question is why an electrical engineer was placed in charge of a company which makes mechanical devices?
What would happen if Hewlett-Packard hired a mechanical engineer to run the company? Would HP start production of the (human powered, therefore “green”) Babbage model?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_engine
HP had Carly Fiorina as CEO, which arguably began the company’s decline to the current state.
One of the first things Carly did was shutter the calculator division and send what was left overseas.
Re: Carly Fiorina,
I was an HP employee via Tandem Computers and Compaq during that time. Fiorina was totally fucking clueless and ran one of the greatest tech companies into the ground in record time. Her whole plan was to be bigger than IBM. Then when she predictably failed, she blamed it on the good ole boys club…..totally useless waste of human skin that one. She was the precursor to what we have now and it’s going down like a flaming bag of shit that it is…..as I’ve said so often in the past, eventually the market will correct but that may be too late for all of us.
>shutter the calculator division
I use my trusty 12C nearly every day.
Wore out the keypad on my 41CX many decades ago.
RPN forever.
That picture of her looking like grandma wearing a leather jacket.
She’s hot!
Thing is, for a very narrow demographic, in a very narrow use case, the EV is more convenient.
If you own a home with a garage, with open breaker positions on the panel, where it can be easy to add a 220V outlet.
If your commute is less than 50 miles or so round trip and never deviates.
If you have a second or third vehicle for longer trips or exceptions.
If you can afford the up-front cost
If you pay enough income tax to make the refunds worthwhile.
IF you meet these five criteria, you might be satisfied with EV ownership. For the rest of us, well…
The other thing about EVs is that the demographics seem to skew young. First vehicle after landing that manager trainee in the DEI department cars. You haven’t been brought into car culture because you’re an urbanite, and the idea of all those… fluids… and explosions makes you sick to your stomach. So sure it might be a little harder, but think about all that time your friend spent at the shop after buying that beater… an EV sounds pretty good on paper, just charge it up, right?
But I wonder how many people will be second buyers? After getting tires every 15K miles -and not the cheap ones either, those low rolling resistance ones. After coolant leaks, hard reboot problems, and of course the decaying battery? I still see Teslas on flatbeds up and down the valley, are they headed to the vacation home or the “authorized service center?”
If you can charge far from your house so it doesn’t burn your house down….
If you can put suffer getting a replacement EV every 6 months when the one you bought glitches out and can’t be fixed so is scrapped….that is happening right now today…
If you can suffer getting it towed every week because it is so defective it keeps breaking down….
If you don’t mind being microwaved in it while driving down the road…from the EV’s huge EMF field….
The utter hubris of declaring one knows exactly what the market will do is astounding. She obviously neither had, nor has, any idea.
Never mind that most of us are struggling to eat, and sleep indoors.
The arrogance of her assumption we all have the same options she has.
Buying an EV is pocket change for her.
@Eric – Disney purged the lesson of the tar baby and “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” from the US parks this year with the replacement of the “Song of the South” themed “Splash Mountain” with “Tiannna’s Bayou Adventure”.
Ironically, the Japanese retain the attraction in the original form, Brer Rabbit, tar baby and all.
At least for now …
Disney couldn’t stand the idea of being accused of being racists, so they spent a fortune on redoing Splash Mountain. The updated ride has had major mechanical issues ever since. Meanwhile, the truth is coming out that Disney is engaging in child sex grooming on a massive scale. They are publicizing “gay pride” parades across the country where naked men are exposing themselves in front of children whose parents are stupid enough to take their children to these events. Disney is also sponsoring a group that is focused on transitioning children as young as thirteen, and it has a now revealed “not so secret gay agenda”. The O’Keefe media group has been exposing this agenda in excruciating detail, along with Disney’s anti-white racist hiring practices. But at least Disney has taken a bold step to fight racism in one of their formerly most popular rides.
‘people who can afford to buy a Cadillac-priced vehicle are people who do not like to be inconvenienced.’ — eric
One thing money can buy is relief from inconvenience. Others can be hired to perform tedious tasks, whether it’s scrubbing the toilet or filling out tax forms. Even the TSA guards at airports can be bypassed by chartering your own jet, as Taylor Swift does.
How can EeeVee Mary, who presumably flits around in chartered jets herself, not know this?
Even at the ‘baby millionaire’ level — say $500,000 to $3 million annual income — having to cool heels at the charger, while lowly wage slaves shouldering $1,000 a month payments for their giant pickups gas and go in five minutes, is mortifying. It’s an inversion of the social order. And it’s not acceptable.
So things are bad? Well then, let them get even worse: ‘Trump’s desire to renew his landmark 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and to reduce the corporate tax rate to 15% means that the budget deficit, having ballooned to wartime levels, will not shrink any time soon if ever. — ZeroHedge
HA HA HA. Is anyone surprised? Reagan’s budget director David Stockman is still writing forty years later about his shock and anguish, when the decision was made to just let the deficit rip. Trump’s second term will explode the national debt from $35 trillion to $50 trillion.
Drink and dance and laugh and lie
Love, the reeling midnight through
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But alas, we never do.)
– Dorothy Parker
It doesn’t matter who resides in the White House, the fiat money creation went uncontrolled chain reaction long since and that on book debt is going to increase radically. I’m surprised and disgusted it has taken this long, my mind is incapable of wrapping itself around the evil that TPTB will resort to while clinging bitterly to their illicit power and privilege.
There is no good way out of the trap, be prepared to gnaw that limb off.