Automotive
Electric vehicle weight poses threat to current road infrastructure, safety experts warn
Tesla Model Y
From LifeSiteNews
By Bob Unruh
A report in the Washington Times explains that electric vehicles (EVs) can weigh up to 50 percent more than internal combustion motor vehicles. That extra weight could more easily damage roads, bridges, and parking garages.
If all of the existing headaches for those pushing expensive electric vehicles on resisting American consumers could vanish, there’s still a big one that may have no ready solution.
Already, it appears the U.S. could end up dependent on unfriendly nations for materials for all those batteries. Then there’s the fact that the nation’s grid simply can’t support all that recharging – California already has been sending out advisories for owners not to charge. And then there’s the limited range, extended recharging times, both worsened by bad weather.
But now a report in the Washington Times explains that those batteries are heavy, and EVs can weigh up to 50 percent more than internal combustion motor vehicles.
And that weight damages roads, bridges and parking garages, with those vehicles easily plowing through safety guardrails while posing a higher danger to other drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists traveling the same routes.
“The problems associated with EVs are poised to grow as more consumers purchase the cars under the Biden administration’s plan to eliminate gas-powered vehicles and the tailpipe emissions that come with them,” the report explained.
It explained engineers writing recently for Structure Magazine suggested construction companies, and building codes, need to make accommodation for the higher weight.
Parking garages, they said, should be redesigned to hold more weight.
That’s because some hold hundreds of vehicles, and just one EV. A Ford truck, weighs in at 8,240 pounds, nearly a ton (about 1,000 kg) more than the gas-powered version of the same pickup.
“Significantly increasing passenger vehicle weights combined with recently reduced structural design requirements will result in reduced factors of safety and increased maintenance and repair costs for parking structures,” the engineers wrote. “There are many cases of parking structure failures, and the growing demand for EVs will only increase the probability of failure.”
Then there are those guardrails, installed to minimize damage when traffic goes awry.
They are installed between lanes for traffic moving opposite directions, between lanes and edge drop-offs and more.
That concern comes out of a procedure at a test facility in Nebraska, where examiners took a 3.6-ton Rivian R1 and sent it into a metal guardrail at 62 mph, first head-on, then at an angle.
Both times it “ripped through” the guardrail and continued into what would have been lanes for oncoming traffic, the report revealed.
The conclusion was simple: making vehicles much heavier means “a lot more force” is required to redirect the vehicle.
University of Nebraska professor Cody Stolle, told the Times, “We found these guardrail systems don’t have great compatibility with these [electric] vehicles yet.”
The heavier vehicles also could cause more damage to other vehicles in collisions.
The report said an insurance institute expert confirmed the weight provides more protection to those inside the EV, but at the expense of anyone in another vehicle involved in an accident.
Joe Biden has insisted over and over that consumers should be buying the much more expensive and often less reliable electric cars the government programs subsidize.
The weight differences are significant. The report said the Tesla Model Y is more than 4,400 pounds while the similar size gas-powered Honda Accord is 3,300. Kia makes multiple SUVs, with the gas model weighting 3,900 pounds and the EV unit nearly 6,500.
Residential roads already are not engineered to handle the heavy weight on highways, and the lifespan of bridges could be reduced with much heavier traffic, the report said.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., recently said, “EVs are typically much heavier compared to similarly sized, gas-powered vehicles, which will put additional strain on America’s transportation infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers warns that an increase in EVs could substantially reduce the lifespan of roads and bridges, necessitating further investment in infrastructure.”
Reprinted with permission from the WND News Center.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By WILL KESSLER
President Joe Biden’s administration unveiled tariffs this week aimed at boosting domestic production of green energy technology, but the move could end up hamstringing his larger climate goals.
The tariffs announced on Tuesday quadruple levies for Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) to 100% and raise rates for certain Chinese green energy and EV components like minerals and batteries. Biden has made the transition to green energy and EVs a key part of his climate agenda, but hiking tariffs on those products to help U.S. manufacturing could jack up prices on the already costly products, slowing adoption by struggling Americans, according to experts who spoke to the DCNF.
The risks posed by hiking levies on green technology expose the inherent tension between Biden’s climate agenda and his efforts to protect American industry, which often struggles to compete with cheap foreign labor. Items on his climate agenda typically raise costs, and requiring companies to comply could make them uncompetitive on the world stage.
“These tariffs are a classic example of the Biden administration’s left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing,” E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, told the DCNF. “The inability to import Chinese-made EVs due to prohibitively high costs will necessitate importing raw materials and parts for EVs from China. Since automakers can’t afford to build and assemble the vehicles here, prices will have to rise. In other words, American consumers will pay the cost of this tariff, not the Chinese.”
The White House, in its fact sheet, pointed to China artificially lowering its prices and dumping goods on the global market as the justification for the new tariffs in an effort to help protect American businesses. China has pumped huge subsidies into its own EV industry and supply lines over the past few years, spawning a European Union investigation into vehicles from the country.
“Tariffs on Chinese EVs won’t just make Chinese EVs more expensive, they will also make American EVs more expensive,” Ryan Young, senior economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the DCNF. “This is because domestic producers can now raise their prices without fear of being undercut by competitors. Good for them but bad for consumers — and for the Biden administration’s policy goal of increased EV adoption.”
Several American manufacturers are already struggling to sell EVs at a profit, with Ford losing $4.7 billion on its electric line in 2023 while selling over 72,000 of the vehicles. To ease price concerns and increase EV adoption, the Biden administration created an EV tax credit of $7,500 per vehicle, depending on where its parts are made.
The market share of EVs out of all vehicles fell in the first quarter of 2024 from 7.6% to 7.1% as consumers opted to buy cheaper traditional vehicles instead. Growth in EV sales increased by just 2.7% in the quarter, far slower than the 47% growth that the industry saw in all of 2023.
The Biden administration has also sought to use regulations to push automakers toward electrifying their offerings as consumers refuse to voluntarily adopt EVs, finalizing rules in March that effectively require around 67% of all light-duty vehicles sold after 2032 to be electric or hybrids.
“By raising the price — and thereby stunting the deployment — of EVs, the tariffs undermine the Biden administration’s stated goals of reducing carbon emissions (as many U.S. environmentalists and EV fans have recently lamented),” Clark Packard, research fellow in the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, wrote following the announcement. “The EV tariffs (and also-announced solar tariffs) would continue the administration’s habit of choosing politics and protectionism over their environmental agenda.”
Despite the subsidies, the 25% tariff that is currently in place for Chinese EVs already prices the product out of the U.S. market, resulting in no Chinese-branded EVs being sold in the country, according to Barron’s. Only a handful of the more than 100 EV models being sold in China appeal to American consumers, and none of them can compete under current levies.
“Something like this happened just a few years ago when former president Donald Trump enacted 25% steel tariffs in 2018,” Young told the DCNF. “Domestic steel producers raised their prices by almost exactly the amount of the tariff, and America soon had the world’s highest steel prices. As a result, car prices went up by about $200 to $300 on average. Larger trucks with more steel content increased even more. Now Biden is going to do the same thing to EVs.”
I won’t allow American towns and workers to be hurt by China’s unfair trade practices that flood our markets with cheap products.
That’s what these new tariffs are all about. pic.twitter.com/GGApGqtg7O
— President Biden (@POTUS) May 15, 2024
In the year following the increase in steel tariffs under the Trump administration, U.S. Steel’s operating profit rose 38%, prices were hiked 5 to 10% and revenue was up 15% due to reduced competition, according to CNN.
Despite the massive tariff hike on EVs, Biden only raised the tariff rate on Chinese lithium-ion EV batteries and battery parts to 25%, according to the White House. The tariff rate on certain essential minerals, like natural graphite, was also hiked to just 25%.
“Despite rapid and recent progress in U.S. onshoring, China currently controls over 80% of certain segments of the EV battery supply chain, particularly upstream nodes such as critical minerals mining, processing, and refining,” the White House wrote in its fact sheet. “Concentration of critical minerals mining and refining capacity in China leaves our supply chains vulnerable and our national security and clean energy goals at risk.”
China has broad control over the majority of minerals necessary to construct EVs, possessing nearly 90% of the world’s mineral refining capacity. Sources of the required minerals often also have serious human rights concerns, such as the world’s supply of cobalt, which has widespread ties to child labor.
Biden attacked former President Donald Trump during the 2020 election for the broad tariffs that he put on Chinese goods, noting that “any freshman econ student” could point out that the costs of the tariffs would be passed on to American consumers.
EV makers have increasingly struggled over the past year to maintain profits amid stalling demand, with the largest American EV manufacturer, Tesla, reporting a 10% drop in year-over-year revenue in the first quarter of 2024. Tesla is one of several EV makers that have announced layoffs in recent months.
“Fortunately, the EV market is still small in the U.S. and Chinese EVs are an even smaller slice of that small pie,” Antoni told the DCNF. “Even if the EV market in the U.S. were large, these tariffs would not help the domestic EV industry. While consumer demand for EVs would shift to domestic models, an increase in domestic production would rely on very expensive inputs from China, cutting into profits.”
The White House did not respond to a request to comment from the DCNF.
From the Fraser Institute
Evidence continues to accrue that many of these “investments,” which are ultimately of course taxpayer funded, are risky ventures indeed.
Even as the much-vaunted electric vehicle (EV) transition slams into stiff headwinds, the Trudeau government and Ontario’s Ford government will pour another $5 billion in subsidies into Honda, which plans to build an EV battery plant and manufacture EVs in Ontario.
This comes on top of a long list of other such “investments” including $15 billion for Stellantis and LG Energy Solution, $13 billion for Volkswagen (with a real cost to Ottawa of $16.3 billion, per the Parliamentary Budget Officer), a combined $4.24 billion (federal/Quebec split) to Northvolt, a Swedish battery maker, and a combined $644 million (federal/Quebec split) to Ford Motor Company to build a cathode manufacturing plant in Quebec.
All this government subsidizing is of course meant to help remake the automobile, with the Trudeau government mandating that 100 per cent of new passenger vehicles and light trucks sold in Canada be zero-emission by 2035. But evidence continues to accrue that many of these “investments,” which are ultimately of course taxpayer funded, are risky ventures indeed.
As the Wall Street Journal notes, Tesla, the biggest EV maker in the United States, has seen its share prices plummet (down 41 per cent this year) as the company struggles to sell its vehicles at the pace of previous years when first-adopters jumped into the EV market. Some would-be EV makers or users are postponing their own EV investments. Ford has killed it’s electric F-150 pickup truck, Hertz is dumping one-third of its fleet of EV rental vehicles, and Swedish EV company Polestar dropped 15 per cent of its global work force while Tesla is cutting 10 per cent of its global staff.
And in the U.S., a much larger potential market for EVs, a recent Gallup poll shows a market turning frosty. The percentage of Americans polled by Gallup who said they’re seriously considering buying an EV has been declining from 12 per cent in 2023 to 9 per cent in 2024. Even more troubling for would-be EV sellers is that only 35 per cent of poll respondents in 2024 said they “might consider” buying an EV in the future. That number is down from 43 per cent in 2023.
Overall, according to Gallup, “less than half of adults, 44 per cent, now say they are either seriously considering or might consider buying an EV in the future, down from 55 per cent in 2023, while the proportion not intending to buy one has increased from 41 per cent to 48 per cent.” In other words, in a future where government wants sellers to only sell EVs, almost half the U.S. public doesn’t want to buy one.
And yet, Canada’s governments are hitting the gas pedal on EVs, putting the hard-earned capital of Canadian taxpayers at significant risk. A smart government would have its finger in the wind and would slow down when faced with road bumps. It might even reset its GPS and change the course of its 2035 EV mandate for vehicles few motorists want to buy.
Author:
Medical Elites’ Disgrace Over Ivermectin
Despite claims of 215 ‘unmarked graves,’ no bodies have been found at Canadian residential school
The WHO’s Proposed Pandemic Agreements Worsen Public Health
Japan’s most senior cancer doctor: COVID shots are ‘essentially murder’
-
COVID-191 day agoCOVID Lab Leak: Over four later, EcoHealth Alliance funding is finally suspended
-
Crime2 days agoSlovakian prime minister who opposed WHO Pandemic Treaty shot in assassination attempt
-
Community1 day agoThe Grand Opening is TODAY!
-
COVID-191 day agoNIH Quietly Altered Definition For Gain-Of-Function Research On Its Website, Former Fauci Aide Confirms
-
conflict2 days agoWhite House Reportedly Worried About Russia’s Sudden Momentum Months After Biden Declared Putin ‘Already Lost’ War
-
Censorship Industrial Complex2 days agoJim Jordan Exposes Biden’s Censorship-Industrial Complex
-
Energy1 day agoPope Francis calls for ‘global financial charter’ at Vatican climate change conference
-
Business2 days agoESG Puppeteers