“Despite the optimists telling us how well EVs are selling and that the charging and cost issues will be quickly resolved, the industry struggles.  The math doesn’t work, and consumers are concluding hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) better meet their driving needs.  Auto executives are wondering whether their betting on the EV transition, even with mandates, is putting them on the road to bankruptcy.”

“The math doesn’t work,” Mark Fields, former Ford Motor CEO, told Joe Kernen of CNBC early last week.  Until the industry solves charging and cost issues, EV sales will continue to underperform.  The bottom line for Fields is that “the government [Biden administration] will have to back off” its policies mandating two-thirds of new vehicle sales being EVs by 2030.  Absent such an adjustment, emissions will worsen, and the EV transition will lag. …

Ed. Note: A classic Candid Camera episode is where a car without a motor makes a downhill stop at a service station for a checkup. The attendants are stunned to find the car is engineless. Fiction and funnies turned into fact with Trevor Milton, whose hydrogen/fuel cell/electric truck company, Nikola Corp., pulled this stunt with a rolling truck in a promotional video. Kenneth Maize has the story in “Trevor Milton, E-truck Nikola Corp. Founder, Headed to Prison?“

“It was mostly smoke and mirrors. The company had acquired “gliders,” truck platforms without engines. In one notorious case highlighted by Hindenburg, Nikola in 2018 posted a YouTube video of a battery-powered Nikola cab and trailer … moving rapidly along a desert highway. Hindenburg said the truck wasn’t moving under its own power.

Ed. Note: The repost of the first post at MasterResource (from 12/26/2007) marks the 16th anniversary of the free market energy blog site. In this period, MR has posted more than 2,700 posts from more than 300 authors.

“… our blog name is inspired by the late Julian Simon (1932–1998). He labeled energy the master resource because it is the resource needed to bring other resources from a state of nature to one of human usefulness. Simon also used the term the ultimate resource to describe human ingenuity.”

We are just getting started here, but some of us veterans of the energy debate from a private property, free-market perspective have teamed together to offer our thoughts on late breaking energy items. When I read my newspapers each day, I have some thoughts that I wish I could share with folks from a historical, worldview perspective.…

“Energy is not for conserving; it is for unleashing to serve us, to make our lives better, to allow us to realize our dreams and to reach for the stars, those bright lights that pierce the darkness of the night.”

Since early men ignited the first fires in caves, the unleashing of energy for light, heat, cooking, and every human need has been the essence and symbol of what it is to be human. The Greeks saw Prometheus vanquishing the darkness with the gift of fire to men. The Romans kept an eternal flame burning in the Temple of Vesta. Our deepest thoughts and insights are described as sparks of fire in our minds. A symbol of death is a fading flame; Poet Dylan Thomas urged us to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”…