Electric Vehicle Tax Credit Rules Create ‘Chaos for Consumers’ – The New York Times

By Lawrence Ulrich

April 20, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

6 MIN READ

“Designed to accelerate the shift to electric cars among other climate goals, the Inflation Reduction Act has in practice made buying such vehicles a lot more complicated.

In August, the law ruled out the full tax credit of $7,500 for electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids assembled outside North America. That may make it harder for consumers to take the financial or psychological leap to buy a battery-powered car.

The Treasury Department further tightened those rules this week by requiring that a certain percentage of the components and minerals in car batteries are sourced from the United States or in countries that are its trade allies — numbers that will increase over time.

Just 11 electric cars from four automakers — Tesla, General Motors, Ford Motor and Volkswagen — now qualify for the full tax credit; several others can qualify for a partial $3,750 credit. The list is expected to grow as more automakers reconfigure their supply chains.”

In China, a Big Auto Show Returns to a Country That Has Gone Electric – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/business/shanghai-auto-show-electric-vehicles.html

By Keith Bradsher

Reporting from Shanghai

April 19, 2023, 5:22 a.m. ET

4 MIN READ

“A hall showing off electric vehicles made by Nio, XPeng Motors, Zeekr and dozens of other Chinese companies was mobbed with visitors. An area nearby full of gasoline-powered cars by foreign brands barely got a second look by anyone.

At the same event, Volkswagen, which vies with Toyota to be the world’s biggest seller of cars with combustion engines, issued a bold forecast: Within two years, half the cars sold in China, the world’s largest automobile market, will be electric, up from only 6 percent in 2020.

The theme at the Shanghai auto show this week was clear. Electric cars are here to stay, and Chinese automakers are leading the field.

Silvio Pietro Angori, the chief executive and managing director of Pininfarina of Italy, a nearly century-old car design business, said the global industry is not going back.”

How Electrifying Everything Became a Key Climate Solution – The New York Times

By Nadja Popovich and Brad PlumerApril 14, 2023

“How electrification became a major tool for fighting climate change.

The United States still gets most of its energy by setting millions of tiny fires everywhere. Cars, trucks, homes and factories all burn fossil fuels in countless engines, furnaces and boilers, creating pollution that heats the planet.

To tackle climate change, those machines will need to stop polluting. And the best way to do that, experts increasingly say, is to replace them with electric versions — cars, heating systems and factories that run on clean sources of electricity like wind, solar or nuclear power.

But electrifying almost everything is a formidable task.”

E.P.A. Lays Out Rules to Turbocharge Sales of Electric Cars and Trucks – Coral Davenport – The New York Times

By Coral Davenport

April 12, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

5 MIN READ

“WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Wednesday will propose the nation’s most ambitious climate regulations to date, two plans designed to ensure two-thirds of new passenger cars and a quarter of new heavy trucks sold in the United States are all-electric by 2032.

If the two rules are enacted as proposed, they would put the world’s largest economy on track to slash its planet-warming emissions at the pace that scientists say is required of all nations in order to avert the most devastating impacts of climate change.

The new rules would require nothing short of a revolution in the U.S. auto industry. Last year, all-electric vehicles were just 5.8 percent of new car sales in the United States and fewer than 2 percent of new heavy trucks sold.

“By proposing the most ambitious pollution standards ever for cars and trucks, we are delivering on the Biden-Harris administration’s promise to protect people and the planet, securing critical reductions in dangerous air and climate pollution and ensuring significant economic benefits like lower fuel and maintenance costs for families,” the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, Michael S. Regan, said in a statement.”

E.P.A Lab Helps Plan the Fastest Road to an EV Future – Coral Davenport – The New York Times

By Coral Davenport

Coral Davenport spent a week in Michigan at a government laboratory in Ann Arbor and at the Ford manufacturing complex and the United Autoworkers Local 600, both in Dearborn.

Published April 7, 2023 Updated April 8, 2023,

7 MIN READ

“Inside a secretive government laboratory, behind a tall fence and armed guards, a team of engineers has been dissecting the innards of the newest all-electric vehicles with a singular goal: Rewrite tailpipe pollution rules to speed up the nation’s transition to electric cars.

On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to propose ambitious greenhouse gas emission standards for cars that are so stringent, they’re designed to ensure that two-thirds of the new vehicles sold in the United States are all-electric by 2032, up from just 5.8 percent today. And the rules could put the nation on track to end sales of new gasoline-powered cars as soon as 2035.

Transportation is the largest source of the greenhouse gases generated by the United States and scientists say that slashing pollution from tailpipes — fast — is essential to averting the most catastrophic impacts of global warming.

But that would also require overcoming myriad technical and logistical challenges: electric vehicles are still too expensive for most consumers, in part because of snarled global supply chains for the materials to build them. The cars also need a national network of millions of easy-to-use fast-charging stations.”

Ezra Dyer | Ford Is Leaving Tesla in the Dust – The New York Times

By Ezra Dyer

Mr. Dyer is a columnist for Car and Driver magazine.

“Tesla had me convinced, for a while, that it was a cool company.

It made cars that performed animatronic holiday shows using their lights and power-operated doors. It came up with dog mode (a climate control system that stays running for dogs in a parked car), a GPS-linked air suspension that remembers where the speed bumps are and raises the car automatically, and “fart mode” (where the car makes fart sounds).

And, fundamentally, its cars had no competition. If you wanted an electric car that could go more than 250 miles between charges, Tesla was your only choice for the better part of a decade. The company’s C.E.O., Elon Musk, came across as goofy and eccentric: You could build great cars and name each model such that the lineup spells “SEXY.”

Tesla Cuts Prices Sharply as It Moves to Bolster Demand – The New York Times

By Neal E. Boudette

Jan. 13, 2023

4 MIN READ

“Tesla has cut prices on most of its electric cars in the United States and Europe by as much as 20 percent in a bid to spur slackening demand.

The automaker faces increasingly stiff competition in the global market for electric vehicles. It also must contend with rising interest rates in the United States, which have increased the cost of financing vehicle purchases.

“I think Tesla recognizes they are not the only game in town and the Detroit companies are jumping into the deep end with E.V.s,” said Dan Ives, a Wedbush analyst. “I think the price cuts mean Tesla is going to rip the Band-Aid off and try to go on the offensive.”

Tesla stock fell sharply in early trading Friday after the price cuts were reported, but ended the day less than 1 percent lower. The share price has fallen roughly 70 percent since November 2021.”

David Wallace-Wells | Electric Vehicles Keep Defying Almost Everyone’s Predictions – The New York Times

By David Wallace-Wells  Opinion Writer

“It is striking that in the same year that Tesla’s stock price dropped by about two-thirds, destroying more than $700 billion in market value, the global market for electric vehicles — which for so long the company seemed almost to embody — actually boomed.

Boom may not even adequately communicate what happened. Around the world, E.V. sales were projected to have grown 60 percent in 2022, according to a BloombergNEF report prepared ahead of the 2022 U.N. climate conference COP27, bringing total sales over 10 million. There are now almost 30 million electric vehicles on the road in total, up from just 10 million at the end of 2020. E.V. market share has also tripled since 2020.

The pandemic years can feel a bit like a vacuum, but there are almost three times as many E.V.s on the world’s roads now as there were when Covid vaccines were first approved, and what looked not that long ago like a climate pipe dream is now undeniably underway: a genuine transition away from fossil-fueled transportation. This week, the Biden administration released a blueprint toward a net zero transportation sector by 2050. It’s an ambitious goal, especially for such a car-intoxicated culture as ours. But it’s also one that, thanks to trends elsewhere in the world, is beginning to seem more and more plausible, at least on the E.V. front.

In Norway, electric vehicles now represent four out of every five new cars sold; the figure was just one in five as recently as 2016. In Germany, more than 55 percent of new cars registered in December were electric or hybrid. In China, where more electric vehicles are sold than everywhere else in the world combined, the rise is perhaps even more dramatic: from 3.5 percent of the market at the beginning of 2020 to 20.3 percent at the beginning of 2022. And growing, of course: Nearly twice as many electric vehicles were sold last year in China as in the year before. The country also exported $3.2 billion worth of E.V.s last November alone, more than double the exports of the previous November. Its largest single manufacturer, BYD, has surpassed Tesla for global market share — so perhaps it should not be so surprising that Tesla’s stock is dimming while the global outlook is so sunny.”

David LIndsay: This is good news. Here is the most popular comment:

Richard Blaine Not NYC Jan. 11

We rode to work in electric cars for 25 years. . They weren’t expensive at all. They didn’t require batteries. We didn’t have to worry about parking or repairs. We had a professional chauffeur, too. . That’s the beauty of an electrified catenary, the miracle of steel wheels on steel rails, and the proper provision of public transit. . Electric automobiles are probably not the solution to Climate Change, although they may be part of it. . The bigger part of the solution is reliable, frequent, electrified public transit.

6 Replies506 Recommended

Bill Saporito | Will Southwest’s Debacle Finally Spur Congress to Act? – The New York Times

By Bill Saporito

Mr. Saporito is an editor at large at Inc.

“It’s the holiday season, and terrible weather is causing airlines to make a cascade of cancellations across the country. One airline — its jets and crews caught in the wrong places, its data and phone systems hopelessly inadequate — suffers a catastrophic meltdown, stranding thousands of angry passengers and employees for days as it struggles to knit the system back together.

Southwest? No, JetBlue, in 2007, in what became known in the industry as the Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

EPA Tightens Rules on Pollution From Vans, Buses and Trucks – The New York Times

By Lisa FriedmanDec. 20, 2022, 9:45 a.m. ET4 MIN READWASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Tuesday strengthened limits on smog-forming pollution from buses, delivery vans, tractor-trailers and other trucks, the first time in more than 20 years that tailpipe standards have been tightened for heavy-duty vehicles.The new rule from the Environmental Protection Agency is designed to cut nitrogen oxide from the vehicles by 48 percent by 2045. Nitrogen dioxide is a poisonous gas that has been linked to cardiovascular problems and respiratory ailments like asthma. The rule will require manufacturers to cut the pollutant from their vehicles starting with the model year 2027.