Electric Cars: A Desperate Situation Understood By Few
The push for electric vehicles (EVs) is gaining momentum worldwide, but is Europe's rapid transition a recipe for success or a gamble with millions of jobs on the line?
In this video I examine the risk of job losses in the auto industry, the massive infrastructure upgrades needed, and the potential dominance of Chinese electric car manufacturers.
Watch the video, or if you prefer, read the transcript below.
A Desperate Situation Understood By Few - Video Transcript
This video will discuss a desperate situation and why it has come about.
The change to electric vehicles has become a gamble with very high stakes.
If the transformation fails, European industry is likely to suffer badly. Millions of employees in the automotive companies and their suppliers will lose their jobs through the decision to ban the sales of electric cars from 2035.
And automotive companies have to change very rapidly to 100% electric vehicles. They need to find new jobs, and new jobs need to be created in order to maintain a high level of employment.
This can be achieved through the rapid expansion of electromobility systems that will be needed, but no plans have been made for this. And automotive companies have invested billions in the development of electric vehicles.
They need to rapidly increase the sales of all types of electric vehicles to make profits as they are will be forced to stop producing their cash cows from 2035 in the case of cars, and diesel trucks and buses will be rapidly phased out starting in 2030, 2035, and continuing through 2040 and onwards.
The decisions made by the EU have created a very precarious situation for the European economy.
The future of European automotive companies is threatened as they are forced to abandon their existing very profitable product lines and go 100% for electric vehicles. This is a new market, and they need to build entirely new supply chains. And at present, there is low profitability in this, and many companies make losses on their electric vehicles.
Through the change, there will be a big loss of jobs without any plans for the creation of new jobs by supporting the expansion of growth markets. So millions of people may remain unemployed for a long time through the change and awaiting measures to stimulate investments in power and charging infrastructure, this will become a very dire situation for the European economy.
The problem that makes this a desperate situation is that very few people understand the seriousness.
The politicians who made the decision do not seem to understand that they have put Europe's future at peril, and the managers of automotive companies, utilities, and other electric mobility players have expertise in their present markets, but history shows us that many leading companies have lost their markets through technology changes.
IBM lost their leading computers to Dell, HP, and Microsoft through the change to laptops and personal computers.
Ericsson and Nokia were driven out of the mobile phone market when smartphones took over, and the market was taken over by Apple and Samsung.
And many more examples of this exist throughout business history, and it doesn't seem as if the leaders in the automotive industry have considered this opportunity and taken enough height in order to prepare for this change.
Most people seem to underestimate the complexity and risk of technology shifts. Electric vehicles and the change to electric vehicles means the need to build up new supply chains.
Mechanical engineering companies need to be replaced by batteries, electric motors, and increasing numbers of electronic suppliers. It will take decades to build up and fine tune technologies and solutions, and it will take a long time to both establish and crank up the efficiency of suppliers in these new supply chains.
Automotive companies are still newcomers to electric vehicle development and manufacturing, and they don't have much experience of managing the new supply chains for electric vehicles.
And the bigger volumes and longer experience of Tesla and Chinese manufacturers make a lot of difference in this young industry.
There is also a risk that Tesla fails. Despite their success so far, Tesla is a high risk venture. Over the past year, Tesla has lost big share of their sales and profitability, and they are struggling to avoid bankruptcy. If Tesla fails, the Chinese have no European or American competitor with a strong track record and profitability in electric vehicles.
Millions of jobs are likely to be lost to China, and a number of strong European and American companies may lose their market share or a large part of their market share or they may even go bankrupt.
As I've said, few realize the seriousness of the situation. It is complex to understand the possible pitfalls of the change to electric vehicles.
How can we explain to decision makers that 700 TWh of power will be needed to drive all the 245 million cars of the EU on electricity.
How can we explain that transportation vehicles will require another 600 TWhs?
And do they even know that the total amount of electricity produced every year in the EU is 2800 TWhs. This means that 40/45% of present power generation will be needed to fuel electric vehicles.
Can we explain the power generated by a nuclear reactor amounts to 10 TWhs per year and that it would require power generated by 120, 130 nuclear reactors to drive all vehicles in Europe on electricity.
Will they understand that even more reactors will be needed to generate the power for other purposes that are planned such as hydrogen fueled industries and so on, and can they understand the difference between the amount of power needed and the need for generation capacity?
My recent book, “The Severe Economic and Social Consequences of the Change to Electric Vehicles”, explains the consequences of the transition. (View on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3UQCf0t )
I am sharing my knowledge about the transformations electric vehicles through this YouTube channel, if you found this video interesting press like and subscribe to the channel.