Automotive
The Harsh Realities of Electric Vehicles in Canada
From EnergyNow.ca
By Lorne Gunter
When it comes to electric vehicles (EVs), the Trudeau government and Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault are putting the policy cart before the technology horse.
If last week’s extreme cold temperatures over most of the country taught us anything, it’s that EVs just aren’t practical (yet) for a country this big and this cold.
The federal Liberals may be willing to risk hundreds of billions of your tax dollars and mine for manufacturing subsidies, purchase subsidies and EV infrastructure to try to force a market for electrics into existence, but Canadians are just not ready to get rid of their internal combustion engines (ICEs). And with good reason.
I heard from a reader in northern Manitoba. He has a Ford Lightning (the fully electric version of the F-150 pickup). When the temperature fell to -40C last week, his truck’s range dropped by half after driving it just 18 kms. He was forced to abandon his work-related trip so he could return home before the charge ran out and he found himself stranded quite literally in the middle of nowhere without heat in the cab.
Another reader, this one from Edmonton, found that not only was his range severely reduced by the cold, but charging time was doubled. His wait at a public fast-charger was two hours instead of one because he had to keep the heat on in his Tesla.
Many charging stations across the country have also been reported to stop working in the extreme cold.
Since this is a country that experiences extreme cold (below -25C) most winters, that makes an EV an unacceptable risk, or at the very least a horrible inconvenience.
Also this week, the highly respected testing magazine, Consumer Reports, said that when temperatures are only as cold as +7C, EVs lose about 25% of their range compared to temperatures of +15C and a third when compared to temps of +25C.
Ranges, of course, are much further diminished when outside temperatures fall below -20C.
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault says the upcoming Electric Vehicle Availability Standard will encourage automakers to make more battery-powered cars and trucks available in Canada. Automakers will have the next 12 years to phase out combustion engine cars, trucks and SUVs with a requirement to gradually increase the proportion of electric models they offer for sale each year. Dec. 19, 2023
Additionally, Consumer Reports (CR) found that “short trips in the cold with frequent stops and the need to reheat the cabin after a parking pause saps 50% of the range.” That means EVs may be impractical in Canada even for urban commuters or suburban families.
Late last year, CR also concluded EVs are 73% less reliable than gasoline vehicles. As well, they were more expensive to maintain and repair. And when the costs of electricity and home chargers are included, EVs are at least as expensive as gasoline vehicles to refuel.
That puts the lie to Guilbeault’s claim (made in December when announcing his mandate that all new vehicles be EVs by 2035) that while EVs are more expensive to buy, once consumers drive them off the lot, they become much more affordable than gasoline or diesel vehicles.
Not only are EVs more expensive to buy and maintain, because of their weight, they chew through tires about 40% faster. They are more expensive to insure because they cost so much more to repair if they are involved in an accident. They depreciate faster than ICEs. And their batteries lose up to half of their life in four or five years, even if they are fully charged.
All of this explains why car-rental giant, Hertz, announced earlier this month that it was selling its EV fleet – 20,000 cars. They are just too expensive.
Electric vehicles may not be that good for the environment, either.
Many components are, of course, manufactured in China (or by Chinese companies operating elsewhere) using electricity from coal-fired power plants. And this week, Blacklock’s Reporter revealed the federal Fisheries department is reviewing Northvolt, the Swedish battery maker building a heavily-subsidized plant in Quebec, for potential harm to fisheries, wetlands and streams.
The Liberals’ EV mandate is a very, very expensive farce that will likely produce few, if any, environmental benefits.
Automotive
Bad ideology makes Canada’s EV investment a bad idea
It doesn’t bode well for our country that our economic security rests on tariff exceptions to be negotiated by Liberal politicians who have spent the majority of Trump’s public life calling him a “threat to liberal democracy” and his supporters racists and fascists. Their hostility doesn’t lend itself to fruitful diplomacy. In any event, Trump’s EV rollback and aggressive tariffs will spell disaster for the Canadian EV sector.
What does Donald Trump’s resounding win in the recent U.S. election mean for Canada? Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to have been much thought about the answer to this question in Ottawa, because the vast majority of our political and pundit class expected his opponent to be victorious. Suddenly they’re all having to process this unwelcome intrusion of reality into their narrow mental picture.
Well, what does it mean?
It is early days, and it will take some time to sift through the various policy commitments of the incoming Trump Administration to unpack the Canadian angle. But one thing we do know is that a Trump presidency will be no friend to the electric vehicle industry.
A Harris administration would have been. But, Trump spent much of his campaign slamming EV subsidies and mandates, pledging at the Republican National Convention in July that he will “end the electric vehicle mandate on day one.”
This line was so effective, especially in must-win Michigan, with its hundreds of thousands of autoworkers, that Kamala Harris was forced to assure everyone who listened that the U.S. has no EV mandate, and that she has no intention of introducing one.
Of course, this wasn’t strictly true.
First, the Biden Administration, of which Harris was a part, issued an Executive Order with the explicit goal of a “50% Electric Vehicle Sales Share” by 2030. The Biden-Harris Administration (to use their own formulation) instructed their Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to introduce increasingly stringent tailpipe emission regulations on cars and light trucks with an eye towards pushing automakers to manufacture and sell more electric and hybrid vehicles.
Their EPA also issued a waiver which allows California to enact auto emissions regulations that are tougher than the federal government’s, which functions as a kind of back-door EV mandate nationally. After all, auto companies aren’t going to manufacture one set of vehicles for California, the most populous state, and another for the rest of the country.
And as for intentions, though the Harris camp consistently held that her prior policy positions shouldn’t be held against her, it’s hard to forget that as senator she’d co-sponsored the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act, which would have mandated that all new vehicles sold in the U.S. be “zero emission” by 2040. During her failed 2020 presidential campaign, Harris accelerated that proposed timeline, saying that the auto market should be all-electric by 2035.
In other words, she seemed pretty fond of the EV policies which Justin Trudeau and Steven Guilbeault have foisted upon Canada.
For Trump, all of these policies can be filed under “green new scam” climate policies, which stifle American resource development and endanger national prosperity. Now that he’s retaken the White House, it is expected that he will issue his own executive orders to the EPA, rescinding Biden’s tailpipe instructions and scrapping their waiver for California. And though he will be hindered somewhat by Congress, he’s likely to do everything in his power to roll back the EV subsidies contained in the (terribly named) Inflation Reduction Act and lobby for changes limiting which EVs qualify for tax credits, and how much.
All of this will be devastating for the EV industry, which is utterly reliant on the carrots and sticks of subsidies and mandates. And it’s particularly bad news for the Trudeau government (and Doug Ford’s government in Ontario), which have gone all-in on EVs, investing billions of taxpayer dollars to convince automakers to build their EVs and batteries here.
Remember that “vehicles are the second largest Canadian export by value, at $51 billion in 2023 of which 93% was exported to the U.S.,” according to the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association, and “Auto is Ontario’s top export at 28.9% of all exports (2023).”
Canada’s EV subsidies were pitched as an “investment” in an evolving auto market, but that assumes that those pre-existing lines of trade will remain essentially unchanged. If American EV demand collapses, or significantly contracts without mandates or tax incentives, we’ll be up the river without a paddle.
And that will be true, even if the U.S. EV market proves more resilient than I expect it to. That is because of Trump’s commitment to “Making America Great Again” by boosting American manufacturing and the jobs it provides. He campaigned on a blanket tariff of 10 percent on all foreign imports, with no exceptions mentioned. This would have a massive impact on Canada, since the U.S. is our largest trading partner.
Though Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland have been saying to everyone who will listen how excited they are to work with the Trump Administration again, and “Canada will be fine,” it doesn’t bode well for our country that our economic security rests on tariff exceptions to be negotiated by Liberal politicians who have spent the majority of Trump’s public life calling him a “threat to liberal democracy” and his supporters racists and fascists. Their hostility doesn’t lend itself to fruitful diplomacy.
In any event, Trump’s EV rollback and aggressive tariffs will spell disaster for the Canadian EV sector.
The optimism that existed under the Biden administration that Canada could significantly increase its export capacity to the USA is going down the drain. The hope that “Canada could reestablish its export sector as a key driver of growth by positioning itself as a leader in electric vehicle and battery manufacturing, along with other areas in cleantech,” in the words of an RBC report, is swiftly fading. It seems more likely now that Canada will be left holding the bag on a dying industry in which we’re invested heavily.
The Trudeau Liberals’ aggressive push, driven by ideology and not market forces, to force Electric Vehicles on everyone is already backfiring on the Canadian taxpayer. Pierre Poilievre must take note — EV mandates and subsidies are bad for our country, and as Trump has demonstrated, they’re not a winning policy. He should act accordingly.
Automotive
Major Automaker Exec Flatly Says Liberals’ EV ‘Mandates’ Are ‘Impossible’ To Meet
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Toyota’s North American Chief Operating Officer (COO) Jack Hollis criticized U.S. policies promoting electric vehicle adoption (EV) on Friday, according to Bloomberg.
The Toyota COO said that electric vehicle policies are “de facto mandates” that are not in sync with consumer demand, according to Bloomberg. Hollis also said that EV mandates such as those in California are impossible to meet, according to CNBC.
“The whole EV ecosystem is ahead of the consumer,” Hollis told reporters Friday, “It’s not in alignment with consumers. It’s just not.”
The Biden-Harris administration has introduced various EV-related policies as part of President Joe Biden’s climate agenda, including introducing a tailpipe emissions rule in March that would require about 67% of all light-duty vehicles sold after 2032 to be EVs or hybrids. Biden has been leading a push to build half a million public EV chargers nationwide by 2030, that has so far been met with various slowdowns.
Various American automakers have backpedaled on EV goals despite the current administration funneling billions of dollars in subsidies as part of its EV agenda. The California Air Resources Board’s “Advanced Clean Cars II” regulations require that 35% of 2026 model-year vehicles be zero-emission.
“I have not seen a forecast by anyone … government or private, anywhere that has told us that that number is achievable. At this point, it looks impossible,” Hollis said of the zero-emission regulations. “Demand isn’t there. It’s going to limit a customer’s choice of the vehicles they want.”
Many automakers have experienced issues with EV sales, including used EV models experiencing drastic price cuts due to slackening consumer demand. Ford Motor Company announced in October that it lost an additional $1.2 billion on EVs in the third quarter and announced in September that it would offer free EV chargers and home installations to incentivize customers.
Toyota did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Flickr/Ivan Radic)
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