Mike's Minute: What are we going to do about EVs?

I've got an EV car question for you. 

But first, the latest EV news. 

Nissan are laying off thousands of workers, Toyota says the California regulations are unworkable, Trump has arrived, tariffs are an issue and he is anti-EV, and in Britain they are discounting EVs by a third because of rules that make manufacturers sell a certain number of EVs, and if you don’t sell that many you are fined. 

Sales here are dire. Sales of petrol cars for the past month are up. Last month was the second best month of the year, apart from EVs, which sold next to none. 

So, to the question - what are they going to do? 

Under normal market circumstances a product lives and dies on demand. 

Demands can waver and prices are adjusted accordingly, models are updated, and marketing is refreshed to fizz up demand or awareness. But ultimately, if something doesn’t have a customer base it dies. 

EVs don’t appear to have a customer base. They did, to a degree, when Government's subsidised them, but that I suspect simply gave early adopters a cheaper ride. 

It's not like you can't get a good deal now, but even with a cheap price they still don’t sell. People, in bulk, simply don’t want them. 

What's made this unique is the manufacturers have been forced into producing something, I suspect, they knew wouldn’t work. 

They would have been way quicker to bail on a failed product if they hadn't had Government's lecturing them, hectoring them, and changing the laws and forcing them into a business that looks like it's going nowhere fast. 

So the question is, just what needs to be done to either increase sales or kill off the whole idea and come back another day? 

You can't force people into something they don’t want and the lack of sales show this to be true. 

Are they going to ban regular cars? No. 

Are they going to subsidise them forever? No. 

Are jobs going to be lost, bottom lines going to bleed red and factories close because of all this? Yes. 

So, who blinks first? The ideologues, or the realists? 

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