Ford faces £100m bill for failing to sell enough electric cars
The American carmaker is the worst performing of the big brands in electric car sales in Britain, with only 6.8 per cent of its sales electric in the first 11 months of 2024
It is *consumers* who decide which car to buy. Pordicers *can not* compel consumer behaviour. But we’re fining producers for consumer behaviour?
Ignorant, arrogant, fuckwits.
Note this is the mirror image of the fossil fuel companies. They are not responsible for climate change. Because it is us consumers who desire to travel, keep homes toasty and eat hot food.
Any idiot could have seen that coming, and many of us did. *
What I’d like to see is the original proposal put up to government (where? The EU, the WEF, the UN?) and whether the non-co-operation of the consumer base was even imagined, never mind taken into account
* Yes, I did it on purpose.
Any little tax scam where the scum in goverment get some extra cash to waste and get to announce that they are doing good at the same time.
I have a BMW 1 series petrol. I purchased it new 8.5 years ago and it is still going strong, mainly because it only has about 39000 miles on the clock. The pandemic and WFH (now full time due to the employer no longer wanting to have to operate an office in the UK) means I drive less than 6000 miles a year. The car is fine. Fully paid off, not too bad to insure and service, works when I need it to.
The Volt heads keep on trying to convince me to sell it and get into serious debt to by an electric car. I am letting the side down from what I understand from their arguments and I am not doing my bit for the environment and the UKs reputation as a leader in the fight against climate change.
But we’re fining producers for consumer behaviour?
The fines will be passed on to the consumer, so this is the proles being punished for making the wrong choices.
Having said that, I would prefer consumers to buy 100% EVs as that will accelerate the collapse of the grid and the social unrest required to rid us of the demented net zero religion.
Sadly,I think you’re right. I used to think politicians were of average intelligence but devious, cunning, greedy bastards who always wanted to be the centre of attention.
But the Labour lot really are very stupid. I don’t know why but I suspect that having to believe 583 contradictory things at once doesn’t require the imagination and intellect I thought it did. Queers for Palestine? I thought that must need some deep insight into the affairs of Lord Alli, but it seems as though they’re just really stupid.
I was reading a post by Nick Drew at Capitalists@Work and wandered over to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4T9BLiQ5HA to see what the thoughts of those on the Left were currently. I was quite amused. The Indian lady who seemed to be chairing the “discussion” seemed to reduce everything to racism and how people like her were discriminated against. There were a few ideas about how The Fight had to be fought. Apart from that there were no thoughts on what type of society they were aiming for. A few sneers at their bogeymen on the right, condemning the riots sparked by the desire to deny asylum seekers refuge. And that was it. Just like the Labour government which doesn’t really know what it wants to do which is why we get these random unconnected strategies of which Net Zero is the prime example. They have no idea about any science relating to it or the effects of trying to achieve it, or how the resulting society will actually function. Extremely worrying…
“But the Labour lot really are very stupid.” True, but there’s plenty of blame to be shared with the Blair-lite Coalition and Conservative governments – especially for encouraging the continuance of the loonie energy policies introduced by Weird Ed.
And Parliament sets such bad examples so that, for instance, the SNP policies in Scotland are utterly daft too.
The other argument is that it’s the stupid, ignorant electorate who are to blame – it’s the drivel they spout in focus groups that results in these asinine policies.
Ford should simply say “Not paying”. Provoke a confronation. Let the Government cope with closing down all the Ford dealers, the redundancies, the lawsuits from customers, the broken contracts for service, guarantees, oh, my popcorn overfloweth.
While I despise the “Green” nonsense, the “incentive” from gov’t works – auto makers are forced to subsidize EVs enough to sell the required %. They then have to increase prices on real cars. The same BS has been going on for quite some time in the US with the CAFE requirements.
Automakers just have to figure out whether it’s better to pay the fines or subsidize/over-charge.
One other point – the gov’ts also like to do it this way because the costs are hidden from consumers, taxpayers & voters.
Again, not in favor of this BS, but this is the how & why, which I think does work quite well from their standpoint.
Looking at the visual disaster that Ford have come up with as the electric iteration of the iconic Capri marque I wish them every failure imaginable and then some.
It’s hard to decide which is worse, the promo photos of this bog-standard lump or the risible TV ad (where presumably the skiers have been well paid to keep a straight face).
What would happen if Ford said something.like, “We can’t really afford this fine so, to find the money, we’ll close the factory, putting thousands out of work, and sell the land to Angela Raynor to build her 1.5 million houses”?
SoT, I live in the south, but my home town, which I visit several times a year, is in the North East, some 300 miles away. During the last service on my 12 year old Hyundai, the sales rep tried to sell me an electric version. Nice looking car, with a not nice looking price. I told him of my visits North and suggested his EV be driven along with me, to see who would get their first. If it was the EV, I would buy one. He worked out the EV would need to be charged at least twice, while my 12 year old makes it on one tank full, with some left over. For some reason, he declined the offer. Funny that.
The Indian lady who seemed to be chairing the “discussion” seemed to reduce everything to racism and how people like her were discriminated against.
That’s just SOP for Indians who have been allowed into Western countries. Their political positions are:
* You’re racist
* Give me X,Y,Z
* MORE INDIANS NOW!
Also, while they’ve still to master modern sanitation in India, they’re convinced they’re better than you. Winston Churchill was right.
I once interviewed a Singaporean bloke (self-made millionaire, spawn of Lee Kuan Yew, calls himself Mr Toilet) who, convinced that better sanitation is the key to better 3rd World health, set up a charity installing toilets in Indian village houses. He found the villagers sold them or used them as storage pots and continued to shit on their doorsteps. Huntington was right.
If Ford is facing a £100 million bill the big winner may be Tesla. If they haven’t already done so Tesla could sell the “production credits” on a big bunch of its electric cars to Ford. Even if Tesla charged £95 million, it would still save Ford £5 million.
Another example of the fuckwits lack of any sort of plan for economic growth (from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy0n14ywzqpo):
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, the chancellor and business secretary have written to the UK’s main regulators asking them to come up with ideas for reform that could boost economic growth.
Will getting rid of the regulators, who impose stupid restrictions/regulation on the private sector that costs serious money to adhere to, be one of the suggestions I wonder?
And lo, the regulators replied: “Well, if we put ourselves out of work and fire all of our staff, growth will certainly follow.” And the turkeys voted for Christmas.
An American writes of his Bharat experiences:
When you are speaking with an Indian, you are not communicating. You are engaging in a choreographed dance where they are exclusively tasked with mirroring your moves, and leaving you to walk away thinking that your needs will be satisfied. And that is all that has happened. If you don’t know which follow-up questions to ask, you’ll have no idea that you’ve just been handled by an entity that understands how to “close,” but not how to deliver anything promised. The idea of the latter is never even part of the equation. Utterly alien minds to us.
One of Britain’s greatest crimes was teaching them to speak with that hackneyed, goobledygook accent, because it simply fries the brains of most Americans. It is scamouflage for the fact that they will lie, lie, lie as easily as you or I draw breath. It’s indescribable.
Remember Jumpshit, our tiny Indian PM?
it’s the drivel they spout in focus groups that results in these asinine policies.
Oh come now! You really think “focus groups” are selected from a representative portion of the public? A “focus group” will consist of a majority of people in favour of what you want. It is always politics based evidence that is required.
You really think this is just an Indian thing, Steve? Sorry to delusion you but dictum meum pactum is concept only practiced in a relatively small proportion of the Anglo-Saxon world. It doesn’t even apply in half of Europe. One does however notice that that’s the more economically successful half, over time.
“Tim the Coder
December 28, 2024 at 11:30 am
Ford should simply say “Not paying”.”
Tim’s right.
The car makers should just tell the Labour lot to fuck off and let the idiots pick the bones out of that.
The time and expense to bring a case against them would be huge, and in the meantime, Nissan, Toyota and the other lesser players like JLR should say, “Pursue this and we’re off.” Up stumps to somewhere like Romania, where they’d be welcomed with open arms and far cheaper labour rates.
Even the ruddy EU hasn’t gone down this particularly stupid quota and fifteen grand fine route and, as there isn’t a single car maker in the UK (including good old Morgan) that isn’t either part or wholly foreign owned, they’d have no compunction in leaving this sceptred isle. The fall-out in loss of income and rise in the unemployment numbers would be catastrophic for Starmer
BiS – Yes, it’s an Indian thing. (I work with retards)
Btw, I treat them like shit, and they love me for it.
It’s a mistake to trust Bharats or be nice to them, they’ll assume (probably correctly) that you’re a soft white pussy and you’ll never get any work out of them. But throw a bit of stick about, make em jump, and you can get some semblance of productive activity done for the sahib. They’re either at your feet or your throat. Anybody who tells you school bullying doesn’t work is a liar.
I have none of these problems with the black African or Eastern European guys who work for me. I also appreciate the black and Tibor guys for not being grovelling suckups.
BIS,
The big problem with focus groups is you only get the sort of people who want to spend their spare time going to focus groups to collect a fiver and have nothing better to do.
Which generally means the sort of people who are retired, unemployed, barely working.
Some hedge fund manager who can afford a big pile of coke and a couple of Russian whores is not going to spend his time after work at a community centre drinking bad coffee.
@WB
Why do you think they make the stipend a fiver?
I’d have to do the math, which means I’ll never know, but I wonder if Ford just screwed up their accounting a bit – if they should have dropped their EV prices substantially enough so that sales went up, saving them the 15,000 lb fine per “missing” EV sale.
IOW, they should have dropped EV prices enough so that they sold more and only “lost” 80 million pounds in unprofitable sales, not the 100 million pounds in fines.
I prefer TtC’s suggestion. Anything that accelerates the Net Zero collapse is fine by me. Win the war quickly, save lives. Curtis LeMay’s philosophy.
Bobby – listen to yourself tho.
Nobody can run a business in this environment, it’s mental. The government is out to fuck you every ways.
Given how notoriously unprofitable (Ford average net profit margin: 2.5%) the business already was, I’m surprised more carmakers haven’t just packed it in yet. They were barely turning a profit selling ICEs, and now/soon they’re supposed to compete with Chairman Xi’s bargain basement cheapo leccy cars that retail for about £6000. Why not just get out of the car building business altogether, just as we got out of the computer-building business 30 years ago? The consumer finance divisions of these companies are a lot more lucrative than the parts that make actual products.
(Underdiscussed aspect of EV’s, because they’re pretty much all the same driving experience, they are likely to commodify the car market somewhat. If you’re gonna drop £150k on an Aston Martin, you want the beautiful growling petrol engine to snap knicker elastic at X paces, etc. If all your choices are electric go karts, and they’re all pretty good actually, where’s the value in the traditionally upscale marques? The car is now just another consumer appliance, the crucial experience differentiators have dissolved. How much were jAGuar hoping to charge, again?)
At some point Atlas will shrug, I think. Probably sod off to the pub, get in a game of Aunt Sally.
“At some point Atlas will shrug, I think. Probably sod off to the pub, get in a game of Aunt Sally.”
I think that point is rapidly approaching, if we have not already passed it. Any business owner who has enough assets to retire will. Sell the business if they can, or sell the assets, especially if you’ve business premises where you can get planning permission to build more flats to house even more migrants. Why continue to slog your guts out dealing with all the sh*t the State bureaucracy can throw at you, while paying higher and higher taxes, and dealing with ‘I know my rights’ employees who act like they own the place (which they do in effect, they have far more rights than the business owner does)? Pull the plug, put your feet up and enjoy life. Lots of business owners have been continuing more out of habit than economic necessity, and I think that habit is going to take a hammering over the next few years.
Steve
December 28, 2024 at 7:25 pm
“Nobody can run a business in this environment, it’s mental. The government is out to fuck you every ways.”
Oh, I agree with that.
But we’re talking about Ford. Their BoDs is all-in on the woke crap. Instead of “maximize SH value”, they’ve adopted the “serve mankind” vision.
So it seems to me that they could have preserved their woke cred by being a bit more careful, all while only losing $80 million instead of $100 million. (Sorry, no pound symbol on my computer.)
To add: at the end of the accounting period, they could have saved millions by selling a bunch of EV’s for one dollar, just to get out of that fine category.
Esteban said:
“Automakers just have to figure out whether it’s better to pay the fines or subsidize/over-charge.”
They have to over-charge for non-electric cars either way – either to recoup the subsidy or the fine. The only question is whether it’s cheaper for them to subsidise electric cars or pay the fine.
“at the end of the accounting period, they could have saved millions by selling a bunch of EV’s for one dollar” And if they’d sold them to their own staff all the morons who believe the tale would repeat the story of the logic behind Henry Ford’s pay rises.
Any business owner who has enough assets to retire will. Sell the business if they can, or sell the assets.
Promble is, the government is also intent on stealing all your money when you sell up as well as all your money when you don’t sell up.