In a market car rolling down the ramp – tenth month of a minus 20% decline in March – and where even second-hand sales are descending, the electric car is doing it like a watt.
We can even speak of a boom with a 40% increase in the first quarter of 2022 and last month a market share of 13.5% that is now close to that of diesel, which falls to 14.3%.
Should we be happy with the rise of the electric car?
Let’s say yes, but you also have to keep in mind that it will be stock for lack of sufficient production.
+ €6,190 for the Tesla, + €1,300 for the spring
Because the watture (I really need to find another nickname for it) is greedy for these exotic materials and components running out. To the continuous rise in the prices of lithium and rare metals in recent years, to the shortage of semiconductors since the Covid, we now have to add the embargo on Russian metals that affects the prices of aluminum, magnesium, nickel, copper and even iron ore.
Not to mention the runaway prices of gas and electricity: It takes almost twice as much energy to make an electric one as a thermal one.
In fact, everything combines to increase prices, already the main obstacle to purchase. In one year, the price does not include bonus of the Tesla Model 3 “basic” rose by €6,190, that of the Dacia Spring has just grown by €1,300 and if sales have not slackened for all that, it will undoubtedly soon be the offer that will be missing.
Let’s face it: the goal of a 100% electric car market within 13 years, if ever realistic, has become a pipe dream. Unless we get massive supplies from China, production won’t be able to meet demand, which is very real. And even urgent for the big daily rollers who ruin the liter for 2 euros.
Jam for the pigs…
Like the fuels expensive, very expensive, for a long time, probably forever or even more, as land use planning will not be changed in five or ten years, has a huge fringe of the rural or suburban population, who like it or not , an essential need of the electric car.
What’s geeky is that the tens of thousands being sold (20,000 in March!) aren’t bought by those who would make the best use of them. But for the most part, a Norman salesman confided it to me recently, by retired ecologists, wealthy townspeople, senior executives, trendy people (should say) or who wanted to appear that way. Few country people and not many big wheelers.
In other words, jam for the pigs.
Because if it’s not doing great mileage, an electric car has no environmental interest: it will only repay the carbon debt emitted during manufacture very late in the non-CO2 emissions. And will not allow large profits afterwards.
And no social interest if it does not, within a limited budget, replace hectoliters of fuel of € 2 per liter with electricity of 17 cents per kWh.
Given the autonomy and limitations of charging, this intensive use is only possible on long daily trips and charging at home. Not by going from Puteaux to Levallois along the quays of the Seine and then to Deauville, sometimes on weekends, past the supercharger of the motorway station.
Distributing these cars in the countryside to these heavy morning and evening drivers, who all have 220 V in the garage, would have another social interest: not to spend billions of euros on a public charging network.
I draw a yellow vest for you?
Do you see the sign? Shortage of electric cars on the one hand, and on the other a huge mass of motorists who now have an urgent need. If the word imperious means nothing to you, I can draw you a yellow vest.
We must assimilate this new deal: in addition to the ecological emergency, today the electric car is responding to a social emergency.
How was the latest social (and health) emergency handled, when it was necessary to distribute the first vaccines against Covid, which are also rare? Not for the highest bidder, not for €300 per dose, but for those who needed it most: the old first, then the youngest.
This is why the current method of subsidizing the electric car is absurd: 6,000 euros bonus for everyone then in the best case 5,000 € (but more often 2,500 €) provided that a car is sent that the son or sister could have serve law.
That is, for a reasonable Peugeot e-208, €22,950 at best “responsible” and certainly €25,450.
Forfeit the bonus in automatic watering mode
In the populations considered here, who has such an amount to invest in a car? Who can get credit for such an amount? How long to pay it off in fuel economy? For a Dacia Spring we drop to a maximum of € 7,690,- and, moreover, these are the only electric ones, with a few Zoe, which we see in the countryside. The Spring, super small car, only 4 places. And who would get behind the wheel on vacation or even a weekend?
In short, the billions from the CAP will, for the most part, have been used to subsidize the purchase of electric cars for those who do not make good use of them. And to help finance the purchase of thermals that emit no less C02 than those they replace, only slightly less NOx and particles, which is not of great importance in rural areas…
If we want to promote the use of the electric car, a use that only makes sense if it is intensive, then it is only with this population – who really need it and cannot afford it – that you should do your best .
And for that left the bonuses in automatic watering mode, the same absurdity that by blindly reducing 18 cents per liter of petrol saved me €3.60 on the last fill-up of my motorcycle. In three full (1,200 km) I won a pack of cigarettes.
Necessity or good conscience?
Before you call me a communist, think about this: why spend hundreds of millions of dollars in public money to subsidize the purchase of these cars (nearly 3 billion bonuses since 2013 for electric cars alone) if they don’t drive enough for the slightest environmental virtue ? Why help those who buy them out of good environmental conscience and who will never write off their additional financial and environmental costs, depreciation that they also buffer?
All this to confirm that, in the same way as the conversion bonus, the electric bonus should now be reserved for users who need to be identified, whose only criteria are high daily mileage with no alternative public transport, and a modest or average income. And for this bonus to be effective, and because it will be better targeted, it will have to be doubled or even tripled.
