Audi hits brakes on EV rollout as enthusiasm wanes
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
Audi will hit the brakes on its rollout of electric car models as consumer enthusiasm wanes in the face of high prices compared to petrol models.
Gernot Döllner, the boss of the Volkswagen-owned brand, said that he wants to avoid flooding dealerships and factories with the vehicles as sales slow.
“The advantage of EVs (electric vehicles) is becoming visible to consumers step by step,” Mr Döllner told Bloomberg News.
Official forecasts for electric car take-up in the UK were slashed by almost half last month. Sales of new battery-powered cars were expected to grow steadily until they accounted for 67pc of the market by 2027, under a prediction issued in March.
But that figure has now been revised down to just 38pc by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which said the take-up of EVs has been slowing.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/12/18/audi-hits-brakes-ev-electric-cars-rollout/
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
There are a lot of good comments about why sales of EVs are falling. The public is beginning to understand the reasons (cost, charging, insurance, fires, range etc).
“The DISadvantage of EVs (electric vehicles) is becoming visible to consumers step by step,” Mr Döllner told Bloomberg News”
Fixed it for you!
Oh well edited DW.
“The advantage of EVs (electric vehicles) is becoming visible to consumers step by step”
You have to admire the optimism. The truth would appear to be that consumers are realising that battery cars are a crap idea and in the UK it is only the business purchasers that are propping up the sales. That might be changing as they find out how few people want to buy the ex-lease vehicles and their resale value craters. In Australia Hertz have dropped battery cars and Sixt is dropping Tesla, with a core reason being high maintenance costs giving a lie to the claim that with fewer moving parts they will be cheaper. I suspect the OBR – not an especially competent body – 38% is over-optimistic in a falling market.
Had Gernot Döllner been British I could have put his statement down to the British sense of ironic humour, as he’s not it can only be optimism.
What credibility can we put on the OBR when they predict 67% and then later drop it to 38%. These (the OBR) are the brain boxes supposedly guiding the great and the good in our government! YCMIU!
“in the UK it is only the business purchasers that are propping up the sales”
Forgive my ignorance, but does that translate as “it is only tax-payer subsidies to business purchasers that are propping up the sales”?
From the article “It comes as electric car sales fell by the most on record last month following Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s climbdown on banning petrol models. ”
But no mention of the punitive taxes by proxy being imposed by the government on car manufacturers if they fail to make their government imposed
tractor EV quotas.Just like with gas boilers.
Cowardly government policies, stealth price rises. The free market will win in the end, no government can buck it forever. After the ERM fiasco, do the Tories still need to be taught that lesson?
Bollocks! Missed the closing after tractor!
You also got ‘buck’ wrong.
Whilst chatting to a fellow EV sceptic yesterday he mentioned that apparently, used car dealers now conduct battery capacity tests on EVs. The results have a significant downward effect on used values. Who would buy an EV if depreciation is far worse than ICE vehicles. Can anyone shed light on this?
It’s just that PVs and DVs are better in every way than EVs. In 10 years we will wonder why we bothered with EVs.
“Official forecasts for electric car take-up in the UK were slashed by almost half last month. Sales of new battery-powered cars were expected to grow steadily until they accounted for 67pc of the market by 2027, under a prediction issued in March.
But that figure has now been revised down to just 38pc by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which said the take-up of EVs has been slowing. ”
Meanwhile the MPs have voted for the escalator for ‘fines’ on makers for not meeting a target that is well above this…. um???
I expect that manufacturers will just load the fines they are forced to pay for selling too many ICE cars onto the price of these. So new ICE cars will end up as expensive as, or more,expensive than, new EVs. Whether this persuades more people to buy EVs will be interesting to see.
Overall though, the effect of this idiotic price of Govt legislation will be to depress ALL new car sales and could lead to the collapse of car manufacturing in Britain.
‘Audi will hit the brakes on its rollout of electric car models as consumer enthusiasm wanes in the face of high prices compared to petrol models.’
That’s new. Wait . . . no, it’s not! Mustoe is full of …..
Gamecock’s opinion is that the market is saturated. EVs are niche vehicles with limited appeal. Those interested and affluent enough to buy them have bought them. The man with a Tesla is out of the EV market.
Note that the market has worked (well, by definition, it has to work). People who want EVs have them. Government cheerleading with pronouncements of massive market penetration, and government action to force it, are dystopian.
The rich have bought theirs, and regretting it, and we, the more careful, are learning not to take on debt or spend precious savings to share their frustration and misery.
False. EV owners are quite pleased with them.
Oh dear Gamecock,
Ask my son, his Renault had been worked on three times in a year and is now in the garage until March at least. Most of my friends, half of whom have electric cars of one flavour or another, will not but another. Recharging is a nightmare on long runs. service costs and time are very high, and tyre wear and cost is really bad.
Most hate all the complicated buttons to press.
Yes, but they only use them for local trips. They have an ICE for long distance journeys.
My friends have Teslas, not the low market crap.
The Tesla reliability is very poor with many recalls. I read 2 million are to be recalled in the US to replace dangerous software.
What’s your point, Phillip? They knew their limitations when they bought them.
The ‘dangerous software’ doesn’t affect reliability.
I dare say most owners will not go out of their way to get the update, as they aren’t so foolish as to let the car drive itself.
You don’t know how foolish most wealthy Americans are – look who they vote for!
My guess is that most new EV car sales in the UK rely on tax breaks. “Level the playing field” on taxes and new EV car sales would plummet even further.
No doubt.
The prosperous buyers have no qualms about getting other people’s money to help them out.
“Thou shalt not steal” is only a suggestion, superseded by “Saving the planet.”
I suspect almost all current new EV’s are company car tax breaks. I know at the accountants my spouse works at all the partners are getting Tesla’s because of the outrageous tax breaks. The benefit in kind tax on an EV is just 2%.
I have a business colleague who is buying a new EV. His motive is because he can get it as a company car on his business 98% tax free.
He’s still keeping his old VW Golf ICE though.
Agreed TS. But I think GC is in the USA. I wonder if tax breaks are better there.
Yes, Harry, in USA. EVs are generally private purchases, and almost exclusively Teslas.
The key point I wish to make is that a $7,000 subsidy on a $60,000 car will have an effect, but the market here would still be big without the subsidy.
‘Gernot Döllner, the boss of the Volkswagen-owned brand, said that he wants to avoid flooding dealerships and factories with the vehicles as sales slow.’
Meanwhile, the state of South Carolina agreed legislatively to back the building of a new VW factory (which is currently held up by permitting). I told my state senator friend that site preparation should be for an industrial site, not specifically for VW. Secondly, don’t do anything that could piss off BMW, who already has a large presence in Greer.
I don’t think he paid much attention to me. All the rah! rah! EVs! Jobs! got to him. Projections of up to 200,000 units a year will never materialize.
“ “The advantage of EVs (electric vehicles) is becoming visible to consumers step by step,” Mr Döllner told Bloomberg News.”
Somehow ‘dis’ fell off the front of ‘advantage’.
The cash-strapped German government just ditched EV subsidies ‘after paying out some 10 billion euros since 2016, the Economics Ministry said’.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/germany-end-e-vehicle-subsidy-programme-2023-12-16/
Good luck chasing car buyers for the future missing billions.
The whole subsidies fraud stinks. A friend of a friend is making a fortune out of the “subsidies” being thrown at insulation and installing heat pumps. No private company throws out money with so little oversite as does Central and Local Government.
So all those virtue signallers out there only wanna “thave the pwannet” when they get subsidised! How shallow and yet how not surprising.
I now think of the 90K people who were in Dubai. How many of them travelled their on their own dollar? Cut off the source of funding ( their hands in your and my pocket) and the climatistas will melt away as if they never existed ….stopping off to see if they can get their snouts into the troff of one of the other subsidised absurd left wing motivated industries like diversity and equality for ex.
Troff; is that the American spelling for Trough ?
I was just looking. Entering Troff on the interweb produces lots of pictures of pigs. Think it must be the space between the two countries which is not a trough.
Talking to street furniture about the climate is a thing in Dundee?
Opening gambit….
“Hello; I think that the whole of the global warming thing is bollox, a scam. What do you think?”
Maybe it’s an adjunct to a drugs policy?
OMG … it’s real…
https://www.dundeecity.gov.uk/news/article?article_ref=4602
already archived in Iceland…
https://archive.is/9rEFS
Ross Clark says heat pumps are going the same wasy as EVs. See: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/19/one-by-one-the-heat-pump-myths-have-crumbled/
All government subsidised schemes end up a disaster. But that is always the result of socialists in action with your money.
I didn’t realise our present government were socialists! Gosh.
Well they are certainly not conservative, and they have left-wing policies (e.g. 5-year plans, which haven’t gone down well in communist countries).
Well both parties’ top people are educated in Oxford so by definition their learning is left biased. Their joint record since WE2 is one of consistent failure.
Quill doesn’t get out much.
You would be surprised!
They just look “left” to get voted back in.
I think this sums it up. https://img.patriotpost.us/01HHYBKZA3QF2GQPQHCJJJ7ETN.jpeg?w=1024&dpr=2&q=50
Market forces, Adam Smith’s Invisible hand, are returning to the EV marketplace. Face it, EVs are expensive, unreliable Veblen goods, and range anxiety is for credulous consumers only. Without mandates no one save Hollywood starlets and pretentious millionaires would buy one.
I’ve told you a million times not to exaggerate.
Expensive? Yes.
Unreliable? No. Teslas run and run.
Veblen goods? Absolutely! One of the best examples.
Range anxiety? Not really. Owners’ practices – local use only – insure range is never an issue.
Only “Hollywood starlets and pretentious millionaires?” Many Americans can afford them, and would still have bought them. Subsidies contribute to increased sales, but the market is not wholly dependent on them.
Pity about the fires.
A “million times” really, who is exaggerating now? Pedantic, yes. Your much beloved Teslas are the most subsidized vehicles on the Planet. Xi has sent Elon to the U.S. to destroy what is left of the Big Three, and comrade Elon is doing just that. One day Xi will nationalize Tesla and most likely take Tweeter as part of the deal, a conciliation prize of sorts. Don’t drive too far,as you might be sorry if there is an ICE car from the advance crew of some Green Warrior blocking spaces for the photo shoot.
Veblen goods, good to see some economics terms on here. The demand curve is essential to understand economics. Governments imposing price caps, then subsidies and now penalties just screw up the market place.
Giffen goods ( Bread) are going to be second hand ICE vehicles 12 years old or more. My Ford Focus registered in 2009 cost me £6000 in 2013, it is still worth about £5000 and I am going to run it into the ground. (PS I am 75)
“Pity about the fires.”
[citation needed]
Good luck! EV vehicle fires are rare. But they all make the front page!
Those “rare” EV fires have made it unlawful to charge one inside a parking structure, or within ten meters of an inhabited structure. They must be “fiery, but mostly peaceful” conflagrations. And once they “rarely” get started, ain’t nobody gonna put them out. Ask any first responder with EV fire experience.
Show me the data, billyd!
This has become tedious and boring. Read a news paper. Happy Christmas,
BD
As expected, you don’t have any data. Blowing smoke.
https://www.autoweek.com/news/a38225037/how-much-you-should-worry-about-ev-fires/
https://www.motortrend.com/features/you-are-wrong-about-ev-fires/?slide=9
https://carbuzz.com/features/electric-cars-explode-myths-facts-ev-fires
This only says that 117000 US cars catch fire every year.
How many of those are EVs – a quarter? They don’t know.
What I do know is that an EV fire must be left to burn out. Too dangerous to extinguish with liquids (400+ volts) and giving off dangerous fumes that kill. UK fire crews will not attempt to rescue people inside – it is too dangerous.
Consequently insurance companies have typically doubled their insurance on EV vehicles and garages must keep damaged EVs ten metres away from other vehicles so few will take them.
Equally, to ease the insurance cost for owners of EVs slightly the companies are increasing the cost of IC car insurance, my cars went up by about a third this year despite my never having claimed for over fifty years!
You want some data? Gather your own. Grab a box of sweet rolls and head to the break room at your local fire department. Ask the professional smoke eaters what they have been trained to do regarding EV battery fires–stay back and keep onlookers away till it burns itself out. Go to a block party, neighbor’s BBQ, a wedding reception–any large gathering will do. Find an insurance guy and ask them about the rate EVs are totaled from minor road accidents. NO ONE wants anything to do with the liability associated with a damaged EV battery. The huge, expensive block of cells, mined by child slave labor that was just an anchor about the neck of the range-anxious owners has been rendered a ticking time bomb by an accident that no one wants their name on. Happy Christmas,
Wm Richard.
Richard,
I think you have made exactly the point I was making. I got my data as you said: from two different fire crews and from three insurance companies and two garages. So why are you patronising me, that is not nice.
Glad you agree with me.
We both miss one other thing: the firs crews not only keep people back but up wind out of the fumes.
Me think thou doth protest too loudly. This is still tedious and boring.
Out,
Wm R
Sorry Billy, no, I must not comment.
“Ask the professional smoke eaters what they have been trained to do regarding EV battery fires–stay back and keep onlookers away till it burns itself out.”
Ask them how many actual EV fires they have dealt with. Double-ought zero.
Related:
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2023/12/20/half-of-buick-dealers-take-buyouts-to-avoid-having-to-sell-gms-electric-cars/