A new chapter in the Electric Vehicle folly -
potential collapse of the EV project and a future return to liquid fuels.
China is a 97% monopoly holder of access to the rare Earth metals used in production of Electric Vehicle batteries and for the Green industry. That should be worrying for the world's motor manufacturers and people who might buy electric vehicles.
The ability for China to 'turn off' and immobilise electric vehicles touted in the press recently is not new technology, this facility has been inside vehicle software for years.
Some few years ago, a tractor that was ploughing a field in Britain stopped, the owner rang the dealer who said it had been remotely turned off because the owner hadn't made a payment. So this is a reality.
Imagine a theoretical scenario with the danger for the British motor manufacturers for example, that China 'dumps' a massive amount of cheap electric vehicles onto the Western markets, cheaper than the resident manufacturers can make them for in the first place.
Such a move could make these other manufacturers stop producing vehicles and essentially go out of business because they could not compete. Or they would have to go back to recommencing petrol and diesel production to survive.
This move would allow China then to set the price of their own produced EV vehicles for sale in the West at whatever price they choose, you would have no other purchasing choice except not to buy and go back to walking.
As such, then China could with effectively near complete market control, could choose as a geopolitical policy, not to produce electric vehicles and sit on the access to the required minerals so no one else can either. Or sell the minerals at a very high price if it chose to.
Thus, the West would be forced to again to start production of Petrol and Diesel vehicles from a point zero if it could start from the ashes of the EV folly.
If the western motor industry collapses totally, China could then become virtually one of the only providers of motor vehicles and the result would be that the electric vehicle project could be eternally doomed, the street chargers then being little more than monuments to the stupidity of the whole project.
China could decide that it would only produce liquid fuel vehicles and as such the EV market could almost collapse. In effect it could control most of our transport by default.
No one seems to have woken up to this potential problem.
No one seems to have seen that the early technology of the EV is dangerous to pursue as a sole alternative to other forms.
The EV policy is being presided over by people who often of not have the technical ability to understand the great steps needed to drive alternatively.
It is easy to grab headlines by making bold statements of intent, but these are often at the expense of the technology to do so not being a proper solution that is ready to go.
