There’s a lot of money at stake, at this point all what economists call sunk cost, but even more important for a politically dictated technology, there’s a lot of ego at at stake. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:
Here’s the problem with the battery powered devices being pushed on us as the mandatory replacement for vehicles:
See that business about mandatory.
Even if the mandates – which chiefly come in the form of regulations, a sneaky way to mandate something evasively – were to be repealed tomorrow, the car industry has already bought in.
Literally.
It is not merely a matter of feigning a kind of vapid belief in the merit of the Latest Thing. The car industry is an industry. It makes things, in other words. Complex things that require an enormous investment in physical things, such as tooling and assembly lines to make the things. As well as the things themselves. One does not simply draw a vehicle – or a battery-powered device – on a napkin, though that may the starting point insofar as how the end result might look. But to transform that drawing into a finished vehicle that moves – and that complies, with all the myriad regulations – takes years of careful planning and millions of dollars put toward making it happen.
It generally takes four years to develop a new vehicle. Thus, the vehicles that will be available four years from now are just now in the process of being fleshed out. And almost all of these are battery-powered devices, because the car industry has bought into the narrative – and the attending need to manufacture only that which they’ll be allowed to sell.
