Your next new car will be old when you buy it
Jack Baruth
Perhaps you’ve heard that electric vehicle sales aren’t as high as the automakers and the government expected them to be. You might have also heard that EV inventories are out of control, with the average dealer sitting on over a hundred days’ worth of battery-powered stock, while many new internal combustion engine, or ICE, vehicles are impossible to get at any price. Fewer than 1 in 10 cars sold this year will be exclusively electric. This is despite lower prices at Tesla and a disturbing amount of taxpayer-funded EV subsidies.
There are many theories in the auto industry and its media to explain this slacking of EV demand, ranging from the merely fanciful to the outright deranged. But the simplest explanation is likely the best. Namely, there’s a limited number of customers for cars that cost more while offering less, and most of those customers already bought one.
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A significant improvement in the abilities of electric cars, or a significant decrease in their price, could go a long way towards addressing this situation. Unfortunately, there’s no feasible technological path to better performance, at least not in the next 10 years or so, since the current crop of electric cars maximizes the physical limits of the best existing battery technology and stuffs as many pounds of these batteries as possible into each car, increasing range but compromising handling and creating an unsustainable need for mining of battery minerals. And what could possibly be done about the cost when the government is already subsidizing manufacturers, throwing up to $7,500 of your money at every possible buyer with a pulse, and, nonetheless, Ford is set to lose $4.5 billion in 2023 selling EVs at the current price?
It seems obvious, therefore, that the next car most of us buy won’t be electric after all. The same probably goes for the one after that, which is good news for those of us whose idea of a perfect vacation doesn’t include sitting at charging stations for a couple of hours every day. Less obvious and less good, but no less true, is the following: The next couple of new cars most of us buy won’t really be new.
Don’t get me wrong. That showroom-fresh Honda, Ford, or BMW you buy in 2030 or afterward won’t have any miles on it, and it won’t have empty ketchup packets under the seats. But it will feel curiously … familiar, as though it’s basically a car from 2023 or even earlier, only with a bit of window dressing on it. That’s because that’s what it’s going to be. The development of “real” cars in this country has all but come to a standstill. My contacts at the Big Three automakers from my work as a car magazine reporter confirm that not only are all future ICE vehicle programs going on the back burner as of about two years ago but also that future layoffs will come almost exclusively from those programs. If you want to keep your job, you’d better be working on EVs.
Earlier this year, Renault CEO Luca de Meo stated, “Nobody is, you know, from scratch developing a new combustion engine in Europe. … All the money is going to electric or hydrogen technology.” Some readers may imagine any improvements to the good old gasoline engine have already been made, but that’s not true. Giving up on development work on the good old gasoline engine will cost us. The internal combustion engine, particularly when paired with a Toyota-style Synergy Drive hybrid system, has significantly improved its efficiency in just the last few years, with more gains possible if someone would just put in the effort. There’s more to be done in gasoline direct injection, combustion efficiency, and hybrid economy. Yet that work isn’t being done.
Somewhat ironically, one possible pathway to an efficient ICE future is about to debut in the form of a massive 5,000-pound pickup truck. The new Ramcharger from Stellantis has a conventional V-6, but it’s not connected to the wheels. Instead, it turns a generator, which charges a battery, which then turns the wheels via electric motors. This “series hybrid” approach allows the gas engine to run at maximum possible efficiency, much like the diesels in a modern locomotive, and it’s likely to set new standards for the modern truck economy. But there’s a catch: The “Pentastar” engine that’s doing the work in this application was developed 15 years ago, and for an entirely different set of tasks. Could series hybrids be even more efficient with an engine designed from scratch around that purpose? You betcha, and not by a small amount. But it’s not going to happen.
Don’t blame the manufacturers. They’re just now recovering from COVID-related production problems, only to find themselves facing a combination of a sagging middle-class economy and interest rates that significantly affect car payments. But the government mandates to develop and build a full line of EVs continue, most recently with a dubiously legal requirement from the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency that new car lines, on average, reach 58 miles per gallon within the decade. That $4.5 billion Ford lost chasing electric dreams? It had to come from somewhere, and the somewhere in question is ICE development and engineering.
In the next few years, the fallout will be obvious. If you want a new Chevy Camaro or Dodge Challenger, you’ll need to act fast because they’re both being discontinued with no replacement. For most vehicle lines, however, we will simply see a lack of new-generation products. It will be like the years immediately after World War II, where none of the automakers managed to introduce a genuinely new car because they’d spent the past half-decade building B-24 Liberators and Jeeps and whatnot. You’ll still be able to walk into a showroom and get a car. It just won’t differ from the car you could have gotten last year or the year before. ICE cars will be harder to get because the automakers are also decimating their production capacity in favor of new plants and lines that are EV only. Let’s hope you won’t need some sort of rationing coupon to place your order.
Expect the automakers to play along with the governmental EV fantasies until they are obviously, provably, impossible. States and the federal government are making few if any plans to generate the increased power supply they are mandating drivers will demand from the grid, much less to permit battery mineral mining on U.S. land or the sea floor. Reality, in the form of battery shortages or brownouts, will hit us like the proverbial hammer to the forehead, at which point the voters will revolt and everyone will be allowed to make a hurried switch back to ramping up production on decade-old ICE designs. This will have yet another unpleasant side effect: Chinese plants, unencumbered by labor and environmental oversight, will be able to get ICE capacity on line far faster than their Western counterparts. So your new 2032 or 2035 car won’t just be eerily similar to the one you had in 2022 but will also likely be made in China.
As tragedies go, this moronic EV development and production boondoggle isn’t exactly equal to the Dust Bowl migrations or the Great Depression. It is, however, almost certain to put a few more dents in our national character. Affordable personal transportation has been a part of the American dream since the Model T. That dream has been taken away from many people in the past few years and will be taken away from many more in the years to come. So, chances are that the worst part of buying decade-old designs out of showrooms in the future won’t be your disappointment at the performance or your resignation at the cost. It will be dealing with your odd, nagging, almost Soviet gratitude at being able to buy a car at all.
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Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.