Dan McTeague from Canadians for Affordable Energy just posted a short video he filmed at the currently-shuttered Oakville, Ont., Ford plant. Workers at the plant were told that it would be closed for six-to-eight months for retooling, to enable it (with the help of $600 million in taxpayer dollars) to produce electric vehicles. Doing so would entitle the company to more of those sweet subsidies being poured on EV manufacturers by the Canadian federal government, and the Ontario provincial government. Except the plant has now been shuttered for two years, and with no apparent end in sight.
As McTeague explains, "the Ford Motor Company is losing $130,000 Canadian Dollars on every electric vehicle unit that it's selling." Which is to say, they're in no rush to start get the assembly line up and running again in Oakville. But they are happy to keep taking the subsidy money.
For McTeague, this is a perfect illustration of the entire EV illusion. And not everyone is in on the grift -- he mentions that Toyota has been very upfront about their contention that EVs will never account for more than 30 percent of the total market. But that hasn't stopped Justin Trudeau and Ontario premier Doug Ford from throwing truckloads of money at potential EV manufacturers, a play which is ultimately bad for workers, for taxpayers, and for drivers.
Give it a watch:
The post EVs: Take the Money and Run first appeared on The Pipeline.