It would be good for the US and the world if I were wrong and you were right, but go see what the LLMs predict when you ask them. Gas in some places in some states is already at $7 or higher from time to time, I was really genuinely talking about national average. But you have to feed in all the context: remind it that the Straits were first closed on March 2nd and haven’t really opened up, and then ask it to consider comparable oil shocks.

I’m saying the US is more car dependent now than in the 70s. Roads infrastructure has been developed more fully, and public transit infrastructure has been damaged, looking across the country as a whole. Just take a look at a picture of an American city in the 70s compared to today: massive suburbs, freeways everywhere, giant parking lots, lack of sidewalks, retail pushed out.

SPR = strategic petroleum reserve. The yikes is everywhere.
https://x.com/JavierBlas/statu...
https://tradingeconomics.com/u...

I don’t want to be immodest, but I live on a road where the average house price is way above £1m and literally no-one on this road has a summer and winter car. Nearby in the very poshest roads in Hampstead there are houses worth £10m or more, sometimes a lot more, and people still don’t do that. They may have a weekend fun car, eg a Lambo or a McLaren, they may have a fleet of cars for the household, but there’s no such thing as winter cars here. My kids were schoolfriends with the kids of at least four billionaires and countless other super-rich people, and went to their houses from time to time, so I am really pretty confident on this. It’s just not a thing.

I dunno, I think Renault, Kia, Hyundai and BMW are all doing pretty well at weathering the storm of the Chinese OEMs.

It's going to get substantially higher than $4. I think it could end up pushing 7 bucks. Historically, the US has tolerated recessions more lightly than it has gas above 5 bucks. So this is a really really big deal, not least because demand destruction through mode shifting is much less tenable than in the 70s due to greater car dependency, and the SPR is already extensively drawn down ahead of winter. A whacking great recession may well be on the way.

You love to take on this persona of someone able to step back and see the bigger picture, but you are so wildly parochial and US-focused and ignorant about the rest of the world. Low cost EVs that are as cheap on a like-for-like basis as ICE cars are common across almost all non-NA markets. Here in the UK, we have the Citroën ë-C3, Renault 5, BYD Dolphin, Hyundai Inster, Dacia Spring, Kia EV2, GWM Ora 03, BYD, Fiat 500e, Vauxhall Frontera, Leapmotor T03, Cupra Raval, Nissan Micra, BYD Atto, Skoda Epiq, and we're about to get the Renault Twingo and VW id.Polo and a bunch more Chinese models. I'm sure my list isn't comprehensive, either. This might be hard for US OEMs to replicate (although Stellantis owns several of these brands), but it's not hard in principle and it certainly doesn't cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

For this kind of use case, best is an LFP or sodium battery stored at 80% of charge. But this is completely unimaginable from the UK, keeping a summer and a winter car.

I hear you on all that. I need no convincing that European governments are, on average, doing a better job of public policy than North American governments. And Northern Canada is always going to be a challenge for EVs because it’s remote, so charging infra has to be amortised across a small user base. The classic way to solve that problem is through publicly owned infra, but as you pointed out

Absolutely. The actions of a doddering venal and stupid paedophile rapist who knows nothing about anything but thinks he knows everything about everything.

This is just a new version of Akerlof’s famous lemons. Information asymmetry has always been a bitch in the used car market. But I know noone did that with my son’s Renault Zoe because it does 0 to 60 in 13 seconds

Remember, ICE vehicles can have been used for towing beyond the capacity or fluids not replaced properly leading to transmission failures. The seller knows if they towed a boat every weekend, the buyer does not. Or in Canada, the buyer knows if they did lots of short cold weather trips that screwed up the engine internals, and the seller does not.

In reality, used EVs suffer from a moderate pricing uncertainty problem based on not being able to be sure how often a battery has been rapid charged or know what effect that has truly had on long term degradation. But the data shows that batteries are holding up much better than expectations, not worse.

This is just a difference between the UK and Canadian car markets. Finance is cheap in the UK and you won’t pay more per month for electric than ICE, and in many circumstances, you’ll pay much less. I’m talking about like-for-like comparisons.

Sure, but it’s pretty clear that was a toe-in-the-water moment, and that both governments want to find a path that allows expansion in a way that serves their interests. Might it be shut down or never allowed to grow further? Sure! But Carney is looking to expand, not contract, global trading links in the face of weakening US-Canadian relations.

Worth bearing in mind also that Danish people can do modal shifts to public transport, walking, cycling etc to cut costs in a way that most Americans can’t, and Danes drive about 30 miles a day vs 40 miles a day in the US as well. So while gas is cheaper in the US than Denmark, it’s much less “negotiable”

I see what you’re saying but this is a platform shift, not a market share threat. You can’t fast follow a platform shift, you have to invest strategically and in good time. It’s Kodak or BlackBerry or Nokia, not Ford vs Toyota. The investment is in the global supply chain as much as anything: fast followers don’t get access to the cell manufacturing capacity, motors, etc, especially when vertical integration and fast innovation cycles is how the Chinese OEMs are operating. And engineers working on electric motors etc aren’t going to wait around for a decade at Ford doing research, they’re going to jump ship.
I think you’re accurately describing the plausible and quite clever sounding arguments that Ford et al are making internally. But they’re post hoc rationalisations of priors, in my view.

Clearly the lessons they took from that were about using protectionism to stave off the future and Chapter 11 to avoid market forces

and back to business as usual

If by “people”, you mean “some Americans”, I’m sure you’re right. But this is patently not true in other countries, where all of what you said just reads really weirdly. There’s no meaningful price tag premium, in either the new or used markets. No-one ever queues in the UK to use an EV charger, the average utilisation rate for a public charger is only 15%, so there’s demonstrably tons of spare capacity, and the growth in chargers is keeping pace with the growth in EVs. To drain your battery down to 3% every other day implies driving an average of 150 miles a day. The UK average is 19 miles a day, the Danish average is 29 miles a day, and the US is about 40. The numbers of drivers whose typical day involves 150+ miles of driving in the UK is absolutely miniscule, like 1 in 2000. For the US, NHTS data suggest the 95th percentile is 30k miles per year, so hitting 55k miles per year means you’re in the top 0.1 to 0.2% of drivers. This is just not an issue. More than half of US drivers would be fine with a weekly charge, more than 85% would be fine with twice a week, and more than 99% would be fine with three times a week. In the UK, it’s more than 90% who’d be fine with a weekly charge, more than 98% who’d be fine with twice a week, and more than 99.9%(!) who’d be fine with three times a week. Obviously, there would always be weeks when you’d need more charges and weeks when you’d need fewer, this is an average. But the data is clear and the modeling is pretty straightforward.