Rising Cost Of European Energy Makes EV Battery Plants “Unfeasible”, VW Exec Says
We’ve already written this month about how the “tax break” incentive to buy an EV is starting to vaporize into thin air in places like Japan and the U.K.. Now, the irony continues, as rising costs of energy in Europe, helped along by “green” energy policies, are making industrial projects like battery cell factories “unfeasible”.
Volkswagen brand CEO Thomas Schaefer said this week that investments in German and EU projects will no longer make financial sense if “policy makers fail to control ballooning energy prices in the long-term”, according to the Times.
In a post on LinkedIn, Schaefer said: “Unless we manage to reduce energy prices in Germany and Europe quickly and reliably, investments in energy-intensive production or new battery cell factories in Germany and the EU will be practically unviable. The value creation in this area will take place elsewhere.”
Last week, French and German economy ministers proposed an outline for policy cooperation that Schaefer claims “falls short in crucial areas and does not address the envisaged priorities”, the report says.
“Outdated and bureaucratic state-aid rules” fail to focus enough on “the short-term ramp-up, scaling and industrialisation of production,” he said.
The report says that EU officials are focused on responding to President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which they say “violates World Trade Organisation rules and discriminates against non-US companies.”
Meanwhile, Volkswagen is in the process of putting 6 battery factories in operation across Europe by the year 2030, the report says. The company’s lead plant in Germany broke ground this July and already has a €3bn (R53bn) joint venture with Umicore in place for cathode material production.
Recall, just days ago, we reported that the UK was looking to raise more tax revenue from electric vehicles, shattering the years-long assumption that if you contributed to “helping the environment” by buying an EV, you’d be entitled to subsidies and tax credits.
Now Japan’s internal affairs ministry is reportedly weighing whether or not to raise taxes on electric vehicles in order to make up for a shortfall in income from taxes on traditional gas powered cars.
And so it’s turning out that the economics of an industry pivot set into motion almost solely due to government subsidization may not entirely make sense. Who would have figured?
0 Comments
Latest Hacked Sites
- Truth Finder - 8,159,573 breached accounts February 4, 2023In 2019, the public records search service TruthFinder suffered a data breach that later came to light in early 2023. The data included over 8M unique customer email addresses, names, phone numbers and passwords stored as scrypt hashes.
- Instant Checkmate - 11,943,887 breached accounts February 4, 2023In 2019, the public records search service Instant Checkmate suffered a data breach that later came to light in early 2023. The data included almost 12M unique customer email addresses, names, phone numbers and passwords stored as scrypt hashes.
- School District 42 - 18,850 breached accounts February 2, 2023In January 2023, Pitt Meadows School District 42 in British Columbia suffered a data breach. The incident exposed the names and email addresses of approximately 19k students and staff which were consequently redistributed on a popular hacking forum.
- Planet Ice - 240,488 breached accounts January 31, 2023In January 2023, the UK-based ice skating rink booking service Planet Ice suffered a data breach. The incident exposed the personal data of 240k people including email and physical addresses, phone numbers, genders, dates of birth and passwords stored as MD5 hashes. The data also included the names, genders and dates of birth of children […]
- KomplettFritid - 139,401 breached accounts January 23, 2023In January 2023, the online Norwegian store KomplettFritid was reported as having had a data breach dating back to February 2021. The incident exposed 140k customer records including physical, email and IP addresses, names, phone numbers and passwords. Most passwords were stored as bcrypt hashes with a small number appearing in plain text.
- Autotrader - 20,032 breached accounts January 23, 2023In January 2023, 1.4M records from the Autotrader online vehicle marketplace appeared on a popular hacking forum. Autotrader stated that the "data in question relates to aged listing data that was generally publicly available on our site at the time and open to automated collection methods". The data contained 20k unique email addresses alongside physical […]
- Zurich - 756,737 breached accounts January 22, 2023In January 2023, the Japanese arm of Zurich insurance suffered a data breach that exposed 2.6M customer records with over 756k unique email addresses. The data was subsequently posted to a popular hacking forum and also included names, genders, dates of birth and details of insured vehicles. The data was provided to HIBP by a […]
- DoorDash - 367,476 breached accounts January 7, 2023In August 2022, the food ordering and delivery service DoorDash disclosed a data breach that impacted a portion of their customers. DoorDash attributed the breach to an unnamed "third-party vendor" they stated was the victim of a phishing campaign. The incident exposed 367k unique personal email addresses alongside names, post codes and partial card data, […]
- SlideTeam - 1,464,271 breached accounts January 7, 2023In April 2021, the "world’s largest collection of pre-designed presentation slides" SlideTeam had 1.4M records breached and later published to a popular hacking forum the following year. Allegedly sourced from a compromised Magento instance, the data included names, email addresses and passwords stored as salted hashes.
- Twitter (200M) - 211,524,284 breached accounts January 5, 2023In early 2023, over 200M records scraped from Twitter appeared on a popular hacking forum. The data was obtained sometime in 2021 by abusing an API that enabled email addresses to be resolved to Twitter profiles. The subsequent results were then composed into a corpus of data containing email addresses alongside public Twitter profile information […]
NY Times
- Inside the Tent Camp Housing Thousands of Migrant Children – ‘No Place for a Child’
Migrant children and families are sleeping shoulder to shoulder on mats in a Texas border facility designed for 250 people that is now holding more than 4,100, according to some of the first photographs to emerge from the crowded camp that has become a focal point of the Biden administration’s struggles to absorb thousands of […]
- Atl Suspect’s Fixation on Sex Is Familiar Thorn for Evangelicals
“Sex addiction” is not an established psychiatric diagnosis, and there is a debate in the mental health community about how to define and treat compulsive sexual behavior. “There’s no evidence-based treatment for sex addiction,” said Joshua Grubbs, an assistant professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University and a clinical psychologist. Evangelical sex addiction treatment […]
- Tom Cotton Mocks Social Justice Warriors at New York Times in CPAC Speech
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) on Friday mocked “social justice warriors” at the New York Times and their “meltdown” this summer over his op-ed in the paper calling for troops to restore order during the rioting at the time. Speaking on the first day of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, Cotton recalled how hundreds […]
- Congress Clears 2-Day Spending Extension to Finalize Stimulus Deal
Negotiators worked into Friday night to put the finishing touches on key details of the stimulus compromise, continuing negotiations on how long unemployment benefits should last, how to distribute federal relief for small businesses and the extension of a federal eviction moratorium. The plan was expected to revive the Paycheck Protection Program, a loan program […]
- SACRAMENTO Unemployment Scam Using Inmates Names Costing California Hundreds of Millions
SACRAMENTO — A rash of fraudulent pandemic unemployment claims filed under the names of jail and prison inmates, including more than 100 on death row, has bilked California out of hundreds of millions of dollars, a law enforcement task force said Tuesday. In a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom, the task force, led by district […]
- Politics, Science and the Remarkable Race for a Corona Vaccine
WASHINGTON — The call was tense, the message discouraging. Moncef Slaoui, the head of the Trump administration’s effort to quickly produce a vaccine for the coronavirus, was on the phone at 6 p.m. on Aug. 25 to tell the upstart biotech firm Moderna that it had to slow the final stage of testing its vaccine […]
- Newsom Do as I Say, Not as I Dine Coronavirus Message
SAN FRANCISCO — It was an intimate meal in a wood-paneled, private dining room in one of California’s most exclusive restaurants. No one around the table wore masks, not the lobbyists, not even the governor. [Sign up for California Today, our daily newsletter from the Golden State.] Photos that surfaced this week of a dinner […]
Washington Post
- Donald Trump Shreds ‘Fake News Media’ in Series of Videos: ‘Not Reporting with Credibility Has Its Consequences’
Former President Donald Trump shredded the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC as “fake news media” in a series of videos shared to his Truth Social account and his campaign’s war room Twitter account on Wednesday. “The fake news media like CNN, MSDNC – which is sometimes referred to as MSNBC –the […]
- Media Ignore Physical Attack on Republican Gen. Don Bolduc
The establishment media have ignored the physical attack against Republican New Hampshire candidate Gen. Don Bolduc. The three top establishment newspapers, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, all failed to report the physical attack on Gen. Bolduc that occurred moments before Wednesday’s debate with Democrat Maggie Hassan (D-NH). The media’s decision […]
- Sex Offender Thanks Ketanji Brown Jackson for Three-Month Prison Sentence: ‘She Knew This Was Going to Hold Me Back … So She Didn’t Really Want to Add on to That’
The registered sex offender who was given three months in prison by Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, nominated for the Supreme Court by President Joe Biden, is speaking out and seemingly thanking the judge for her lenient sentence in his case. In 2013, Jackson sentenced then-19-year-old Wesley Hawkins to three months in prison, three months of […]
- 15 Media Personalities Claimed Hunter’s Laptop Emails Were Likely Russian Propaganda Before New York Times Admitted
Fifteen establishment media personalities claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop emails were likely Russian propaganda before the New York Times admitted it Wednesday. After nearly two years of dismissing Hunter’s tantalizing emails uncovered before the 2020 presidential election, the Times admitted the laptop was authentic, in direct contradiction of many in the Democrat-allied media. The media personalities seemingly went […]
- Covington Teen Nicholas Sandmann Settles $275 Million Defamation Lawsuit with NBC
Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann announced Friday that he settled a $275 million defamation lawsuit against NBC. Neither party publicized the terms of the settlement. However, Sandmann asked for $275 million in damages in his lawsuit against NBC Universal and MSNBC. “At this time I would like to release that NBC and I […]
- Washington Post Columnist Calls on CNN to Correct Its Dossier Reporting — After WaPo Corrects Its Own
A Washington Post columnist criticized CNN for not correcting its reporting that the dossier put together by Fusion GPS and ex-British spy Christopher Steele — which claimed the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia — was “corroborated.” The paper’s media critic, Erik Wemple, wrote Friday that CNN hosts and reporters had long-claimed the Steele dossier had […]
- Washington Post ‘Forced to Admit They Lied’ After Pretending ‘F*ck Joe Biden’ Chant Was ‘Let’s Go, Brandon’
The Washington Post, the leftist legacy media outlet whose motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” admitted to publishing fake news about the public’s discontent with floundering President Joe Biden. During a September speech by Donald Trump Jr. in Georgia, the crowd broke into a “F*ck Joe Biden” chant at the prompting of the former president’s […]
