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.

FORD TO SCALE BACK PLANNED $3.5 BILLION ELECTRIC VEHICLE BATTERY PLANT IN MICHIGAN

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........

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