From Mark Kane, Inside Electrical Vehicles, Q1 2020

The EVs in Q1 were only slightly affected by COVID-19 and the sales were at all-time record levels.

The preliminary sales data for Western Europe* indicates that the plug-in electric car sales were in the first quarter higher than ever before.

The all-electric car registrations improved some 56% year-over-year to a record of 126,000 (4.6% market share). In March alone, it was a near-record at 50,000 and 6.5% market share.

The total number of plug-in car registrations (including PHEVs) in Q1 exceeds 200,000.

According to industry analyst Matthias Schmidt, the top automotive groups by all-electric car sales in Q1 in Western Europe were:

Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance: close to 30,000
Volkswagen Group
Tesla
PSA Group
Hyundai-Kia
BMW Group
Daimler
SAIC/GM
Jaguar Land Rover
Honda

* 17 markets: EU Member States prior to the 2004 enlargement plus EFTA markets (Norway and Switzerland) and UK

Triton Reveals 8-Seat Model H Electric SUV With 700-Mile Range

View more EVs for sale on MYEV.com

https://insideevs.com/news/410428/plugins-q1-2020-western-europe-sales/amp/

By Dana Drugmand, DeSmog Blog, March 13, 2020

As this week the U.S. Senate tries to advance stalled bipartisan energy legislation, the American Energy Alliance (AEA) last week announced its latest initiative opposing any tax credit extension for electric vehicles (EV) in that bill.

Through a series of digital ads, the group, which receives a substantial share of its donations from an oil refinery trade group, is calling on Senate Republicans to squash a proposed amendment expanding the number of vehicles eligible for the credit.

That amendment, introduced by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), would raise the per-manufacturer cap on electric vehicles eligible for tax credit from 200,000 to 600,000 and would extend a tax credit for fuel-cell vehicles through 2024, among other clean energy incentives.

Wyden proposed the amendment as a part of the American Energy Innovation Act (AEIA), a package of around 50 bills aimed at spurring research and development for technologies like energy storage, carbon capture and storage, and advanced nuclear. Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) introduced the AEIA legislative package on February 27.

In a March 3 statement announcing his amendment, Wyden referenced the uneven playing field between clean energy and fossil fuels — which continue to receive billions in government subsidies each year. “We’re facing a climate emergency, but Big Oil continues to be showered with tax breaks while incentives for clean energy are held up again and again. My amendment would help reduce carbon emissions, lower electricity bills for American families, and advance us down the path toward a clean energy future,” Wyden said.

He acknowledged his amendment would likely not pass muster in the Republican-controlled Senate. However, the American Energy Alliance immediately pushed back with digital ads and an accompanying press release on March 5.

https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/13/oil-american-energy-alliance-electric-vehicle-tax-credit-senate-bill?utm_source=DeSmog%20Weekly%20Newsletter

John Michael Greer talks a lot about this, how progress is the central myth of our civilization. I call this emerging religion androtheism, the believe that Man is God (and no, I don’t mean Humanity–this is a very male trip).

Technophilia is a key tenet of this religion; when Kurzweil talking about inevitable and speeding progress he is talking about nothing but technology (not, say, social progress). Regardless of whether he’s right that it’s developing as fast as he claims, the bigger question is in his assumption that all tech development is good (he never directly says so because he considers it a bedrock assumption).

But the reality is that life for the average human has gotten worse, made more superficial, more anxious, more alienated and atomised. Life for the average mammal, meanwhile, has CEASED, as much of the population of most other species has been replaced by ever expanding human flesh, and that of our livestock.

Quite a lot of the lovely new electronic technology developed in the past decade is used to track and spy on and manipulate virtually everyone — motivated, perhaps, by the reality that there are too many humans, the impossibility of doing anything about it within the current “democratic” paradigm, and the reality that the increasing wealth of the 1% and especially the .0001% is reaching an end-point, where explosion can be expected.

Perhaps ours is the first civilizations whose elite, in the collpase stage, can prevent uprisings because despite the huge population, they already know who all the leaders are and what their plans are and can simply send drones around to kill them, and to crush any flame of revolt before it can grow.

Meanwhile we still have disease, and plague grows more likely; we still have hunger, and major famines are almost certainly inevitable, especially with climate change which is fairly certain to destroy this marvelous civilization; and we have not abolished nuclear weapons but are busy building a new generation of them.

Yeah, it sure is great to be living in a time of tremendous PROGRESS, isn’t it?

Mary Wildfire, Roane County, WV