TESLA & TRUCKS
An epic ying-and-yang battle is on for sales supremacy
“All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.” — David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Revolutions don’t come easily to the automotive industry. What with buttoned-down senior executives married to the concept of creeping evolution, and — to be fair to those old fogeys — consumers who get upset if anybody screws with their favourite shade of red, it is an industry ruled by hidebound conservatism. Oh, every car company trumpets each new model as a revolution in the making, but in my almost 40 years of trying to make sense of the automotive world, I can remember only two events even remotely paradigm-shifting: Chrysler’s introduction of the Magic Wagon in 1983 and the introduction of the Honda Accord (my surrogate for the subsequent decades-long domination by Asian automakers). Other than that, everything else is but a tepid revision of tired old themes.
All of this is to say that the fact we’re currently in the middle of two such paradigm shifts is nothing if not incredible. Oh, one of these insurgencies might be (for now) a bit of a paper tiger, but what makes these two so interesting is that they have diametrically opposed outcomes.
I am talking about our march toward emissions-reducing electric vehicles at the same time we’re buying ever more emissions-spewing pickup trucks. Like seemingly everything in our postmodern, internet-fuelled world, it seems the automotive consumer is seismically divided, the middle ground (as in politics) and the traditional fourdoor sedan (the automotive equivalent) abandoned to the outer extremes. What makes this particularly troubling is that — again, just as in politics — these divisions make progress on the fuel consumption and environmental fronts almost impossible.
Indeed, for all this talk of an impending electric revolution, the fact remains the increasing popularity of large trucks has more than wiped out any CO2 reduction credited to EVs. As but a single example of how our newfound love of trucks, consider the case of Tesla and Ford’s F-150 pickup.
Since the introduction of the Model S in 2012, just fewer than 21,000 Teslas (yes, I am including the Model 3s sold so far this year) have been registered in Canada. Ford of Canada, meanwhile, has sold an average of 30,000 more F-150s per year in that same time frame. That’s not the number of F-150s sold each and every year — about 135,000 — or, like the Tesla number mentioned, the total number of trucks Ford has sold since 2012 (that’s 890, 284 up until the end of September 2018), but the increased number of pickups — 184,000 in all — that Ford has sold since Tesla started selling the Model S.
That means — and for once the math in my diatribes is fairly simple — for every zero-emissions Model S, 3 or X Tesla Canada has sold, there are nine more offsetting F-150s. Now, never mind that Ford’s EcoBoost-powered trucks are relatively parsimonious compared with other pickups, the increased CO2 emissions of those nine trucks more than wipes out any greenhouse-gas reduction from the EVs Tesla has sold.
As if that’s not disturbing enough, consider this: Include all domestic pickups versus all EVs and the numbers get even worse. And note I haven’t included the increased sales of full-sized SUVs — the Ford Expedition, GMC Yukon, Chevrolet Suburban, et al — nor did I factor in any of the full-sized imports — Nissan’s Titan comes to mind — that are either new or have increased their sales in the past five years.
Even in California, which recently boasted that EVs are now 10 per cent of all new-car sales, the aforementioned F-150 still outsold all plug-ins combined, and overall, fullsized pickups outsold electric vehicles three to one.
Admittedly, both of these revolutions have their weaknesses. Our supposedly inevitable march to electrification is almost completely dependent on the charisma of one man: Elon Musk. Of those record plug-ins sold in California in August, 47 per cent were Teslas. If you take the Model 3 out of the equation, the total upswing in EVs in the whole of the United States was a mere 16,000 units, an increase of only 10 per cent year-over-year, rather than the 74 per cent being trumpeted in headlines.
As for this run on full-sized trucks, if recent history tells us nothing else, it shows that the popularity of gas-guzzlers rises and falls in concert with the price of gasoline. It’s easy to rationalize 13 or 14 L/100 kilometres when the price at the pump is less than a buck a litre, but that fully loaded F-150 King Ranch will be a little harder to justify if — more likely when — gas heads to two bucks a litre.
Nonetheless, for those assuming that the triumph of the “progressive” electrical revolution over “populist” pickups is unstoppable, it might be wise to remember that nothing is inevitable. For the better part of the past century — and apologies for again referencing politics, but it is perhaps the best metaphor for such polemics — the march toward liberalism seemed unstoppable. More recently, however, I think we all can agree that reactionary demagogy is putting some serious boots to progressives.
Yes, all projections say electrification is inevitable, and yes, experts seem to agree that gas-guzzlers will eventually go the way the of the dodo bird.
The worst thing about this polarization is that the middle ground — of which I consider myself a fervent adherent — that seeks compromise between practicality and pollution is being hollowed out. Newspapers may lament the demise of the sedan, but much less publicized is the fact that, as Julia Pyper reported on greentechmedia. com, the increased popularity of PHEVs and EVs is coming at the expense of traditional hybrids.