We know that electric vehicles, whose manufacture requires rare earth minerals mined by third-world children, aren't clean.

We also know that electric vehicles, which get their electrical charge from coal-fired plants and emit more carbon dioxide than conventional vehicles, aren't green.

We also know that electric vehicles, as recent storms and heat waves have indicated, aren't reliable

Now we learn that even at $70,000 a pop, complete with tax savings and government subsidies, green vehicles aren't profitable, either.

According to Breitbart News:

Ford Motor Company says its electric vehicle (EV) unit, “Ford Model e,” is losing billions of dollars, and should be viewed as a startup company.

Model e has lost $3 billion before taxes over the last two years, and is expected to lose another $3 billion this year as the company invests in the new technology, according to a report by Associated Press.

In 2021, Ford’s Model e unit had pretax losses of $900 million. And in 2022, that number was $2.1 billion. Ford reportedly believes Model e will be profitable before taxes by late 2026, with an eight percent pretax profit margin.

Three billion dollars is a lot of money to lose, even for a company like Ford. Breitbart described it as "bleeding red ink."

With that many negatives, all of which contradict the claims that electric vehicles are the wave of the future, why the heck are these things still being made?

Yet Ford, and probably all the others, keep losing it, because Joe Biden's politics demand that they keep investing in and making electric vehicles. Too bad about the little kids in the mud pits mining cobalt in the People's Republic of Congo or those nasty losses on the quarterly earnings report. They're losing money.

By way of creative explanation, the company argued that its electric vehicle division is actually a startup, so losing money is natural:

“As everyone knows, EV startups lose money while they invest in capability, develop knowledge, build (sales) volume and gain (market) share,” Ford Chief Financial Officer John Lawler said.

Which seems a little after-the-fact, actually. If I had to guess, I suspect the EV unit losses made Ford want to isolate it, calling it a "startup" so they can collect data on how this unit is doing and get rid of it on that basis when the best opportunity comes. Ford's other vehicles seem to be selling reasonably well, but its electric vehicles are money losers, sucking out all of the company's capital and affecting even its conventional car business (there were layoffs at its conventional business a few weeks ago), so calling the EV unit a "startup" looks pretty on paper for the shareholders and more importantly, their political overseers.

In real life, they'd call their EV operations a pariah unit and shut it down and move on to something more practical that buyers actually want. But somehow, they keep plodding on.

It may well be that Ford's executives privately know that the unit is a money pit and want to get rid of it, but their board members are all still enamored of greenie ideology and continue to fancy that EVs are the wave of the future. They're looking at their peers, who also have money-losing EV units and don't want to be the odd man out. Meanwhile, getting rid of the green unit would draw the ire of Democrat politicians in Washington, who would find some way to 'get them' if they should stray from the dominant orthodoxy. 

Each little statement of trouble reveals that green vehicles are unsustainable, costing companies billions and consumers huge dollars, to save the earth, which isn't happening. Every claim about green vehicles is false now, yet they are still being made. With losses like Ford is seeing, it suggests that the entire auto industry is heading off a cliff.

Image: Greg Gjerdingen, via Flickr // CC BY 2.0