mr peters speaks about the costs and future of electric vehicles;

New cars sales are way down – by millions of vehicles annually – but that hasn’t caused new car prices to go down accordingly. In fact, they have gone up – a lot. The average price paid for a new car last year was almost $50,000 – which is both a record high and about $15,000 more than it was just three years ago.

Two factors are driving this.

The first is “electrification,” which is expensive. And becoming more so.

There are more expensive EVs on the market now than there were three years ago, when Tesla was pretty much the only one making them in significant numbers. Now almost every car company is making them, because they have to make them. Well, it’s true that they could decide not to make them – but that would take courage, in short supply in corporate boardrooms these days. Instead, the impetus is compliance. Go along to get along – and pretend it will all keep going, somehow.

Which it did – for awhile – for as long as interest rates remained low and inflation did, too.

A six year loan on a $50,000 car was feasible when the cost of money – interest – was essentially nothing. It was almost an investment to take out a loan. But the cost of money is now three times-plus what it was just a couple of years ago, which has made what was feasible and not financially irresponsible increasingly impossible..........more......