THE MORNING RANT: Periodic Roundup of the EV Follies – 4/25/2025

Wheels on the EV Bus Don’t Go ‘Round

Making school buses electric is an idea that is so stupid that only our “highly educated,” credentialed elites could have thought it would work out. Now that school districts are putting EV school buses into place, it is becoming clear just how awful an idea it was.

“Kansas school halts electric bus use over student safety concerns” [KSNT – 4/17/2025]

The Wabaunsee School District serves rural communities west of Topeka. After deciding to pull its Lion electric school buses out of service, its superintendent was quoted as saying, “While the buses showed early promise, we encountered ongoing operational issues that ultimately led us to pause their use. Out of an abundance of caution, and in line with our highest priority of student safety, we made the decision to remove the buses from active service while we work with the manufacturer toward resolution.”

Working with the manufacturer toward resolution will be difficult…

These are the same Lion EV school buses that have proved to be such a nightmare for schools in Maine, as I recently discussed. Lion has ceased production and has filed for bankruptcy protection, despite the Biden administration having funneled $160 million of taxpayer dollars to it.

Meanwhile, Blue Bird Corporation has fully mastered the corporate-communist business model, as I documented a few months ago. Blue Bird not only receives government grants to manufacture electric school buses, but the government also pays school districts to buy Blue Bird’s buses…or at least it did until Trump took office. Well, Blue Bird’s EV school buses are also not working out very well, either. This news just broke:

“Blue Bird Recalls Electric School Buses” [The Brake Report – 4/21/2025]

The issue came to light in October 2024 following two collisions involving Blue Bird Vision electric buses. Investigations revealed that a high-voltage system shutdown disabled the primary brake assist, and the secondary brake assist system was inoperative due to a blown fuse in one vehicle and a disconnected wiring harness in another. The lack of diagnostic warnings for these failure modes left drivers unaware of the compromised braking system, contributing to the crashes.

As much fun as I have mocking those people and institutions who believed the EV hype and have taken a financial hit for their foolishness, it is deeply disturbing that children are still being subject to the consequences of this awful episode. Every electric school bus is now a sunk cost that cannot be salvaged. It’s time to permanently shut down the EV school bus experiment and get the kids back on safe, reliable, petroleum-powered buses.

Plug-in Hybrids: A Solution in Search of a Problem

Not only are plug-in hybrids a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, they’re a dangerously bad “solution.”

As best I can tell, the only problem plug-in hybrids solve is that of virtue-signaling people who need the range of an ICE vehicle while still wanting the smugness that comes from driving a plug-in electric car. Unfortunately, plug-in hybrids simply create a very heavy, very inefficient car that is also subject to runaway thermal fires, just like regular EVs.

This is a lesson some Volvo customers are learning, as they are now being told NOT to plug in their plug-in hybrid.

“Volvo Tells Thousands Of Plug-In Hybrid Owners To Stop Charging” [Car Scoops – 3/26/2025]

Volvo is recalling thousands of plug-in hybrids in the United States as they could short circuit when parked and fully charged. This poses a serious fire risk and it could occur at night, when the vehicle is parked in your garage.

That’s a scary thought and owners are being advised not to charge their vehicles until the recall has been addressed.

Delving deeper into the matter, Volvo identified a “production deviation with the battery module” that could potentially lead to a thermal runaway event.

There is this one amazing trick that can ensure a car owner that he will never experience a thermal runaway event with his vehicle. Can you guess what it is?

Does Blowing up a Warehouse Full of Lithium Batteries Count as “Recycling”?

Facilities that collect used lithium EV batteries for disposal / recycling are effectively massive bombs with a fuse that’s waiting to be lit. And it doesn’t even take a spark to light the fuse, just a little instability.

Stories like the following are becoming so common that it is clear that there is no safe way to store used lithium batteries:

“Battery plant EXPLODES for second time in just one year as terrified residents flee debris raining down on their newbuild estate next door” [Daily Mail – 4/10/2025]

Every news story I read about this fire at the Fenix Battery Recycling plant in Kilwinning, Ayrshire, Scotland carefully avoided using the words “lithium,” “electric,” and “EV” so as not to allow readers to understand the actual cause of the inferno. In some online forums, people were arguing that this might have been a fire involving traditional lead-acid car batteries.

No, it was a massive conflagration of rechargeable lithium batteries from electric vehicles. This is from an article in May of 2021 when the Kilwinning battery recycling plant was opening for business:

As lithium ion battery use surges with the growth in the electric vehicle market, a new multi-chemistry battery recycling facility has been opened in Kilwinning near Glasgow. The site will play an important part in Fenix Battery Recycling’s plans to develop facilities to offer on-site recycling for multiple battery types, with this site specialising in recycling Electric Vehicle Batteries.

That 2021 article went on to state that this EV recycling plant was the result of “significant grant funding to develop an innovative technology to make lithium ion battery recycling cleaner and more sustainable.”

Comrade Arthur originally sent this story to me, and I took the occasion to seek clarity as to whether burning a city down with exploding EV batteries is the “clean” part of green energy or the “renewable” part.

Today’s header photo is also a picture of the “recycling” operation at the EV recycling plant in Kilwinning.

A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss, but a Parked EV Quickly Loses Its Charge

An ICE car with gas in the tank does not lose its fuel supply when it’s parked for days on end, nor does it draw on its 12V battery. As electric vehicle owners are learning, the same cannot be said for their charged-up EVs.

“3,100 Miles In, I Parked My Hyundai Ioniq in My Garage for 10 Days With 78% Battery, Now It's Dead and the Dealer Says It Killed The 12V Battery” [Torque News – 4/10/2025]

Let me set the scene for you. You buy a brand-new Hyundai Ioniq 5. You love the futuristic design, the spaceship dashboard, and the whisper-quiet ride. You’re sitting at just over 3,000 miles—barely out of the honeymoon phase. You park it in your garage, battery sitting at 78%, and go away for ten days. You come back expecting to drive off into the sunset. Instead, what greets you is a total system shutdown. The car is completely dead. Not low battery - dead. You have to use a manual key to get in, and then jump-start a brand-new 12V battery just to bring it back to life. That’s exactly what happened to James Heckathorne, who shared his experience in The Ioniq Guy Facebook group - an increasingly essential place for Ioniq owners to make sense of their EVs beyond the sales brochures and glossy commercials.

There is some interesting discussion in this piece about the electrical and mechanical reasons why this problem occurs in EVs, but the fact that parking your EV for 10 days may turn it into a brick is yet another unnecessary hassle involved in driving an EV instead of a reliable ICE car.

EV Death Pool Update

Rivian is inching closer to its ultimate destination, as Q1 2025 sales tumbled dramatically. You’d think with leftists turning against Elon Musk, that Rivian might pick up some lost Tesla sales, but that did not happen.

“Rivian's Q1 Sales Fell 36% Amid L.A. Wildfire Fallout” [Inside EVs – 4/02/2025]

…amid L.A. Wildfire fallout.” That’s funny. I would suggest that “…amid massive consumer rejection” would be a more accurate headline, but that is a story the media doesn’t want to tell.

Rivian sold just 8,640 vehicles in the first quarter of 2025, compared to 13,588 in Q1 of 2024, a 36% drop. 2025’s sales annualize to only 35,000 units per year. Rivian had been eking out about 50,000 unit sales in recent years, while still promising to build a plant in Georgia to manufacture hundreds of thousands of vehicles each year.

The problem isn’t supply. Rivian manufactured over 14,000 vehicles in the quarter. What this means in the short term is that Rivian will have to start heavily discounting soon to get rid of the glut of unsold units. That will get the EV fanboys all excited about the uptick in sales, but only until the next round of catastrophic financial statements are released by Rivian as a result of dumping the excess vehicles at a huge loss per unit.

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Rivian cannot churn out money-losing vehicles indefinitely, especially in the face of collapsing demand.

Stop Building Electric Vehicles that No One Will Buy

When General Motor announced the launch of its “BrightDrop” electric delivery van several years ago, it forecast that by 2023 the BrightDrop would be producing about $1 billion per year in revenue, which comes out to about 12,000 units sold per year at the anticipated sales price of about $85,000 per unit. But GM sold less than 500 units in 2023, and only sold 1,529 BrightDrops in 2024 as it unloaded its excess production from 2023 with huge incentives. The current GM rebate on a BrightDrop is $25,500 per unit, and this doesn’t include any federal incentives! Yet the auto manufacturer still can’t unload them.

Suffice it to say, electric delivery vans have been a financial disaster for GM.

“GM cutting jobs, idling Canadian electric van plant due to ‘market demand’” [CNBC – 4/11/2025]

General Motors is cutting production of its all-electric BrightDrop delivery vans at a plant in Canada and will idle the facility through much of 2025, the company confirmed Friday.

If GM is idling the plant for most of the next eight months, there must be a serious glut of unsold BrightDrops.

The Detroit automaker said the decisions are not related to President Donald Trump’s tariffs. “This adjustment is directly related to responding to market demand and re-balancing inventory,” GM said in an emailed statement.

According to this USA Today piece, GM produced 3,500 BrightDrops in 2024, which is about 2,000 more units than it actually sold. This means GM has more than a year’s supply of its unwanted electric delivery vans to unload!

General Motors’ CEO Mary Barra was extremely obedient to her handlers in the Obama/Biden administrations, consistently implementing the destructive EV-agenda they demanded. Now it’s time for her to learn that Biden and Obama are gone and aren’t coming back, and if she is going to avoid the ignominy of being the (insanely overpaid) executive who killed GM, she needs to quickly back away from her all-EV pledge.

Hybrids are a “Bridge to EVs” Like Shrimp are a Bridge to Bug Eating

Traditional, gas-powered, “non-plug-in” hybrids (most famously the Prius) are great vehicles. They generate electricity with regenerative braking, and that electricity is stored in a small battery that is used for incremental propulsion, increasing overall gas mileage. Toyota has had great success by ignoring the EV hype and making much of its lineup traditional hybrid vehicles.

The EV zealots were determined to kill off traditional hybrids along with all other gasoline-powered vehicles, but with the consumer rejection of EVs and the growing market share of traditional hybrids, the EV-loving media is trying to credit hybrids as being “electrified” vehicles that are transitioning people to EVs.

This recent Motor Trend story is typical: “VW to Add Two New Hybrids by 2027”

To Volkswagen’s credit, it realizes that there is a huge market for gasoline-powered hybrids, and with its all-electric ID.4 being a massive flop in the U.S., VW is making a necessary pivot. But Motor Trend is still trying to frame this as a step to an all-electric future.

But [Volkswagen], like many others, miscalculated the speed with which American customers would adopt electric vehicles, betting they would go all-in on full battery electric cars, trucks, and SUVs with greater speed. But the forecasts were too ambitious, and the market is more interested in hybrids then pure EVs right now.

No, Motor Trend, the issue is not “the speed” with which Americans are “adopting” EVs, it’s the passion with which we are rejecting them. We are not just rejecting electric vehicles ”right now.” We are emphatically rejecting EVs, period.

This means VW will have added electric motors to its top-selling models by volume in North America.

Sure. And my gasoline-powered SUV also has a 12V battery, so I’m clearly interested in battery power when it comes to my car.

I’ll keep saying it, hybrids are a bridge to EVs in the same way that eating shrimp is a bridge from beef to bug-eating. In other words, they’re not.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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