50 Tips For Slowing The Electric Car Revolution

August 11th, 2016 by Zachary Shahan

My recent article “22 Ways To Delay The Electric Car Revolution” was hugely popular, but readers offered a lot more ideas and wanted me to take the list to 50, so here we are. 

To keep everything in one place, I’ve copy & pasted the original article here and then expanded it.  Enjoy! 

Let’s say that, for some reason, you really don’t want humans to drive in cleaner, more enjoyable, more exciting, safer, better electric cars.  How do you go about slowing down the transition?  Below are prescriptions for four different groups (automakers, the media, investors, and politicians) that could “pitch in and do their part” to delay the transition. 

Automakers

Also see: How To Write An Electric Vehicle Vaporware Press Release

Media

Investors

Assuming an electric carmaker tries to enter the scene, mock it for only producing a small number of handmade, expensive sports cars.  Short the stock.  If this carmaker grows up a bit, focus on any growing pains and predict its pending doom — maybe even throw in a countdown clock to bankruptcy/death.  Short the stock.  If the carmaker is persistent and produces a class-leading — even industry-leading in all of history customers If the carmaker won’t stop growing, and pumps a great deal of cash into faster growth, act like it will run out of money tomorrow, collapse, and leave a crater the size of Texas as a nearly eternal scar on the planet.  Short the stock.  If the company decides to expand into complementary industries top solar industry pioneers and execs If the company has to implement a resale value guarantee in order to obtain competitive financing options for its customers, and GAAP accounting has a warped way of recording that If this 100% electric car company also adds unique features to its cars (like automatically opening doors, falcon-wing doors, etc.),  claim that the entire company, including its stock value, is built on gimmicks.  Short the stock.  Even if this car company actually had the highest gross profit margins per car in the industry, but is growing very fast and investing a lot of money into that growth, simply divide the number of cars produced by all expenditures in order to claim that the company “loses money on every car sold.”  Short the stock.  Act as if you have completely crunched the numbers and determined that a concept electric car that this electric car company is planning to sell costs much more to build than the selling price.  Claim that the batteries alone cost as much as the selling price of the car — and try not to let company executives get on the same call with you and tell you that your battery cost assumptions are completely absurd by sharing the actual battery cost If things are really going too well for this electric car company, claim that the CEO is lying about everything, committing felonies (making comparisons to Scrushy, Madoff, and Enron can help with this strategy), and should be throw into a jail on the moon Mars as punishment. 

Politicians

If all of the above fails, maybe it’s time to find a new job…. 

Image Credit: Kyle Field | CleanTechnica (CC BY-SA 4.0)











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