EU Study finds ICE vehicles consume 20% more fuel than advertised

The source is a press briefing from the EU Auditors that happened from Luxembourg on the subject yesterday. You gave a link to one report from January, but the auditors drew on the findings of reports published over the past three years.

Its good to check the sources of articles in the media.

Good point.

RTE have a piece on it today also.

The auditors report was pretty scathing of fuel savings, basically saying the past 10 years of efficiency improvements have been completely wiped out by the rise in less efficient SUVs

So exactly nothing has been achieved by ICE cars

Meanwhile EVs are the only way to meet CO2 goals, but need to become a lot cheaper for mass adoption

There's going to be some fun between the EU and European car manufacturers. The manufacturers want tariffs on Chinese imports because they distort the market (by representing a fraction of EV sales), but if European companies just use that as an excuse not to release cheaper models then I say open the floodgates from China

The report seems to paint the European manufacturers in an extremely poor light, so I doubt they sponsored it at all

Frankly I'm surprised there wasn't more of a campaign to kill it before publication

Western manufacturers have been dragging their heels for decades, pushing hybrids as the future while up selling customers to SUVs and negating any benefits from better efficiency

Meanwhile China made the bet early on EVs and is now reaping the rewards while everyone else plays catch-up

I agree. This looks really bad for European manufacturers. If any company was sponsoring it I'd say it would be a manufacturer of all-electric cars like Tesla, BYD or MG. I assume that in the interest of unbiased journalism that Adrian Weckler will be all over this in his next publication

I think it's much simpler than that, China has large coal deposits but no oil or gas worth speaking of

An oil based economy forces them to be subject to international market prices, which they don't like

It also increases their dependency on oil exporting nations like the US, which they really don't like

This is part of why China has often been friendly with Russia and Iran. They aren't allies per se, but they have common interests

In terms of EVs, Chinese companies made very early investments in essential minerals, refining and battery production as well as EV manufacturing. They've had the market cornered long before the westerners got off their arses

Lately there's been a drop in domestic demand for EVs in China, similar to the rest of the world. So Chinese companies have been pushing exports to try and alleviate oversupply

While China did have an early start with EV battery production, the initial effort was really by Panasonic in conjunction with Tesla - in the US. EV battery manufacture only happened off the back of Li-ion batteries used in portable devices, something which the EU was not ever meaningfully engaged in. It's actually Japan that started the Li-ion battery revolution, with Sony and Panasonic being the world leaders initially, with the Chinese typically copying and stealing Japanes IP. South Korean companies have also been big in this field.

Chinese made products should be tarrifed, due to their relentless theft of IP from other countries, not to mention dumping. If I had my way I would increase tarrifs on Chinese manufactured goods by 10% PA with no max until no western companies are reporting IP theft by Chinese hackers or below cost stuff is getting dumped to kill off western industries.

Those cheap Chinese made EV batteries people like so much look to likely incorporate IP stolen from LG, for instance, who are the world's second largest EV battery manufacturer after China's CATL.

300 GW of renewables isn't indicative of how much energy will be produced due to the low capacity factors. Wind in China looks to have a 22.8% capacity factor, so if that was all wind, it would only equal 68.4 GW of actual production capacity increase.

I suppose if you are an optimist it looks like the right direction, but it's off a poor baseline:

I for one don't think increasing renewables on the back of forced labour and slavery is something to applaud. I'd rather have coal, though my preferred option is nuclear.

And all the other materials used...

Companies are not going to survive on such an uneven playing field when it comes to labour.

About the only thing it doesn't...

Uyghur forced/slave labour is used to make those incredibly cheap Chinese solar panels. I haven't seen any indication that it's an element in China's coal production, which by necessity is highly mechanised.

Steel, iron, aluminium are all used in ICE manufacture, and imported into Europe.