Economy-Transportation Sector
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Honda commits to going out of business by pulling back on EVs as sales rise
by Jameson Dow 20/5/25 electrek
Honda’s announcement came earlier today in Japan, stating that it will scrap its plan for EVs to be 30% of its global vehicle sales by 2030, citing a “slowdown in the expansion of the EV market due to several factors, including changes in environmental regulations.” It will reduce planned investment from 10 trillion yen ($69 billion) to 7 trillion ($48 billion).
Video Shows Alternative High Speed Rail Concept for US
by Theo Burman 29/6/25 Newsweek
The pitch, outlined in HSR America's promotional video, is ambitious, but grounded in patents and research, and most importantly, its creators believe the technology could avoid the pitfalls currently facing high-speed rail development.
Lidar is lame’: why Elon Musk’s vision for a self-driving Tesla taxi faltered
by Nick Robins 29/6/25 The Guardian
The 22 June launch initially appeared successful enough, with a flood of videos from pro-Tesla social media influencers praising the service and sharing footage of their rides. Musk celebrated it as a triumph, and the following day, Tesla’s stock rose nearly 10%.
China floods Brazil with cheap EVs triggering backlash
by Alessandro Parodi and Victoria Waldersee 20/6/25 Reuters
China's top producer of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, is offering Brazilian car shoppers relatively low-priced options in a market where the green-car movement is still in its infancy. Brazilian auto-industry officials and labor leaders worry that the vast influx of cars from BYD and other Chinese automakers will set back domestic auto production and hurt jobs.
WELLS, WIRES, AND WHEELS
"We calculate that to get the same amount of mobility from gasoline as from new renewables in tandem with EVs over the next 25 years would cost 6.2x-7x more. Indeed, even if we add in the cost of building new network infrastructure to cope with all the new wind and/or solar capacity implied by replacing gasoline with renewables and EVs, the economics of renewables still crush those of oil. The clear conclusion of our analysis is that if we were building out the global energy system from scratch today, economics alone would dictate that at a minimum the road-transportation infrastructure would be built up around EVs powered by wind- and solar-generated electricity. And that is before we factor in the other advantages of renewables and EVs over oil as a road-transportation fuel, namely the climatechange and clean-air benefits, the public-health benefits that flow from this, the fact that electricity is much easier to transport than oil, and the fact that the price of electricity generated from wind and solar is low and stable over the long term whereas the price of oil is notoriously volatile."
