1w ago

Prime Minister Mark Carney is under intense pressure from the United States and Car Companies to make an electric vehicle U-turn.

According to Politico, Mark Carney is under intense pressure.

Auto Manufacturers want to get rid of the electric vehicle mandate. They simply refuse to sell more small electric cars in Canada, claiming it's impossible / unprofitable.

They also say Donald Trump is now President of the United States. Climate Change is no longer an american concern. The political climate in the United States has changed and Canada should follow the US, whether it likes or not.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/10/canada-ev-mandate-elon-musk-tesla-00446980

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EVs are a halfway solution anyway. We need to be investing in mass transit. If every car turned into an EV, we would still have politicians like Doug Ford trying to tunnel under a highway to end gridlock, we would still have motorists claiming bikes cause congestion, we would still be creating tonnes of tire waste and microplastics pollution, people will continue to die on roads while accidents could get worse due to extra weight, and our roads will wear down faster and cost more to maintain due to the extra weight.
In the grand scheme of things, EVs solve almost none of the major problems presented by cars.
- This is about the most accurate answer I’ve read on here in a long time.
  EVs and other electrified vehicles are good and all, but saving the climate comes down to building proper infrastructure not designed around cars, that gets the populace from A to B efficiently.
  
  I'm not exactly anti EV. If a car must exist it might as well be electric, but just converting every car into an EV is not enough. Plus there are other massive benefits to transit like increasing density and diversity in zoning, which could increase housing supply and make small businesses more versatile and resilent.
  Transit is also much cheaper than car ownership which lifts low income people up by reducing their transportation costs. Its also more fair, a 14 year old, a blind person, or someone with a suspended lisence could all take transit when none of them should be driving.
- Just one more highway, finished 15 years from now, will solve traffic!
- EVs should replace cars that need to be replaced, let's not re-create the ecological disaster that was "cash 4 junkers".
  And yes, they should go alongside a large reduction in total vehicles on the road using practical, fast, accessible, clean (as in maintained) electric and cheap public transit subsidized mostly by car owners and in small part by other taxes.
  Let's reduce traffic and traffic violence by reducing the total number of vehicles from the road, making driver's ed more complete and stricter, and gently discouraging people in high-density, transit-friendly cities from owning personal vehicles.
  We will also see the costs of road maintenance go down, unused lanes that can be reclaimed, and less asphalt to absorb heat and keep the earth from draining properly, all while keeping the remaining car traffic relatively efficient, with less idling and faster time to destination while requiring lower speeds, which EVs excel at.
  Sorry, I've ranted all over this thread, but I feel very strongly about a balanced and supported approach to mass transit, car dependence reduction and picking the right usage model (car pool, car share, rental, ownership) and car size for your needs.
- We need to be investing in electric mass transit. Powered by renewables.
  
  Even disiel electric is much better than private automobiles we should start by building electric but any transit is better than none. We need to prioritize laying tram and train tracks. Once those are laid we can easily upgrade to electric.
- Mass transit is great for cities and that’s it right now. If you live in an area with less than 500,000 people mass transit isn’t happening for awhile. EVs give us clean powered vehicles for the interim which - optimistically - will still be 20-30 years.
  Stopping EVs now is a bad idea. Use them to leverage electric renewable infrastucture.
  For cities, though, yeah minimal cars is better.
  
  Somewhere with 500,000 people can definitely make use of transit. Maybe not mass but definitely trams, buses and regional rail. Also active infrastructure like bike lanes (granted provinces seem to be at war with cyclists recently).
"The political climate in the United States has changed and Canada must follow the US, whether it likes or not."
- The guy next door totaled his car you should too!
Sounds like someone wants to lose their sales to BYD and Europe.
There's a lot of words missing in in the first statement. Shareholders in American auto manufacturers other than Tesla want to get rid of the electric vehicle mandate. Also note that elsewhere in the world internal combustion cars are losing ground to electric vehicles. Do we really want to attach ourselves to this sinking ship?
I have seen a few small electric vehicles reviewed on youtube. I am in Canada and would buy one today if available. 99 % of my travel is less than 2km to the grocer. I put on well under 10,000km/yr.
- I don't see it being viable for me as my car sits in front of my house most of the time (love the walkable neighbourhood) and then suddenly makes a 700 km trip once a month, and I can't charge it at home, and the charging options are ass at my destination, and there's exactly one fast charger on the route. The constant fast charging would also hammer my battery like crazy, and I total roughly 25,000 km in a year. To top it all off, the station wagon / practical sedan / large hatchback EV offering is very slim, and I really hated the "sitting on a skateboard" feel of the IONIQ 6, it made my legs ache.
  But I'm a perfect storm. For someone who does not go far often and can charge at home (that happens to be the vast majority of people who need a car), EVs are basically perfect. Just rent a car or take a plane the few times you need to go out of range from a charger, or just plan for charging.
  What I want for myself is a plug-in hybrid, but they're kinda rare, expensive, make little sense for most people and aren't really available in a sedan / wagon form factor.
  I love EVs, I like driving them, and I think they would go great with a general reduction of total vehicles on the road (i.e. more effective public transit), more right to repair and less telemetry.
  Addendum - My case sounds like it would be perfect for using car sharing like Communauto, but they're really expensive for my use case, and tracking one down has been such a complete pain in the past that the extra cost of maintaining my own vehicle was worth it for the ability to be able to up and leave for work at a moment's notice wherever I'm needed. I remember having to travel an hour into town to get to my Communauto rental, just to discover it's in limp mode, it's trashed, etc. They're much better nowadays, but my pandemic then-new-car is now mostly paid off.
  
  The constant fast charging would also hammer my battery like crazy, and I total roughly 25,000 km in a year.
  If you’re doing a 700km trip once a month, and if we assume you need to charge back up four times — that’s 4 full charge cycles per month, or 48 per year.
  A typical EV battery is rated for 1000 to 2000 charge cycles. With an average range of roughly 450km per charge for many modern EVs, and assuming the lower bound of 1000 cycles, you’ll need to put 450 000 km on your vehicle before you have to worry much about battery degradation. Based on your own 25 000 km/year estimate, that’s 18 years of ownership.
  Or if we look at it based on charge cycles per month (which we’ll round up to 6 to accommodate for other driving outside your 700km trip once a month), that’s 72 full cycles per year, which won’t get up to 1000 total cycles for nearly 14 years.
  Considering the average ICE vehicle in Canada only lasts 10 to 12 years, you’re going to do way better in an EV than you would with ICE. Battery degradation for EVs is VASTLY overstated — estimates of modern EV batteries from the last few years is they should be able to get 1 million miles out of them — the rest of the car is likely to fall apart before the battery fails.
  Now the lack of suitable charging infrastructure on your route is a real (and valid!) problem, and we can only hope that situation gets better for everyone (here in BC, BC Hydro has been building out fast charger infrastructure every 150km along all highways throughout the Province, so road trips here are NOT a big issue. I’m on such a trip now incidentally!). But myths about battery life, especially coming from EV enthusiasts has to die.
Doesn't the other big C country sell electric cars for cheap?
He needs to put the canadian people first and hold steadfast on the 2030 ice ban. Don't let America and the legacy automotive industry degrade Canada.
Please provide a source for the quote beginning with, "We do not have a trade problem", and change the title to match what the Politico is (rule 1 of this instance.)
Capitulation Carney :(
Don't make this a theme
- The username checks out for the situation. We need to keep our car energy supply directly within Canada.
  
  huh?
Fuck Carney if he caves 1 milimetre on this fascist bullshit.
Sounds like Asian and European EVs are the go. TACO will come through in the end.
- Trump is looking more wrong as time goes on. Pathetic man who lose his power eventually.
I agree, EV's aren't a complete climate solution. Do car company's or trump need more capitulation though? Haven't they gotten enough.
The part these automotive executives are conveniently not mentioning is that the EV mandate already allows auto manufacturers to get out of meeting the quotas if they build out charging infrastructure instead. They can get credits for building charging stations to go against current and future years where they miss their commitments.
AFAIK, in Canada there is currently only one auto manufacturer that is building out charging capacity, and that’s Tesla (who don’t even need that credit, as they only make EVs anyway!).
The Carney Government needs to tell these automakers that they need to get shovels in the ground and start building out that infrastructure. That will be good for Canadian jobs, and will increase the likelihood their customers will choose an EV in the future. The two Provinces where EV charging is easy and prevalent (BC and Quebec) already have the most EVs on the road (as a proportion of all vehicles) out of all the Provinces — so we know building more charging capacity leads to more sales. I’m no fan of Tesla (I drive a Hyundai IONIQ 5), but they realized early on they couldn’t just wait for others to build out charging capacity for them if they wanted to sell EVs — the other North American auto manufacturers need to realize that and get on to building out that capacity. Then they’ll sell cars, and then they’ll meet the mandates.
Shoves in ground, CEOs. And do us a favour and buy Canadian — we have several EVSE manufacturers in Canada making some really good kit to choose from.
The future of automobiles ain't going to be ICE vehicles, so that would literally be sacrificing the future of Canada's Auto Industry.
The last thing any nation should do is follow the MAGA crowd in sinking the future of their nation as a modern high-tech economy in the XXI century.
Hey car companies, know what's really impossible? Me ever behind the wheel of a gas powered vehicle ever again!
Nope! Not going to be a captive market for murican car makers.
EVs made in US and its allied colonies are already at price parity with their ICE versions before rebates. EVs have much higher performance, comfort, and operational costs not subject to geopolitical/extortionist industries, and even empower individuals to escape electric monopoly extortion, and in near future, cooperate with utilities/society to permit much more renewables, and profit from your EV through electricity arbitrage.
EVs get cheaper every year. Infrastructure supporting them improves every year. Protectionism for oil companies, and legacy ICE that oil companies depend on, is a terrible private and social investment strategy. It is not just climate terrorism to protect evil from competition, policy requires ever more protection as the rest of the world improves EV value proposition even more. Insurance costs skyrocketing as planet boils is further made worse.
Whether or not credits are kept, mandate should be obvious, because investment in EVs or micromobility is not only obvious, but by 2030/2035 gives everyone plenty of time to get there.
For Carney to cave on EVs, he needs to deny global warming, and explicitly endorse the climate terrorism policies that have effectively been in place through war distractions/priorities over a sustainable world ever since global warming was understood.
US policy designed to destroy Canada's auto sector would furthermore lead to recommendations against submission to a future where Canadians can still only buy US branded gas guzzlers. I'd rather see nuclear annihilation threats made against the US instead of yet another act of cooperative submission, for explicit purposes of destruction of human sustainability, and cooperation in Canadian auto production destruction, being considered by Canada.
- Hydrogen powered cars will never be a thing.
  
  Hydrogen powered motion technology is a fat cope from the fossil fuel industry. Most hydrogen is either blue (bio) or gray (fossil) hydrogen, whose manufacturing releases pollutants. Only the rare green hydrogen is renewable, and it is more expensive.
  They do have some advantages, such as better range and speed of charge, but hydrogen cars seem to mostly be a technological dead end while batteries get better.
- Not even Japan is mass adopting hydrogen vehicle infrastructure, why would we? How many hydrogen cars are on the road?
  Mass transit? Yes 100%. Hydrogen vehicle infrastructure? No. Not at a mass scale, or not on the near future, anyway.
  How many hydrogen cars are on the road in Canada? A few hundred, maybe a few thousand? We're not going to build infrastructure around a concept when even the heaviest adopters of that concept aren't fully behind it.
They're not wrong.
Ive owned an EV for 7 years now and it does some things really well and its not very good at others. Its not SUPERIOR to my gas vehicles, its just different.
Its ludicrous to tell Canadians that they can ONLY buy EVs at a certain point. It doesnt make sense to force that change when they dont suit a lot of applications. For example there are currently NO EVs that are great at pulling trailers, they lose far too much range when hauling. They also lose 20 to 40% of their range in winter. They also take considerably longer to charge on a road trip than a gas car takes to fill up and thats only IF you can find a convenient charger, its available, its working and you have signed up for the correct payment app - not nearly as simple as using a gas station.
They ARE good for commuting especially if you live in a city. And theres no denying that they are far less costly to maintain. My little EV has cost a TOTAL of $400 in 7 years. Thats amazingly low. And its very reliable. Nothing to check, just unplug it and drive it. But its still not my first choice for many tasks.
Buyers aren't stupid, they will buy what they need and what suits their lifestyle, not what the gov tells them they need.
- Its ludicrous to tell Canadians that they can ONLY buy EVs at a certain point.
  The goal isn't to force consumers to buy one. It's to force manufacturers to work out the flaws you mentioned and produce a better EV instead of focusing on out-dated technology. That's why the cut-over date is so far out. They want to give them time to work on the technology.
  
  But there are some things about EVs that cannot be overcome because science. Like the fact that gasoline holds far more energy for its weight than batteries ever can. Which is why things like the Tesla semi is a flop. Because to get the range you get out of two saddle tanks of diesel the semi would have to carry much more weight in batteries than is practical and charge times and kW input would be astronomical.
  The same goes for cars but to a lesser extent. We CAN make them go far (a Lucid EV just set a record at 1205 km on a single charge) but that car costs well over 150,000 because of the massive amount of batteries needed.
  Then there's the electrical infrastructure issue. Most EV owners charge at home, but if EVERY household had an EV there will be a significant new draw on our electrical grid. If everyone charges at night thats not a huge deal but obviously if everyone had an EV there going to be a lot of people charging during the day too, especially on trips. We'd have to add a lot of power to our grid and EVERY power source requires some kind of environmental cost, the question is only how much.
- It doesnt make sense to force that change when they dont suit a lot of applications.
  So when the worlds climate scientists say we must stop buring fossil fuels or risk the collpase of civilisation, your retort is, only when it's convenient for Candaians ?
  
  When it's pointed out that many millions around the world die every year from transport pollution, sucks to be them?
  Here's what one Canadian had to say to that
  https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/07/un-expert-human-rights-climate-crisis-economy
  Outgoing special rapporteur David Boyd says ‘there’s something wrong with our brains that we can’t understand how grave this is’
  
  The thing is the environment doesnt care WHERE the GHG's are coming from. So it makes sense to attack the problem where the problem is. And the problem is NOT in Canada. Our emissions are a margin of error in the global scale and Canada does very well because we have such a huge land mass and a lot of plants and trees to take up our carbon and GHG's.
  So when people say we have to buy EVs, thats a pretty ridiculous statement for Canadians. If EVERY vehicle in Canada was an EV the global climate would not even notice the difference. Therefore forcing EVs in Canada is far more about performative actions and virtue signalling than it is about actually changing the environment.
  What would actually make a difference is to change the way we do business with the two biggest polluters in the world - China and the USA. They are dumping GHGs into the atmosphere by the tonne. Its like a boat has hit a log that's punched a huge hole in the hull and water is pouring in but Canada is here putting a bandaid over a little crack at the back of the boat. We just dont matter til the big hole is fixed and even if the little crack is completely sealed the boat is still sinking fast.
  It wouldn't be hard to say to both countries, we will limit our trade with you til you clean up your act. Put a limit on China's emissions in order for us to buy their goods.
  But that won't happen. Because that eats into profits. And no corporation is going to support that. So instead they push Joe Average to buy an EV, as if parking his 20 yr old Corolla and buying an 60k EV is going to make a smidgen of difference in the worlds climate. It wont. But that doesnt matter, what matters is that no one looks too hard at whose doing the damage and forcing them to change because it will worsen their bottom line. The EV message is mostly smoke and mirrors to keep you from looking behind the curtain.

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