Up North And Backwards?

They say that politics make for strange bedfellows.? Despite today being election day, this article is not about the US Presidential election.? Rather it is about a strange situation happening in the Great White North.

Canadian has no auto industry of its own and yet it does.? There is no such thing as a Canadian automaker, but several automakers have manufacturing plants in Canada.? The Great American Ponycar, the Chevrolet Camaro was built there.? And so was the famed American Ford GT.?

What is going on in Canada as far as the automotive industry is quite odd.? They are ramping up their EV mandates while the US is winding them down.? They are dropping subsidies while the US is keeping ours in place.?

Ford just temporarily shut down its F510 Lightning production due to lack of demand.?

The demand for EVs in the US has cooled.? Apparently, this is not the case for Canada.? Tesla is shipping its Cybertrucks en masse to our neighbors to the North to an awaiting public.

The problem with US adoption is in part to high prices.? Most EV owners are fairly affluent.? In order for mass adoption, there needs to be vehicles that people not only want, but that they can afford.? 22% of all US auto loans are upside down.? And few institutions are willing to roll that negative equity into a new car.

Nissan has seen some success by offering dirt cheap leases on EVs in Colorado.? The take rate is through the roof.

However, Canada is pushing back up all the economic levers that it has to move its citizens into EVs.? And from my perspective, that is not a wise move as they are moving forward with progressive mandates.

Canada makes a lot of money off of rare earth metals mining and battery manufacturing, but that is all for export at this point.? It does not, to the best of my knowledge, produce electric vehicles.

Canada is one of the cleanest miners of these EV materials in the world.? That also means that only producers like most legacy automakers are buying them.? Emerging EV makers from China which are growing in strength are going for the least expensive sources regardless of the ecological record.

From a marketing perspective this is backwards.?

The US can give favored status to domestic automakers because we have the industry and the innovation.? Foreign automakers are moving to the US to produce their goods to take advantage of that.? Canada cannot compete on that level.?

Traditional automobile manufacturing is being squeezed out.? Demand for clean energy from Canada is in a precarious position at least in the short-term.? And Canada is forcing its citizens to buy vehicles that are too expensive.

I am not a fan of incentives or mandates, but you cannot have mandates without incentives in this case.? You can have incentives without mandates as the US is now seeing.

Admittedly there may be something that I am not seeing.? I have done my best to investigate this, but it is possible that some information has gotten lost in translation.? I would love to hear from the Canadian public on this.? The automakers seem to be predicting doom and gloom from this side of the border.? ????