China’s EV Disposal Problems Will Be Everyone’s Problems Soon

When I wrote about the fact that massive graveyards of unsold and unsellable electric vehicles were dotting the landscape of China several months ago, advocates for the EV industry responded on Twitter and LinkedIn that the stories were somehow fake and overblown. Now that even the EV boosting Bloomberg News has run a major story on the matter this past week, I’ll suppose the blowback to this will be somewhat muted.

You know a negative aspect of this energy transition that governments are trying to subsidize into reality must have grown into a truly major PR problem once outlets friendly to wind, solar and EVs – the transition’s officially-chosen rent-seekers – start to report it. It is a pattern we’ve seen repeatedly in recent years. Bloomberg’s report, headlined, “China’s Abandoned, Obsolete Electric Cars Are Piling Up in Cities,” places the focus firmly on the issue’s impact in China, but no one should think this problem will be limited to that country.