General Motors has announced the end of production for the sixth-generation Chevrolet Camaro for the 2024 model year. Another American muscle icon bites the dust — but Chevy says this isn’t the end of the road for the vehicle as we know it; we just have no idea what’s coming next. The final car will roll off the production line at the Lansing Grand River Assembly Plant in January of next year.
In the manufacturer battle, I never once pulled for a Camaro in Trans-Am, NASCAR, IMSA or any other series. I’d never buy one either. It doesn’t lower my respect for it as a good car, except for the gas war years when all cars got neutered.
I’ve followed them since 1968 because of Roger Penske and Mark Donohue. Those pony car days made for great auto’s and brand marketing. This includes the Mach 1 which I think is going away also.
One of my friends in college had the bad ass Z-28, sort of like this one.
He’s lucky he didn’t get killed on the run from Orlando to Haines City at over 100 MPH.
Not being a GM fan doesn’t mean I don’t respect it as a good car.
It’s a shame for GM to kill off such an iconic brand. Not one of the major manufacturer’s are making money on EV’s (other than Tesla) and they keep cutting their own throats with moves like this.
I’d never buy one, but you need good competitors to have a race. Chevy just took that away.
I find this interesting because part of the thrill of one of these ultimate driving machines is the sensory overload. The sounds and smells are as much a part of the thrill as is the rush of being pushed back into the seat when you push down the loud pedal (accelerator for the under educated).
I’ve been to races for 6 decades now. You can smell the exhaust, tires and hear it before you get to the track. You don’t get that from a station wagon or an SUV.
Even if I lost my vision, I’d only not be able to see how sleek and fast they look. My other senses would say it’s a real car.
Fortunately, even though it is ridiculous E-Fuels, at least they aren’t going to plug in a 911.
I still open the window of my car just to hear them drive away.
With many automakers transitioning from petrol-powered vehicles to electrified ones, Porsche and Ferrari are pursuing a new strategy by concentrating on the advancement of eFuels to preserve gas-powered engines. This decision follows the European Commission’s delay last week of the proposed 2035 ban on new internal combustion engine vehicles as the commission prepares to carve out a role for eFuels after 2035.
“Porsche and Ferrari’s status as national icons was enough to move their governments to challenge the EU plan last week just days before a scheduled vote,” Bloomberg wrote.
Germany’s Transport Minister Volker Wissing told the European Commission that he would withhold support for the approval of the new engine standards to end the sale of new combustion engine cars unless there were a plan for eFuels post-2035. Italy also threatened to fight the reforms.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Sunday, discussing a comprise that would likely involve eFuels.
Germany and Italy are home to the world’s top sportscar manufacturers. There has been growing opposition against Brussels’ plan to ban petrol-powered engines. That’s because who in their right mind would purchase an all-electric Porsche 911?
The alternative route, mainly for sportscar brands, is the development of eFuels as a climate-neutral way to preserve combustion engines—just something about the sound of a twin-turbo V-8 or V-6 that captivates motorheads.
While most carmakers are pouring tens of billions into the EV shift, Porsche has also invested in an e-fuel plant in Chile, partly because the manufacturer doesn’t plan to make its 911 sports car with a plug. Operating combustion-engine vehicles in a climate-neutral way could also help speed up the decarbonization of the transport sector, according to a Porsche spokesman. Existing vehicle stock should be included in the push to lower CO2 emissions faster, he added. Ferrari has said it’s pursuing alternative fuels to keep making combustion-engine cars that preserve its heritage.
Proponents of e-fuels, say they’re essentially renewable electricity that’s been converted into a combustible, liquid fuel. To make it, scientists combine captured carbon dioxide with hydrogen that was split from water in a process powered by renewable energy, creating a synthetic hydrocarbon fuel. When burned in a combustion engine, the e-fuels create carbon dioxide. But since it was made from previously captured CO2, they argue it’s climate neutral.
We’ve outlined the growing resistance among vehicle brands and motorsport organizations that are firm in their belief the combustion engine will be sticking around for years to come.
A great sport has been overtaken by the environmentalists saying this is the future of clean energy and the usual word salad to prove their point. They have created some of the most cutting edge technology and speed you can possibly do. It was at the cost of fun, enjoyment of the car and the rush you get from all of your senses.
Before I get to the facts below, everyone likes the sound of a screaming V-12,10 or even 8 over a hybrid car. You can hear them before you see them and the noise and smell enhance your senses of excitement.
It’s not going to happen though, but here’s why it should:
The electric car’s biggest disadvantage on greenhouse gas emissions is the production of an EV battery, which requires energy-intensive mining and processing, and generates twice as much carbon emissions as the manufacture of an internal combustion engine. This means that the EV starts off with a bigger carbon footprint than a gasoline-powered car when it rolls off the assembly line and takes time to catch up to a gasoline-powered car.
One of the big unknowns is whether EV batteries will have to be replaced. While the EV industry says battery technology is improving so that degradation is limited, if that assurance proves overly optimistic and auto warranties have to replace expensive battery packs, the new battery would create a second carbon footprint that the EV would have to work off over time, partially erasing the promised greenhouse-gas benefits.
With governments now in the business of mandating electric vehicles, the battery challenge assumes a global scale. The majority of lithium-ion batteries are produced in China, where most electricity comes from coal-burning power plants.
The process of mining critical minerals is sometimes described in language that evokes strip mining and fracking, an inconvenient truth that is beginning to attract notice. “Electric cars and renewable energy may not be as green as they appear,” a 2021 New York Times article noted. “Production of raw materials like lithium, cobalt and nickel that are essential to these technologies are often ruinous to land, water, wildlife and people.” The Times has also warned that with global demand for electric vehicles projected to grow sixfold by 2030, “the dirty origins of this otherwise promising green industry have become a looming crisis.”
All of these CO2 metrics could come into play in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s recently proposed rule that would require publicly traded companies to disclose the greenhouse gas emissions they produce directly, as well emissions produced indirectly through their supply chains around the world. While the implications aren’t clear yet, the new rule could standardize CO2 disclosures and transparency on EV carbon impacts, but some say that such calculations are nearly impossible for global contractors, and automakers would have to rely on the same kinds of estimates and modeling that are used now. Echoing a common concern, EV battery maker Nikola Corp. told the SEC that “some climate data is not readily available, complete, or definitive.”
As a result of these uncertainties, many consumers don’t understand the complexity of these analyses and may assume that their electric cars are literally zero-emissions, or that what matters most is that EVs are better for the environment and the precise degree is not that important.
more….
EV advocates are optimistic that in the coming decades electric cars will become cleaner as power grids are “decarbonized” and the industrialized world reduces its reliance on CO2-spewing fossil fuels, primarily coal and natural gas. Exactly how much cleaner is not easy to pinpoint. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, about 60% of the nation’s electricity was generated from coal and gas in 2021. In its Annual Energy Outlook, the agency projects those two fossil fuels will generate 44% of U.S. electricity by 2050.
But those percentages can be misleading. Even as the relative fuel proportions change over time, overall electricity demand is going up, so the total amount of fossil fuels actually burned in the mid-21st century goes down by only about 5%, according to EIA estimates. Future greenhouse gas emissions will depend on the number of EVs on the road and how electricity is generated, and those forecasts swing wildly. The EIA forecasts a mere 18.9 million EVs on U.S. roads in 2050, which is very conservative compared with advocacy group EVAdoption’s prediction of more than 25 million EVs on U.S. roads by 2030, only eight years away. BloombergNEF forecasts 125 million EVs on U.S. roads in 2040, up from 1.61 million at the end of last year, which would constitute about half the cars in this country.
“They’re making these forecasts that are basically licking your finger and sticking it up in the air,” David Rapson, a professor of energy economics at the University of California, Davis, who analyzes electric vehicle policy, said about California forecasts, which also applies more broadly. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen.”
Back to me.
Don’t try to tell me racing a hybrid is environmentally helpful when you fly around the world in many private and cargo jets each F1 weekend. Hauling the freight to one race is the pollution (carbon is not pollution) of all the cars in every race.
Cut us some slack and put real engines that we can hear coming, building our excitement.
Even the greenie drivers loved it when Fernando Alonso drove his championship winning Renault to some exhibition laps. They miss the sound also.
It’s not a step backwards, rather a step in the right direction.
Burying the blades of wind turbines because they can not be recycled. Very Earth friendly move by the climate crowd. They don’t tell you this part of the lie.
The Media
“Every human has four endowments—self awareness, conscience, independent will, and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom … The power to choose, to respond, to change.”
And in Germany, who was warned not to trust their energy needs by a recent president or they would lose their self-sustenance. Instead, they closed all the petroleum fired plants :
German Food & Ag Minister: Some Of You Will Have To Starve, And That Is A Sacrifice I’m Willing To Make
The zealots of the Sustainable Organic Church Of The Carbon Apocalypse are no longer hiding the fact that they expect many of you to die in order for them to achieve their green utopia. (Isn’t it weird how left-wing utopias always have such an awful body count?)
The German Food and Agriculture Minister, Cem Özdemir, recently stated that “Hunger is no argument against bio diversity and protection of the climate.”
And in Colorado:
Tens of thousands of Colorado residents found themselves unable to turn down their smart thermostats after energy company Xcel took control of them, citing an “energy emergency.”
On Tuesday, around 22,000 customers of Xcel, a Minnesota-based energy company who supplies customers across a number of western states, found themselves unable to turn down the temperature in their homes, despite the outside temperature reaching into the 90s, Summit News reported.
Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy to society.
Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the [energy] equivalent of one barrel of oil.
By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.
In all the Democrats’ speeches and publicly stated positions over the past several years on renewable energy, the Green New Deal, etc., there is not the slightest indication from any so-called liberal environmental “expert” or elected officeholder that they have even the dimmest awareness of any of this. Instead, Democrat politicians and their Green supporters simply spout their vacuous, predictable, totally inaccurate party lines about “saving the earth before time runs out,” or the “evils of big energy corporations.” The smart money says that not one liberal environmental proponent—elected or otherwise— has even read this report, much less is able to refute any of it in a coherent, logical manner.
Delusions of Adequacy 