Empty shelves that usually stock bottled water at Sainsbury’s supermarket, Greenwich Peninsular, on September 19, 2021 in London, England.
Chris J Ratcliffe | Getty Images
LONDON — Britain has been plunged into uncertainty as issues over gasoline, electricity and food have prompted warnings of “a really difficult winter” for the country.
A significant lack of truck drivers has meant deliveries of fuel and goods have fallen short.
In a bid to incentivize people to take the job, some employers have reportedly offered salaries as high as £70,000 ($95,750) a year, with joining bonuses of £2,000.
Speaking to ITV News on Thursday, Paul Scully, the U.K.’s minister for small businesses, warned that “this is going to be a really difficult winter for people.”
“We know this is going to be a challenge and that’s why we don’t underestimate the situation that we all find ourselves in,” he said. However, he told Times Radio on Friday that there was “no need for people to go out and panic buy.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s spokesman said earlier this week that there was no shortage of fuel in the U.K., and people should continue to buy gas as normal. He also described the U.K.’s food supply chain as “highly resilient,” but acknowledged that some businesses in the industry were facing challenges and said the government was having meetings with representatives from the sector.
Gas station closures
As supplies of some essential goods have dwindled, reports have emerged of empty shelves and long lines of cars outside gas stations.
In a BBC interview on Friday, U.K. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said people should continue to buy gasoline as usual, adding that military personnel would be brought in to drive trucks if it would help the situation.
Vehicles queue for fuel at a Sainsbury’s petrol station on September 24, 2021 in Weymouth, England.
Finnbarr Webster | Getty Images
Oil giant BP confirmed Friday that it had temporarily closed a handful of its U.K. gas stations due to shortages of unleaded gasoline and diesel.
“These have been caused by some delays in the supply chain which has been impacted by the industry-wide driver shortages across the U.K., and there are many actions being taken to address the issue,” a spokesperson said via email.
“We continue to work with our haulier supplier to minimize any future disruption and to ensure efficient and effective deliveries to serve our customers. We are prioritising deliveries to motorway service areas, major trunk roads and sites with largest demand.”
A spokesperson for ExxonMobil’s Esso told CNBC that a small number of the sites it operated in the U.K. had been impacted by fuel shortages, but that the firm was “working closely with all parties in our distribution network to optimize supplies and minimize any inconvenience to customers.”
In an emailed statement on Friday, a spokesperson for Tesco, the U.K.’s largest supermarket and an operator of 500 gas stations, said: “We have good availability of fuel, with deliveries arriving at our petrol filling stations across the U.K. every day.”
The company has only experienced temporary outages at two of its own gas stations so far. Some stations are owned by other operators but have a Tesco convenience store onsite.
Competitor Sainsbury’s said it wasn’t currently experiencing any issues with fuel supply but was monitoring the situation.
‘Serious labor shortages’
Some food supplies in Britain have also been affected by delivery disruptions. But according to Ian Wright, chief executive of the U.K.’s Food and Drink Federation, food and drink manufacturers in the country have been experiencing the “same serious labor shortages as those being seen across the food supply chain.”
“We need Government urgently to conduct a full survey of the state of employment markets to gain an understanding of the most pressing issues,” he said in an emailed statement.
“For example, workers may have returned to their respective home countries during lockdown and not returned [to the U.K.]. Some estimates put this figure at well over a million. If fast action is not taken, the impacts we are already seeing will worsen.”
One remaining drink is seen on a near-empty shelf at an Asda supermarket in London, England on September 19, 2021.
Chris J Ratcliffe | Getty Images
In recent days, a serious carbon dioxide shortage in Britain had prompted concerns that food production would suffer a blow and dent supplies nationwide. U.S. CO2 producer CF Industries recently closed two U.K. sites that produce 60% of the country’s commercial supplies, blaming soaring wholesale gas prices.
While Britain’s government struck a deal with the company to restart production, the BBC reported that the country’s food industry could end up paying five times more for the gas under the agreement.
Energy companies have also come under strain, with at least seven suppliers collapsing since August after the price of wholesale natural gas soared 250% in less than nine months. According to energy industry body OGUK, prices surged 70% between August and September alone.
The U.K. has limits on how much suppliers are able to charge consumers for energy, with price caps reviewed by the government every six months. Some are expecting the current cap to be lifted when it is reviewed by ministers in April, meaning British households will absorb some of the increased wholesale cost.
In a report on its latest monetary policy decision on Thursday, the Bank of England warned that the inflation rate was likely to climb to “slightly above” 4% this year, double its target level.
Positive growth outlook
A surge in demand following coronavirus lockdowns is seen as a factor behind these issues, as well as labor and supply shortages accentuated by Britain’s full departure from the European Union at the start of this year.
Speaking to CNBC in a phone call Friday, Yael Selfin, chief economist at KPMG U.K., said it didn’t look as though the country’s supply chaos was going to be completely resolved before the winter.
Labor shortages could take at least six months to resolve, Selfin said.
“We are a little bit vulnerable as there’s a lot of strain in the system already. Any additional shock, like what we’ve just seen with gas prices, is just going to make it harder for businesses and households to absorb,” she told CNBC.
However, Selfin’s overall outlook for the U.K. economy remained positive.
“The good news is that we are quite near to where we were prior to [the coronavirus pandemic],” she said. “We’re expecting the economy to reach its pre-Covid level by the third quarter of next year. Even with additional shocks, we may have weaker growth, but we’re still expecting 6.2 percentage point growth.”
“The main problem is that there’s very strong demand that cannot be met. So it’s bad, but it could be worse if no one wanted to buy anything,” Selfin added.
Andrew Goodwin, chief U.K. economist at Oxford Economics, also told CNBC on Friday that it would take time to resolve the delivery driver shortage.
“Training or recruiting new HGV [heavy goods vehicle] drivers isn’t something you can do overnight, it’s going to take quite a while. The industry is really going to have to work with what it has at the moment,” he said via telephone.
However, Goodwin said he too remained “reasonably optimistic” about the state of the U.K. economy.
“Households have got this big stockpile of savings to spend, but that will be starting to ebb away a bit simply because the bad news we’re having on things like inflation,” he told CNBC. “[But] certainly over the next year we should achieve much stronger GDP growth than we normally would because we’re still in the catch-up phase.”
“I suspect, we’re going to end up in a situation where the reality is a little bit disappointing to what we were expecting say three months ago,” Goodwin added. “And that’s simply because of these issues with supply shortages, both in terms of sort of constraining output and also just eating into consumers’ purchasing power.”
Hyundai Motors is recalling 145,235 EVs and other “electrified” vehicles in the US, citing concerns about a loss of driving power, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said on Friday.
The NHTSA announced this morning that the recall affects selected IONIQ 5 and IONIQ 6 EVs, as well as certain luxury Genesis models, including the GV60, GV70, and G80 electrified variants, from the 2022-2025 model years, Reuters reported.
It looks like the issue stems from “the integrated charging control units in these vehicles, which may become damaged and fail to charge the 12-volt battery. This malfunction could lead to a complete loss of drive power, posing safety risks for drivers,” the NHTSA stated.
If you’re an owner of one of these Hyundai models dating 2022-2025, stay tuned. Hyundai has not yet provided a timeline as to when affected vehicles will be repaired.
To make that happen, the company’s dealers will inspect and replace the charging unit and its fuse if necessary, NHTSA said. Free of charge, of course.
Importantly, no crashes, injuries, fatalities, or fires due to this issue have been reported in the US, Hyundai reported.
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Tesla announced that ‘Actually Smart Summon,’ its autonomous driving feature that enables moving its vehicles without anyone inside over short distances, is now being launched in Europe and the Middle East.
The automaker’s Full Self-Driving suite of features has been limited in those markets due to regulations and Tesla’s focus on making them work in North America first.
Actually Smart Summon is the vision-only version of Tesla’s “smart summon” feature, which was released years ago on Tesla vehicles with ultrasonic sensors.
When Tesla transitioned away from ultrasonic sensors, Smart Summon was one of the missing features that Tesla had yet to adapt to the vision-only (cameras and neural nets) system.
However, that’s only in North America where Tesla focuses its Full Self-Driving (FSD) development, the feature package that includes Actually Smart Summon, also referred to as ‘ASS’.
Most of Tesla’s other markets, including Europe, don’t have the same capabilities under the Full Self-Driving package. That’s partly due to regulations, but Tesla also focuses on making the features work on North American roads first.
Now, Tesla has announced that its Actually Smart Summon feature is launching in Europe and the Middle East:
The feature can only be used on private roads, like parking lots and driveways. Most people have used it to bring their vehicles parked in a large parking lot to them as they exit a store or restaurant. However, the vehicle moves quite slowly under the feature and the owner needs to keep an eye on it at all time and be ready to cancel the summon as Tesla doesn’t take any responsibility for accidents caused by using Actually Smart Summon., like all other FSD features.
Therefore, most people I know who have the feature, myself included, tried once or try to see or impress some friends who have never seen a car move without anyone inside and then stopped using it.
The feature’s main useful use-case is for people with extremely tight parking spots. It enables them to exit the vehicle before it is in its final parking spot and then move the car in and out remotely.
However, that has been the case for years with the regular Smart Summon, as you generally don’t need the vehicle to handle complex parking lots. You mostly need it to move a few feet forward or backward.
US Automakers are planning to ask Mr. Trump to retain President Biden’s EPA exhaust rules, in the face of signs that Mr. Trump might try to reverse them. If the rules are reversed, it would cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of deaths per year.
Interestingly, this is the opposite of what big auto did the last time a reality TV show came to the White House – signaling that they have perhaps learned their lesson this time ’round.
First, some history.
In the middle of the 20th century, the effects of human activity on the atmosphere became readily apparent. Certain cities – with Los Angeles among the forefront – were choked by smog, and it was soon found out that vehicle pollution was the primary reason for this smog.
Since Los Angeles was one of the most smog-choked cities, California led the way on clean air regulation, creating the California Air Resources Board in 1967 (under then-Governor Ronald Reagan).
The federal government gave California special dispensation to set stricter regulations than the rest of the country, in recognition that it had a unique smog problem in its primary metropolis. California has retained this dispensation, in the form of a “waiver,” since then. And other states can follow California’s rules, but only if they copy all of the rules exactly.
Thus, there have been two separate sets of clean air regulation in this country since then – the federal rules, and then the “CARB states” which follow California’s rules.
In 2012 that finally changed, when President Obama’s EPA negotiated with California to finally harmonize these standards and also implement higher fuel efficiency nationwide. This would have been a huge boon for both industry and consumers, saving money and giving regulatory certainty to the auto industry.
But then, in 2016, the candidate who got the 2nd most votes in the presidential election was headed for the White House. And automakers responded by immediately lobbying to torpedo these standards, even before inauguration.
Now, you might think that asking a profoundly ignorant individual, who ended up staffing the EPA with bought-and-sold science deniers (huh, that would never happen again would it?), to change rules which had already been set through years of negotiation and lobbying was not a great idea. And you’d be right.
Not long after automakers had the dumb idea to ask an idiot to fix something that wasn’t broken, that idiot went and broke things further, fracturing the agreement between California and the federal government and ensuring less regulatory certainty for automakers.
But it was too late, and we are now back in the era of disparate regulatory regimes – something which John Bozzella, head of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation (formerly called Global Automakers), keeps complaining about these days, despite having lobbied for exactly this in the first place.
The US EPA and California are still not fully harmonized, but both released recent new standards which do have somewhat similar targets. If a manufacturer builds towards one set of rules, they’ll probably not be too far off from meeting the other.
So in the end, we did get better emissions regulations and California has continued to push forward with clean air regulations, thus signaling a failure on the part of Mr. Trump to cause the long term harm to Americans that he and his oil industry solicitors so desperately seem to desire.
The most recent EPA standards, finalized in March (after being softened at the auto industry’s request), do not mandate any particular powertrain, but rather require steep emissions cuts – and EVs are the easiest way to achieve lower emissions.
Notably, Tesla lobbied in favor of making this last set of standards stronger, and they also lobbied against ruining the Obama/CA standards in 2016 – being one of very few automakers who were on the correct side of that discussion.
Despite that the President Biden EPA’s rules do not mandate any particular powertrain, Mr. Trump, in his usual ignorance, has said that he will end the nonexistent EV mandate. And now that he has received more votes than his opponent for the first time (after three tries, and despite committing treason in 2021 for which there is a clear legal remedy), it looks like the upcoming EPA might be directed to end these emissions cuts and fuel/health cost savings for Americans.
But in this instance, it sounds like the automakers might actually do the right thing for once, and ask the government not to do any rollbacks, and instead let them continue on with the plans without disruption from a convicted felon who seems determined to cede a US EV manufacturing boom back to China.
Detroit’s Big Three automakers – GM, Ford and Stellantis – are all reportedly trying to figure out how to ensure that these rules stay in place. The mentality is that constantly changing regulations are not beneficial for companies – particularly in the auto realm, where models take on the order of 7 years to plan and execute. Long-term planning is important for the hundreds of billions in manufacturing investment that EVs have attracted in the US during Biden’s EV push.
These attitudes are notable, given that this is not what automakers did in 2016/2017. That time, they compulsively pushed for fewer regulations, and now they are asking for regulations to remain in place.
It’s further notable that Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose company lobbied strongly in favor of emissions cuts and makes more use of the federal EV tax credit than any other company, is now allied with the very entity that’s looking to harm EVs. It seems that we have entered opposite world.
On the other hand, a former reality TV host – tagged along with by the CEO of the company that has sold more electric cars than any other – seem determined to kill electric cars, despite the harm that would cause to Americans’ pocketbooks and health insurance premiums. And that famously vindictive character may be even more spurred towards this harmful course of action after failing in his efforts the first time.
Who ya got?
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