I.C.E. – Eideard

Mustang Mach E GT

The world hit a transport milestone in 2017, though most people wouldn’t have noticed it at the time.

That year, consumers bought more than 85 million automobiles, a sales volume that declined in 2018, and again in 2019, and then plummeted in 2020 due to Covid-19. Meanwhile, sales of electric vehicles rose, and rose again, making EVs the auto industry’s only growth market—and meaning that we almost certainly hit peak internal combustion engine car sales four years ago.

The future looks even more electric, according to BloombergNEF’s annual Electric Vehicle Outlook. (My colleague Colin McKerracher wrote his highlights for Hyperdrive yesterday.) The report is full of bold conclusions. For one, it sees mostly electric vehicles sold by the 2030s and mostly electric vehicles on the road by the 2040s—and that’s just the business as usual scenario. In a net-zero emissions world, EVs would comprise 100% of passenger vehicle sales just 15 years from now, with all other classes of road vehicle—from two-wheelers to heavy commercial trucks—being either fully electric or fuel cell-powered by the early 2040s…

Electric cars get a lot of attention, but they’re only one type of now-electrified road vehicle. Last year, EVs were more than 4% of total passenger car sales and 1% of the commercial vehicle market, at most. Meanwhile, electrics were 44% of electric two- and three-wheeler sales, and 39% of bus sales. As efficient as modern car factories are, they won’t be able to keep pace with an e-scooter factory targeting 10 million units a year.

Passenger cars have a long way to go to catch up. That said, I don’t want to minimize the rate of change so far. Total new car sales value last year exceeded $2 trillion, even with a massive overall sales drop-off. EVs are already a $100 billion-plus annual business, with a striking growth rate.

One of the future delights I miss in advance. As good as my health and fitness have been – and are – unlikely I’ll be around in a decade or two. Ah, well. It’s nice enough, now, to see what’s coming down the Yellow Brick Road.

Committed suicide after he was denied painkillers for a broken leg

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.

The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security…

But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.

As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.

In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.

The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.

RTFA. Please. A long, detailed narrative of medieval management – punctuated by American-style bureaucrats working hardest and longest at covering their tracks.