“The Biden administration is banking on the old ‘if you build it they will come’ approach to cudgel the auto industry away from gas-burning cars. It also seems to recognize a giant problem at the heart of the long-awaited EV revolution: Americans don’t really want them.” In other words, they will force you to comply, as always…
If only life worked for the average person the way it does for the government. Your boss didn’t give you that raise you think you deserved? Simply mandate that the company give it to you anyway. You can’t afford that shiny new car? Mandate that the company sell it to you cheap or even give it away for free. Get rejected by the woman or man you’re really into? Mandate that they marry you or at least date you. Yes, the world truly would be an amazing place if we could simply force companies and people to do what we want, whenever we want. An amazing place for us, at least. Your boss, car dealer, or significant other will likely have a different perspective on the matter, which is why we are said to live in a free society, having freedom of association and freedom of markets. Supposedly, we can work for who we choose, purchase from who we choose, and date who we choose without unnecessary interference, making our own decisions in matters large and small based on our assessment of what’s best for us and our loved ones. The government, however, doesn’t work that way, being the only organization in the country empowered to use force to get what it wants, force at the point of a gun if necessary. This is why – contrary to the opinions of even Supreme Court Justices who should certainly know better – the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were specifically designed to “hamstring” the government, preventing the prevailing authorities from exercising force except in specific instances. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground,” meaning that your freedom of choice is continually under assault from the government and the individual is likely losing the battle. If the Biden Administration gets its way, the electric vehicle market will rather sadly serve as a case study of this principle in action, where the publicly stated plan is to substitute the power of the government for the will of you as an individual consumer, and your opinion on the matter be damned, but first, a little backstory on the role of the government in the electric car industry and the current state of affairs.
The government began subsidizing electric vehicles in earnest over fifteen years ago, as part of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package, signed shortly after he entered office in 2009. The plan, at the time, was to furnish customers with rebates and tax incentives totalling $7,500 per vehicle while funding investments in companies to produce more batteries and other necessary parts. The goal was to have 1,000,000 electric vehicles on the road by 2015 and to create a self-sustaining industry. By 2012, progressive-minded groups were already crediting him with doing precisely that. ProPublica, for instance, reported on “How the Stimulus Revived the Electric Car.” “One success the Obama administration can duly claim is the rebirth of the electric-car industry in the United States. Automakers have unveiled a number of mass-market electric cars, which have seen small but rising sales. Battery and parts manufacturers are building 30 factories, creating thousands of new jobs. A123 has hired 700 workers at Herrera’s plant and a second one in nearby Livonia, and plans to hire a couple thousand more people over the next few years. If it wasn’t for the stimulus, the companies say, they would have built these plants overseas. It was all part of an effort to promote ‘green’ manufacturing and put a million electric cars on the road by 2015. The question is: Will it last?” Even at the time, there were significant concerns. ProPublica went on to describe a plant in Elkhart, Indiana that had failed despite government largesse. “Eager to seed a new industry, the county witnessed electric-vehicle ventures sprout out of nowhere as the stimulus took off in 2009. But by late summer 2011, what had sprouted were weeds. The parking lot of the Think electric-car plant was full of them, some more than a foot high growing from the cracks. Out front were two pickups and a motorcycle. Hundreds of laid-off factory workers were supposed to have found jobs churning out the Norwegian company’s bug-like, plastic-bodied cars, which ran solely on electricity. Today the Elkhart factory employs two. Its parent company filed for bankruptcy in June. Its largest shareholder and battery maker, Ener1, which received $118 million in stimulus money, did the same last week.” The problem back then is the same as it is now: “Consumers have been slow to embrace the electric car. The price of the battery is still too high, and the price of gas is still too low, the Government Accountability Office warned in June 2009 before the grants were awarded. The starting price for the all-electric Nissan Leaf is $33,000, while the hybrid Volt sells for about $40,000 before tax credits — far more than many middle-class families can afford. About 40 percent of drivers didn’t have access to an outlet where they park their vehicles, the GAO noted.”
Over the next decade, Elon Musk managed to turn Tesla into a success story, selling millions of cars on their own while making a fortune that ranks him among the riches in the world, and other automakers have tried to follow suit, including my own beloved Porsche. In total, 1.2 million electric cars were sold in 2023, representing about 7.6 percent of the overall market. This sounds impressive and to some extent it certainly is, but the overall growth has been slowing significantly and has also been uneven across different brands and models. Late last year, Ford, for example, announced a dramatic slowdown in their entire electric vehicle strategy after piling up losses of some four and a half billion dollars, an astounding $62,016 per vehicle sold. As a result, Ford has slashed production by 50% of its vaunted F150 Lightning pick up truck to a measly 1,600 per week, about 10 percent of the volume of its gas powered cousin. Ford was not alone. Ivan Drury, Edmund’s director of insights claimed that “Every EV on the market is being battered by bad news…Nothing is meeting expectations.” “EVs are getting harder to move,” he continued. “Earlier in the year they were still going for above MSRP. Once the average interest rate hit 7% EVs began to linger on the lot and now require a lot more work from automakers and dealers to sell.” Overall, ABC News described the state of the market in January, noting that “recent headlines for electric vehicles have been brutal: Sales are dropping. Momentum is slipping. Consumers are souring on the technology.” John Voelker, an opinion editor at Car & Driver put it this way, “the industry overall may have overestimated Americans’ initial fascination with them,” to use ABC’s phrasing of his comments. “Some of the manufacturers got overly ambitious,” he explained. “It may be difficult to get to 50% [of new EV sales] by 2030. We’ve moved beyond the early adopters now.” Here we get to the crux of the matter: The initial sales were likely to have been driven by those excited about the prospect of an electric vehicle for whatever reason. It could’ve been that they wanted to make a statement about the environment (even though the environmental benefits are doubtful and some claim the cars are even racist), or that they were willing to accept the challenges that come from EV ownership in a second car in exchange for a (theoretically) lower cost per mile. It could even have been that they liked the instant acceleration, which admittedly is fun especially at lower speeds. Given the price of EVs compared to regular cars, commanding an approximately $12,000 premium, it is also likely that the first round of buyers were affluent and many had multiple cars to begin with. (Anecdotally, this is exactly what the Porsche dealer told me about the Taycan. The average customer already has more than one Porsche, good work if you can get it.)
These cars are all sold at this point, however, and penetrating more of the market is going to require converting buyers from traditional automobiles. This isn’t something that is likely to happen by choice because – at least according to the standards the average person uses to judge an automobile – electrics perform far worse than their gas-powered counterparts. The range is shorter, especially for less expensive options that the average person can afford. The Nissan Leaf, mentioned earlier, now costs approximately $38,000 and has a range of a meager 212 miles according to the EPA, barely half of what you would expect from a car in its class. Charging stations are far less readily available than gas stations, plus standards vary from manufacturer, meaning you might pull up to one and find out it doesn’t work with your brand. (On a side note, the Biden Administration promised to fix this problem as part of the much vaunted infrastructure bill, but despite allocating almost $10 billion to the effort, has yet to install a single charger more than two years later.) The stations are also far more complicated than simply filling up, requiring a multi-pronged plug that is easily damaged and can break entirely, as anyone should be familiar with from using common household outlets. Of course, it also takes significantly longer. Even the most advanced – as in expensive – electrics require 15 minutes to reach about 80% charge compared to less than five minutes to fill up entirely. They are also susceptible to extremes in the weather, and cold in particular can greatly limit their charging capacity while requiring energy to run basic conveniences like the heater. Earlier this year, extreme cold in Chicago stranded dozens of Tesla’s at a charging station. As NBC News reported, “It was a rough time to start driving for Uber in Chicago this month, said Marcus Campbell, who signed up with the ride-hailing company last week using a rented car. Campbell said he has already found the frigid weather buffeting the Windy City can make for a longer workday and fewer fares, requiring him to spend several hours waiting his turn at a charging station and powering up.” “When I should be asleep, I’m outside charging my vehicle, falling asleep in my car,” he explained to NBC News’ Adrienne Broaddus. “I’m not making any money.” Mr. Campbell wasn’t alone, either, “Many drivers across the country are likely to face frustrations like Campbell’s this winter.” This is because research from AAA found that an electric vehicle loses 41% of its range on average when temperatures fall below 20 degrees Fahrenheit, like a leak that drains almost 50% of your gas tank. Even worse, Consumer Reports found that electric vehicles have 80% more problems than conventional cars. The so called plugin hybrids fared even worse with 150% more problems.
The media has largely responded to these challenges by blaming manufacturers, consumers, basically everyone except the government, and insisting that all of this is worth it simply to save the planet. Earlier this year, Fortune magazine put it this way. The “climate crisis is a first-order crisis with compounding effects across every facet of society. Last year was the warmest year on record, and we are just getting started. The EV tradeoff is worth it, in my humble and professional opinion, to reduce carbon emissions and dirty pollutants coming out of tailpipes.” Putting this another way, you, the average American, has to do more with less, paying much more for decidedly less, all for a car you might not even be able to drive in the winter. The government, not surprisingly, agrees, and despite the obvious signs of an already subsidized market teetering on the brink of collapse, the plan is to double down on forcing you to purchase an electric vehicle, whether you like it or not. On Wednesday, the Biden Administration announced that they were moving ahead with their long-planned regulatory scheme to mandate that two thirds of all cars sold are electric in less than ten years, whatever signals the market or consumers may be sending, and they were in fact, doing it for your own good. In advance of the announcement Politico described this outright power grab as a “hard-fought climate rule” that would “tackle the nation’s biggest source of planet-warming pollution and accelerate the transition to electric vehicles.” The rule requires “carmakers to cut their average emissions of carbon dioxide 52 percent between 2027 and 2032,” which is of course impossible to do with a gas powered vehicle. Thus, the “EPA projects that the standard would push the car industry to ensure that electric cars and light trucks make up about 67 percent of new vehicles by model year 2032.” As CNN described it, “The Biden administration is banking on the old ‘if you build it they will come’ approach to cudgel the auto industry away from gas-burning cars. It also seems to recognize a giant problem at the heart of the long-awaited EV revolution: Americans don’t really want them.”
Incredibly, they continued to describe this “cudgel” that wasn’t voted on by anyone as a “a political win for Biden, who’s made the EV transition a signature item in his climate agenda, and a practical win for automakers, who’ve been lobbying the administration for a bit more time and flexibility when it comes to reaching electric sales targets.” Perhaps never before has beating an industry and their customers into submission with a weapon been described as some sort of victory. Here, I thought references to violence in political discourse were necessarily bad and should never be used. Even more incredibly, CNN and others are all acting as if the automakers will foot the bill for this fantasy instead of consumers. Where do they think this money comes from? Ford, for example, has no money of its own. They only have the money their customers give them to purchase their products. If they lose $4.5 billion on electric vehicles, they need to offset that somewhere else. This is one of the reasons why car prices have been surging well beyond the already high inflation: The average person is already paying for the investments and the losses, and the Administration plans to force you to pay even more. In the private sector, a dramatic slowdown in the market combined with much hire rates of repair and limited environmental benefits would likely result in rethinking the overall strategy. The government doesn’t work that way, however, and instead, it’s full steam ahead, wielding that cudgel no matter the impact on your lifestyle or your wallet. As I said at the beginning, it must be nice to be the government.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 