A strong case can be made that the worst thing that ever happened to the electric vehicle industry was Joe Biden. His strongarm tactics to force Americans to buy battery-operated cars have only stiffened consumer resolve not to purchase them. EV sales had been robust before Biden entered the White House, but the boomlet stalled as conservative voters rebelled and even ridiculed EVs as “Biden cars”.
While EVs have become popular in blue states like New York and California – where more than one-third of the sales have occurred – Red Staters have turned a thumbs down to these cars of the future.
That hasn’t been the only setback.
Deloitte’s Global Automotive Consumer Study recently found: “Consumer interest in [traditional] Internal Combustion Engine vehicles is rebounding“ due to “affordability concerns” about $75,000 plug-in vehicles. Some 67 per cent of consumers said they prefer an internal combustion engine for their next vehicle purchase – up from 58 per cent last year. Just 6 per cent prefer pure EVs and 21 per cent prefer hybrids.
Back in March, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a new emissions rule only slightly less unachievable than its original pie-in-the-sky proposal, which mandated 67 per cent battery-electric vehicle sales by model year 2032 (currently only about 7.6 per cent of new car sales are non-hybrid EVs). But Biden’s base scenario is still that 56 per cent of all model year 2032 vehicle sales must be non-hybrid EVs. Worse yet, Biden would just allow 64 per cent of new vehicles sold in model year 2027 to be internal-combustion-only and just 29 per cent in model year 2032. It’s 84 per cent now.
As a consequence, the odds that a federal mandate of 67 per cent EV sales by the end of the decade could be achieved is about as likely as Trump and Kamala Harris kissing and making up after the election.
But Democrats remain oblivious to this cold reality and are still pursuing a total ban on gas cars by 2035. Many blue state politicians in California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington have already ordered such an anti-choice policy.
What the politicians have lost sight of is that Americans have love affairs with their cars.
The auto industry also forgot that lesson as it followed government mandates to roll EVs off assembly lines without asking car buyers what they thought. As a consequence, companies like Ford have lost more than $30,000 for every EV they’ve sold. That’s a business model from hell.
Meanwhile, Volvo was the first car manufacturer to pledge to sell only electric vehicles by 2030. Now it has joined a dozen other firms in scaling back its EV ambitions. Why? According to Volvo chief commercial officer Bjorn Annwall: “Fully electric cars also need to be profitable” so they must “adjust to reality”. Ditto for about six or seven other major car companies.
Right now EVs are headed down the path of the infamous Ford Edsel that, in the 1950s, was supposed to be the can’t-miss car of the future and became an historic flop with consumers.
What is perhaps most amazing about the stall out of EVs – except in very wealthy zip code areas, where driving a plug-in car has become a hoity-toity form of virtue signalling – is that the federal government is paying car buyers $7,500 to purchase them, subsidising their production with billions of dollars of grants, and giving all the choice parking spaces to EV owners. But Americans still aren’t biting.
The irony of this flop is that polls and buying habits show that hybrids may be the next big thing. They reduce pollution levels and are convenient for consumers who want an electric battery for short distances and gas for long distance travel. (For the record, my wife and I own a hybrid.)
Yet foolishly the green movement wants none of this. Hybrids don’t count in the mandates and are effectively treated as gas cars. This is because of an economically retarded commitment to “net zero” emissions policies. So instead of pushing car buyers towards vehicles that can cut emissions by as much as half – they’d rather try to bully people into cars they won’t buy.
So we now have a policy in place that’s bad for the environment, bad for taxpayers, bad for the US auto industry, and is having the opposite effect to the one that was hoped for. Yet 190 Democrats in the House recently voted en masse against an amendment to ease the unachievable EV mandates.
It’s hard to believe that supposedly smart people have come up with such a dumb strategy.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and co-author of the new book: “The Trump Economic Miracle”
