The Biden administration recently rolled out new emissions regulations that the New York Times (NYT) said will “transform the American automobile market.” [emphasis, links added]
In what the paper called “one of the most significant climate regulations in the nation’s history,” the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is mandating that a majority of new passenger vehicles sold in America be hybrids or EVs by 2032.
The Biden administration and defenders of the policy argue that the EPA’s regulation is “not a ban” on gas-powered cars since carmakers are not prohibited from producing gas-powered vehicles.
Instead, automakers are required to meet a government-mandated “average emissions limit” across their entire vehicle line to force them to produce more EVs and fewer gas-powered cars.
It’s a clever ruse in that it allows the Biden administration to use regulatory power to force automobile manufacturers off of gas-powered vehicles while denying that they are banning them.
Whatever one chooses to call the regulation, its purpose is clear. “Make no mistake,” the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) noted. “This is a coerced phase-out of gas-powered cars.”
This might be music to the ears of those who see fossil fuels as evil, but economics and history suggest the White House’s plan to force Americans off of gas-powered cars could be a disaster.
What’s Holding Up EV Adoption?
A major reason why the White House is forcing this “transformation of the American automobile market” is that Americans aren’t voluntarily adopting EVs quickly enough to satisfy the White House.
Though Americans purchased more than a million EVs last year, that still represents less than 8 percent of total vehicle sales in the United States.
The government’s current target is 56 percent. (If the White House was serious about speeding up this transition, it might consider eliminating the 25 percent tariff on cars built in China—which accounts for some 60 percent of global EV sales—but that would be too easy.)
Despite massive subsidies encouraging consumers to purchase EVs, Americans didn’t buy them as rapidly as predicted, causing auto companies to pump the brakes.
Ford recently announced it was halving production of its most popular EV, the F-150 Lightning. General Motors, the largest U.S. automaker, and Toyota, the second-largest U.S. automaker, followed suit, announcing significant reductions in EV production.
The weak demand for electric vehicles no doubt has several sources, but the BBC identified a few primary reasons, two of which appear over and over in consumer surveys: price and charging reliability.
Ford’s F-150 Lightning starts at $50,000. Its popular Mach-e starts at $40,000, and that’s after a recent $8,100 mark-down. GM’s top-selling EV, the LYRIQ, starts at $59,000. On average, EVs sell for about $5,000 more than similar gas-powered cars.
And EV prices are going up, not down, researchers point out.
“In 2011, the inflation-adjusted price of a new EV was near $44,000. By 2022, that price had risen to over $66,000,” said Ashley Nunes, a senior research associate at Harvard Law School, in her testimony to Congress in 2023.
The second problem is that Americans have serious concerns about how they’ll charge their EVs.
A 2023 survey conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago found that 77 percent of respondents cited concerns about charging stations as a reason for not purchasing an EV.
This is not an irrational concern.
When Americans drive their gas-powered cars, they are not worried about where they’ll fill up when their fuel runs low. Gas stations are plentiful in the United States and easy to find. Charging stations are another matter.
Bloomberg reported last year that, despite steady growth in recent years of EV charging stations, there is just one quick-turn electrical vehicle charge station in the United States for every 16 gasoline stations.
Federal efforts to expand charging infrastructure, including $7.5 billion in new spending to build half a million stations, have been embarrassingly slow.
Read rest at Epoch Times
Phase out the Liberal Democrats and the United Nations would be far better
“If the White House was serious about speeding up this transition, it might consider eliminating the 25 percent tariff on cars built in China”
Seems that China is interested in building an EV manufacturing plant in Mexico. Trump has promised a 100% tariff at the boarder if they do.
The problems of cost and range anxiety have often been cited as why more families don’t buy electric cars. Durability is often over looked. A typical gasoline car will last for many miles. Here is a single example of an electric car. When a woman purchased it the car lost range and could only go 90 miles on a full charge. This fell to 60 miles. At that point in her commute to work she did not use the heater or air conditioner for fear she would be stranded with a dead battery. She looked into replacing the battery and for that car the cost was $25,000.