What’s behind the Republican Hatred of EVs?

February 14, 2024

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by Kelsey Brugger, Rebekah Alvey (E&E Daily) ... At a recent auto show, Rep. Roger Williams (R-Texas), the Small Business Committee chair, confidently predicted: “EVs won’t exist in a few years.” Hybrids were more viable, argued Williams, the owner of a car dealership.

After a recent cold snap in their state, Iowa lawmakers complained that President Joe Biden’s EV “fantasy” was completely unplugged from reality.

“No consumer in Iowa is buying an electric vehicle to drive across the state when it’s 30 degrees below outside,” said Rep. Zach Nunn (R-Iowa). “No farmer is out there saying, ‘I want to have an EPA mandate requiring me to drive an electric tractor when I have 10,000 acres I need to plow.'”

Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) who has been advising the campaign of former president Donald Trump on minerals issues, recently told E&E News, “I don’t think EVs are going to be part of the future.”

He said this despite the insistence of many backers that onshoring mineral supply chains is crucial to the domestic EV industry.

Indeed, Trump himself has often railed against electric vehicles with his typical blend of wild and unsubstantiated claims.

All this talk comes after a bumpy few months for the EV sector: The January cold snap in the Midwest highlighted concerns over batteries, sales have slowed and the rollout of a nationwide charging station network has been anemic.

Republicans are eager to take advantage. Since taking control of the House in 2023, they have sought to roll back much of Biden’s green agenda.

In December, the GOP-led House backed an effort to block an EPA rule on stricter vehicle emissions. Republicans declared the rule “a de facto EV mandate.”

In January, Congress voted to undo a Federal Highway Administration rule that would ease “Made in America” requirements for building EV chargers. Biden vetoed it.

Republicans are also itching to undo recent proposed fuel economy standards seen as favoring EVs. Even EV-friendly Republicans have pushed back against the government-backed transition.

“I think it’s the kind of thing that eventually you know more and more people will adopt and it doesn’t need to be forced on people,” said Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who owns a Tesla. “The grid’s not ready yet. The goals that Biden has set are unrealistic.”

Republican disdain for battery-powered cars is now part of the culture wars — but it’s not exactly new. Rather, it can be traced back to the early 2010s, when the federal government first offered Tesla and Fisker loans, said Nick Loris, vice president of public policy at the conservative climate consulting firm C3 Solutions.

“There was a sentiment that 1) EVs couldn’t survive without the taxpayer’s help and 2) The tax credits are going to wealthy Californians,” he said.

Even though the more recent tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act are means tested, Loris said, “the sentiment remains the same.”

The message that coastal elites only drive EVs has stuck.

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New polling from Third Way shows that a whopping 96 percent of voters do not own an EV. And most have no plans of purchasing one in the next 10 years. The poll was conducted last month via text and online with 1,000 likely voters, with an oversample in swing states. It had a 3.1 percent margin of error.

But there’s a sharp partisan divide. Fifty-five percent of Republicans say there’s no chance at all they’d consider buying an EV in the next decade, compared to only 14 percent of Democrats and 28 percent of independents who say the same.

The results also showed that while 77 percent of Americans support clean energy investments, only 49 percent support EV investments.

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“Democrats want to fund EV manufacturing because it creates jobs, cuts emissions and saves families money on gas,” Becker (Emily Becker, Third Way) added. “But most Americans can’t afford a new car, so they won’t get those savings. And they’re nervous about China and not especially concerned about the climate.”

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Ford is rethinking its EV strategy and delaying production at some battery plants across the United States. During an earnings call this year, the automaker’s CEO said the company had lost $4.7 billion on its EV investments in 2023.

Recently, General Motors’ CEO Mary Barra lowered the company’s goal of producing 400,000 EVs in 2024 to between 200,000 and 300,000.

And the chair of Toyota, which has been resistant to the full-electric transition, predicted battery electric vehicles will max out at 30 percent of the market while hybrids, hydrogen fuel cell and gasoline-powered cars will make up the rest.

Automakers — including Tesla, GM, Ford and Stellantis — did not respond to interview requests for this story.

Last fall, the high-profile United Auto Workers strike was — in large part — about the Detroit Three automakers transition to EVs. READ MORE

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Excerpt from BBC: In February, President Biden said that China's policies "could flood our market with its vehicles, posing risks to our national security" and that he would "not let that happen on my watch."

Washington could impose restrictions over concerns that the technology in Chinese-made cars could "collect large amounts of sensitive data on their drivers and passengers", the White House said.

It warned cars that are connected to the internet "regularly use their cameras and sensors to record detailed information on US infrastructure; interact directly with critical infrastructure; and can be piloted or disabled remotely".

China is the world's largest producer of cars and vying with Japan to be the biggest exporter of vehicles.

The number of Chinese cars on US roads is, however, extremely low due to the fact the latter currently imposes a 27.5% tariff on the vehicles.

This week, while on a trip to China, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned Beijing that Washington would not allow a repeat of the "China shock" of the early 2000s, when Chinese imports flooded into America.

In response, China's vice finance minister, Liao Min, expressed "grave concern" over restrictions the US has imposed on trade and investment.

Mr Liao said China's competitive advantages are due to its "large-scale market, complete industrial system and abundant human resources".

Also on Thursday, America's biggest airlines asked the Biden administration to halt approvals of new flights between the US and China.

In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Transportation Department Secretary Pete Buttigieg they said China's “damaging anti-competitive policies” put US carriers at a disadvantage. READ MORE

Excerpt from E&E News Energywire: Tesla told its workers Monday that more than 10 percent of them would lose their jobs, a sign that slowing interest in electric vehicles is causing significant disruption for the world’s leading EV-maker.

The company also parted ways with two top executives: Andrew Baglino, a top lieutenant who developed Tesla’s vehicles and energy products, and Rohan Patel, a vice president of public policy who once served as a climate and energy adviser in the Obama White House.

After two years in which Tesla opened two new factories, one in Texas and another in Berlin, the automaker’s layoffs come amid declining interest in its vehicles and growing competition from other automakers.

...

‘I don’t want to make this sound too cynical, but it’s an indication that Tesla is a car company,” said Mike Ramsey, an auto analyst at the consulting firm Gartner.

“It has long been considered a technology company, and it for sure has been a leader in innovating technology inside the car, but the fact of the matter is that these layoffs are much more similar to what we see in the rest of the auto industry when you have grown beyond your current demand,” he said. READ MORE

Excerpt from Washington Post:

One reason is that Republican leaders have injected electric vehicles into the culture wars, in light of President Biden’s effort to move the country away from gas cars. Former president Donald Trump has railed against electric cars, calling support of them “electric car lunacy” and the push for an EV future “very, very stupid.”

“I think it is getting more polarized,” Murphy (Mike Murphy, a former Republican strategist who runs the nonprofit EV Politics Project) said. “Republicans are instinctively: ‘If Biden’s for it, we’re against.’”

An analysis of social media content by The Washington Post shows that conservative criticism of electric cars rose in August 2022 after California announced rules to phase out fully gas-powered cars by 2035 — and when the Biden administration finalized an Environmental Protection Agency rule in March that would push automakers to make more than 50 percent of cars sold by 2032 all-electric or hybrid.

Conservatives talking about EVs often make a few standard critiques: that switching to electric cars will end up supporting China, that the vehicles are too expensive for ordinary Americans, or that Democrats are taking away Americans’ right to choose which cars they drive.

“It’s a religion,” Tucker Carlson said on Fox News shortly after California announced its plan to phase out gas-powered cars. “It’s about making them feel like good people and increasing their control over you.”

But there are other reasons Republicans might be more reluctant to switch to electric cars. Marc Hetherington, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a co-author of the 2018 book “Prius or Pickup?” says that political polarization partly stems from deep-seated psychological “worldviews.” Liberals tend to be more afraid of systemic issues like climate change compared to conservatives. Conservatives also tend to be more hesitant to adopt new technologies; liberals are more open to change.

Those preferences can lead Republicans to stick with the large cars and trucks that they know; it can also lead liberals to opt for hybrids or electric vehicles.

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When it comes to Democrats adopting EVs, Davis (Lucas Davis, a professor of business and technology at the University of California at Berkeley) said, “It demonstrates your environmental bona fides to your neighbors.”

And once those habits are created, they become calcified. Cars become not just a way to get around but a form of personal expression, identity and group membership. Democrats see friends and family driving EVs and want to do the same; Republicans hear elite members of their party blasting electric cars and opt to stay with gas.

Some analysts hope to change how conservatives see electric cars. John Marshall, the founder and CEO of the Potential Energy Coalition, a group that uses marketing strategies to boost climate action, says that his group’s research shows that abstract messaging — around EVs as job creators or as a path to energy independence — doesn’t work as well as pointing out how EVs cut pollution and the cost of owning a car. (According to an analysis by the group Energy Innovation, EVs can save $14 to $80 per refuel.)

Talk of banning gas-powered cars also doesn’t help. “Mandates, bans and limitations never win,” said Marshall. “Whenever one of those three things is mentioned, you lose support pretty significantly.”

Murphy says that carmakers need to focus primarily on how they can help consumers. “They’re fast, they’re quiet, need much less maintenance,” he said.

Gil Tal, the director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at the University of California at Davis, says that resistance to new technologies is a normal part of the process. But he worries that this partisan divide could slow the process.

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About 40 percent of new car buyers are Republicans, Murphy points out — without them, the country won’t be able to shift fully to electric vehicles.

One of the big questions going forward is how much of the trend is due to deep-seated disagreement on electric cars — and how much is simply the effect of seeing friends and neighbors owning the vehicles. Multiple studies have shown that actions like buying solar panels or buying EVs are “contagious”; they spread among communities.

That means that if EVs gain a foothold in Republican areas, they could spread quickly. READ MORE