by James Osborne (Houston Chronicle) Sitting on stage at the Washington Auto Show last week surrounded by the latest electric offerings from Tesla and Rolls-Royce, Rep. Roger Williams, a North Texas Republican whose family had sold cars for three generations, shook his head in disbelief.
"It used to be customers told (dealers) what they wanted. We told the manufacturers, and that's what they made," he said. "The government is trying to shove these EVs down people's throat. They don’t want it. It’s a phony economy."
Ten months ahead of the presidential election, Republicans are honing in on a series of recent setbacks for electric vehicle sales as proof the technology and the Biden administration's effort to get it in Americans' driveways as quickly as possible are a doomed effort that will cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
...
The Biden administration, which along with governments worldwide has made electrifying transportation a cornerstone of its climate policy, has portrayed the production delays as bumps in the road as the United States establishes itself at the forefront of a major new industry.
...
How much of a role EVs play in an election year where issues such as inflation, the future of Democracy and immigration are top of mind for most voters remains to be seen when general election campaigns ramp up this year.
But Republicans clearly see an opening, using EVs as an opportunity to portray President Joe Biden and Democrats as out of touch with average Americans, said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University.
...
"This election is going to be about mobilizing voters, and this is an issue you can use to mobilize people," he (Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University) said. "You can see Republicans making this about Democrats and coastal elites trying to impose their values and making everyone buy a more expensive product than they would prefer to buy."
It might be working.
A poll by the Pew Research Center last summer found that the number of Americans who supported the transition away from gasoline-powered vehicles had declined to 40% from 47% in 2022, with skepticism particularly pronounced among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. READ MORE
Related articles
- Ford Cuts Workforce Making Electric F-150s on Weak Demand: Follows December news that 2024 production would be halved; Carmaker adding third shift to make more Broncos, Rangers (Bloomberg)
- Environmental Defense Fund will oppose Trump's candidacy as it aims to spend $20M before election -- While the group's political arm isn't explicitly endorsing Biden, a source told NBC News that opposition to Trump opens the door to working in support of re-electing the president. (NBC News)
- Biden should push plug-in hybrids, not just EVs (Washington Post)
Excerpt from Washington Post: The battle for the climate will require electrifying America’s transportation system. But the Biden administration’s effort to push drivers into electric vehicles is unrealistic — and it risks setting back the country’s whole climate program, legitimizing Republican arguments that the energy transition needed to prevent catastrophic climate change is an ill-wrought, heavy-handed intrusion by the government into Americans’ lives.
...
The moment requires more than just softening rules to acknowledge union and industry gripes, however. The administration should shift the transition to a perhaps slower but more plausible path — one that acknowledges the many obstacles blocking a quick, mass electrification of the light vehicle fleet. Many American drivers remain reluctant to replace their gas-powered cars and trucks with electric vehicles. EV sales are slowing, prompting several carmakers to pare back their production schedules. This is understandable. Drivers fear getting stuck on the road without juice, far from stations that can replenish their batteries in reasonable amounts of time.
Even the fastest chargers can take up to an hour to recharge a spent EV battery. And despite rich incentives for charger deployment in the Inflation Reduction Act, there aren’t many at the moment. There are fewer than 10,000 fast public charging stations around the country, according to the Energy Department, alongside 54,000 slower chargers that can take up to 10 hours to charge a car from empty to full. By contrast, there are about 170,000 gas stations where drivers can fill tanks pretty fast.
...
The good news is that there is an alternative electrification path available that doesn’t rely on unrealistically rapid deployment of charging infrastructure: The administration can open space in its rules to encourage the purchase of plug-in hybrids. These are not just traditional hybrid cars; they have large batteries, albeit not as large as those for full EVs, that can power cars for substantial distances without assistance. But they also have internal combustion engines that kick in when their electric batteries run out.
The Just Stop Oil crowd might see this as an unacceptable favor to the fossil fuel industry. But hybrids can match 80 percent or more of the carbon emissions reductions delivered by full EVs, according to Paul Bledsoe, an environmental policy lecturer at American University. That’s because Americans, on average, drive fewer than 40 miles in a day, which keeps them within the range of the smaller plug-in hybrid battery.
Plug-in hybrids deliver other benefits. They are much cheaper, and they do not require the vast amounts of rare earths and other hard-to-find minerals that EVs need. Mr. Bledsoe, who served on President Bill Clinton’s Climate Change Task Force, says that five plug-in hybrids can be made from the minerals used in one EV.
...
Opening a short transitional phase in which the government includes substantial room for plug-in hybrid vehicles in its vehicle standards would create time for the next generation of battery technologies — which won’t require as many rare minerals — to mature.
The European Union, it’s true, has set 2035 as the year when all new cars in the bloc must produce zero emissions, as have some U.S. states. This would bar plug-in hybrids. But the EV market share of new cars in Europe is double that of the United States. The bloc also enjoys a denser network of charging stations.
And, critically, Europe’s politics are different. The push for full electric vehicles in the United States is one of Republicans’ leading attack lines. EVs’ cost and range issues spur more anxiety here.
Perhaps the best case for hybrid gas/electric cars is that the driving public is embracing them: Worldwide sales of plug-in hybrids spiked 47 percent last year, which was 17 percentage points higher than EVs’ sales growth. Toyota, hybrids’ loudest champion, sold 3.4 million of them last year, earning headlines such as “Was Toyota’s bet on hybrid cars right all along?”
The EV transition will have to happen over the next couple of decades. But forcing an immediate transition to full electric vehicles could produce backlash against the Biden administration’s entire climate change strategy. Encouraging plug-in hybrids first would be like driving through a green light. READ MORE
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