Late last year, I reported that car dealerships across the nation were begging Biden for help, wanting him him to use his pen and phone to undo the ridiculous EV mandates that have popped up across the nation thanks to green energy pseudoscience and climate cultists.
Someone in the Biden administration appears to be lucid enough to recognize that the appeal of electric vehicles (EVs) is becoming more select….even in the blue bastion of California.
After years of rapid expansion, California’s booming EV market may be showing signs of fatigue as high vehicle prices, unreliable charging networks and other consumer headaches appear to dampen enthusiasm for zero-emission vehicles.For the first time in more than a decade, electric vehicle sales dropped significantly in the last half of 2023….It’s unclear whether the declines are a mere blip or the beginning of a downward trend, but the news is already raising questions about California’s ability to meet its ambitious climate goals, including a pledge to ban the sale of new gasoline- and diesel-powered cars and light trucks by 2035.“It’s an interesting time for the automakers and consumers,” said Greg Bannon, director of automotive engineering at AAA. “The government and automakers have spent billions on something consumers may not want.”
A significant reason for this trend is that the realities, and expenses, associated with EV ownership are becoming more apparent to a larger number of potential car buyers.
Now, as the presidential primary season is heading toward its Super Tuesday climax, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is poised to slow down on the high-speed transition to electric vehicles. The agency is backing off on tailpipe emissions limits and EV sales targets until after the now rapidly approaching year…2030.
In a concession to automakers and labor unions, the Biden administration intends to relax elements of one of its most ambitious strategies to combat climate change, limits on tailpipe emissions that are designed to get Americans to switch from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles, according to three people familiar with the plan.Instead of essentially requiring automakers to rapidly ramp up sales of electric vehicles over the next few years, the administration would give car manufacturers more time, with a sharp increase in sales not required until after 2030, these people said. They asked to remain anonymous because the regulation has not been finalized. The administration plans to publish the final rule by early spring….Last spring, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed the toughest-ever limits on tailpipe emissions. The rules would be so strict, the only way car makers could comply would be to sell a tremendous number of zero-emissions vehicles in a relatively short time frame.The E.P.A. designed the proposed regulations so that 67 percent of sales of new cars and light-duty trucks would be all-electric by 2032, up from 7.6 percent in 2023, a radical remaking of the American automobile market.That remains the goal. But as they finalize the regulations, administration officials are tweaking the plan to slow the pace at which auto manufacturers would need to comply, so that electric vehicle sales would increase more gradually through 2030 but then would have to sharply rise.
Reality and economics are now harshing the climate cultists’ fantasies of a fossil-fuel-free utopia.
The cost of an EV is, on average, $53,000 — still about 4 percent more expensive than your typical car, even though prices have fallen dramatically in the past year. If a driver with stellar credit finances 80 percent of that purchase, as is the typical amount people borrow, that’s more than $11,000 in interest at today’s rates.This leads back to the automakers themselves. Car manufacturers can cut prices — and they have — but new, expensive factories and higher wages for workers make it harder for them to make a profit. And this is key. All the major EV companies are publicly traded, meaning that management has to answer to shareholders who care about the value of their stock holdings. The fact that consumer demand for battery-electric vehicles is falling means that they will push something else to keep their profits from falling. For Ford and GM, this means selling more cars with combustion engines or, in the case of GM, plug-in hybrids. (GM said it expects to sell at least 200,000 EVs this year, which would roughly triple its sales from last year, a projection that Schirmer calls “optimistic.”) …. But if the U.S. is going to have a meaningfully electrified fleet, it needs the Big Three to sell these cars, which means making models that both appeal to the masses and earn them a profit — something that they haven’t quite figured out how to do.“The impetus to try to make sure they hit the 2030 targets is going to be overshadowed by the need to make profits,” Jenkins says. “It’s as simple as that.”
How much money and effort have been spent on the effort to force Americans into EVs? This has been a dreadful disaster for our nation and its prosperity. However, all the same chemistry and physics that make EVs impractical with the current power grid and charging network will still be relevant after 2030.
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