Pete Buttigieg: Families Buying Electric Cars “Never Have to Worry About Gas Prices Again”
“The people who stand to benefit most from owning an EV are often rural residents who have the most distances to drive, who burn the most gas, and underserved urban residents in areas where there are higher gas prices and lower income”
Biden Energy Secretary Pete Buttigieg recently offered some very comforting words to American families who are struggling with higher gas prices. Just buy an electric car.
Never mind that electricity isn’t free, or the fact that electric cars are still significantly more expensive than gas-powered vehicles. Talk about being out of touch.
Maureen Breslin reported at The Hill:
Buttigieg: Families who buy electric vehicles ‘never have to worry about gas prices again’
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stressed in a new interview that families who buy electric vehicles (EVs) “never have to worry about gas prices again.”
While speaking on MSNBC’s “The Sunday Show With Jonathan Capehart,” Buttigieg noted that Democrats’ proposed social spending package includes incentives to make it more affordable to buy an electric vehicle.
Buttigieg said that families would essentially have a “$12,500 discount” in transportation costs, adding that “families who own that vehicle will never have to worry about gas prices again.”
“The people who stand to benefit most from owning an EV are often rural residents who have the most distances to drive, who burn the most gas, and underserved urban residents in areas where there are higher gas prices and lower income,” Buttigieg said.
“They would gain the most by having that vehicle. These are the very residents who have not always been connected to electric vehicles that are viewed as kind of a luxury item,” he added.
This video is cued to start at the 4:33 mark, so just press play:
If you watched to the end, you saw the ‘journalist’ ask Buttigieg for baby pictures, because that’s what journalists do when they view politicians as friends and allies.
On the tax credit point made by Buttigieg, Ed Morrissey of Hot Air notices a problem:
Where does one start with this nonsense? Let’s start at the “discount,” given as a point-of-sale tax credit similar to that passed in 2009 in Barack Obama’s stimulus plan. Even with the more robust figure, five thousand dollars higher in Joe Biden’s BBB plan, it still doesn’t bridge the gap for car buyers. In a Quartz analysis one year ago cited at Car and Driver, the difference between an average gas-powered vehicle and an EV is $19,000, even if it’s narrowing recently, and repair costs are still higher…
Buttigieg lives in a political bubble with other members of the Biden administration, far removed from the real world where the rest of us live.
Everyone can probably afford electric cars in the world that Pete Buttigieg lives in.
Average Americans struggling with record high gas prices? Not so much https://t.co/Zyovi2pJoU
— Mercedes Schlapp (@mercedesschlapp) November 29, 2021
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Comments
Ummm, I guess that answers the question of, is he really that stupid? Yes, exceptionally so!
My understanding is that Pete is a graduate of at least one of Klaus Schwab’s schools. He is saying what he is told to say. Stupid? That too. He is useful at the moment.
He’s a dumbass, who tests well. He’s a total fraud.
Buttgag may be dumber than Biden. The pair couldn’t ring the bell at the 50 level on the IQ scale.
Dumber than Biden? More moronic and vapid, too? If so, he’s the next Democrat nominee for president for sure.
He was chosen to be a future presidential nominee the first day he sashayed into the mayors office
Shaking my damned head…
Surcharges and user taxes will suddenly appear after the dumb schmuck buys the electric car.
You mean electricity doesn’t grow on trees?
Wait until you have to change out the batteries. Ka-ching!
I keep hearing how a battery change is no more expensive than a new engine
I’ve taken 6 different f250s a n d f350s over 200,000 miles, half of those over 250, and one to 300,000.
Gas engines, not diesel. And carrying loads the whole time, while regularly pulling trailers up to 14k
Show me any EV than can get those miles out of average use in commuting
I want someone to point me
Dang it
Meant to drop that last line
So where are the electric farm tractors, combines, passenger aircraft or 18 wheeled trucks? Let’s face the truth, fossil fuels will be the cost effective solution for most, if not all purposes for many years to come.
Not to mention the environmental impacts of the acids, heavy metals and rare earth metals contained in these expended batteries. Don’t forget, Hunter Biden brokered the sale of the world’s most productive cobalt mine to China giving them the lead in advanced battery production.
Meanwhile, the price of Electricity is rising faster than gasoline thanks to fuel surcharges.
If it did grow on trees, they would outlaw electricity.
Electricity comes out of the walls! It’s magic! And it somehow never goes up in price, unlike the coal and oil that is used to generate most of it. That’s how magic it is!
I thought that it just comes out of the plug
The only difference between this and “Let them eat cake” is that Marie Antoinette reportedly did not say it.
I think the misunderstanding is this: she did indeed say “let them eat cake“. The cake to which the dear lady referred however is a buildup of stuff on the inside of a woodstove. It gets there from cooking. It was colloquially called, “cake”. In short, the people were starving, and she told them to eat the baked on residue that was on the inside of their cooking stoves.
“Cake” was also the “sacrificial” dough placed between the hot oven floor and the bake goods to prevent burning/charring of the bottom of the baked good. It was scrap but still edible. Nothing to lose your… well .. on second thought… Tone deaf beyond belief but just as today… enough to be destroyed over as the new Reign of Terror tools up.
So Butthead might as well have said: “Let them fill their gas tanks with baked-on residue”.
Nope. She never said it. There was no misunderstanding, it’s a plain misattribution. The quote is from Rousseau in 1766, when Marie Antionette was an 10-year-old in Austria and he’d never heard of her. He attributed it to “a great princess”.
She certainly would never have said anything as heartless as what you attribute to her. She was a nice person, who cared about the poor. Even Rousseau’s apocryphal princess was not heartless; she was simply clueless about what life is like for people outside her bubble.
THANK YOU for this!!! To be slandered for more than two centuries is not fair to her.
Now do Kyle Rittenhouse.
He’s got 199 years to go before he’s been slandered for two centuries…
I’m one of those rural folks who burn the most gas. I looked seriously at the F150 Lightning, but ultimately went with the F150 3.5 ecoboost. Even if EV’s do get to where they have a usable range for us rural folk, the recharge times will be a problem for a long time to come.
No thanks Pete
People who stand to benefit most from owning an EV are often rural residents who experience the most frequent and longest-lasting power outages? At least if you have a gas car you might be able to use it to go someplace that’s heated if yours isn’t due to the power outage, or at least warm yourself in it by running its engine.
Although you can expect your electric car to go farther if you refrain from turning on the cabin heat …
(Consumer Union also claims the lifetime cost of an electric vehicle is lower than that of one with a combustion engine, but their bias is so strong in favor of electric that I have little confidence they’ve taken their own biases into account and adequately compensated for these.)
Sorry optic, byte ll me WHY we vote for these traitors?
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/12/01/exclusive-tool-to-enforce-orwellian-rules-80-house-republicans-help-pass-bill-to-fund-federal-vaccination-database/
We did? That’s news to most of us:
CIA just put out a doc, “Trump—A Unique Challenge,” that is inappropriate & contributes to the perception (& at times reality) that elements of the IC are partisan attack dogs against Trump/GOP. Even some current Intel officials are privately characterizing the doc as a hit job
https://twitter.com/Cliff_Sims/status/1466145357730041859
This is why I am not impressed by polls showing Republicans with a titanic lead over Communists in the 2022 midterms. If they continues to follow their present course of licking the Communists’ jackboots, the national GOP stands an excellent chance of (1) alienating large swaths of their own voters and (2) getting clobbered again by massive voting fraud.
A 7.5 KW GenSet takes about 3 hours to fully charge a Tesla from a 10% charge. It burns just over 13 gallons for the full charge range of 200 miles. That works out to 15.4 miles per gallon.
Whether it is coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, or nuclear the cost for electric is greater than fossil fuels. Especially when you add in the cost of replacement batteries and the disposal of the old batteries.
We are probably getting into the early stages of the technology for the electric motors but we need to improve. We are nowhere near where we need to be technology wise for the storage of energy. Lithium Ion is not the answer.
Electric cars have been around for over a hundred years. The problem isn’t the motors, it’s the energy density of the power storage. Nothing, absolutely nothing, beats gasoline for energy density. Everything else is limited by our current understanding of chemistry, so people claiming that batteries will get better Real Soon Now are talking out their ass.
I’ve been waiting for years for solar PV cells to get better Real Soon Now as well. And I live in farking Arizona, where I ought to be able to siphon power off an outdoor Stirling engine, FGS.
I get between 18 and 19 mpg out of my 2003 Cummins-powered Ram 2500, including the move from CA to UT this spring. I topped off at Minden and Tonopah at about 20 minutes each (precautionary plus head-call). So I put over 200 miles in my ride in about 5 minutes of actual fuel-pumping time.
After 25 years in rural CA I found that motor fuel was less expensive there than in the “big cities”. I had animals and went days without leaving the property, save a trip to the post office box. I would love to see Mayor Pete move manure, mow pastures, and cut firewood without gas powered equipment.
“I would love to see Mayor Pete move manure, mow pastures, and cut firewood without gas powered equipment.”
Mayor Pete comes from the Mayor Bloomberg school of farming…………………………
Sorry about that, autocorrect is God awful and then you can’t edit!!!
You can’t edit, certainly. But you can inadvertently give somebody a down tick when all you want to do is reply. Count your blessings! /ducking
Las I checked (it’s been a while, so things may have changed) the vast majority of electricity is still produced using fossil fuels; the price of gas will still have an effect.
Why is this guy so off-putting?
Same reason Kamala Harris is: they’re complete contrivances.
I look at this guy and I see a guy who took a highly-paid, highly crucial job, then immediately went on a two-month vacation.
You ever had a job where that sort of thing happened? Me neither. I had to fight my last employer for the one-year unpaid sabbatical after 15 years of service that was in my signing contract.
But I’m sure Biden got a real bargain in Buttigieg. He only had to pay him 71¢ for every $1 he would have had to pay a guy who wouldn’t go out and get pregnant.
and this is the best fjb could come up with for an energy secretary? stupid doesn’t even come close to describing tailhook
Energy secretary, like most cabinet positions, or just giveaways. You don’t need to know your subject. You just need to be the right person in the right place at the right time.
Hey, the way he’s always talking about “electric” cars, you would think he held the title of Energy Secretary. Actually, he holds the title of Transportation Secretary. I think the job description he was given included 5 hours off for every hour worked (which saves energy in his office since he is always at home), smiling and patting EVs on the head in his best Alfred E. Newman look, and pumping breast milk for his baby (which is why he needs 5 hours off for every hour worked). I have yet to hear the climate guys address the future need for landfill sites to dispose of all these discarded batteries. Could someone point me to that data? I know they scream over nuclear power plant rods, decrying their “destruction” of the planet so I know that they are equally alarmed over a far more prevalent need for battery disposal sites.
Just once, I wish these people would think things through before spewing forth garbage talk. Why not just eliminate cell phones? Those things have batteries that are clogging landfills since most young people replace the phone after a year (at most). I love the targeted “outrage” of this crowd. Butthead plays perfectly to his Beavis, er Brandon, er Biden. They are like Siamese twins attached at an empty head!!
How many decades, if ever, before we have the expensive charging station and green electricity generating infrastructure to power a large number of these? Until then aren’t we just trading a convenient fossil fuel car for a fossil fuel utility powered, inconvenient EV, at higher costs?
This administration thinks ” if you build them, they will come”
That’s why the infrastructure bill includes demanding they be built, regardless of the need
Just a step to forcing everybody into EVs
Consumer costs is of no importance to them
Hey, next thing you know, the reward for crossing our border illegally will be a brand new EV. At least then, we can identify them!!
This reminds me of W’s lightbulb debacle. The federal government forced change too soon and American companies got screwed because they had to retool to produce something other than incandescent bulbs. Most of them went with CFL’s because it was the best option at the time. Meanwhile, China was able to take their time developing LED tech which was a much better replacement for incandescents in the long run. As a result, my community lost 750 good paying jobs because they just simply couldn’t compete with the Chinese LEDs.
What was once one of the best employers in my community sat dormant for years. It seems thee federal government NEVER considers the unintended consequences when they force this stuff upon us………or maybe they do, I don’t know.
Transportation not energy Secretary,
And she’s even worse
And people didn’t think that was possible!!!
During the CA mega-fires, the utilities shut off the power to nearby communities to avoid sparking more fires. The people with electric vehicles couldn’t charge their cars, so they were stranded when told to evacuate.
Tell that to Butthead.
Give Butthead another Covid shot – in his eye.
Speaking of complete bullshit:
Guess who’s exempt from all requirements and mandates to get the COVID-19 “vaccine”? The following people are totally exempt: all US Senators and House Representatives plus all Congressional staff; 6,000 White House employees; all employees of Pfizer (2,500), Moderna (1,500), and Johnson & Johnson (120,000); 15,000 CDC workers; and 14,000 FDA employees. Two million illegal aliens are also exempted from the vaccines by the unelected President Biden, so that they can flood the country, get bussed or jet-planed to Republican states, and spread sickness and death while they receive endless government hand-outs and vote Democrat. And the Republicans are letting it happen.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/11/no_author/an-impolite-message-to-those-who-got-the-covid-vaccine/
Blow darts.
About time for people to wake up and see what is happening to us. We are being led to the slaughter by a group of self-installed power-mad selected idiots. The “Rules for thee but not for me” crowd is in control now while most of the “thees” are asleep or idealogues who completely trust their government to “take care” of them. They just don’t realize that the “take care” is in the same vein that used to happen in the Mafia “families”.
Booty Judge really is a special kind of stupid, isn’t he?
he/she thinks out of he/she’s BUTT
“… families who buy electric vehicles (EVs) “never have to worry about gas prices again.”
Those families only have to worry about what the next agenda driven shortage will be coming out of this administration which is so determined to take control of the lives of all Americans.
Funny how America was the leading producer of petroleum at an affordable price before you commies showed up and screwed up the prices and availability. Buttgig is so incredibly loathsome
Gas tax could pay for road maintenance or new infrastructure or they could create trillions of dollars out of thin air to pay for their “zero cost” infrastructure bill. Without road maintenance you might want the off road version of the Prius.
Federal Fuel tax was supposed to pay for ALL that. What happened to the FUNDS???
Light rail, bike paths, ATV trails, state police, sewers, Vision Zero, schools, landscaping, general government, you name it.
Washington Examiner: “one of every four tax dollars collected for the Highway Trust Fund is actually spent, according to the Heritage Foundation, on “subways, streetcars, buses, bicycle and nature paths, and landscaping.”
Probably went to China along with the supplementary unemployment funds.
I figure at today gas price it will cost me about $60 to drive 400 miles. Cost of electric for the same distance is over $80. Plus about a day to recharge the vehicle with 110V house power.
I understand that Mayor Pete has a strong preference for rear wheel drive.
The only thing the government should be doing is nanoscience and other battery-related reseach that reaches beyond what universities and industry can do.. That is what national labs are for. The subsidies gimmick will just misallocate capital and screw up yet another industry.
This is radical environmentalism at work
This fool is a complete DUNCE. I’ll get an electric car when I want to, not when you want me to. And that will be NEVER.
Yep, buy an electric car and never again worry about buying gas. Instead, you can worry about whether there will be enough electricity to charge your batteries after the Biden Administration shuts down fossil fuel powered electric plants.
Let’s point out that the vast majority of electricity comes from fossil fuels. This is not an honest proposal. Legalize nuclear then we’ll talk. The fact that he’s a Karl schwab acolyte is very concerning.
Only if they install charging stations at every windmill farm…
Living in California, where there are more idiots than one can shake a stick at, we see electric cars everywhere. One thing we have noticed, when they first came out electric car drivers were speeding around everywhere, because the cars are fast, but then reality hit home and they realized the charge dwindles quickly when speeding. Now most Teslas are driving the speed limit or less on highways, otherwise they will have to pull over for hours to re-charge.
As to living in a rural area, there are few electric car users in our rural area as power isn’t reliable and charging stations are not easily found. Most charging stations are “quick charge” and don’t provide a full charge, limiting range. As usual, range tends to far less than advertised.
Way back an article in the WSJ did a comparison between a prius and a similarly equipped corolla. At $5/gal gas the breakeven point was 130K miles. Toyotas response was that people felt good driving a prius.
They followed up with a more comprehensive article.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB119335110403372123
FWIW, I like to drive my 5 spd manual subie. I guess autonomous isn’t in my future as well.
And there are murmurs about this guy being on the short list for the Democrats in 2024. The only thing short this guy should be on is a bus.
Mr. OMICRON buttigieg
Aren’t anagrams great !
What I find is amazing is how economically illiterate the progressive fascists are!
The claim that they want to improve the economy by spending money to create jobs. They don’t care that this has been proven to fail every time it’s tried. Remember that “shovel ready jobs aren’t shovel ready!” . The truth is that they don’t care about the economy, they just want everyone to be poor and dependent on them, on government.
The proof is that if the wanted to improve the economy they would do what JFK, Reagan and Trump did to create a booming economy with lots of jobs. They would cut taxes and regulations so businesses would be profitable and invest.
The European Union has decreed that beginning with the 2022 model year, all new cars shall be electronically forced by software to adhere to every speed limit, all the time. The same software – and hardware – that probably two-thirds of all new cars sold in the USA already have merely awaiting activation. Intelligent Speed Assist will cut throttle over which you have no real control, since the throttle is controlled by the car’s computer and not by your right foot, no matter how furiously you mash the accelerator pedal. Which is really just a throttle input sensor – drive by wire – which transmits data about how far down you have pushed the pedal, sends the data to the ECU – the computer that is in control of the engine – which then decides how much to rev the engine. It can decide to not rev it at all. And beginning in Europe 2022, it will do just that. Speeding will be countermanded at a stroke – for your safety. But really for the sake of absolute control, just about, over your car – which amounts to control over your mobility. Which means, control over you. What if the government sent a update to your ECU and told the car not to start or run or recharge, or simply forcing rolling power blackouts for control? And the government will know where you are at!
All tax payers are subsidizing the purchase of these costly EVs for people who can afford them even without the subsidy. Transfer of wealth from bottom poor to upper rich? And when you need to travel far or quickly, which powered vehicle are you going to choose? And EVs don’t tow or haul weight very well. Electric cars can never be more than the subsidized toys of the affluent and a recipe for national gridlock. EVs will limit your mobility and restrict your freedom of privately driving the vehicle of your choice. So let’s forget about the call to ban the internal combustion engine that powers the affordable vehicle you currently drive. Why should a customer buy a product that is significantly more expensive but can do much less than what he already has? Only when a new product can do two or three important things better can you convince customers to switch. But this scenario doesn’t fit the electric car, because with its “electrochemical factory,” you can never reach the range, efficiency, and safety of a combustion engine powered by fossil fuel. Conventional engine technology is by far the most economical and safest technology for the transportation of goods and people and, overall, also the best for the environment. When it comes to value, customers are quite pragmatic, and you will not be able force them to buy electric cars, because they are so much worse than what they currently own. And taxpayers do not need to subsidize credits for the affluent to buy the damn things.
correct on several important points–was running a chevy store in south texas when the general debuted the “spark”–despite agressive marketing, big factory rebates and generous dealer incentives, we couldn’t give the damn things away
as far as hybrids(not pure electric) prius is the one–in the us market for over 20 years now and generally perform/endure as advertised–spectacular(for our time)fuel economy–near-bulletproof reliability–if fuel economy is your overriding concern, the clear choice and worth the $$$
otherwise, have not seen/driven/owned a hybrid/ev that exhibits the spectrum of utility currently available in piston gas/diesel engine vehicles
For the first ten years of our marriage, we lived in a mobile home which cost less than the *used* car I drive today. ($8k) We now live in a house with three used cars, which if they were electric, would cost more than the house.
Pete is a moron.
I wonder if this brain trust Buttigieg has ever looked at the power grid. We already have major cities with rolling brown/black outs because of a shortage of power and now he’s advocating adding millions of electric cars to this grid. Wind and solar have proven to be unreliable multiple times (remember Texas last winter) and environmental regulations will tie up a new, proposed power plant for decades. Where is all of this power going to come from? And this guy is being considered for the Presidency?
No; they just have to worry about replacing their car’s battery pack at enormous cost, less than ten years down the road. Throw in the range limitations that are intrinsic to all electric cars, and, the fire hazard characteristics that are inherent to electric cars engaged in “quick charging,” and, that are involved in collisions, and, wow, what a great deal for consumers.
“In a Quartz analysis one year ago cited at Car and Driver, the difference between an average gas-powered vehicle and an EV is $19,000, even if it’s narrowing recently, and repair costs are still higher”
——-
I comment as someone who owns a Ram 3500 diesel pickup and a dinky little Think EV bought out of that company’s bankruptcy, the latter at a 70% discount and purely a curiosity purchase. My views piss off both sides, probably because I evaluate the EV without any political overhead. My mantra: “It’s a car, not a cause.”
Yes, the EV price (apart from my bargain) is higher. But maintenance is far cheaper. There is an array of pluses and minuses. I’ll leave it at that, with a final word: You won’t find many people more knowledgeable and objective on this one than me. It’s a favorite subject of mine, and only “objectivists” (not in the Ayn Rand sense but in the colloquial sense) appreciate my maddening refusal to be on anyone’s barricades.
So……who is going to pay for the EV? $45,000 – 65,000++? There is no way most families can afford this. Many of us drive paid for combustion engine cars that will be worthless as a trade-in so it’s all new cost. And Pete…….who is paying for the electricity? Also Pete, those batteries degrade just like your cell phone battery and have to be replaced after 3-5 years. BTW, Pete, where are you going to store all those environmentally toxic batteries as they wear out……landfills? charge to the consumer for disposal? The ignorance of our public officials is unprecedented.