Automakers Urge Trump to Keep Biden’s Market-Distorting, EV-Pushing Policies
The car-makers may have some short-term pain, there will be long term gain. EV’s have been an anchor dragging down the profitability of the automotive companies.
During his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump declared his intention to completely reverse Biden’s electric vehicle (EV) policies. Trump criticized the current administration’s rush towards battery-powered cars, describing the mandate as “crazy.”
Major U.S. automakers, including Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, have asked Trump to reverse gear on this promise. As a reminder, Biden’s Green New Deal commitments included senseless emissions regulations and the $7,500 EV tax credit, which has totally distorted the automotive market.
The conversation would require diplomatic finesse. Mr. Trump has railed against the E.V. rules, which strictly limit the amount of tailpipe pollution while also ramping up fuel economy standards. They are designed to get carmakers to produce more E.V.s and have been a cornerstone of President Biden’s fight against climate change.
Mr. Trump sees them differently. He has falsely said the rules amount to a Democratic mandate that would prevent Americans from buying the gasoline-powered cars of their choice — a concern of his campaign donors from the oil industry.
And Mr. Trump still holds grievances against some of the automakers, whom he views as having betrayed him because during his first term they supported Obama-era auto emissions rules.
In fact, most automakers don’t love the more stringent rules Mr. Biden put in place. But they have already invested billions in a transition to electric vehicles, and fear that if Mr. Trump made an abrupt change as he has promised, they could be undercut by automakers who sell cheaper, gas-powered cars. They argue it would harm an industry that is a backbone of American manufacturing and employs 1.1 million people.
Perhaps I would have more sympathy for the automakers if they had vigorously countered the climate crisis pseudoscience and spent some advertising dollars educating the public on the realities of carbon dioxide and climate science. However, they thought there would be a sweet compromise position and decided to enjoy the financial incentives to roll over spinelessly.
Live by the mandate, die by the mandate.
These companies can now have their tax lawyers find ways to write off their losses.
Their pleas are not receiving any sympathy from many other Americans either.
No. If EVs can’t make it without mandates and subsidies that should be telling us that the demand for EVs just isn’t there. The car companies should have reacted sooner. The signs were all over the place.
— Samuel Culper 722 (@politiwars) November 23, 2024
Trump administration to automakers that want to keep Biden EV mandates in place:
“Piss off.” https://t.co/MgGyMBFVhl
— Joseph Toomey (@JosephEToomey) November 24, 2024
This NYT story about automakers urging Trump to keep Biden EV rules in place encapsulates two things:
1. Not letting the market work.
2. Congress abdicating its responsibility to the executive branch, which will change rules on the fly depending on who is in office.…— Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) November 23, 2024
While carmakers may experience some short-term pain, there will be long-term gain. EVs have been an anchor dragging down the profitability of automotive companies.
“Losing $70,000 on an EV is not a winning business model and U.S. automakers know that,” said Tim Stewart, president of the U.S. Oil & Gas Association. Stewart said axing the EV tax credit gives members of the auto industry the opportunity to shift back to traditional production lines.
“If I was a CEO, I would quietly be relieved to have a reason to shift production lines back to traditional models and invest in new hybrid technologies,” Stewart told Fox News Digital. “The EV tax credit was the only way to entice consumers to ‘maybe’ purchase something they really didn’t want, but told by the Biden folks they had to buy.”
“With the tax credit gone and the onerous Biden regulatory mandates lifted, the new administration is providing the exit ramp the U.S. producers were really hoping for, and U.S. consumers really want.”
As I noted earlier this year, a study shows that almost 50% of Americans who own an EV have buyer’s remorse and want to switch back to vehicles with traditional internal combustion engines. Trump’s reversal will begin correcting the market distortions that are an inherent part of Bidenomics’ failures.
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The auto industry is not stupid. They see that Harris received 74 million votes and figure (correctly) that no Republican other than Trump can match that number in 2028. But Trump cannot be president then. If a president can make the industry switch gears and go all electric and high mpg fleet, and then another president pulls out the rug and sinks all that investment, the smart bet is to keep the EV mandates in place because the probability of a Democrat in 2028 is high.
Long range forecasting is what they are doing.
Long range suicide is what they are doing. They can’t sustain this nonsense for four years without the subsidies.
It’s better to dump and run. Next time, maybe they will tell a future Harris administration to suck a gas pipe, then sue them to the Supreme Court for unconstitutional mandates.
But no. They want suck off the government teat for as long as possible
Drop dead a-holes.
I remember when Ford committed to investing 100 million in the US. When Trump lost they invested the 100 million in Mexico,
Another thing. “Major U.S. automakers, including Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis…”
GM now imports many, if not most, of their CARS. I am not talking trucks. I am talking Chinese Cadillacs and Buicks, Korean Chevrolets.
Ford moved production of one of their Lincolns to China; I see more of this coming down the road.
Stellantis is not an American company; they are French/Italian. The American product line is being ignored into oblivion and the quality has gone from meh-to-bad all the way to Fiat levels of failure.
A pox on all of their houses. For the record, I drive a Subaru Ascent, built in Indiana. Sure, it has a Japanese engine and transmission, but Peter and Mary built it, not Pedro and Maria, or Pierre and Marie, or [insert Asian names here], and provides secondary jobs in American communities. I have no sympathy for any of the alleged “US” auto makers. Two of them have American mailing addresses; aside from that they are trying to become auto importers, not auto makers.
I hope to never be in a position to buy an EV. I will restore an old truck or muscle car first. For now, I will consider a vehicle assembled within the US, regardless of the marque.
“Marque”. So. You want something expensive. ;-{)}}}
Us proles call our cars by “brand”, or “make”. Marque. Please, that’s Merc, Audi, Jag, and Rolls Royce territory.
/or is that “We proles”…
Typical. Automakers could have just said no but, they made the choice to invest those billions into a market they knew customers wouldn’t want to join. Now, they want us to bail them out. Again.
It’s time businesses learn that their decisions have consequences.
I say no more bailouts. People stopped wanting Hudsons and Nash’s, so the companies merged and built cars folks would buy and hung on another 20 years. Studebaker remained in business; they just stopped making cars. Countless makers are gone. Moon, Willys-Knight, Franklin, and the list goes on. Even the vaunted and praised-to-the-skies Toyota is slipping badly with bad truck engines and transmissions. Nissan, once really great, is now the butt of jokes. I mention both of them because despite being Japanese they have manufacturing presence here.
I see no reason for me, Mr. Taxpayer, being obliged to prop up badly-run businesses. They’ve been bailed out before, more than once, and thanked us by exporting jobs.
Sad to hear about Toyota trucks. They are on my list for a next purchase. My ’05 Camry is practically indestructible.
Lots has changed. And, from my one-man vantage point, my opinion is that Japanese cars were never the be-all / end-all they were said to be, and with RARE exception, domestic cars were never as BAD as we were told they were.
German? Many conflate 347 parts to do a 49 part job as being “precision engineering”.
Needless complexity just tells me the engineers are not competent enough to do a 49-part job with 49 parts. (My favorite calling-out of this was a poster showing Corvettes coming across the finish line at some major European race 1, 2, 3, 4. The text on the picture was, “… and we did it with push-rods”.
My opinion of German engineering went way downhill when I found out that BMW used a plastic housing on the water pumps of their Minis. Apparently, there ARE really people that stupid.
I will continue to enjoy the savings I enjoy by not purchasing spark plugs or other ignition parts. Not to mention no loan payments. The Ram (Cummins) was 21 y/o this year and going strong. I still get 500 miles out of a tank (factory) of diesel, and refuel for another in 5 minutes or less. EV has a long way to go before it can compete in an open market.
Established big players in any industry loves them some expensive regulations and mandates.
The big guys can absorb the expenses and losses (at least for a while) of those regulations and mandates, but they know that their smaller competitors cannot and will fold, reducing competition.
Added bonus if the mandate or regulation is something the big guys wanted to do in the first place. The woke leadership at Ford, GM and Stellantis were already committed to saving the world through transitioning to iCars. Having it mandated just meant that they weren’t taking all the risks themselves and small competitors couldn’t undercut them by continuing to make ICE vehicles for less money.
They’ve now invested all that capital into EV production, capital that will essentially have been flushed down the toilet because public demand for the vehicles isn’t there and the only hope they have of surviving is with mandates…so of course they want the mandates to continue…and they’re too big to fail after all, aren’t they?
The other unspoken factor in the American Automakers moving to EV’s was the idea that they could close all their old legacy factories as unsuitable for EV manufacture and coincidently lose almost all of their high-paid legacy workers who would have to both relocate to the new factory location AND pass retraining requirements for new jobs on much more automated assembly lines, ala Tesla.
So: tons of government money, government dictated buyers, and a clean out of old high paid workers.
The only flaw in their cunning plan is that nobody wants their EV’s.
The government of demonrats always had an agenda. That agenda is always bad for the masses, i.e. wind farms and solar. They have to raise taxes to support their lunacy with handouts, or these products won’t fly.
It’s time to get out the two inch violins to play mournful songs about reality. A government that forces industries with their horrible ideas needs a big kick in the derriere! Trump simply wants what’s best for the country.
Yeah, yeah, “Trump’s Hitler.” “Trump’s a dictator.” “Trump’s a fascist.” Look to the left for who REALLY FILLS THAT BILL..
Hitler and other fascists controlled their countries’ industries.
Trump wants to de-control some industries. And he’s the fascist according to people who don’t have a clue about “fascism.” Or maybe he’s a fascist for not wanting to de-control all of it.
The Achilles of EV is battery capacity. There are new battery technologies in the works which will fix that problem.
Rapid release of stored energy will continue to be a problem. Much of that problem is due to use of wrong firefighting measures. Dumping large amounts of water on reactive metals is stupid. I recently saw something about a large fire smothering blanket, which looks promising.
That’s hardly the only downside of battery powered cars. Charging time, Increasing cost of electricity. Poor performance in cold weather. Rapid decrease in range with weight (can’t tow or haul worth a darn). Insufficient capacity in our power delivery infrastructure. Availability and costs of the materials to make batteries. Environmental damage caused by mining and refining those materials as well as the manufacturing processes involved. I could go on. And you get all that in return for spending way more money on the car to begin with. What a bargain.
Battery capacity is only one Achilles heel. There’s performance in cold weather, high price, electric grid capacity, and how to charge your car during a lengthy power failure. And that’s all I can think of quickly.
EVs are toys for the wealthy. And even the wealthy need to have an ICE vehicle as a backup.
I believe progress will be made, in good time. But the present electric car buyer is the early adopter. He has to have the latest and greatest. Think of their grandfathers buying the first pulsar watches. $2,000 starting price, ate batteries like a circus elephant eats peanuts, and you had the boundless pleasure of pushing a button to tell what time it was.
(Meantime, I wore an Accutron with the tuning fork mechanism. I took great joy in finding the “sweet spot” on a table and placing my watch on it. I would watch as others in the room were looking up and around, wondering why they were hearing “ooooooooo…” and what the cause could be. ;-{)}}}
Never forget that a full tank of gas is about 350 pounds to go 400 miles and a “Battery” weighs 1200 pounds to go 200 miles. No matter the type of battery, that formula will never work.
And, the battery remains at the same weight while the ICE car becomes lighter.
This is the main problem with electric aircraft. Aircraft (esp. large aircraft designed to carry very heavy payloads in passengers and freight) have differing takeoff and landing weights – they can takeoff with considerably more weight than that at which they can safely land. Aircraft usually takeoff at above their landing weights, allowing the burning of fuel en route to their destinations to lower the aircraft to safe landing weight. (This is why when making an emergency landing aircraft often must dump fuel. A shorter trip than planned might find the aircraft above its safe landing weight, so fuel must be jettisoned.) This does not happen with battery-powered aircraft. Such an aircraft must sacrifice payload because its maximum takeoff weight is limited to its maximum safe landing weight. Short of air-dropping its freight and having its passengers parachute to the ground, this problem is well-nigh unsolvable.
Energy density is the real Achilles heel, closely followed by the inability to mass-transfer enough electrons to fill the thing back up quickly.
Supposedly, new battery tech will deal with these issues. Current LiFePo4 battery tech charge rate scales with battery capacity, and cold tolerance varies with specific technologies.
And no, I am not against fossil fuels . We need to quickly ramp up fossil fuel production.
regardless of tariffs, rebates, tax credits, etc. the reality is that the infrastructure to support EVs does not exist—and who, pray tell, is going to pay for its construction ?
The plan is for the government to steal from all of us to pay for it, and to pay multiple times it’s true because of fraud and waste.
,,, multiple times it’s true value …
Interesting point there….The Biden administration laid out $7.5 Billion dollars for charging stations in 2021. According to the most recent information I can find, they actually built 8.
https://www.autoweek.com/news/a60702457/federal-funds-yield-only-8-ev-charging-stations/
Eliminate all EV credits. Offer credits for the smallest, cleanest gas-powered cars. Impose a luxury tax on larger, gas powered vehicles. This would create a much fairer, cleaner and sane country. The working poor could afford decent cars, people could still buy larger vehicles, but not on a whim, and the rich poseurs will pay full freight on their electric status symbols.
“Impose a luxury tax on larger, gas powered vehicles.”
No. A Luxury tax on large luxury gas powered vehicles maybe. Small business owners, farmers and people who live in rural areas should not be charged a “luxury tax” for vehicles that are not a luxury.
I have a 13 year old F-250. It is the base model truck (and still has way more “bells and whistles than I’d have liked), I bought it used because I can’t afford new and it’s not a fashion statement – it’s a tool.
Charging me a luxury tax because I can’t haul 3k pounds of livestock feed or tow a 12k pound trailer of fence posts with a Geo metro would cripple me.
Amen, Brother. My diesel Ram is 21 and has 5-speed, 4×4, and roll-down windows, and requires a key to unlock. Basics last forever.
I wish I had a manual transmission. Unfortunately, those have been special order options for a long time so a 5 speed in a truck newer than 20 years old is about as rare as hen’s teeth.
It’s also got A/C and automatic locking hubs that I could have done without, but I’ll use them until they break. Everything else is manual.
The biggest thing, though, is that everything in the truck is run buy a computer. If you don’t have the tech savvy to deal with that, I’d stick with the 20 year old models. I’m blessed to have Electronics experience that helps me figure stuff like that out.
Even so, I won’t buy anything newer. It’s just gotten more ridiculous as time has gone on. New cars aren’t really even cars any more…they’re Information Technology systems on wheels.
I have 2 Ford Super duty, F250 & F550, both diesel 7.3, the best Ford produced.
Not a higher tax on some vehicles, lower taxes on others. Also any tax break for the manufacturer could be granted by having qualified buyers make an application for a discount by filing a financial declaration with the dealer that will lower the price of the car at the point of sale and giving the manufacturer a credit with which the manufacturer is relieved of a portion of the regulatory costs associated with the car’s production. This would not adversely affect buyers who don’t qualify for the benefit, and will make the benefit available to each purchaser according to his own financial status, so the scale of the benefit (and the credit to the manufacturer) can slide.
The Bride and I have discussed all this. We’re not in the market because our 2007 Tucson and 2012 Santa Fe have been reliable and adequate for our needs. IF we wanted a newer car it MIGHT be a plugin hybrid. Most of our driving is within a half hour of home so we could charge it overnight from the 120 volt receptacle by the front door and probably go a month on a tank. Most likely, though, we’ll stay with the mature technology of an ICE due to the effect of temperature on the battery. It gets cold and hot in the Old South.
Pure electric? No way!
.
Biden green new deal is such a fraud.
I would like to be able to afford to buy a used ICE car. I can’t now, thanks to the green fascist mafia. And they call Trump a dictator while they dictate to us constantly.
Exactly! A nice used ICE car will be good for many years providing good mileage and extremely low emissions. Try that with battery power. You’ll also keep the thing on the road and not in a landfill, a far better environmental proposition than what awaits an 8 year old Chevy Volt.
Not just no, but HELL NO!
What are the automakers doing by lobbying for keeping EV mandates (that shouldn’t even exist in a free society) and lobbying for continued losses to their bottom line and reduced opportunities for auto workers? It doesn’t make any sense, but I can understand that the “leadership” is used to Its fascistic “partnership” with the unconstitutional regulatory bureaucrats that President Trump is threatening.
Trying to justify sunk costs to shareholders
The democrats ‘mandated’ new toilets, now most people flush twice. More expense and more water wasted. They ‘mandated’ dishwashers, mine takes 5 hours to run and does a lousy job. They’ve got the knife out for washers and dryers.
Nobody mandated fluorescent lights years ago. Once the public saw a brighter, cheaper way to light up your house and office, the product took off. Nobody mandated computer monitors either, once a better, cheaper screen was available to replace the CRT, we all bought one and now they are cheaper than dirt.
Let it be the same with cars. The EPA rules have given us high mileage and emissions that might be cleaner than the air that went in. You can drive 1000 miles in a day if you want. It’s too bad that all the weasel auto execs saw was the handouts, let ’em pay the price now. I’d just ask Trump to find a way to make whatever he does ‘permanent’ so we don’t have this back-and-forth every few years. Let’s see.
People flush twice, AND the sanitation had to start adding water to the sewage because it wasn’t flowing properly.
Low flow toilets are garbage. Routinely flush twice OR MORE since they don’t work properly in the first place.
I don’t have that problem. Nor does my dishwasher take 5 hours to run a load of dishes. Will somebody please tell me what I’m doing wrong? Or am I just basing my experience on my experience rather than what I hear from others.
“Cycle time is anywhere from 1.5 to 4 hours long depending on the cycle and options selected. Energy efficiency is gained by extending cycle time and reducing the amount of wattage and water used during the dishwasher’s cycle. Efficient dishwashers run longer to save water and energy, just as driving a car slower saves on gas.”
https://producthelp.kitchenaid.com/Dishwashers/Dishwasher/Cycle_Concerns/Cycle_Not_Advancing/Long_Cycle_Time/Long_Cycle_Time_-_Dishwasher
How old are your toilets and dishwasher? I don’t have those problems either…because my house was built in 1954, my toilets are not low flow and I installed the dishwasher 30 years ago when I remodeled the kitchen shortly after buying the house. It’s loud, but it gets the dishes clean and in about 30 minutes; 45 if I put it on “pots and pans” cycle. I’m dreading when it breaks. I doubt I’ll be able to find parts for it. If not, I may just put a cabinet there and go back to doing the dishes by hand.
If he really wants to next level this whole thing he should shift it to ice hybrid and use the carrot rather than the stick.
These cars are going to be a huge part of the future. The markets would thank him for this I believe. I also think this will be more effective than a clawback because judicial challenge is less meaty. The only other audible I would consider would be a fund towards nuclear but that’s not vehicular power.
I agree about hybrid autos, though I am unlikely to buy one, and hybrid inverters for my farm, I have 4 of them producing 24 kw.
EVs are basically a niche market for very good reasons having to do with basic physics. Let’s look one small aspect: charging. Gas pumps at US filling stations are limited to 10 gallons per minute which is 0.63 liters per second. A liter of gasoline has approximately 34.2 million joules of chemical energy. So energy is transmitted through the tube at a rate of 21.6 million watts! One joule per second equals one watt of power. An electric charger operating at 220 volts would require almost 100,000 amps. Up the voltage to 1,000 and you get over 21,000 amps. The thickest standard wire (AWG 0000) is only rated at about 200 amps. So you can never charge your EV battery anywhere nearly as quickly as you can fill your gasoline tank. You need to increase the charge time to many hours instead of minutes to fill your gas tank. Of course we could switch out the whole battery, but that’s been tried and failed for reasons which require another discussion.
Of course transmission of electrical energy is not exactly equivalent to the transmission of chemical energy in the form of a fluid because electrical energy is high quality (low entropy). If all the energy were converted to heat instead of mechanical energy, we would have equivalence. Nevertheless this calculation shows a basic limitation of EVs. There are rapid charging stations, but they accelerate battery depreciation, and those batteries are very expensive.
The consequences if the increased service time (hours instead of minutes) are profound. To evaluate we would need to go into queueing theory. EVs are practical as a second or third car for someone who has a house with garage and the money to buy the charging equipment. All this points to a niche market.
So how come the automobile manufacturers don’t know all this? They have staff engineers and physicists and mathematicians who can advise management as the realities. I can only speculate. Management would punish anyone who tried to inject some reality into their thinking. So now they have to pay the price. We didn’t need Trump. The EV enterprise would have failed on its own, albeit at a much higher cost.
I wonder how many EV vehicles would have been sold without the mass fleet purchases caused by local or state mandates to purchase EV fleets for their own government workers?
I live in a bluest of blue state, where our county, which is the poorest in the state has every county employee driving a shiny new EV.
Arguably, a huge and unnecessary expense. arbitrarily imposed because climate feelz..
It’s all about the Benjamins. Those sweet, sweet subsidies make those very expensive-to-produce EVs sellable. And they all have huge over-production problems as the reality of EVs is terrible.
At this point, 46% of current electric vehicle owners in America now say they intend to “switch back” to internal combustion-powered cars on their purchase. Further, 20% of EV owners have switched back to internal combustion.
They suck.
I am looking forward to a glut of hard to sell EVs which can serve as additional battery capacity at rock bottom prices.
So the car companies want to continue their subsidies for trying to sell what they customers don’t want to buy? Nah, that’s stupid. Make the stuff that will sell.
So, the car companies are bellyaching about having to compete with more affordable cars with gas engines?
Cue the violin music and cry me a river.
Most people can’t afford new cars with a sticker price north of 50 grand, nor are they willing to sign up for seven-year loans for something that may or may not even last that long.
They made that bed, they can lie in it while they think good and hard about why they’re in the predicament they’re in.
Never ask a drug addict if they would like less drugs.
Hope the answer is
No
The government companies jump into bed with may not last forever, so choose your bedmates wisely.
Is this news or editorial? In any case it isn’t false, said rules were obviously intended to have that result.
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