Comes now the Biden admin with its lofty Green New Deal that mandated wholesale conversion from the internal combustion engine to electric vehicles. To be clear, I am not opposed to electric vehicles.
[For a second, let’s suspend our skepticism as to from whence all that power will come, how it will be distributed by our fragile grid, where the chargers are, how long it takes to charge, and how EV batteries perform in extreme heat and cold. Play along.]
Carmakers — driven by generous government subsidies for their buyers — leapt aboard the train smiling and optimistic. It was a mass hallucination, a bloody love fest.
And then the rains came — customers did not buy the carmakers EVs, inventories grew to troubling levels, and they all re-thought their lofty goals, pushing their mandates to go “all electric” out further and further in time.
The market — as it always does — graded the offerings and said, “Nope.”
So what did the Biden admin do, Big Red Car?
Ahhh, the Biden admin used the hammer of future regulation to propose pollution standards (province of the Environmental Protection Agency) that cannot be met by internal combustion engines thereby forcing the industry to buckle to the Green New Deal.
Bloody fascists! [It is healthy to scream “bloody fascists” at least once a day. No more, mind you. Once a day.]
You can still have an ICE vehicle; it just has to piss unicorn fairy dust.
1. The Biden regulators started with tailpipe pollution standards — introduced on a Friday afternoon to blunt the dissemination and miss the news cycle — for passenger vehicles that mandate performance in year 2032 that cannot be met by internal combustion engines.
This means every car made and sold in 2032 will be electric though they pretend they only want 56% of cars to be EVs (16% hybrids also) by that date.
This is a bloody foolish objective given that currently only 1% of the 290MM vehicle American fleet today is an EV and many of those EVs are for secondary transportation rather than primary transportation meaning they represent a much smaller percentage of the actual miles driven in the US.
This is a wildly unattainable objective because last year only 1.2MM EVs were sold equating to 7.6% of all cars sold.
The numbers are so extreme as to be laughable.
2. Similarly, they mandated pollution standards for trucks that will similarly drive out the ICE and welcome the EV. Trucks are far more important to our economy given the nature of business transportation of goods.
The dirty big secrets
One of the problems with this ambitious, unrealistic mandate is there is not an electric grid capable of serving that level of EVs, there is insufficient electric generating capacity, there is no national charging solution, EVs take a long time to charge, EVs cannot operate in extremes of cold and hot, and the life of EV batteries is an incredible problem.
Bottom line it, Big Red Car
Of course, dear reader.
The Biden admin confronted with the market reaction of both the consumer and the carmakers has decided to stow the carrot and break out the stick by creating regulatory mandates that are draconian and unattainable.
As all cowardly regulators do, they have left the problem to whomever is in charge in 2032 rather than dealing with it in real time.
Will this hurt the auto industry, the consumer, and the economy? You can take that to the bank — only the ones that will still be open.
But, hey, what the Hell do I really know anyway? I’m just a Big Red Car.
Happy Easter. He is risen. God bless us all.