Don’t crash the U.S. auto market by forcing us to buy EVs

[cartoon id="267165"] About 20 years ago, the belief that commercially-significant quantities of fuel blends containing organic materials would soon be available led to the passage of alternative fuel requirements. Yet, because science failed to deliver on its promise, America ended up becoming more dependent on ethanol. That growing dependence affects the price of fuel and feedstocks adversely, making each trip to the grocery store more costly than the last. The bureaucrats responsible for the idea, flush with taxpayer dollars as the result of congressional green-energy largess, made a bad bet. It’s going to happen again. Just look at the billions Ford Motor Company just announced its shift to an all-electric fleet has cost it. Bad news for corporate management, bad news for stockholders, and bad news for The Ford Foundation, which ironically enough has been using its holdings to promote the global green energy transition. There’s nothing inherently wrong about wanting to use clean, renewable energy to power the economy. In the abstract, it’s a grand idea that, when fully implemented, should lead to a global reduction in prices that would be a boon to consumers. The problem isn’t “green energy.” It’s that the government bureaucrats who make policies we all have to follow are operating off a timetable that’s divorced from technological realities. Earlier this year the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released two rules proposing to regulate the tailpipe emissions of light-, medium-, and heavy-duty- vehicles as part of its promotion of President Joe Biden’s anti-climate change agenda. The proposal is pretty strict, on purpose. The only way vehicle manufacturers can meet the targets set by the agency is to move most or all of their fleet off the internal-combustion platform onto an electric one. That’s the objective, and the Biden administration is being fairly ruthless in its attempt to get us all there. If this were a small thing, the U.S. might withstand it but it’s not. America is a mobile nation. Cars and trucks are essential to the nation’s economy and, for the moment, absent something better, gasoline is its lifeblood. Never mind that carbon emissions coming from motor vehicles are down from what they were when our moms drove station wagons the size of battle tanks, the policymakers driving this agenda won’t be happy until they reach zero. If all new vehicles sold must be powered by electricity, a change the EPA’s proposed rule will force on everyone, the options available to working families will be significantly limited. At around $64,000 a pop for an EV, most of them will see themselves priced out of the new car market. This isn’t hard to predict. A poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago makes it obvious. Only 19% of U.S. adults said it's "very" or "extremely" likely they would purchase an electric vehicle the next time they buy a car. That means more people shopping in the used car market, leaving older cars on the road longer, producing the same emissions they did when they were new. The market handles this by redesigning vehicles and power trains and producing greater fuel economy and fewer emissions – yes, all because of government mandates – but because the transition is gradual, vehicles remain affordable. That means older cars with outmoded technologies are swapped for newer ones that produce fewer emissions. This shouldn’t be hard to understand, but the bureaucrats who wrote these new rules for the EPA can’t see that. They can’t see what they’ve put on the table runs counter to the achievement of their ultimate goal. No car company is going to stay in business manufacturing cars no one wants. The American auto industry learned that in the 1970s when the Japanese and the Germans moved into the U.S. market with more fuel-efficient, affordable vehicles that were cheaper to operate and maintain and lasted longer than what Detroit was still putting out. It took us a long time to learn the lessons of that experience. Yet those mistakes are about to be repeated in the government-driven rush to make every car sold in America an EV by the beginning of the next decade. It's a bad idea, commercially, technologically, and financially. Someone needs to put the brakes on it before the American auto market crashes and takes the rest of the economy with it. - Copyright 2023 Peter Roff distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Peter Roff is former U.S. News and World Report contributing editor and UPI senior political writer now affiliated with several DC-based public policy organizations. He writes for numerous publications and appears regularly on international television talking about U.S. politics. You can reach him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @TheRoffDraft.