Biden may cave to pressures from automakers and Trump on EV ambitions
Biden may cave to pressures from automakers and Trump on EV ambitions
US President Joe Biden may walk back his yearly EV requirements through 2030 due to political pressures and pushback from automakers.
I didn't really have much faith that his EV ideas would get past the auto makers anyway. They are so resistant to making EVs because they think people don't want them, when the truth is that dealerships either don't have them or won't sell them.
Sixty-six percent of US car dealers don’t have any EVs to sell, and 45% said they wouldn’t sell them no matter what, according to a new report from Sierra Club about the EV shopping experience in the US.
https://electrek.co/2023/05/09/us-car-dealers-evs/
The EV bottleneck is the dealers. Laws in many states don't even allow you to buy a car unless it's from a dealer. And unless Biden does something about that, which he probably can't since they've successfully lobbied a lot of this on the state level, the bottleneck will continue.
There's also a chicken-and-egg problem here. EVs are hard to sell because the infrastructure to support them at scale isn't there. The infrastructure won't scale up until there's sufficient demand to make capital investments in that infrastructure profitable.
This isn't a problem you can stimulus your way out of, either. Better or worse, there's enough distrust in EV reliability and longevity that it throws cold water on the whole proposition. Gas works. I pass a half dozen gas stations and repair shops on my short.commute to work. None of those places have chargers, or will touch an EV if I have it towed there for service. Not being contrary, that's just reality.
And forget the negative propagada being pushed by people invested in the current paradigm.
We're just not there yet. I don't know that there's enough time left even to get there before it doesn't even matter anymore, and I say this as an HEV owner.
“ Laws in many states don't even allow you to buy a car unless it's from a dealer.”
Besides being an utterly corrupt stitch-up by auto dealers, can anyone explain what the supposed rationale is for these laws?