Tag Archive for: electric vehicles

Chinese-Owned EV Company Showered Dems With Campaign Contributions

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The U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer and its top executive have given hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign cash to Democrats in recent years.

Stella Li, a top executive for BYD Americas, and the company itself have given tens of thousands of dollars in campaign cash to Democratic candidates and organizations in California and beyond over the past decade, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of federal and state political spending records. Based in China, BYD is the biggest EV producer in the world, and Congress moved in January to ban the Pentagon from buying its batteries due to security risks, according to Bloomberg News.

For example, BYD and Li gave more than $40,000 to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) between 2020 and 2023, according to the DCNF’s review of political spending records. The company and Li have also poured more than $30,000 into organizations boosting President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection effort to date.

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom received about $60,000 from Li and BYD USA between 2018 and 2023. Newsom drew scrutiny for his administration’s decision to give BYD a $1 billion no-bid contract to supply protective equipment during the coronavirus pandemic despite the company’s core competency being in a different business, and Newsom subsequently took a BYD vehicle for a publicized test drive during a 2023 trip to mainland China.

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa received more than $10,000 from Li to help his failed 2018 gubernatorial campaign, while the California Democratic Party received approximately $19,000 from Li and BYD USA between 2018 and 2020, according to the DCNF’s review of political spending records.

Michael Anotovich, former Chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and an architect of California’s bullet train project, received more than $11,000 from BYD USA and its executives in 2015 and 2016 to help his political career, according to the DCNF’s review of political spending records. Anotovich often governed in ways that benefited BYD, such as when he, along with Villaraigosa, steered millions of dollars from a Los Angeles municipal clean bus testing program toward BYD, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2018.

Additionally, BYD USA forked over $25,000 to a 501(c)(4) organization called California For Safe, Reliable Infrastructure in 2018, according to the DCNF’s review of state records. Californians For Safe, Reliable Infrastructure was an organization that opposed the failed Proposition 6 in 2018, which would have repealed a 12 cent per-gallon tax on gasoline passed the prior year and required voter approval for future tax or fee increases on gasoline. 

Ed Chau — formerly a member of the California State Assembly — raked in $7,000 from BYD USA and executives to boost his ambitions in 2018 and 2020, according to the DCNF’s political spending records review. Notably, Chau nominated Li for a “woman of the year” prize in his district in 2018.

Meanwhile, BYD USA and Li gave Los Angeles City Councilman Kevin de Leon more than $19,000 in 2017 and 2018, according to the DCNF’s review. Notably, then- President pro Tempore of the California Senate de Leon said that “California and the rest of the nation needs more companies like BYD that take opportunities presented by policy and turn it in to job creation” regarding the 2017 ribbon cutting ceremony for BYD USA’s expansion of its Lancaster, California manufacturing facility.

BYD is one of the biggest EV manufacturers in the world, though its Americas subsidiary focuses specifically on electric trucks, forklifts, and buses, according to its website. The company is reportedly examining options for penetrating the U.S. EV market by way of Mexico, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recently-finalized tailpipe emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles may end up benefiting BYD USA in the long-term, according to analysis by HEATMAP, a climate-focused publication.

The company has expanded its presence around the world in recent years under the “impetus” of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), according to a 2018 paper published in Advances in Economics, Business and Management Research. The BRI is a $1 trillion Chinese government effort to build infrastructure projects and accrue economic influence in other countries that is “widely recognized as an economic power play that could challenge U.S. influence geopolitically,” according to the Jamestown Foundation.

Additionally, BYD is touted in several articles posted to an official Chinese government website called “Belt and Road Portal.”

Moreover, Congress has specifically flagged the company in two separate National Defense Authorization Acts (NDAA). The 2020 NDAA contained a provision that banned public funds going to boost China-linked transportation companies like and including BYD, according to The Washington Post, and the NDAA that passed in December 2023 prohibits the Pentagon from buying batteries made by BYD and five other Chinese companies starting in 2027, according to Bloomberg.

The offices of Newsom, Ma, de Leon, BYD USA, the DNC, the California Democratic Party, ActBlue, and the Biden campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Anotovich could not be reached for comment, and Villaraigosa’s current employer did not respond to a request for comment on his behalf, nor did the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, on which Chau now sits.

AUTHOR

NICK POPE

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Red States Slap California, Biden Admin With Lawsuits To Halt Electric Truck Push

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Large coalitions of red states are suing regulators in Washington, D.C., and California over rules designed to effectively require increases in electric vehicle (EV) adoption.

Nebraska is leading a 24-state coalition in a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recently-finalized emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and a 17-state coalition suing the state of California in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California over its Advanced Clean Fleet rules. Both regulations would increase the number of heavy-duty EVs on the road, a development that could cause serious disruptions and cost increases across the U.S. economy, as supply chain and trucking sector experts have previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“California and an unaccountable EPA are trying to transform our national trucking industry and supply chain infrastructure. This effort—coming at a time of heightened inflation and with an already-strained electrical grid—will devastate the trucking and logistics industry, raise prices for customers, and impact untold number of jobs across Nebraska and the country,” Republican Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers said in a statement. “Neither California nor the EPA has the constitutional power to dictate these nationwide rules to Americans. I am proud to lead our efforts to stop these unconstitutional attempts to remake our economy and am grateful to our sister states for joining our coalitions.”

Heavy Duty Complaint by Nick Pope on Scribd

ACF Complaint by Nick Pope on Scribd

While specifics vary depending on the type of heavy-duty vehicle, EPA’s emissions standards will effectively mandate that EVs make up 60% of new urban delivery trucks and 25% of long-haul tractors sold by 2032, according to The Wall Street Journal. The agency has also pushed aggressive emissions standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles that will similarly force an increase in EVs’ share of new car sales over the next decade.

California’s Advanced Clean Fleet rules, meanwhile, will require that 100% of trucks sold in the state will be zero-emissions models starting in 2036, according to the California Air Resources Board (CARB). While not federal, the California rules are of importance to other states because there are numerous other states who follow California’s emissions standards, which can be tighter than those required by the EPA and other federal agencies.

Critics fear that this dynamic will effectively enable California to set national policies and nudge manufacturers in the direction of EVs at a greater rate and scale than the Biden administration is pursuing.

Trucking industry and supply chain experts have previously told the DCNF that both regulations threaten to cause serious problems for the country’s supply chains and wider economy given that the technology for electric and zero-emissions trucks is simply not yet ready to be mandated at scale, among other issues.

Neither CARB nor the EPA responded immediately to requests for comment.

AUTHOR

NICK POPE

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Top Automaker Takes $1.3 Billion Dollar Bath On Key EV Line

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Top American automaker Ford hemorrhaged over a billion dollars on electric vehicles (EV) in the first quarter, leading to massive losses per vehicle.

Ford sold 10,000 vehicles in its EV Model e unit in the first three months of the year, losing $1.3 billion on the line altogether, equating to a loss of $130,000 per vehicle sold, according to data from the company’s first quarter earnings report. Despite the loss on EVs, Ford’s net income was $1.3 billion, selling over a million vehicles with $42.8 billion in revenue in the quarter.

The Biden administration has sought to boost demand and production of EVs as part of the president’s sweeping environmental agenda, offering a $7,500 tax credit for some EVs in an attempt to ease high costs using funds from the $750 billion Inflation Reduction Act. Federal regulators have also put in place tailpipe emission standards for consumers that will effectively require 67% of all light-duty vehicles sold after 2032 to be electric or hybrids.

“Ford Model e revenue was down, as wholesales declined and significant industrywide pricing pressure continued to affect electric vehicles currently on the market,” the company’s first quarter report reads. “The segment had an EBIT loss of $1.3 billion, with costs that were flat year-over-year. The company expects EV costs to improve going forward, but be offset by top-line pressure.”

Sales for Ford’s EV line were down 20% compared to last year, and revenue was down 84%. Ford’s combustion engine line, Ford Blue, sold 626,000 vehicles, which is a decline of 11% from last year, with revenue down 13% in that same time frame.

Not all EVs sold by Ford fall under its Model e unit, with commercial fleets being sold under the Ford Pro unit, including an unspecified number of EVs, according to the earnings report. The Ford Pro unit sold 409,000 vehicles, up 21% since last year, with revenue up 36%.

Ford lost $4.7 billion on EVs in 2023, higher than the $4.5 billion loss the company predicted mid-year. Other automakers have seen similar losses on EVs, such as General Motors, which reported a $1.7 billion loss in the fourth quarter of 2023.

EV demand across the whole U.S. economy slowed in the first quarter of 2023, with growth in EV sales decelerating to 2.7% compared to 5% for all vehicles. As a result, EVs’ market share dropped from 7.6% to 7.1%.

Ford did not immediately respond to a request to comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

WILL KESSLER

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Biden’s Electric Vehicle ‘Mandate’ Might Just Be A Surprise Gift To China

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The Biden administration has put in place regulations that would require many Americans to adopt electric vehicles (EV) in the coming years despite U.S. companies struggling to produce the products, leading some experts to wonder if vehicles from China will be needed to meet current goals.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized emission standards in late March for light-duty vehicles that would effectively require 67% of new models sold to be electric or hybrid by the end of 2032 in hopes of speeding up an EV transition to reduce carbon emissions. The regulations are in spite of sluggish American EV demand that has led to both concerning losses and slowdowns in production for automakers, with both Tesla and Rivian missing production expectations for the first quarter of 2024.

China’s EV industry could fill the gap left by the lagging U.S. market, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“China’s EV production would pose no risk to American consumers or U.S. geopolitical security if we had a free market allowing U.S. companies to concentrate on their comparative advantage in pickups, SUVs, and minivans, and allowing consumers to decide which types of vehicles best meet their needs,” Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the DCNF. “EV mandates, however, create a captive market for EV producers, and China is today the world’s top EV producer.”

BYD, China’s top EV maker, has experienced a meteoric rise in recent years, with yearly profits growing 80.72% year-over-year in 2023 amid global expansion, but has so far been priced out of the American market due to current restrictions. EVs and hybrids made up 30% of all Chinese car sales during the first 11 months of 2023.

China also has broad command over the current EV supply chain due to its control over minerals needed to build batteries required for electric vehicles. The country currently controls 87% of the world’s mineral refining capacity, with U.S. attempts to increase its own capacity not yet yielding sufficient results.

The Biden administration has sought to incentivize the purchase and manufacturing of certain American EV models with a $7,500 tax credit in an effort to drive down costs for consumers, conditioning the subsidy on manufacturers not using a certain level of components from foreign entities of concern, like China. Despite incentives and mandates, sales for new EVs in the U.S. grew only 2.7% in the first quarter, below the 5% that sales for all new vehicles grew, leading to a drop in auto market share to 7.1% for EVs.

Automakers, including Bentley, GM, Ford, Mercedes-Benz and Honda, have scaled back their previous EV goals as consumers decline to buy the product.

“So, if U.S. manufacturers are forced to keep making high-priced EVs, their market share could contract while BYD’s increases,” Lewis told the DCNF. “Global auto industry leadership would shift from the United States to China. California and EPA’s EV campaign could end up helping fulfill China’s ambition to be the world’s leading superpower.”

The Biden administration has also put forward restrictions on heavy-duty vehicles, like trucks, that effectively require at least 25% of new long-haul trucks and 40% of all new medium-sized trucks to be electric or zero-emission by 2032.

Several American auto manufacturers have posted huge losses due to EV development and sales, including Ford, which lost $4.7 billion on EVs in 2023, losing nearly $65,000 on each EV that it sold. General Motors lost $1.7 billion in just the fourth quarter of 2023, despite strong profits overall.

“Americans rely on too many critical goods and raw materials from China, which is why we need to ‘strategically decouple’ from CCP supply chains as soon as practicable,” Adam Savit, director of the China Policy Initiative at the American First Policy Institute, told the DCNF. “That goes most especially for critical high-tech and defense needs, such as semiconductors, AI, quantum computing, and rare earth elements. U.S. policymakers have made us increasingly dependent on EVs for transportation, so as long as such policies are in place, we must decouple from CCP EV supply chains as well.”

Savit pointed to the current tariffs on EVs as the reason Chinese EV makers have been unable to break into the U.S. market and are unlikely to if current trade restrictions were to remain the same. The Trump administration put in place a 25% import tax on EVs, which Biden has so far kept in place.

BYD has sought to infiltrate the American market through possibly building EV plants in Mexico, which, under current restrictions, could skirt around tariffs, delivering EVs that could compete with even gas-powered vehicles in terms of price to American buyers. Chinese EVs are also often of lesser quality, have access to cheaper materials and can utilize less expensive labor.

“Even American-made EVs are produced with a lot of Chinese inputs, including critical minerals,” Savit told the DCNF. “Many EV-related CCP supply chains are tied to human rights abuses and forced labor in Xinjiang.”

Former President Trump, in a campaign speech in mid-March, called for putting a 100% tariff on every single car manufactured outside the U.S., which would severely hamper China’s ability to sell in the country, while also reducing competition for domestic manufacturers, according to CNN.

Chinese EVs have already made large headwinds in the European market, with around 19.4% of EVs sold on the continent in 2023 being made in China, which is expected to rise to 25% by the end of 2024, according to an analysis from the European Federation for Transportation and Environment. The European Union announced in September 2023 that it had launched an investigation over whether to impose punitive tariffs on Chinese EVs due to artificially cheap prices from state subsidies, according to Reuters.

The White House did not respond to a request to comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

WILL KESSLER

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Ford Puts Dent In Biden’s Plans To Expand EVs

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Ford Motor Corporation announced Thursday that it would be delaying the production of new electric vehicle (EV) models as domestic demand for electric cars falters, despite heavy federal investment.

Ford joined General Motors and Mercedes-Benz in reeling in its EV production strategy, pivoting instead to producing more hybrid vehicles, according to a Thursday press release. The high-profile retreats from the EV market follow billions in federal spending by the Biden administration aimed at supporting the industry.

“As the No. 2 EV brand in the U.S. for the past two years, we are committed to scaling a profitable EV business, using capital wisely and bringing to market the right gas, hybrid and fully electric vehicles at the right time,” Ford President and CEO Jim Farley said.

Ford’s EV division posted a $4.7 billion loss in 2023, before accounting for interest and taxes. The corporation’s gas and hybrid division, by contrast, posted a $7.5 billion profit, according to The New York Times.

“We have said our EV business needs to be profitable in its own right,” a Ford spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation, adding the delay of new models “support the development of a differentiated and profitable EV business over time.”

Auto manufacturers are responding to slowing growth in the EV sector.

EV sales only grew by 2.7% in the first quarter of 2024, a far cry from the 47% growth the vehicles saw in 2023, according to CBS News. Auto sales on the whole, meanwhile, grew by 5%.

“EV demand is growing, just at a slower rate than the industry forecast,” the Ford spokesperson said. “We expect continued growth in global Ford EV sales in 2024, though less than anticipated.”

General Motors and Mercedes-Benz have both delayed plans to transition to EV-only manufacturers.

As automakers retreat from EVs, and consumers react to them lukewarmly, taxpayers are left on the hook for the billions the Biden administration has spent subsidizing the vehicles.

The administration allocated $7.5 billion to build EV charging stations across the country, in accordance with the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill. Despite billions allotted, only seven stations have been built using those funds.

The Biden administration also made $12 billion available to automakers to repurpose existing factories to manufacture electric vehicles.

The White House wants 50% of all new cars sold by 2030 to be EVs. EVs only accounted for 7.1% of U.S. sales in the first quarter of 2024, down from the previous quarter, CBS News reported.

AUTHOR

ROBERT SCHMAD

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Mercedes-Benz Walks Back On Huge Electric Vehicle Commitment Amid Slowing Demand

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Mercedes-Benz on Thursday walked back plans to have an all-electric line-up by 2030 as consumers decline to adopt electric vehicles (EV) at the rate automakers expected.

The company has changed its expectations to have only 50% of its sales be EVs by 2030, announcing that it will be updating its current line-up featuring the internal combustion engine into the next decade, according to Mercedes-Benz in its fourth quarter report. EV sales grew 21% year-over-year in 2023, but total car sales remained relatively the same, bucking hopes that EVs would fuel growth as the automaker pushes electric models.

“It is almost like we will have a new lineup in 2027 that will take us well into the 2030s,” Ola Kaellenius, CEO of Mercedes, said following the report, according to Reuters. Kaellenius noted near the end of last year that even European markets, which are more likely to adopt EVs, might not be able to reach the 2030 all-electric goal due to consumer reservations about issues like lack of charging infrastructure and appealing models.

The Biden administration has sought to ease charging concerns as the president pushes for an EV transition, allocating $7.5 billion for charging infrastructure. Despite the huge investment, lack of demand, regulations and union requirements have stalled construction, with only two charging stations having been built as of December 2023.

Mercedes-Benz also posted its fourth quarter results, with revenue declining a disappointing 1.8% year-over-year but up slightly by 2.1% comparing 2023 to 2022, according to a release from the company. Net profit was down 21.5% in the quarter year-over-year and 1.9% for 2023.

The company also announced a 3 billion euro stock buyback in an effort to boost its stock price, according to the fourth quarter report.

Other automakers have also had to cut EV goals, including Ford, which announced that it would be reducing production volume of its F-150 lighting as of January after losing a total of $4.7 billion on EVs in 2023. General Motors reported a $1.7 billion loss in the fourth quarter in the production and sale of its EV line, despite being profitable otherwise.

“Our overall goal remain unchanged: Our Ambition 2039,” Mercedes-Benz said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Thereby, the ambition is to make our entire fleet of new vehicles net carbon-neutral along the entire value chain and over the vehicles’ entire life cycle by 2039. Therefore, we continue to put our company in a position to go all electric.”

AUTHOR

WILL KESSLER

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

HART: Dems Want To Make Everything Electric — Except The Border Fence

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Joe Biden spent his first three years in office telling everyone that “our southern border is secure.” He would squint into the cameras, looking like that banjo player from “Deliverance,” and say that.

Yet we all knew he was not serious about it because he put Kamala Harris in charge. The only less genuine effort to defend the border would have been for him to put the Dallas Cowboys’ offensive line down there for protection.

Biden is not doing this for any high-minded reasons. He wants Democrat votes. Dems have a realistic view of the old Biblical adage, that if you give a man a fish and he will eat for that day. But if you are always willing to give a man someone else’s fish, and he will vote for you forever. Or until he gets his own fish.

Dems feign a humane concern for foreigners. Illegals will be upset when we build the wall, but they will get over it.

Now, Joe is running for office and polls show that Americans are fed up with crime, fentanyl and costly illegals crossing the border unimpeded. In fact, Biden’s border agents are cutting barbed wire for them, then fist bumping illegals upon entry. It has become politically clear to them that their system of fighting immigration up till now, the honor system, is not working.

Joe says he needs an act of Congress to do something and delusionally blames Republicans. Never mind that Dems have had the House, Senate and White House for most of his term and they did nothing. And that he has enacted sixty executive orders that dismantled Trump’s near-closure of the border.

In an age-old Washington insider move, he has some weak nothing “border bill” that is only about two things: (1) getting more money to the infamously corrupt Ukraine ATM that Joe and Hunter have had access to for years, and (2) to make it look like there is a bi-partisan bill that Republicans won’t pass so he can disingenuously point the finger at and blame the GOP for the border issue.

Biden has had all the power he needed to start closing the border in Title 8, Section 12 of the U.S. code. It says the President can do just about anything he wants to protect our border if aliens are determined to be a problem. Anything. et now, he says he needs congressional action?

It is all so confusing. If they send two men caught at the border to a California courtroom, the judge is likely to just not understand what they are saying and gay marry them.

Most of these illegals say they are fleeing dysfunctional, socialist, one-party dictatorships that threaten those who question their authority. That is why they go from California to Florida, Tennessee, or Texas. California might want to build a fence just to keep their existing citizens there.

The sham bill does little but make the situation worse — and more permanent. It ties the hands of Trump if he is elected. It is a word salad of nothingness with terms like “unsupervised detention.” It is as confusing as Kamala Harris explaining gravity.

Illegals are dumping their IDs at the border. We need an ID to get into Costco, but not illegals. They make up names and fail to show up at their court date three years down the road. And if they did show up, how would a judge know if their tale of woe in their old country is true or not? It is a rubber stamp, even for the scant six percent who show up. It is a joke, and this bill enshrines that joke.

If you think unchecked immigration will not change a country, ask the Native Americans. If you want to get a hotdog and some apple pie, pretty soon you will have to go to the Ethnic Section of Wal-Mart.

Congress should not pass this bill. If Trump wins and the GOP takes back the Senate, there will be substantive border control. Trump will give you chaos, true change, peace, a growing economy, less inflation, lower taxes, and a secure border. But for those of us who write satire, Biden gives us material. So I am good either way.

AUTHOR

RON HART

Ron Hart is a libertarian op-ed humorist and award-winning author, Ron does commentary on radio and TV. He can be contacted at Ron@RonaldHart.com or @RonaldHart on Twitter.

DAVID BLACKMON: The One Simple Reason Electric Vehicles Are Doomed To Fail

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In a story that seems to be becoming increasingly common as time goes on, The Western Journal reported this week about a Canadian EV owner experiencing some massive sticker shock over the cost of replacing the damaged battery in his electric vehicle.

Now, those of us who have always driven internal combustion engine (ICE) cars have at one time or another been faced with big repair bills for some of those vehicles. I can remember spending $4,000 on a new radiator for a 10-year-old Infiniti QX 50 with 220,000 miles on it that I just couldn’t bear to part with several years back. I did finally retire that wonderful vehicle when faced with the prospect of a $6,000 tag for a rebuilt transmission.

So, all cars will eventually cost you or your insurance company big money to repair — no one is saying that’s unique to EVs. But where EVs are concerned, it’s the magnitude of the price for replacing a damaged or worn-out battery that is often quite eye-popping.

I wrote a story in September about a fellow in the U.S. deciding to junk his paid-off EV when he got an estimate of $30k to replace his battery. We now see frequent reports that auto insurance companies are charging higher rates for EVs than for comparable ICE cars due in large part to this extravagant battery replacement cost.

If you think that $30,000 is extravagant, well, get ready, because it apparently isn’t even close to the worst-case scenario. Per the Western Journal, a Canadian man, Kyle Hsu, paid roughly $55,000 Canadian ($41,583 US) in 2022 to buy a brand new Hyundai IONIQ 5. But, less than a year later, Mr. Hsu was involved in what seemed to be a minor accident resulting in superficial damage to his beautiful EV.

Unfortunately for Hsu, it turned out that the battery protector cover on his car’s undercarriage was warped, a problem that could in certain instances cause the battery to explode. This meant that he would have to replace his car’s battery pack in addition to fixing its structural damage. Hsu says he was shocked when the estimate to replace the battery came in at $61,000 Canadian, or about $46,000 in US dollars. That’s almost $6,000 more than he paid for the car when he purchased it brand new.

Even worse, because the damage was caused by an accident, the bill was not covered by the car’s warranty, leaving Hsu with the alternative of filing a claim with his insurance carrier. But the resulting insurance implications were enormous, with Mr. Hsu facing a rate increase of up to 50% if he filed the claim. His only other choice would be to foot the repair bill himself and now have over $87,000 US dollars invested in a $41,000 car.

This is insane. This is not sustainable. The EV industry simply cannot have stories like this one popping up with increasing frequency and hope to sustain growing demand for its products.

When you combine horror stories like this one with:

  • range anxiety that pops up any time the weather isn’t perfect;
  • the lack of charging infrastructure;
  • the unreliability of the infrastructure that does exist;
  • the non-recyclability of the battery materials;
  • the increasing restrictions on charging due to the massive load EVs place on the grid;
  • and all the other significant issues EV makers have yet to address,

You see an industry that is almost doomed to failure before it really gets up and running.

I frequently remind readers that EVs have been around since the 1880s. They are not a new idea in any sense of that word. If they were really the answer to displacing ICE cars at societal scale, it seems likely they would have already done so. What we see popping up with increasing frequency now in the form of stories like this one are simply manifestations of the reasons why that has not already happened.

EVs today are what they have always been: A niche product, a luxury item suitable to fill discreet purposes for the upper 5% or so elites in any society. The technology simply is not there yet to make them anything more than that.

AUTHOR

DAVID BLACKMON

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

‘Tremendously Damaging’: Here’s The Most Aggressive Restrictions Biden’s EPA Pushed On Americans In 2023

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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pushed several aggressive climate regulations in 2023 that could seriously harm the American economy, energy policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The agency proposed or finalized rules that would spur the electric vehicle (EV) transition, decrease power grid reliability by imposing costly restrictions on power plants, tighten air quality standards and more in 2023. Under the Biden administration, the EPA has made considerable efforts to further regulations that would nominally help to counter climate change, often at the expense of the American economy, energy policy experts told the DCNF.

“The EPA took a disturbing trend to a new level in 2023: a willingness to use its regulatory power to kill off industries, dictate or influence what businesses can operate and limit what goods and services are available to the public,” Daren Bakst, the director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, told the DCNF. “Congress never envisioned the agency’s authorized regulatory power would be used as a tool for the agency to engage in central planning, reshape industries and limit consumer choice.”

The “Clean Power Plan 2.0″

The EPA’s May proposal to slash greenhouse gas emissions from power plants would require fossil fuel-fired generation facilities to adopt expensive developing technologies, such as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and hydrogen blending, in order to come into compliance over the coming decades. If finalized in its current form, the regulations— which the EPA contends are legal under the auspices of the Clean Air Act— would significantly raise the chances of blackouts in a massive swath of the Midwest while imposing costs to stakeholders totaling nearly $250 billion, according to analysis conducted by the Center of the American Experiment (CAE).

Power the Future, an energy advocacy organization, dubbed the proposal the “Clean Power Plan 2.0” in a November report because of its strong resemblance to the Obama administration’s “Clean Power Plan” proposal, which the Supreme Court struck down in its landmark decision in West Virginia v. EPAin 2022.

The EPA is moving forward with the proposal, despite the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and a key official for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission warning that the premature retirement of fossil fuel-fired baseload generation and increased reliance on intermittent green energy, like wind and solar, threatens future grid reliability.

“The proposed rule does not require that plants go offline,” an EPA spokesperson told the DCNF in August. “The proposed rule would require plants to install proven technology to abate greenhouse gas emissions. The proposal provides owners and operators of power plants with ample lead time and substantial compliance flexibilities, allowing power companies and grid operators to make sound long-term planning and investment decisions, and supporting the power sector’s ability to continue delivering reliable and affordable electricity.”

However, CAE and one of its leading grid experts, Isaac Orr, are not convinced.

The agency “does not appear to have the expertise necessary to enact such a sweeping regulation on the American power sector,” CAE wrote in its August comments in response to the agency’s proposal.

“This is the regulatory equivalent of studying the structural integrity of the top floor of a 100-story building without doing so for the preceding 99 floors,” Orr told the DCNF.

Tailpipe Emissions Standards

In April, the agency unveiled its proposal for new tailpipe emissions standards in an effort to curb emissions attributable to transportation. The proposed standards would be historically stringent if finalized and they would effectively mandate that 67% of all light-duty vehicles sold after model year 2032 are EVs, according to the EPA.

Under the proposed rules, 46% of medium-duty vehicle sales and 25% of heavy-duty sales will be EVs, according to the agency’s projections.

The proposal could be “tremendously damaging for the American people,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth, the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate and Environment, told the DCNF. “The reason the agency is pushing these rules is because Congress would never pass these as laws … this rule would be very damaging for Americans and get rid of an iconic means of transportation.”

The administration has spent billions to facilitate its ambitious EV push, and other agencies, such as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, have promulgated their own similar rules as well. Despite these efforts, the American EV market is on tenuous footing: consumer demand is not growing as rapidly as anticipated, companies are losing large sums of money on their EV product lines, auto executives are starting to back away from short-term EV production targets and the nation’s EV charging infrastructure remains inconsistent and unevenly distributed across the country.

Notably, the House passed a bill that would effectively nullify the proposal earlier in December by a bipartisan vote, but it is unlikely to make it through the Senate, and the White House has suggested that President Joe Biden will veto the bill if it lands on his desk, according to The Hill.

Fine Particulate Pollution Standards

In January, the EPA proposed to tighten the existing National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for fine particulate pollution (PM 2.5) in order “to better protect communities, including those most overburdened by pollution,” the agency announced in a press release.

More than 70 industrial executives penned a letter to White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients warning him that it could lead to massive swaths of the nation falling out of compliance with the rule, which would in turn choke economic development and complicate key goals of Biden’s own green industrial agenda, according to its text.

The states that would be most directly impacted by a finalized PM 2.5 NAAQS update would be Texas, California, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona and Illinois, according to the letter’s text.

“PM 2.5 is the most demonstrable science fraud going on at the EPA,” Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow for the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, previously told the DCNF. “There is more than enough scientific research to demonstrate that what EPA is doing here is fraud, and it is really a testament to the corruption of the scientific community.”

If finalized, the proposal would kill jobs and put the EPA in a position to deny local economies the right to develop, because states that can not comply with the tightened standards would have to receive approval from the agency to develop new industrial factories and power facilities, Milloy told the DCNF.

The EPA projects that the policy would generate up to $43 billion in net health benefits in 2032, as well as prevent 4,200 premature deaths per year and restore 270,000 lost workdays per year by reducing the current standard of allowable fine particle pollution by up to 25%.

Waters of the United States

In January, the agency proposed a regulation that would define the “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) under the EPA’s regulatory purview as “navigable waters” to include lands containing small streams and wetlands. A federal court blocked the January proposal in April, finding that the 24 states that sued the agency had “persuasively shown that the new 2023 Rule poses a threat to their sovereign rights and amounts to irreparable harm.”

Then, in May, the Supreme Court limited the EPA’s authority under the Clean Water Act — which it had cited as the enabling statute for the January proposal — in its decision in Sackett v. EPA, a case brought by a couple whom the EPA tried to stop from constructing a house on their land in Idaho.

In August, the agency “finalized amendments to its January rule, which are just a half-hearted and incomplete set of corrections to try and fix the flawed rule,” Bakst told the DCNF. “These amendments don’t properly comply with the Sackett opinion and fail to provide needed clarity to implement the opinion. And they did so without seeking public comment.”

The EPA exhibited a “complete disregard for private property owners and the rule of law” in its proceedings pursuant to WOTUS regulation in 2023, Bakst told the DCNF.

Neither the EPA nor the White House responded immediately to a request for comment.

AUTHOR

NICK POPE

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: EPA Bureaucrats Can Rake In Six-Figure Salaries While Mostly Working From Home, Report Finds

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Investors Are Turning On A Key Pillar Of Biden’s Climate Agenda

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Investors are backing off of electric vehicle (EV) charging companies, a key player in the Biden administration’s wider climate agenda, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Major companies in the industry— including ChargePoint, EVgo and Blink Charging— have seen their stock prices tumble over the past year as investors worry about their profitability, a sign of potential trouble for an industry that the White House is counting on to reach its aggressive longer-term EV targets, according to the WSJ. The administration has set aside billions of dollars to boost the industry, which it will need to thrive in order to develop a nationwide network of charging stations.

ChargePoint’s stock price is down 74% in 2023, while EVgo and Blink Charging have seen their shares lose 21% and 67% of their value, respectively, according to the WSJ.

ChargePoint, which the administration has touted in the recent past, is also currently subject to a class action lawsuit that alleges company executives engaged in securities fraud by making misleading statements that unduly inflated the firm’s share price.

“I think the investor class has grown weary of the industry’s lack of profitability,” Blink Charging’s CEO Brendan Jones told the WSJ. EV charging companies once received lofty valuations from investors, Jones told the WSJ.

The Biden administration spent $7.5 billion in the bipartisan infrastructure law to help build out a nationwide network of 500,000 charging stations in order to help reach its goal of having 50% of all new car sales be EVs by 2030. McKinsey, a leading consulting firm, has estimated that there will need to be about 1.5 million public chargers installed by 2030 if that target is to be achieved, according to the WSJ. At present, there are nearly 160,000 public chargers available at approximately 60,000 locations nationwide.

EV charging companies are generally struggling to turn a profit right now, but they expect to attain profitability within the next year or two, according to the WSJ. However, the wider EV industry is lagging despite the Biden administration’s efforts to support it, and charging companies find themselves in a difficult bind: more consumers need to switch to EVs to help these companies improve their performance, but consumers may be hesitant to do so if the reliability of the nation’s charging infrastructure remains inconsistent.

Currently, the vast majority of charging infrastructure is concentrated in more densely populated coastal areas as opposed to more rural areas of the country, according to the Department of Energy (DOE).

ChargePoint, EVgo, Blink Charging and the White House did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

AUTHOR

NICK POPE

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Ernst Is Pulling The Plug On Biden’s Electric Vehicle Charging Initiative

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Biden Admin Touted EV Charging Company To Support Climate Agenda. Now, Its Stock Is Tanking

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The Biden administration held up the electric vehicle (EV) charging company ChargePoint to support the president’s climate agenda on several occasions. Now, the company is facing considerable economic and legal headwinds.

In February, the White House highlighted ChargePoint’s deals with other companies as proof that the administration’s “actions on EVs have spurred network operators to accelerate the buildout of coast-to-coast EV charging networks.” However, in the nearly ten months since, the company’s stock price has lost significant value, ChargePoint CEO Pasquale Romano has stepped down from his post and the company now faces a class action lawsuit.

The White House promoted ChargePoint’s partnership with Mercedes-Benz and MN8 Energy “to deploy over 400 charging hubs with more than 2,500 publicly accessible (direct current) fast charging ports across the U.S. and Canada,” as well as the company’s partnership with Volvo and Starbucks “to deploy 60 (direct current) fast chargers at up to 15 locations along the 1,350-mile pilot route between Seattle and Denver to be completed by summer 2023.” Additionally, the White House touted ChargePoint’s agreement with SMTC Corporation to expand charger manufacturing capacity in California. 

The White House also commended ChargePoint for “[investing] in equitable workforce development and [training] a diverse pipeline of  skilled workers to build our nation’s infrastructure” in a November 2022 press release focusing on examples of “major progress” made by President Joe Biden’s climate agenda. The administration also mentioned the company in several other press releases recapping positive developments in the EV charging industry, including the one from February.

ChargePoint operates the largest public network of EV charging stations in the U.S. as of August, according to Edmunds.

In August 2022, several months before the White House issued the February press release, Biden appointed Romano to the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, a group of private sector and state or local government officials tasked with advising Biden on how to best reduce risks to the nation’s critical infrastructure. Despite the appointment, Romano stepped down as CEO on Nov. 16, as did CFO Rex Jackson, according to Bloomberg News. Between the day before the announcement that Romano was leaving and the day after, the company’s stock lost nearly 40% of its value, according to data from Google Finance.

The company’s stock price peaked at $46.10 per share on Dec. 24, 2020, and it stood at $13.38 per share on Feb. 15, 2023, the most recent that the White House mentioned the company in writing. As of Tuesday, it is trading at around $2.24 per share, according to data from Google Finance. The share price is down by nearly 75% year-to-date.

The company’s third quarter financial filings also show the company’s revenue was 12% lower than it was in last year’s third quarter. ChargePoint posted a net loss of $158.2 million for the quarter, up from the $84.5 million the company lost during last year’s third quarter.

There is also a class action lawsuit against the firm, which alleges that the company and some of its top executives violated the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Specifically, the suit, which covers the time between June 1 and Nov. 16, alleges that the company’s share price became artificially inflated because of false and misleading statements made by company executives. The lawsuit alleges that the company was experiencing elevated component costs and supply overruns, factors that were likely to decrease the company’s profitability by forcing costly impairments.

The company’s supply chain issues ultimately forced it to announce a $42 million impairment, or reduction, to the value of its inventory in November, according to its third quarter filings.

“Based on recent investor interactions and multiple negative datapoints across the EV value chain, sentiment in the EV charging space has been muted and we are not surprised that ChargePoint F3Q (third-quarter) revenues would track below expectations,” JPMorgan analysts, led by Bill Peterson, wrote in a November investor note, according to Reuters. “However, the magnitude of the miss and the deceleration late in the quarter doesn’t bode well for near-term fundamentals for ChargePoint or the broader EV value chain in general, and EV charging specifically.”

ChargePoint’s story shares some characteristics with that of Li-Cycle, a battery recycling company with which the administration reached a conditional commitment for a $375 million loan package in February. Li-Cycle had cleared the Department of Energy’s (DOE) due diligence process while it was accused of defrauding its investors, and the company’s stock price has since tanked.

Charging infrastructure remains a key obstacle to the Biden administration’s wider EV agenda, which aims to have 50% of all new car sales be EVs by 2030. Most charging stations are densely concentrated in more densely-populated, coastal regions of the U.S., according to the DOE.

The Biden administration has set billions of dollars aside to help the EV industry build out a nationwide charging network. The administration has committed billions to subsidize EV manufacturing infrastructure, and also to provide consumer tax credits to increase the appeal of the pricier vehicles.

However, auto manufacturers are mostly losing considerable amounts of money on their EV product lines, consumer demand is not reaching projected levels and auto executives are backing off some of their short-term production targets.

The White House, ChargePoint and the DOE all did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

AUTHOR

NICK POPE

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden’s EV Push Undermined By Scarce And Faulty Charging Stations

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

‘Climate Virtue Signaling’: Another Blue State Commits To Banning New Gas-Powered Car Sales By 2035

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New Jersey will prohibit the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035 in order to fight climate change, state officials announced Tuesday.

Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and Shawn LaTourette, the commissioner of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection announced Tuesday that Murphy would file the “Advanced Clean Cars Rule II” for adoption on Dec. 18, with the policy coming into effect on Jan.1, 2024. The policy will bind the state to completely phasing out the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035, with incremental benchmarks for increasing the minimum share of manufacturers’ new fleets that are zero emission vehicle requirements along the way.

“Here we see yet another Democrat elected official pandering for votes by interceding in the markets in a way that will create perverse incentives for automakers and inevitably higher costs for consumers,” David Blackmon, a 40-year veteran of the oil and gas industry who now writes and consults on the energy sector, told the Daily Caller News Foundation about the policy. “This is just one more example of why politicians are literally the very worst class of people in our society to be making energy-related decisions for the rest of us. Everything they do in this space only serves to make our situation worse.”

New Jersey joins a growing list of states that have adopted 2035 bans on the sale of new gas-powered cars. Other states with similar or identical policies include  California, Vermont, New York, Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, Virginia, Rhode Island, Maryland and Connecticut, according to Coultra.

The state will start restricting the number of gas-powered vehicles that can be sold in the state in 2027, before arriving at zero in 2035, according to Murphy’s office. The 2027 benchmark will require manufacturers to ensure that zero emissions vehicles compose 43% of their new car fleets.

The policy does not ban ownership or use of internal combustion engine vehicles, and it will not bar the sale of used gas-powered cars, according to Murphy’s office.

“There is no justification, environmental or otherwise, to ban gas powered vehicles,” Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, told the DCNF. “All it does is force automakers to charge more for the types of vehicles that consumers actually want to buy. This power grab by unelected bureaucrats will make it harder for tens of thousands of New Jersey residents to buy their first car.”

Environmentalists and other green energy advocates often tout electric vehicles (EVs) as the future of American transportation and car culture, but they have several significant problems that their gas-powered counterparts do not. Public charging station performance remains inconsistent, drivers often have range anxiety, EVs tend to perform poorly in cold weather and they cost significantly more than gas-powered cars.

“By filing the landmark Advanced Clean Cars II rule, New Jersey builds upon its standing as a national leader in climate action and its participation in the global Accelerating to Zero commitment,” Murphy said of the policy.

Notably, some of Murphy’s other decarbonization efforts have not gone as smoothly as hoped. In October, Orsted, a major offshore wind developer, terminated two massive wind farms off the state’s coast that were expected to provide low-emissions power to the state for years to come. Now, the company is attempting to get out of up to $300 million it owes the state, which could ultimately leave New Jersey taxpayers on the hook.

“Governor Murphy needed another means of climate virtue signaling since Orsted messed up his offshore wind plans by cancelling two major projects last month,” Blackmon told the DCNF. “This is what he chose.”

Murphy’s office did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

AUTHOR

NICK POPE

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Ford Burns Through Billions, Expects to Lose $12 Billion on Electric Vehicle Line

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Despite the losses, Ford continues to push forward and hopes to manufacture two million EVs a year by 2026 and hit an 8% profit margin for its EV division. The company is chasing Elon Musk’s Tesla for EV sales in the U.S. and remains far behind the electric car giant. Tesla, which started in 2003, lost money for ten years before finally turning a profit in 2013. Musk’s company made $12.6 billion in 2022, an impressive jump from $5.5 billion in 2021.

They don’t care. As long as the Democrats are running/ruining the economy with their environmental/climate garbage, it’s the American  taxpayer that will have to pay for this mess.

Ford Says It Will Lose $3 Billion on EVs This Year as It Touts Startup Mentality

Ford Motor Co. expects to lose about $3 billion on its electric-vehicle business this year, a reminder of how far traditional auto makers have to go in turning their EV portfolios profitable.

Ford disclosed the figure Thursday while outlining a new financial-reporting structure intended to give investors better insight into the performance of its three business units. Ford finance chief John Lawler described the EV division as a startup inside the 119-year-old company, and said it is normal for a fledgling business to rack up losses.

Ford shares were down about 1.3% in afternoon trading Thursday…

Read more.

Ford Projects Its EV Division Will Lose Billions This Year

The Ford Motor Company is going full throttle toward electric vehicle manufacturing, but that decision will cost the Michigan-based carmaker billions this year alone.

Ford said Thursday that it expects its EV division will lose $3 billion in 2023 as it pushes to produce more vehicles and build electric battery plants in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Michigan, The Financial Times reported. The carmaker wasn’t surprised by the massive loss of money as it views its EV division, known as Model e, as a “start-up.”

“Ford Model e is an EV start-up within Ford and, as everyone knows, EV start-ups lose money while they invest in capability, develop knowledge, build volume and gain share,” said John Lawler, Ford’s chief financial officer.

Despite the losses, Ford continues to push forward and hopes to manufacture two million EVs a year by 2026 and hit an 8% profit margin for its EV division. The company is chasing Elon Musk’s Tesla for EV sales in the U.S. and remains far behind the electric car giant. Tesla, which started in 2003, lost money for ten years before finally turning a profit in 2013. Musk’s company made $12.6 billion in 2022, an impressive jump from $5.5 billion in 2021.

Ford plans to explain its financials in more detail to investors and how it will stick to its goal of selling only zero-carbon emission vehicles by 2040, according to The Financial Times. Ford is relying on Ford Blue, its gas-powered vehicle production, to fund the carmaker’s transition to EVs.

Ford Blue is expected to rake in $7 billion this year, and the company’s commercial vehicles division, Ford Pro, is expected to double last year’s earnings to $6 billion this year. Lawler blamed spending on new battery plants and battery technology for the carmaker’s EV losses.

Last month, the carmaker was criticized for collaborating with a Chinese company to build a battery plant in Michigan. In its proposal, Ford said it would partner with the Chinese company Contemporary Amperex Technology on the plant that would employ 2,500 people when it begins production in 2026.

Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin withdrew his state from consideration for the new battery plant because of Ford’s partnership with the Chinese company. Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, however, has pushed for the battery plant to come to the Great Lakes State and celebrated Ford’s decision to build the plant in Michigan.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Why Are There No EV Charging Stations at Interstate Rest Stops? Blame the Feds!

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Joe Biden’s $5 billion funding plan for electric vehicles failed to allow rest stops to offer charging stations, an Atlanta news station discovered.

When Georgia resident Anita Jefferson pulls her Tesla out of her garage each morning, she knows it’s fully charged and ready to go. But she told a local reporter her confidence disappears when she hits the interstate. Charging stations seem few and far between, even at places where you’d expect them to be, like rest stops.

“The one place you would want to travel and stop would be a state rest stop,” Jefferson told an Atlanta news station. “I want to get an answer as to why they’re not there.”

Jefferson got her answer from WXIA-TV Atlanta’s Verify team: There are no charging stations at rest stops because they are prohibited under a federal law—one that stretches all the way back to the Eisenhower administration.

In 1956, Ike signed into law a bill—the Federal-Aid Highway Act—that paved the way (pun intended) for the interstate highway system, which included rest areas at convenient locations.

While there were numerous problems with the legislation, a relatively minor one was that it created strict limits on what could be sold at these rest stops. Today, federal law limits commercial sales to only a few items (including lottery tickets), the Verify team found. When President Joe Biden rolled out a $5 billion funding plan for states to create EV charging stations, he neglected to carve out a commercial exemption for EVs.

“You would be paying for that energy,” Natalie Dale of the Georgia Department of Transportation told WXIA-TV Atlanta. “That would count as commercialized use of the right-of-way and therefore not allowed under current federal regulations.”

If you think this sounds like an inauspicious roll out to the massive federal EV program, you’re not wrong.

Allowing drivers to charge their EVs at convenient, familiar locations that already exist along interstate highways is a no-brainer—yet this simple idea eluded lawmakers in Washington, DC.

Unfortunately, it illustrates a much larger problem with the top-down blueprint central planners are using to create their EV charging station network.

“We have approved plans for all 50 States, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia to help ensure that Americans in every part of the country…can be positioned to unlock the savings and benefits of electric vehicles,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a 2022 statement.

While it’s good the DOT isn’t trying to single-handedly map out the locations of thousands of EV charging stations across the country, there’s little reason to believe that state bureaucrats will be much more efficient. A review of state plans reveals a labyrinth of rules, regulations, and stakeholders dictating everything from the maximum distance of EV stations from highways and interstates to the types of charging equipment stations can use to the types of power capabilities charging stations must have.

The primary reason drivers enjoy the great convenience of gasoline stations across the country—there are some 145,000 of them today—is that they rely on market forces, not central planning. Each year hundreds of new filling stations are created, not because a bureaucrat identified the right location but because an entrepreneur saw an opportunity for profit.

Bureaucracy will never be able to match the efficiency of markets, which use millions of signals to reach decisions, and are constantly being corrected by market changes, all in the pursuit of serving customers and making a profit.

This, the economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out, is precisely the opposite of what bureaucrats do.

“A bureaucrat differs from a nonbureaucrat precisely because he is working in a field in which it is impossible to appraise the result of a man’s effort in terms of money,” Mises wrote in his seminal work Bureaucracy.

Just how burdensome these regulations will prove remains to be seen.

While some states will develop EV charging plans more amenable to market forces than others, all of them are likely to suffer to some extent because the push toward EVs itself has been top-down, driven by politicians trying to push consumers off of gas-powered vehicles.

What’s clear is that the bureaucratic structure of DOT’s charging station blueprint does not bode well for consumers. Charging technology and transportation are constantly evolving, and politicians and bureaucrats simply can’t respond to these changes as efficiently as markets.

So while there is much talk today that EV charging stations will soon outnumber gas stations, there’s reason to be skeptical of this claim—even with the government’s $5 billion spending spree.

There’s little reason to believe that state planners will create a framework with the proper incentive structure to meet the market’s needs. Bureaucrats and politicians lack both the knowledge and proper incentives to create a functional EV market.

If you doubt this, just ask Anita Jefferson, who can’t even charge her Tesla at rest stops—because of a federal law passed in 1956.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. (Follow him on Substack.) His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

As Other Automakers Push EVs, This Luxury Brand Drove Laps Around Them In 2022

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While electric vehicle (EV) startups that once seemed promising saw their stock prices plummet far faster than the rest of the market, Ferrari managed to stay ahead of other automakers as the industry retracted, and is poised to post the smallest decline amongst major automakers in 2022, CNBC reported Wednesday.

The FactSet Automotive Index, a measure of the economic health of the auto industry, is down nearly 39% year-to-date at time of writing, whereas Ferrari’s stock is only down about 19% trading at roughly $210 per share, according to Google Finance. With just a few days left in the year, Ferrari was well ahead of traditional automakers such as General Motors and Ford, who were each down more than 45% this year, and left EV-focused startups in the dust, according to CNBC.

EV startups Rivian, Lucid and Canoo all posted losses of more than 80% year-to-date, while competitor Nikola saw shares fall nearly 78%, according to Google Finance. Other mainstream brands, such as Dodge-maker Stellantis, and Toyota saw declines of nearly 30% year-to-date, weathering 2022 without the production and liquidity issues that startups struggled with this year, according to CNBC.

Tesla, perhaps the most high-profile EV maker in the U.S., is down roughly 70% year-to-date, losing nearly 20% in the week ending Dec. 23 after CEO Elon Musk spooked investors by selling around $3.5 billion worth of shares. While some investors are concerned that Musk is spending too much time managing Twitter, the social media platform he acquired in October, Musk blames heightened interest rates set by the Federal Reserve to combat inflation for weakening the stock market.

Elevated interest rates have also made car loans more expensive, helping push demand for new vehicles down as 2023 approaches, S&P Global Mobility reported. To spur demand, companies may be forced to cut prices, hurting profits and further damaging their value in the eyes of shareholders.

Ferrari, meanwhile, expects demand will continue to be strong, including for its first-ever SUV, the Purosangue, which will be launched next year, CNBC reported. Although the car starts at $400,000 in the U.S. — well above Ferrari’s average selling price of $322,000 — the company was forced to pause new orders after it received orders for two years’ worth of production.

“[Ferrari’s] focus on the unique quality and performance of its vehicles is unwavering, and has driven a track record of resilient financial performance, as well as significant intangible brand value and a true luxury status,” wrote John Murphy, a Bank of America securities analyst in a Dec. 13 note to investors, according to CNBC. Murphy recommended that investors buy Ferrari, estimating that the stock would be fairly valued at $285 per share.

Ferrari is set to produce its first EV in 2025, and anticipates 40% of its cars will be fully electric by 2030, while 80% will be electrified in some capacity by the same time, according to Forbes. Despite this, Ferrari still intends to improve upon its combustion engine models.

“I believe that the internal combustion engine has a lot to give,” CEO Bendetto Vigna told investors in June, Forbes reported.

Ferrari did not immediately respond to a Daily Caller News Foundation request for comment.

AUTHOR

JOHN HUGH DEMASTRI

Contributor.

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