OPINION:
President Biden wants to decide what kind of car you can drive — despite his attempts to claim otherwise. In prepared remarks last week, he insisted he’s never going to take away your ability to choose.
“Americans — I want to make this clear, notwithstanding what the other guy is saying — can buy any kind of car they want, whether it’s gas, electric or hybrid,” Mr. Biden said from the White House Rose Garden.
Perhaps he forgot that his zealots at the Environmental Protection Agency established their “tailpipe emissions rule” rule last month. This dictate will slowly constrict the supply of gasoline-powered vehicles over the next eight years by setting standards for automobile exhaust emissions at impossibly low levels. As a result, cars and trucks with an internal-combustion engine, or ICE, won’t be able to meet the new criteria.
Current engines are already so clean that such a drastic change to the standard serves no legitimate purpose. If you compare what came out of tailpipes in the 1960s with what’s emitted now, pollutants like carbon monoxide are down over 99%, according to the EPA’s own figures.
“Pollution control” today is merely cover for forcing behavioral modification on a disobedient public that doesn’t want to buy the plug-in cars that Democratic policymakers want them to drive.
Auto manufacturers are finally pushing back. Tired of losing $100,000 every time it sells an electric car, Ford last week announced it was slashing orders for EV batteries. CEO Jim Farley called electric cars “a huge drag not just on Ford but on our whole industry.”
Ford Chief Financial Officer John Lawler went on to explain that Ford doesn’t build electric cars because customers want them, but because, like a mob boss, Mr. Biden says the company has to if it wants to stay in business.
“To continue to sell the ICE vehicles, we are going to need to sell EVs,” Mr. Lawler told investors last month. “It’s not an option for us not to be compliant. If you don’t comply with your [zero-emissions vehicle targets] or your greenhouse gas emissions requirements, you can’t pay fines. What happens is you can’t sell, and that’s consistent across the industry.”
The European automakers Audi and Mercedes-Benz have likewise scaled back their previous boasts of going all-electric as sales of pricey plug-in cars continue to disappoint. The liberals who were first to jump onto the EV bandwagon to signal their commitment to single-handedly saving the planet already have a Tesla or a Chevrolet Volt. Demand has been satisfied.
Lawmakers on the Continent are advancing the same electric-car grift as American politicians, and it’s getting people killed. According to an analysis of pedestrian accidents published on Tuesday in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, electric cars are “three times more dangerous than ICE vehicles in urban environments.”
The researchers looked at U.K. road-casualty statistics and found people walking across the street in a noisy city block may not hear the comparatively quiet electric car headed straight for them.
So not only are EVs a profit killer for the automaking industry, they’re also a literal killer for the public as a whole. The election in November offers some hope that this will change, as candidate Donald Trump promises to end the bloodbath by pulling the plug on EV subsidies and mandates.
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