Onerous electric vehicle mandates have threatened to crash not only the economy, but our electric grid. Joe Biden’s handlers want X% of all vehicles to be electric by X year, which is always an impossibly few years in the future. Gavin Newsom wants…let’s not go there.  Continual exposure to that much crazy is debilitating.

Until recently, American auto manufacturers were politically attuned to the Mummified Meat Puppet Administration’s EV/Climate Crisis goals, but even when one is saving the planet through government mandates and deficit spending, reality inevitably catches up.  Reality in the form of 4000 dealers writing President Biden to tell him they can’t sell or give away the EVs infesting their lots, so perhaps it would be a good idea to please reign in those mandates?

https://www.americanthinker.com/images/bucket/2023-12/250800_5_.jpg  Image: author

Another bit of reality is the current average EV sells for $67,000 dollars. When all but a handful of Americans can’t afford an EV even if they want one—and most don’t—EVs aren’t going to sell, which is the dealer’s polite point.

For decades the Ford F-150 has been America’s best-selling vehicle, so naturally Ford bet its future on the electric F-150 Lightning. Electric vehicles were going to be 40% of Ford’s production in the very near future, and then—gasp—reality struck. Ford admitted losing at least $3.5 billion on EVs in 2023 alone, some $36,000 per vehicle. Ford is cutting Lightning production by half. Ford’s other EV offering, the Mustang Mach-E, has run into a sales brick wall and is plagued by recalls. Ford’s multi-billion-dollar joint battery-building venture with China has also gone the way of the Dodo.

The Administration allocated $7.5 billion to build 500,000 EV charging stations across America, and in a stunning display of government know-how and efficiency has produced exactly one, in Ohio, which is kind of out of range of most EVs.

Proterra, the former electric bus company Joe Biden praised as the future, turned out to be the future of bankruptcy, following Solyndra and other green companies in taking untold taxpayer millions with them to the fiscal grave. It seems Proterra’s buses—they only made about 500—didn’t have the range for even short urban bus routes, constantly broke down, their monstrously heavy batteries cracked frames and parts were nearly impossible to get.  They were not only far more expensive than diesel buses, they had an alarming tendency to spontaneously combust, a feature shared by all EVs, like the Tesla, trying to launch a Jet Ski, that slipped beneath the waves and burned to destruction underwater. At least that one saved the local fire department water.

Imagine the reality smack upside the head of the American hoping to buy a $67,000 dollar EV when he learns he needs an additional $11,000 dollars to install a level two charger in his garage. Then he learns the manufacturer recommends he not charge his shiny new EV in his garage, or near his home, in case it goes up in flames when charging. They also recommend he keep an eye on the vehicle, for the same reason, while it charges, which means if he can only afford a level one charger—120 volt current—that’s two days or so of outdoors eye keeping.

But how about buying a used EV? There is virtually no used EV market. Who is going to buy a used EV when they realize it’s going to soon need a battery replacement that will cost at least 1/3 the original purchase price? Another ugly reality is EV repairs run double the cost of conventional vehicles. Insurers are beginning to take notice.

Then there’s the whole “where does electricity come from?” issue. EV cheerleaders seem to have no idea, nor do they seem to care. Lightning is electricity, right? It comes from the sky, from nature, so it’s sustainable and organic, and probably gluten free too! We can make all manner of EV mandates while simultaneously shuttering our only reliable means of power generation, replacing them with solar and wind power, both of which are unreliable and can’t make up for the lost coal, natural gas and nuclear generation capacity.

Even there, reality is beginning to rear its ugly, inevitable head. Even California is delaying the closure of one of its remaining nuclear plants, though the Administration and Washington state are trying to close three power-generating dams in favor of Salmon—the fish.  Only Congress can do that, but in a Barack Obama imitation, Joe Biden has a pen and a phone.

Fortunately reality appears to be winning if for no reason other than the Big Three’s stockholders are probably threatening massive lawsuits for fiduciary fraud.  Ford is supposed to be in business to make money.  With the economic survival of America’s families at stake, we’ll take what we can get.