Imagine you manufacture a product, an expensive product, a product Americans need.  You have plenty of domestic competition, but listening to your customers you’re making a good profit producing an affordable product and employing hundreds of thousands of Americans. Then, government decides your product isn’t good for the environment and mandates not only that you change its nature while maintaining its outward appearance. Then, government mandates all Americans buy what they don’t want and can’t afford.

Worse, foreign competitors, using actual slave labor, can make this revised product much more cheaply, and they’re prepared to flood the market. Americans, who don’t want and can’t afford your new product, won’t save your business, your employees or your suppliers and their employees. Left with no alternative, they’ll buy the lesser, and far less expensive, of two evils.

I speak of course, of Harris/Biden electric vehicle (EV) mandates, that through thinly veiled subterfuge, will force American manufacturers to make little but EVs. Who are those foreign competitors? China, which already has a lock on most of the rare earths necessary to make EV batteries, and who already make most of those batteries.

Absent protective tariffs, the Chinese can flood the US market with batteries and EVs, and American makers can’t compete.

How can China do that, apart from their monopoly on rare earths and batteries? The average public yearly wage in China circa 2024 is only $9,279 dollars. Not only that, China can mandate as much slave labor as it wants. When the Party calls, Chinese say “yes comrade!” The alternative is a bullet or becoming slave labor for the same jobs.

In America, the EV bubble has burst. EVs are much more expensive than comparable internal combustion engine powered (ICE) vehicles. The 1000-pound+ weight of their batteries wears out tires at incredible rates, their government quoted range is a lie, and they have little or no resale value. Buying and installing a home charger routinely costs more than $10,000 dollars if the electric infrastructure will allow it, and for apartment dwellers charging is a nightmare. Cold and heat so dramatically diminish range and increase charging time, EVs are ridiculously impractical in cold and hot portions of the country. 

Graphic: CBS FaceTheNation Screenshot

Pete Buttigieg, given $7.5 billion dollars in 2021 to build 500,000 public EV charging stations by 2030 has managed to build eight. He explained it’s hard to build those things, even with essentially unlimited government money.

EVs currently sit on dealer lots, collecting dust. Many dealers refuse to stock them, and some have gone out of business rather than dealing with them. Citing a “mysterious cooling EV sentiment,” which isn’t at all mysterious to Americans who can’t afford and don’t want EVs, Ford is trying to entice dealers to buy its F-150 Lightning pickup by paying them as much as $22,500 a month. Ford has plenty gathering dust on its lots, but wants them to gather dust on dealer lots in the hopes they can sell a few.

Ford is even offering 0% financing for 60 months and 1.9% for 72 months, which when other lenders are in the 8%+ range is proof of how desperate Ford is to move Lightnings.

Should Kamala Harris be elected, that desperation is only going to worsen.

Amazingly, Ford’s CEO, Jim Farley, is praising a Chinese EV, which he’s been driving for at least six months:

Graphic: Fully Charged Podcast Screenshot

Ford CEO Jim Farley loves Chinese electric vehicles, particularly the one he flew in from Shanghai that he’s been driving daily for half a year.

“I don’t like talking about the competition so much, but I drive the Xiaomi,” Farley told Robert Llewellyn, host of the Fully Charged podcast, in a recent interview. “We flew one from Shanghai to Chicago, and I’ve been driving it for six months now, and I don’t want to give it up.”

“It’s fantastic,” he said. “They sell 10,000, 20,000 a month. They’re sold out for six months.”

What?! The CEO of Ford is all in for a Chinese EV?

Farley’s praise for the SU7 comes as Chinese automakers are taking over the global EV market, prompting panic in Michigan and elsewhere about the foreign competition decimating domestic automakers.

Is Farley hoping the most China-subservient administration in history is suddenly going to get worried and scale back their EV mandates? Or is he expecting Trump to win and encouraging him to put enormous tariffs on Chinese EVs, the better to protect Ford?

Doesn’t he care what Ford stockholders think, or is he just nuts?

Considering Ford lost $132,000 dollars each--$1.3 billion total--on EVs the first three quarters of 2024, China is probably betting on the latter.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.