I & I Editorial BoardEconomist Steve Moore recently compared EVs to the ill-fated Edsel, “one of the textbook marketing flops of all time.”
“All the automotive experts and Ford executives said it was a can’t-miss. Henry Ford (the car was named after his son) guaranteed hundreds of thousands of sales. But one big thing went wrong: Nobody ever bothered to ask car buyers what they thought of the new car,” he wrote.
“Given the all-in approach to electric vehicles at Ford and General Motors, it’s clear that Detroit never got the message.”
With all due respect to our good friend Steve, there is one key difference between the Edsel of the 1950s and EVs of the 21st century.
Taxpayers weren’t on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars when the Edsel flopped.
The amount of taxpayer money being lavished on EVs is mind-boggling. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill included $7.5 billion in subsidies to build EV chargers. (Two years later, not one charger has been built with those funds.) President Joe Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” includes billions more in tax incentives for battery manufacturers and EV buyers.
In August, Biden’s Energy Department announced plans to “fuel the auto industry’s transition to electric vehicles with $12 billion in loans and grants.”
This, and much more, is all on top of the $22 billion in federal and state subsidies, regulatory credits, and other breaks that have already been showered on EVs. The Texas Public Policy Foundation estimates that EVs would cost $50,000 more than they do today were it not for all this “help.”
Yet despite all the largesse, dealers can’t move the things off their lots. Last week, 4,000 dealers wrote Biden a letter begging him to ease up on his plans to mandate EV sales. They are already suffering as carmakers flood the market with Biden-approved EVs. (You can read the entire letter here.)
“They are not selling nearly as fast as they are arriving at our dealerships — even with deep price cuts, manufacturer incentives, and generous government incentives,” they wrote. “Already, electric vehicles are stacking up on our lots, which is our best indicator of customer demand in the marketplace.”
For a while, EV sales were brisk. But the bottom has fallen out now that most of the wealthy, early-adaptor, virtue-signaling homeowners have bought theirs.
The rest of the car-buying public is more concerned with mundane things such as affordability, range, and not having to worry about the car spontaneously blowing up.
“Today’s current technology is not adequate to support the needs of the majority of our consumers,” the dealers explained to Biden.
This situation isn’t likely to improve as current EV owners realize the true cost and inconvenience of owning one of these “planet saving” cars.
Consumer Reports last week reported that EVs are far less reliable than gas-powered cars, with owners reporting “79% more problems than conventional cars.”
“As more EVs hit the marketplace and automakers build each model in greater numbers, we are seeing that some of them have problems with the EV drive system motors, EV charging systems, and EV batteries (which are different from the low-power 12-volt batteries that power accessories),” it reports. (Keep in mind that Consumer Reports is a big booster of EVs.)
EV owners are also finding that repair costs tend to be much higher. One study found that they cost 29% more to repair than conventional cars. Mitchell, a company that processes millions of repair transactions insurers and repair shops found that repair costs in the third quarter of this year were $950 higher, on average, for EVs than conventional cars.
EVs are also more expensive to insure. An analysis by Policygenius, an insurance comparison shopping site, found that an EV sedan costs 18% more to insure, on average, than a gas-powered one. “Insurance for a Tesla Model 3 and Y costs $1,000 more per year than for a Ford truck,” it reports.
These extra costs might not mean much to well-heeled liberal elites, but for most folks, these are budget-busting numbers.
On top of all this is the inconvenience of operating an EV.
This summer, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm went on a four-day EV road trip to show off the wonders of the technology, only to create a PR nightmare when a member of her advance team blocked a charger so she didn’t have to wait for one. A family traveling with an infant that was waiting for a charger to open up called the cops.
Granholm kept this story under wraps until an NPR reporter, who’d been invited to ride along, wrote about the incident (two months after the fact). The story, headlined “Electric cars have a road trip problem, even for the secretary of energy,” generated a raft of coverage and calls for a congressional investigation.
When a Wall Street Journal reporter went around Los Angeles to test chargers, she found that almost 30% of the 120 she tried were out of order. When you consider how long it takes to charge an EV, having nearly a third of them broken is a recipe for disaster.
We won’t even bother to mention the fact EVs are being sold under false pretenses as “zero emission” or that the batteries’ components are mined by slave labor.
When the Edsel flopped, Ford scrapped the model, ate the losses, and moved on. But what happens if EVs are an Edsel-scale commercial flop?
The government never admits a mistake. So the leftists who run it will just shower more taxpayer subsidies. There’s already talk of an industry bailout as car makers try to absorb the massive losses they are incurring on their EV lines.
And, if more subsidies don’t work, the left will simply ban gas-powered cars outright. That’s what California and several other liberal states are already planning, and it’s why the Biden administration wants to impose regulations that would force two-thirds of new cars sold to be electric.
Consumers, and taxpayers, be damned.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
They might make sense in places like LA with millions of cars and real problems with smog. But we have the age old milton friedman questions to answer/decisions to make. When it gets down to economic viability we need entrepreneurs like elon musk to answer. He lowered the cost of space flight by 99%. NOT NASA, space X! So over 6 decades nasa couldn’t reduce costs by one penny. We need to study this in great detail. In pursuit of profit, he lowered cost, by innovating and cutting out the fat. No fed gov agency has ever cut out the fat.
One correction: Henry Ford II may have guaranteed hundreds of thousands of Edsel sales, but Henry Ford (the elder) most certainly did not, as he was dead for more than a decade when the Edsel was introduced. (d.1947) Son Edsel died even earlier…in 1943.
SpaceX lowered the cost of space flight by focusing on total cost per pound delivered to orbit. All the technical innovations — reusability, in-house production, etc. — were all means to an end. They are not just doing the same things more efficiently; they are doing things differently.
EVs are a disaster precisely because they are focused on “zero” emissions and completely dismiss total cost of operation (both to the individual consumer and to communal/societal infrastructure). This disaster cannot be averted by political attempts to repeal the laws of physics; power that cannot be supplied won’t be. Power that cannot be supplied without exorbitant cost won’t be except as a luxury for the rich.
The elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about are the many conundrums associated with the mandate for EV trucks in the 4th largest economy in the world – California. Electric trucks at any cost should have conversations about the conundrums associated with this mandate, before implementing a Mandate.
https://heartland.org/opinion/californias-electric-truck-mandate-conundrums/
Mandates are not law and will be broken. Plus vote ‘R’ to accelerate the situation.
None of these things matter to the people pushing this. None of them. At all.
Some of them are uninformed “true believers” in the environmental movement who support stupid things like ethanol (net *loss* after you look at how much gasoline is spent on the farming of the corn).
But many of them are just psychopaths who don’t care about the suffering of peasants. Peasants exist to suffer for their benefit, after all. They are the special people.
“Taxpayers weren’t on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars when the Edsel flopped.”
As well, the federal govt was not “asked” to outlaw horses so that gasoline powered vehicles could be forced to succeed. The process to refine petroleum continually improved to reduce the cost of the product and Henry Ford came up with a system to make cars affordable for the masses. THAT IS CALLED FREE MARKET CAPITALISM, SOMETHING THAT SOCIALISM, COMMUNISM, TOTALITARIANISM, ELITISM, ETC DOES NOT ALLOW FOR!!!
EVs are the 21st Century’s Trabant.
In their simplicity (a function of endless scarcity in Marxism), some Trabbies have been coaxed into perpetual life.
The same will not ever be said for EVs.
However, they may, like trabbies, become cult classics.