Recall when electric vehicles were our future, the next generation of automobiles that were going to save us? It’s been a fairy tale from the beginning, as people are beginning to see.

About six weeks ago, President Joe Biden bragged during a Rose Garden event that “thanks to my bipartisan Infrastructure Law, we’re building a network of 500,000 charging stations all across America.” At that moment, only seven stations had been built – three years after the bill was passed.

The lack of progress cannot be explained away by the challenges faced by any infrastructure buildout, though Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg tried to do exactly that when he said the project is more involved “than just plunking a small device into the ground.” No, what we have is an administration that is insisting that the contractors hired to do the work fall in line with the Democrats’ political demands.

“The delay is in large part a result of the White House’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives,” the Washington Free Beacon reported last month.

“These requirements are screwing everything up,” an anonymous senior Department of Transportation told the Free Beacon. “It’s all a mess.”

Connecting charger stations to a power source is another hurdle that’s set back the green dream.

“Businesses building electric vehicle charging stations say that finding enough electricity is a major – perhaps fatal – problem,” Just the News reported over the weekend.

A “survey among leaders in the EV charging industry” recently found that 75% “of electric vehicle charging station developers and operators say electric grid limitations present a significant barrier to deploying commercial EV charging infrastructure,” says Utility Dive. Apparently “a large number” of these businesses “have been unable to secure the energy they need for their projects and have resorted to installing fossil fuel-powered generators to run their chargers.”

Do we need to put those last eight words in bold-faced italics? No. We’ll let them speak for themselves.

Also dragging down the EV era is a lack of reliability.

“Owners of cutting edge, tech-filled BEVs and PHEVs are experiencing problems that are of a severity level high enough for them to take their new vehicle into the dealership at a rate three times higher than that of gas-powered vehicle owners,” wrote Frank Hanley, senior director of auto benchmarking at J.D. Power, in the study.

With all the frustrations building, and all the reasons for not owning an EV, it’s no surprise that nearly half – 46% – of the electric vehicle owners in this country say they are “(very) likely to switch back to” cars with internal combustion engines.

Despite the efforts of policymakers, the market for ICE cars is still there, so why not take advantage of it? Is Tesla CEO Elon Musk watching?

Yes, the company would have to make significant changes and the conversion costs could be steep. But Musk saw the potential money to be made from the EV trend two decades ago before eventually pushing out Tesla’s co-founders and taking over the company. There’s no reason to think that he wouldn’t at least seriously consider the idea. Musk’s customer base might be made of activists (and incurable virtue signalers), but there’s no doubt he’s a capitalist.

 — Written by the I&I Editorial Board