Electric Cars Were Already Having Issues. Then Things Got Political. - WSJ - 0 views
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, anti-“woke” backlash and high-profile politics are increasingly making the suggestion of owning an EV a political cudgel. Or, as Ford Motor Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley recently lamented: “They have become a political football.”
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President Biden’s support of the transition, through subsidizing manufacturing, extending tax credits for EVs and giving money for charging stations, has come under attack from Republican rivals seeking to challenge him for the White House next year.
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“I don’t get why Ford and GM, why these carmakers, aren’t fighting…to make cars that are going to sell, to make cars that are going to be able to go on long distances,” Trump said at a rally during which he predicted the EV policies would lead to “hundreds of thousands of American jobs” being lost.
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The tensions have risen as Ford and other global automakers have spent billions of dollars designing and building EVs, a move that looked especially smart a year ago when they were caught off guard by the strong demand for their new offerings.
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This past week, General Motors said it would delay opening a large EV truck factory in Michigan by a year, citing a need “to better manage capital investments while aligning with evolving EV demand.” The move followed an earlier announcement by Ford pushing back to late 2024 a target of building 600,000 EVs annually. The company has also temporarily cut one of the production shifts for its electric pickup and paused construction of a $3.5 billion battery plant in Michigan.
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In the U.S., for every five Democrats owning an EV there are two Republicans, said Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision, which surveys new-vehicle buyers.
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His data finds that Democrats give priority to “environmentally friendly” when buying their cars while Republicans have other things they are looking for, such as performance and prestige.
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On the campaign trail, however, EVs don’t always sound so cool. The GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, who is against subsidies, has drawn laughs as he suggests that EV buyers are motivated by “a psychological insecurity,” while former Vice President Mike Pence said during the second Republican presidential primary debate that Biden’s efforts “are driving American gasoline, automotive manufacturing, into the graveyard.”
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As the Democrat talks about trying to protect automotive jobs and help the environment with green technology, they raise concerns about losing work and question whether the governments should subsidize them or mandate future zero-emission vehicle sales, as California has done.
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“The real question is whether we’ll lead or we’ll fall behind in the race to the future; or whether we’ll build these vehicles and the batteries that go in them here in the United States or rely on other countries,” Biden said while visiting a Ford factory early in his administration.
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Underpinning the politics of EVs is an economic divide, made more stark by the rise of interest rates. Most EVs are more expensive than the average new vehicle—which sold for about $46,000 in September.
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As new cars and trucks become more costly, the practical effect on buyers shows up in Strategic Vision’s survey: The median family household income of new-car buyers has risen to $122,000. That is a significant increase from around $90,000, where it had been at for a couple of decades until just recently. EV buyers are even better off, with a median household income of $186,000.
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In some ways, the green car tensions are a return to the 2012 political season, when GM’s Chevrolet Volt became the embodiment of the Obama administration’s rescue of the Detroit auto industry in 2009 and efforts to promote electrified vehicles.
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Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination, said the problem with the “Obama car” was that one couldn’t put a gun rack in the plug-in hybrid vehicle.
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Sales of the Volt disappointed, and Dan Akerson, then CEO of GM, was left fuming that the company hadn’t designed the sedan to become “a political punching bag.”