US automakers back away from Biden-Harris EV goals

With Vice President Kamala Harris looking set to become the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nominee, it’s important to note that she is involved in the 2021 Biden-Harris Electric Vehicle Charging Action Plan.

That plan’s ambitious goal is to make half of all new vehicles electric by 2030. But American consumers are putting the brakes on electric vehicle (EV) purchases, and the market appears to be running out of fuel.

One of the reasons for the rejection is that the infrastructure and technology are simply not at the right level to support the operation and maintenance of so many electric vehicles. Those green energy dreams are running into real problems in practice.

The complementary infrastructure for EVs is much less developed than the infrastructure for gas vehicles, which has been built over a century. As a result, many people are less willing to buy EVs because they are concerned about the limited number of charging stations across the country.

To address the problem, the Biden-Harris administration announced a $7.5 billion investment in electric vehicle infrastructure, including the construction of 500,000 chargers by 2030. Yet as of May 2024, only 8 federal charging stations had been built out of the 65,000 charging stations in the country.

By contrast, there are nearly 200,000 gas stations in the U.S. The slow rollout of the Biden-Harris initiative, combined with Donald Trump’s opposition to what he calls “the green new scam,” could further discourage potential EV buyers and raise doubts about the government’s ability or willingness to deliver on its EV promises.

In addition to the relatively low total number of EV charging stations, there is a large regional disparity. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, EV charging locations are clustered on the East and West coasts and in larger cities, leaving vast rural areas underserved and making EVs less viable for people living outside major metropolitan areas.

National plans based on niche market desires are futile. Companies answering to shareholders and carmakers looking to make a profit are starting to adjust their market plans based on cold, hard facts.

General Motors is now slowing its plans for all-electric vehicles by postponing construction of a second U.S. electric truck factory and the construction of the Buick brand’s first electric car.

The six-month delay in the conversion of the Michigan electric truck plant, until mid-2026, also means GM will miss its previous goal of having North American production capacity of 1 million electric vehicles by 2025.

“We are committed to growing responsibly and profitably,” GM CEO Mary Barra told investors Tuesday during the company’s second-quarter earnings report.

Barra’s comments come a week after she expressed concern that GM is missing its target for electric car production in North America.

Barra didn’t provide an update on the timing of Buick’s first electric car, expected in 2024. The entire Buick brand aims to be all-electric by 2030, part of GM’s plans to offer exclusively electric consumer vehicles by 2035.

Meanwhile, Ford Motor is expanding production of its full-size Super Duty trucks to a Canadian plant that was previously slated to be converted into an EV hub. I suspect the motive is related to profit, which appears to be coming from the big trucks.

“Super Duty is a vital tool for businesses and people around the world, and even with our Kentucky Truck Plant and Ohio Assembly Plant operating at full capacity, we can’t meet demand,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a news release. “This move benefits our customers and boosts our Ford Pro commercial business.”

As a reminder, Ford reports that the company is making a huge loss for every electric car it sells.

But it’s not just this country that’s seeing a decline in EV ownership. The green utopia that is Europe is running out of fuel.

Fiat will reintroduce a petrol-powered 500 city car within the next two years due to a lack of demand for electric cars, especially among older drivers, its CEO said.

According to Autocar, Olivier Francois has confirmed that the new petrol 500 Ibrida will hit the market in early 2026, as the adoption of electric cars across Europe has been slower than expected.

However, he confirmed that this will be the final version of the small retro combustion engine car, as the EU will ban the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles from 2035.

One final note about Harris and the focus on EVs that has been a hallmark of the administration. In her time as California’s attorney general, she targeted the fossil fuel industry.

Before becoming Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris served as California’s Senator and Attorney General. In both roles, she took a strong stance against fossil fuels and other factors that cause climate change.

During Harris’s tenure as California attorney general from 2011 to 2017, her office investigated oil giant Exxon Mobil (XOM) over the company’s handling of knowledge about the impact of fossil fuels on climate change and whether its public statements violated securities laws and other environmental laws.

As a reminder, an important scientific paper by Norwegian statisticians, who studied a huge amount of historical data, concluded that carbon dioxide (CO2) cannot be clearly linked to changes in global temperature:

(T)he results imply that the effect of human-induced CO2 emissions does not seem to be strong enough to cause systematic changes in the pattern of temperature fluctuations. In other words, our analysis indicates that with the current level of knowledge it seems impossible to determine how much of the temperature increase is due to CO2 emissions.

Imposing environmental morality on decisions that should be based on science, technology, and real market forces has been a hallmark of the Biden-Harris team from day one. I look forward to seeing our “press” sweep away all of this failure.

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