This is how Democrats are going to outlaw your car
Opinion by Timothy P. Carney, Washington Examiner, 7/21/23
Carmakers and policymakers desperately want people to buy plug-in electric cars, but they have a problem: drivers don’t share the same passion.
Almost 100,000 plug-in vehicles are sitting on dealer lots, and Ford is slashing the price of its electric pickup truck. Demand from drivers is simply not keeping up with the dreams of the corporate and political elites. A recent Bank of America research note suggested that possibly “consumers are happy with their ICE vehicles and don’t want EVs.”
We’ve been down this road before. We’ve seen corporations try to convert their customers to a new green technology, telling us we will love the new high-tech stuff better than the old stuff. This is exactly what happened with the good old-fashioned lightbulb. That story ended with the federal government forcing us to buy the new tech against our wills.
“Consumers need to be educated that the new bulb lines help reduce energy consumption,” a trade publication stated in the 1990s, explaining why the energy-efficient bulbs were not selling that well.
This mismatch between elite green dreams and quotidian consumer tastes persisted for decades. “Over the years, the government and the lighting industry tried to move consumers on to products like halogens and compact fluorescents,” the New York Times reported decades later. “But no amount of subsidy or ‘green’ branding has managed to woo consumers away from Edison’s bulb.”
What is an industry to do in such cases? They lobby to ban the tech that stubborn customers keep buying. In the early 2000s, the three major lightbulb makers began lobbying Congress to set bulb efficiency standards higher than what traditional incandescents could achieve, and to outlaw bulbs that didn’t meet those standards.
Cars will get the lightbulb treatment at some point in the next 10 to 15 years. Many, if not most, of the internal combustion engines manufactured, sold, and driven today will be illegal to make, import, or sell by 2038.
While Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has, through executive order, banned the sale of gasoline-powered cars starting in 2035, the federal ban on gasoline-powered cars will not be so direct. It will, like the Bush- and Obama-era lightbulb law, ban most gasoline-powered cars by setting efficiency standards that cannot be met by the old technology.
Federal law currently allows the Transportation Department to set Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for cars. That is, carmakers can sell cars that don’t meet the 28 mpg standard currently in effect, but the average fuel economy of all their cars sold needs to be 28 miles per gallon.
The Biden administration has dialed that standard all the way up to 40 mpg, which obviously makes it a challenge for carmakers to make big, heavy cars — because for every 20 mpg car it sells, the automaker must now sell two 50 mpg cars. Raise this average mpg standard high enough and you effectively outlaw all but the most fuel-efficient gasoline-powered cars.
Congress or some crafty executive branch lawyers could probably tweak the law to allow even less room for gas-powered pickup trucks or minivans.
Politicians and the fact-checkers in the news media will insist that gasoline-powered cars aren’t being banned, just as fact-checkers have insisted that traditional incandescents weren’t banned. Here’s what the Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote in 2012:
“We don’t see how higher efficiency standards translates into a ‘ban,’ especially when light manufacturers have embraced the new standards.”
Well, if the efficiency standards — on lightbulbs or cars — are unattainable by current technology, then the law is, in effect, banning the current technology.
But Kessler’s second point on bulbs is more important, and it gives a clue as to how your car will get outlawed: A ban on most gasoline-powered cars will come about when the auto industry wants it.
Right now, Ford and other traditional automakers are experiencing growing pains in the EV market. But within a few years, they will have set up supply chains and manufacturing facilities. At this point, the industry will be begging drivers to switch to electric cars, which will require much less labor to make. (The United Auto Workers has good reason to dislike the rush to EVs.)
Plus, the spigot of state and federal subsidies could mean that plug-in cars provide bigger profit margins for automakers.
The free market is pretty annoying to corporate planners, because consumers get to make their own choices. It takes government to force people to buy what industry wants them to buy. Soon enough, this old story will play out in our car dealerships.