By Samuel Strait, Report at Large – January 4, 2021

It would be a dream come true if the current president could magically
create 1,000,000 jobs out of thin air in the immediate future by
manufacturing electric cars.  I have been reading all day about the new
Biden claim that this has become a priority for his administration to
combat climate change, to put the United Auto Workers back to work, as
well as giving them some hope that he hasn’t totally stabbed them in the
back with recent Executive Orders that weigh heavily on that segment of
society.

So how is all this going to work anyway?  It seems that the plan is to
invest heavily in encouraging the auto industry to convert over to
carbonless technology.  This means in most cases for the federal
government to spend money on the production of vehicles that are all
electric.  To invest further in associated carbonless technologies,
battery development, and improvement in overall carbon neutral
transportation.  Biden further intends to convert the national vehicle
fleet to all electric and produce 500,000 charging stations scattered
around the country.  The thing is, many of these projects are well in
hand in many places through out the country, without measurable interest in electric vehicles beyond a small number of the public.  As I said in a previous article less than eight percent of the vehicle market is
electric vehicles and a significant percentage of that is sales to
various federal and state agencies.  In order for that rather feeble
response to electric vehicles to even become measurable, the current
federal government already subsidizes much of that market.

One of the key components of Biden’s plan is to continue the subsidies
of electric vehicles with more money yet. Unfortunately, much of the
technology to make electric vehicles appealing does not yet exist, and
those vehicles, such as Elon Musk’s Tesla are exceptionally expensive. 
Another problem that has begun to surface in many newer models of
vehicles, gas powered or electric, is the unreliability of much of the
electronic technology found in the vehicles themselves.  When you add to
the fact that even the most basic models of electric vehicles can be up
one third more expensive than similar fossil fuel vehicles, it can be
hard to talk about lower maintenance costs down the road. People simply
do not want to hear about cheaper repairs when you are buying a new vehicle.

Then there is the minor problem of where Biden plans on getting the
billions of dollars to accomplish this transformation of not only the
roads in America, but American’s love of their cars. Granted there are
no dates set for this transformation, and the plan continues to be vague
about where the money is to come from. Biden has yet to face the
projected serious decline in tax revenues all due by April 15th.  Of
course the previous remedy has been to either borrow or print more
money, neither of which will benefit the citizens of this country.