The Economy

What I actually have posted over and over again on here is that despite heavy subsidization that has tried to get people to buy electric for years now with part of the cost being pawned off on others, financially it has remained a bad value proposition for the vast majority of people, and that something needed to change if that was going to change (often pointing to the price of gas).

As I type this, less than 1 percent of the cars on the road in the U.S. are electric.

So wrong.

The U.S. could outlaw gas-powered cars tomorrow or tax them so heavily that they make electric vehicles look more attractive to people -- this is the reason the established car companies are making nominal investments into trying to develop electric cars; they need to hedge their bets about what they will be allowed to sell and not sell given the political rhetoric around it. And if that happens, and everyone is driving around in an electric car, I still won't have ever said what you keep trying to attribute to me.

 

Yes Ford has. With the correction that it has announced a pretty big investment in electric, it hasn't actually done much of anything yet. Same thing with GM. Each have announced tens of billions of dollars of commitment to developing them, and of course with the F-150 being the best selling vehicle in America, there is a lot of hype around the electric version. The number they actually are going to be able to produce anytime soon is going to be so small, though, that they are going to leave much of the demand (there is a waiting list) unfulfilled.

The driver for the car companies making those announcements about their commitment to electrics is threat of regulation that can destroy their businesses. This story is the latest (within the last 24 hours): EU lawmakers vote to ban sales of gasoline cars by 2035 - CNN

Those threats have been ratcheting up over time, which is why Ford, GM and others are being forced to hedge their bets. It's not innate consumer demand driving this. The cars are more expensive as they exist, have limitations that some people don't like, and they are getting more expensive in this inflationary environment, in part because of the rare earth minerals they utilize that have spiked in cost (something else I have posted about in the past). Here's a recent article about that: https://slate.com/technology/2022/06/electric-car-prices-tesla-ford-batteries-rare-metals.html