Tom Knighton notes that the government isn’t happy with us dirt people because we’re not all rushing to voluntarily give up our old fashioned internal combustion vehicles and replace them with shiny new electric vehicles like we’re supposed to:
Nissan Leaf electric vehicle charging.
Photo by Nissan UK
I’ve written a lot about electric vehicles (EVs) over my time at Substack. My take is, as it always is, that I like the concept, but they’re not ready for prime time. In particular, their range and recharge time means they lose in a head-to-head comparison with internal combustion engines (ICE).
For some people, even as things currently stand, EVs make sense. They may have charging stations at work and only use them for commutes to and from their place of employment, making all of these concerns irrelevant.
Yet a lot of people don’t have that. They have concerns about EVs and so they don’t see them as a viable option, which is why people aren’t buying them.
Enter the EPA.
It seems that if we won’t willingly do what they want, they’ll just force us to buy something we don’t want.
“Outlaw your car” sounds like such an outrageous phrase, and technically speaking, it isn’t true — but only barely. What practical difference is there between outlawing something, and regulating it out of existence?
That’s exactly what the EPA intends to do this week with strict new rules going forward against gas- and diesel-powered cars and light trucks.
Expected as soon as Wednesday, the Biden EPA “is poised to finalize emissions rules that will effectively require a certain percentage — as much as two-thirds by 2032 — of new cars to be all-electric”, according to Inside EVs. Politico sells the expected rule as one that would “tackle the nation’s biggest source of planet-warming pollution and accelerate the transition to electric vehicles”.
The rule would require carmakers to cut their average emissions of carbon dioxide by 52% between 2027 and 2032. EPA projects that the standard would push the car industry to ensure that electric cars and light trucks make up about 67% of new vehicles by model year 2032.
Of course, this led to pushback by people like dealer groups and car companies who argued, as I typically do, that the American people weren’t ready for that, in part due to the price of EVs and the lack of charging stations.
So the EPA has decided to make it so that we probably can’t afford ICE cars and trucks, either, so we might as well go with EVs instead.
And people wonder why I want to dismantle the EPA at the same time as I dismantle the ATF. It’s for the same damn reason. They just make up rules that impact people’s lives and businesses, all because of their own political agenda.
Of course, raising the prices on all cars by making the emissions standards virtually impossible to meet without making the cars so expensive isn’t going to prompt a lot of people to buy electric. It’ll just make them buy older, less fuel-efficient models.
The market for used cars was already getting pretty spicy before the pandemic. Dealers were barely able to accept trade-in vehicles before they were selling them off the lot to other buyers (and there were waiting lists of willing buyers for certain kinds of vehicles … not even particularly special vehicles, either). I don’t know if that situation has changed since the pandemic, but it indicated to me that the demand for good quality used vehicles must be coming from people who’d consciously chosen not to buy newer, more expensive cars (and pretty much by definition, every EV was more expensive than an equivalant ICE vehicle).
