A guide to electric car misinformation (part 1)
Welcome back to HEATED—Emily here. Just one newsletter this week because Arielle’s on vacation. Hope you enjoy it, and consider subscribing if you like it. See you next week! A guide to electric car misinformation (part 1)The 2024 election is becoming all about EVs — which is terrible news for public understanding about them.
Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have decided to make electric cars central to their campaigns. Biden is doing this by promoting his administration’s efforts to expand EV production and ownership, and Trump is doing this by attacking those efforts. GOP polling has shown that attacking electric vehicle policy has been “amazing” for Republicans, former Trump energy advisor Michael McKenna recently told the New York Times. And Biden’s EV policies have drawn praise from both green groups and the United Auto Workers union—two important political constituencies. So the EV political discourse isn’t likely to die down soon, which is generally bad news for public understanding. Because political actors aren’t primarily motivated by helping you understand reality; they’re primarily motivated by inflaming or exciting you into making a certain political decision. So, with that in mind, I thought it might be a good time to go over some of the most common myths and generally misleading claims about electric vehicles that I’ve been hearing from both sides of aisle lately. Myth: Biden is banning gas cars; taking away gas cars; or preventing the sale of gas cars.Of all the attacks Republicans are making against electric vehicles, the idea that Biden is mandating which cars American consumers can buy is “especially potent,” political analysts recently told the New York Times. It’s so potent that even the New York Times op-ed section has been fooled by it. In a recent column, Ross Douthat complained that Biden’s new EPA regulations tell American consumers: “If you like your [gas-powered] car, I don’t want you to keep it.” The new EPA pollution standard requires carmakers to reduce the average climate impact of their entire new product lines, starting in 2027 and increasing through 2032. What’s true is that the new pollution standards will have an impact on the make-up of new cars that are sold in the future. The EPA estimates that by 2032, “about 56 percent of new passenger vehicles sold would be electric and another 16 percent would be hybrids.“ That’s a big increase from current rates; in 2023, only about 8 percent of new vehicles sold were electric. (Electric car sales in 2023 were, however, about 54 percent higher than in 2022, according to Wards Auto Data). But the regulation does not prevent the sale of gas cars. About 30 percent of new vehicles sold will still be gas-powered; a huge percentage of used vehicles sold will be gas-powered (the regulation does not apply to used cars); and no one will be required to give up their gas car. While some Republicans concede that the rule may not be an outright ban, they still say it constitutes a “shadow-ban.” Former Trump energy advisor Michael McKenna said this to the New York Times, reasoning, “If you make something unavailable it’s the same as banning it.” But Biden’s regulation does not make gas cars unavailable. It means that, in about 8 years, new gas-powered vehicles will be less prolific than they are today. Whether that’s good climate policy is a separate question. But anyone attempting to tell you that gas vehicles will be banned or pulled out of your driveway is either misinformed or trying to inflame you for political purposes. Myth: Electric cars are “all going to be made in China"Another major talking point among Republicans attacking Biden’s electric car push is that it’s a major giveaway to China. Trump himself has said that a second Biden term would result in a “bloodbath” for the U.S. auto industry because Biden will allow Chinese EVs to flood the market. He recently said that EVs in the U.S. are “all going to be made in China.” The threat to American automakers from Chinese EV companies is real. But the idea that the Biden administration is simply sitting back and allowing Chinese EVs to flood the U.S. is not. (Though many EV enthusiasts and some climate advocates wish it were, because China has some of the cheapest and fastest-charging electric cars on the market). The reality is, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, “Washington has effectively built a fortress to keep out Chinese EVs”:
It’s still possible that Chinese automakers will eventually be able to break through these policy barriers. As Politico recently reported, “the average price gap between a Chinese vehicle and its U.S.-made counterpart ranges from 44 percent to 179 percent,” which means the current 27.5 percent tariff may still not be preventative enough. But the Biden administration knows this, so it is going even further. As Robinson Meyer reported earlier this month in Heatmap, the Biden administration recently opened up an investigation into Chinese-made vehicles that connect to the internet. The investigation marks “the first part of what is likely to be a broad American policy response to the rise of Chinese electric vehicles,” Meyer wrote, and “is a big deal, in part because it marks that the backlash to Chinese EVs has begun in earnest in the U.S.” The EPA regulations can be seen as part of that backlash. They are as much an attempt to pressure U.S. automakers to beat China at the EV game as they are an attempt to reduce emissions. Whether that’s good climate policy is, again, a separate question—but as Phoebe Wall Howard recently wrote in the Detroit Free Press: “If North American and European companies don't focus on pushing forward [on EVs], other countries will come in and eat their lunch. There will be no coming back from that.” Misleading: Biden’s EPA rule is the “strongest-ever” climate standard for cars.I’m labeling this claim “misleading,” and not a “myth,” because it is technically true. The Biden Administration’s new pollution standard is technically the strongest climate regulation ever issued for the transportation sector, which is responsible for more carbon emissions than any other sector of the U.S. economy. To secure a safe and stable climate, climate scientists say the world must achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Achieving that for the transportation sector requires massive investments in public transit and biking infrastructure so that people simply drive less—but it also that means 90 percent of of U.S. vehicles must be electric by 2050, and sales of all new gas vehicles must cease by 2038 at the latest (This is according to University of Toronto research and BloombergNEF). The Biden administration’s new EPA rules are “objectively ambitious,” the New York Times reported. They are “projected to eliminate more than seven billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the next 30 years, more than all the greenhouse gases produced by the entire United States economy in one year.” That’s way, way better than where we’re currently at. Further reading:
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