Which is why the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act gives everyone $7500 toward an electric car. Mandates and subsidies are always the road to success, right? Not really, unless you are still using CFL bulbs that the government spent billions on. They instead add to costs because everyone has access to more money but a limited supply. This is such simple economics even Paul Krugman can understand it.
Americans are next to last in electric car uptake. too rebellious for the European model of obeying The State that modern progressives desire. The reasons cited on surveys are lack of charging stations and that 25 percent of them don't work at any given time.
Okay, except surveys are not behavior. A decade ago, progressive Californians on surveys did not admit to being anti-vaccine while progressive hotbeds of San Francisco, LA, and even Humboldt had shocking levels of kids unvaccinated - more than the entire rest of the United States combined. That was the real data.(1)
And surveys are not telling an accurate story with electric cars either. They are not held back because of charging stations, they are an additional car for most, and most use them to go to work and home, where a charging station is, not to the Grand Canyon.
The real story is that Americans simply do not want them. The cost is high, the maintenance cost is high, the battery replacement cost is obscene. It also needs to be noted that Americans lead the world in adult science literacy, so consumers know that 80 percent of their electricity is coming from conventional fuels which are turned into electricity - meaning losses - then transmitted to homes - meaning more losses - before being stored inefficiently in a battery. Let Europeans think electricity is magic, at least until Russians shut off their natural gas.
Conventional cars have lasted for over a century because of terrific energy density, not a Vast Corporate Conspiracy.
Electrics cars have to be better to overcome that, not have everyone pay more in taxes and high inflation so 5 percent of people can pretend they are saving the planet. Instead of being a compelling alternative, electric cars have high cost and low uptake because government is mandating and subsidizing them, there is no real free market at work to bring prices down.
Everyone knows that, except probably Robert Reich, but since most of us don't get paid $300,000 a year to work one hour a week at a public university funded by student loan debt, we don't want to overspend now. Especially if they will be cheaper in the future, which logically they will be because the Biden administration is forcing everyone to get them.
Except that is not how any of this works. If the price never comes down and inflation stays high due to stimulus packages that go to government unions and government auto employees, and the country becomes casual criminals sticking with conventional autos.
The real winners will be conventional auto mechanics who can repair old cars, and they will get rich without any government subsidies at all.
NOTE:
(1) People who deny science rarely admit it on surveys. In the case of vaccines, anti-vax parents never said they were opposed to vaccines, they said they 'need more testing' - the same argument progressives used for GMOs, nuclear energy, and cell phones. And that self-proclaimed conservatives weirdly say about vaccines since 2021.
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