Nice. A flase dichotomy so the right can cut EV subsidies as well as not spending on public transport.
A flase dichotomy
It’s illustrative of our national economic strategy. Which is to subsidize private consumer manufacturing rather than to directly invest in higher quality infrastructure.
This isn’t a false dichotomy, its a deliberate strategy of Patriarchal Libertarianism (which has mutated into full throated corporate fascism).
Don’t disagree but in China you can get a new EV for less than 10k AND get the train.
It’s a magical place
Now that people think Musk is a Nazi because of a gesture, electric cars aren’t the solution anymore.
You are conflating two seperate issues.
Electric cars are not a “green solution”. Because of all the associated costs to produce and maintain them:
The battery requires rare minerals that are to be mined elsewhere (Africa, China, south america…), in abject conditions.
The host country needs to deploy charging stations, plugged to the grid, which has a high cost in copper, contributing to point above.
The internal wiring of the car also increase the cost, contributing also to the first point.
And what to do of all the defective/old batteries ?
Still should better than ice but yeah replacing car with another car is hardly solution to anything environmental
When I have a full disk and have no storage space left. I open a program and see a visual representation of the largest files taking space. I clear them out first because its easy and quick.
For some reason, when we have too much CO2 going into the atmosphere, we see the visual representation of who is polluting the most, and take care of the smallest, little fragmented space. We don’t select the larger chunks like industry, aviation, marine transport, we pick each individual car and press delete.
Look, cars have to change and Americans will have to be dragged kicking and screaming but It kind of pains me when someone looks at an old car someone is driving, using it way past its intended lifetime, and tells them they are the problem. While being perfectly fine taking an airplane twice yearly and ordering shit from china, shit they will forget they ordered before it actually arrives…
We don’t select the larger chunks like industry, aviation, marine transport, we pick each individual car and press delete.
In fairness…
The nuclear powered cargo ship is already here.
And as China is the premier builder of trans-Pacific cargo ships (1,500 to 1,700 ships per year, which is more than the US has built in the last ten) this is technically getting addressed.
Also, incidentally, the premier electric car manufacturers are almost entirely East Asian. The only functional airplane manufacturer is French. Heavy industry in the US is on the verge of total collapse (outside AI and Bitcoin mining).
The US plan to cut emissions is basically just Degrowth.
That because the big files right now are the OS. Just deleting system32 isn’t a good idea, but moving to a more efficient system is difficult. So we do the easy thing and delete old PDFs, and maybe some old games. But the system needs to be changed, and the sooner the better.
I get it. Is there really no bigger fish to fry? Cars are the only ting? I mean, yeah, we’ve put laws or goals in place to replace them slowly and thats good. Better we start the process as soon as possible. Are we doing the same for the bigger fish too?
The thing is that cars are deeply intertwined with other sources of emissions that are much bigger than them, and realistically those other sources can’t be practically dealt with while cars are so prevalent, or at least, dealing with them are much easier in a less car dependent society.
Consider something like oil fractions, when oil is refined you get gasoline, but also fuel oil, diesel, kerosene, bitumen, and others. The production of any one of those is buoyed by the production of the rest, and you can’t do much to control the ratios you’re getting. As long as gas demand is high, all the others will be produced as well, and if they are produced, people will find a use to burn them. Airlines become more fuel efficient or decrease traffic; Previously cost prohibitive uses for kerosene become viable as the price drops due to a consistent supply and a reduced demand from high value airline consumers.
For a serious reduction in oil use, every element of it needs to be reduced in tandem so that the value of no one fraction can keep production high.
Particulates are bad, sure, but they’re not what’s causing climate collapse.
Climate collapse should more accurately be called global ecological collapse. Emissions are only one part of the problem, and the hyper focus on emissions allows other problems like plastics or habitat destruction to go unsolved. They’re all connected though. Our ability to fight climate change is intricately connected to how healthy the global ecology is.
Emissions are a large part of what’s causing the habitat destruction, depending on where, specifically, you’re talking about. For instance, the warming oceans are caused by the increasing CO2 levels, and warming oceans and ice cap melt is causing massive changes in weather patterns, which in turn, is leading to droughts, floods, increased wildfires, more and stronger hurricanes, etc. Deforestation in the Amazon is still an ongoing problem, although I understand that the president of Brasil has instituted a program that takes land back from ppl that illegally burned forests to turn it into grazing land. (I think seizing the cattle would help too; the large-scale rancher that do that need to be bankrupted.) Microplastics are definitely A problem, but I don’t think that we know how much of a problem they are yet, in that we’re not entirely sure how increasing levels of microplastics in animals, etc. is going to affect them in the long term.
True, and I don’t mean to downplay the destruction of emissions. I’m just saying that emissions are often used as the yardstick for sustainability, when the picture is so much bigger. But the people in charge will never admit that because when you look at the problem ecologically, the real solution is to abandon the current economic system that requires constant growth and ever more resources to exploit, all while chasing the bottom dollar and cutting corners to get there.
Deforestation, as a going public concern, has fallen entirely off the radar.
Nobody (in national leadership in Western states) seems concerned with the role desertification is having on the carbon cycle. Nevermind the massive ecological destruction in the oceans and the feedback loop that creates
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That’s a problem, but small/micro particles aren’t the only metric. The gases released by exhaust are also a real problem for people that walk nearby cars, and they’re in a big quantity in certain cars.
But yea, balancing all of this is complicated.
Does having heavier electric cars with no exhaust but more tire usage (because heavier cars) so more particles in the air beneficial? I don’t believe we have serious studies about this, but it could change the meta.
Hear me out here, less cars regardless of their enegry source will reduce both exhaust and microplastics. We don’t have to trade one for the other when we can build alternatives that don’t produce either.
Yea, sure, but cars are still needed in many areas outside of cities
In rural areas or in small villages, it’s basically the only real good option, or for someone in a city to reach those areas in a timely manner
I do believe that public transport should be way more developed in cities, to the point where it becomes more worth it to go by public transport than in a car (ex: Paris)
And alternatives will always cause some sort of pollution. Way way less, but not zero.
Those areas don’t have nearly as high a concentration of these pollutants as a busy, 6 lane road the center of the city. Thats where improving air quality can matter the most, especially because that road is likely to have more pedestrians breathing the pollutants than a rural road.
And on this I agree. But I still think for the air we breathe, the old polluting cars should go. I’d love a future where public transportation is way more developed and used, and the only remaining cars are electric or at least efficient (bye bye diesel)
I agree on mass transit. Highly recommend Adam Something’s youtube video on why self driving cars will increase traffic and waste. Its not a solution for cities large or small. Rural communities may see benefits but they pose weirder problems.
Because at least in the US the airline and car industries hand shake to stop commuter trains.
The west coast regions also have an additional problem where the slopes will need massive amounts of tunnels for high speed rail and are complicated by a lot active geologic zones. So while its the best solution (trains) its expensive but Japan managed to do it. Its not going to be cheap or quick to build the needed infrastructure. Add in most people are heavily invested in car infrastructure when they buy a car. So there’s a public will barrier here built out of billions of garages, cars, and driveways sold.
People also pose “flying cars” etc as a solution. Piloting air vehicles requires air traffic controllers and communicating on an extreme level in addition to pilot licenses and security problems. Its not also not a serious answer to transportation.
Also for flying cars, when a non-flying car breaks down suddenly, it can be a dangerous situation but you just need to avoid hitting anything until your momentum is lost and generally have options (brakes might lose power assist but could work, if they don’t there’s still emergency brakes, and if those also fail, there’s engine braking if you have transmission control, or steering back and fourth to lose momentum via turning friction, and once you’re going slow enough, even colliding with something stationary can help).
With flying cars, maybe it can glide, assuming it even works like that and isn’t more of a helicopter or just using some kind of thrusters. Plus, if you’re falling to your death anyways, you might not have the presence of mind to try to optimize what you do hit with what control you do have to minimize damage to others. Hell, the safety feature might even be ejecting and leaving it to fall wherever, while hoping none of the other flying cars hit you or your parachute, or fly close enough to mess with the airflow in a way where the parachute might fail.
And that’s not even going into how much more energy it takes to fly vs roll.
Flying cars don’t make practical sense. And where they do, we already have helicopters.
Even if every car on the road was electric, the world will still become an ash pile in 50 years.
It’s more blaming the people for the problems of the rich, who will never be seriously regulated. It’s easier to blame all of us.
I often wonder how the emissions generated by producing and shipping a new electric vehicle compare to just keeping your old ICE vehicle until it rusts to pieces. Like how long does it take to break even from that?
A very long time. On the order of multiple decades, IIRC. Realistically, keeping an old ICE vehicle in proper running order beats the carbon footprint of purchasing a new EV.
My daily driver is a '98, I keep it running without codes in efficient closed loop and keep up on all the maintenance.
Now, the classic Ranger to electric conversion I want to do, not sure what the footprint is.
efficient closed loop
you carry oxidizer?
Closed loop in the ECU, i.e. check engine light is off. That means it’s reading the O2 sensors, including post-cat, and adjusting fuel injection for efficienct burn.
That efficiency gets you better gas milage, better acceleration, and lowered emissions.
A very long time. On the order of multiple decades, IIRC
Not true. It also very much depends on where your power comes from (coal/sun).
Thanks for the source.
Skimmed that article. If I’m reading it right, it’s 100k miles for a NEW EV to match the carbon footprint of a NEW ICE. That larger footprint is due to the batteries and rare earth/copper.
I.E. this doesn’t account for the carbon footprint of making a entirely new car vs keeping an old one running well.
I.E. this doesn’t account for the carbon footprint of making a entirely new car vs keeping an old one running well.
Any car’s carbon footprint is very much about the fuel, that will be much greater impact than the production of the vehicle itself. That’s why coal powered electricity is around the same as fossil fuels. Look at the graphs in the article.
I don’t think you understand the scale of the carbon footprint of manufacturing a new car. The footprint of all those raw materials. The majority of the materials are virgin and not recycled for new cars.
I’ll look again if you say it’s there, but that article is comparing the costs of new EV to new ICE. It does not show new EV to used ICE.
When talking about individual carbon footprints vs industrial footprints you get some counterintuitive effects. Recylcing often has a larger footprint than virgin and costs more, most corporations only pay lip service to recycling as it is more expensive. That being said, even with virgin materials, the footprint of manufacturing dwarfs the fuel usage footprint for decades when talking about vehicles. Especially if the vehicle is relatively efficient and the annual mileage is low.
Think about it this way, with a large margin of error, you can directly covert the cost of a new vehicle into carbon. Say $30k of carbon. Every step of the process from mining the ore to make the alloy to the carbon produced by workers driving to work. How many years does it take to burn $30k of carbon in fuel?
The person that purchases a new EV every few years has a larger footprint than the person that drives the same old ICE the entire time. The footprint disparity is also increased the lower the ICE driver’s milage.
The article does compare two new cars, but it’s not hard to see that if your ICE don’t have a start “price” (your well maintained ICE), then the EV will have to drive two years on hydro based power, about three years if it’s mixed power (green + fossil), and 13-15 years if pure coal power.
The success of EV (lower carbon emissions) highly spends on green power.
Those figures also assume all virgin materials for batteries. The reality is that as more batteries are built, they will reach a critical point where battery recycling is a major source of elements for new batteries. We’re only just now coming to that point where there are 10+ year old EVs out there that have batteries that need to be recycled.
Also those studies all look at the super inefficient 3rd world exploitation of minerals and labor to get lithium. There are new techniques being developed out in the Salton Sea (desert in southern california) that extract lithium from ground water pumped in a closed loop. The expectation is that production technique alone will be enough for the entirety of the next few decades of American need. And that’s a far, far more efficient technique.
No doubt. I’m not anti electric vehicle or anything. Common sense says mass transit, robotic taxis/communal cars with low private ownership and all of it electric would be the ideal end goal.
You can easily make the argument that you should buy used electric when your current vehicle repair cost is beyond the value of it.
this doesn’t account for the carbon footprint of making a entirely new car vs keeping an old one running well.
Part of the problem is deliberate Planned Obselecence as an industrial manufacturing strategy. Cars - particularly American cars - begin to fail after ten to fifteen years. Finding parts becomes more difficult over time, finding skilled mechanics even more so, and risks of accident (particularly on highways with speeds exceeding 55mph) lead to cars getting totaled before they’ve been fully exhausted.
I’ll spot you that simply yanking new ICE cars off the road and replacing them with electrics is wasteful. But when you’re talking about a ten year old vehicle, the math for those next ten years gets fuzzier as the risks inherent in ownership rise.
Incidentally, this is why mass transit improvements are an overall better play. Swapping old cars for new is never going to be as efficient as swapping cars for buses and trains, which are maintained as a fleet rather than as an oddball assortment of flavor-of-the-month private vehicles.
No doubt. Most people don’t have the skill or desire to keep 27 year old vehicles running at good efficiency. It’s also common to start adding performance parts or disabling the emissions tech, which is even worse.
I’m on my fourth vehicle lifetime, including the one I lost in a flood. Been drving for over three decades. Figure that I’m actually pretty far down on emissions as so much pollution is tied to the original manufacturing.
There’s that whole reduce and reuse thing everyone forgets about and jumps right to recycle.
The proper comparison here is replacing used ICE with used EV. As battery tech and manufacturers get better, new ICE should have a heavy tax that disincentivises private purchase and ultimately bans them except for edge cases. Keep a collector class with a small maximum mileage and other restrictions.
It depends how quickly you put on miles (and which study you base the calculation on). For most EVs, they break even with the emissions of an ICE car at about 15k miles. By 200k, the EV emitted 52% less emissions compared to the average car.
If the electric grid is powered by more renewables in the future, that would jump to 78% less emissions at 200k.
A two hour commute in an electric car is still two hours in crushing, soul destroying traffic. People ask me why I take a train and a freeway bus for my two days on campus, and I ask them why not? My drive is three minutes from my house to the train.
But in suburban Southern California, public transit is “for freaks and losers.” That was deliberate marketing.
It just sucks if 10 minutes by car/a little more by bike become 45 minutes by public transit, once an hour until 8pm.
thats a little overexaggerating, at most its takes twice as long depending on which bus and route you are taking.
I stopped taking the bus when my city decided to reduce the transit time on all routes. The reduced my transit time from 20 minutes to 45, including the 20 minutes waiting outside for a transfer.
It’s a 25 minute bike ride or 12 minute drive on average.
same for norcal, around bayarea, constantly getting the nagging, why arent you driving instead of taking the bus.
Need to pick your battles tbh.
If you tell every driver to give up driving, the planet ain’t getting saved.
Need to pick your battles tbh.
Trump admin cuts $60M for bullet train. Can railway from Dallas to Houston still happen?
The high-speed rail project intended to connect Houston and Dallas in just 90 minutes.
We literally cannot build trains in this country because we self-sabotage every opportunity.
Houston is getting $4B to redo I-45 but can’t be spared $60M on state mandated planning for an already established rail route.
This isn’t a question of abolishing cars. It’s a question of abolishing trains which we appear dead set on doing.
You can’t really expect a man advised by the CEO of the world’s most valuable car company to make a decision in favour of public transport.
And frankly the man would cut his own dick off if he thought it would be of use to the poor.
In any case, the real alternative to cars was staring us in the face all through COVID. How many people wake up every day, jump into 2-3 tons of their own personal metal, drive for an hour, only to sit staring at the same screens they were looking at through Remote Desktop for 18 months, then do the same thing to get home?
But we can’t have that forever, because fuck us.
The alternative would really fuck up your jobs is the thing. Yes commuting sucks and the issue of being forced to commute is a waste of reources, time, and just a show of power.
Until you realize opening that kraken of questions will just lead to worse job disparity. Physical space usually demands physical effort and labor, a basic sense of meeting one another in an AI infested world. You’ll be competing in the same market for jobs, just your boss has a bigger pool and you’re just as small.
You can’t really expect a man advised by the CEO of the world’s most valuable car company to make a decision in favour of public transport.
He literally also had a rail company that he’d been plugging for over a decade.
the real alternative to cars was staring us in the face all through COVID. How many people wake up every day, jump into 2-3 tons of their own personal metal, drive for an hour, only to sit staring at the same screens they were looking at through Remote Desktop for 18 months, then do the same thing to get home?
There’s material benefit to second and third spaces when collaborating on large, long term projects. And suburbanization is as much at the root of the two hour commute as simple office work.
That said, sure. Telecommuting does quickly what infrastructure improvements would need decades to accomplish.
But we can’t have that forever, because fuck us.
Everything has to be in the service of the short term profitablity of landlords.
I’m not disagreeing with the post, but mass transit is completely non-existent where I live. We have so far to go.
Sure, some places basically require personal transport. Some of it because it is really rural, some of it because it is build to require cars (which is something that can be changed, although it takes time). The problem with cars being the default for everything in everyones mind is just, that possible alternatives aren’t even considered and thus even more car requirements are locked in for decades to come.
You can’t get rid of cars, not everywhere and in many places not right now. But you have to start and look for alternative ways to manage things so you can reduce the need over time.
See how Japan handles that problem: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7ltkiq (jump to 19:42)
My area has no local bus routes but it does have on demand shuttles via our county’s senior services. That doesn’t help with commuters or people trying to go shopping or to the doctor etc though. The biggest challenge is for young adults just getting started making low wages but needing to be able to afford housing, food and transportation.
Don’t know where you live, but to put this into perspective: it’s the same situation here and I live in The Netherlands (outside of the major cities). Even in a rich, flat country, the size of a post stamp, we cannot make mass transit work outside of larger cities. I agree that we need mass transit, but it’s only one solution for the mobility puzzle. Cars also fit in there as a puzzle piece, especially in areas where the population density is lower.
So from my perspective, no, cars aren’t just for the rich.
Cars also fit in there as a puzzle piece, especially in areas where the population density is lower.
When there’s 1 farm per 5 km maybe. In 1920, you could get from Savanah to Boston just by taking trains and streetcars; every neighborhood was served by atleast a tram.
The USSR found it worthwhile to build rail lines to remote settlements, without stops, a few times a day a guy would just drive a 2 train locomotive and stop if he saw anybody.
In some rural parts of Japan, you have lines it’s just 1 railroad, and every 20 miles is an unmanned station where it splits into 2 for the trains to pass, for like 10 stations. So you have 200 miles worth of suburbs being served by 40-50 workers running 20 3 car trains, that arrive every 30 minutes or so. The unmanned stations tend to have tons of bikes, they probably have buses too.
Average cost of owning a car per day is 20USD or so. A single railroad line that allows just 1000 people to not pay for a car does not cost 20,000 USD a day to operate. This is not including the cost of road building and maintenance. But even if it did, cheap transit is a public good; transit isn’t supposed to be revenue neutral. Roads aren’t revenue neutral.
Sure, you can get from Savannah–a major city–to Boston–also a major city just by taking trains. That’s a great case for public transport.
But as someone else pointed out, can you get from one side of Savannah to the other efficiently, at off-peak times? I lived in Chicago for over a decade, and while the transit system isn’t great, it’s not bad. I lived in the Austin neighborhood (if you know Chicago, you know that’s not a great area); if I went to see a concert at downtown without driving, I had to walk about a mile and a half to get home, because that was the closest train stop to my home, and busses in my area stopped running at 11p.
Where I live now, even if trains ran to my town (and they technically do, but it’s only freight), I would have to travel 15 miles to get to the train. And that 15 miles from where I live to the train is also about 1500’ of elevation loss. That’s pretty great for riding a bike there, and really, really sucks for getting home. Especially if I have groceries of any kind.
I agree that we should have better public transit, and I agree that the cost is a net public good. But that doesn’t solve all transportation needs. It may take a large bite out of them, but it doesn’t fix all of them.
But as someone else pointed out, can you get from one side of Savannah to the other efficiently, at off-peak times?
Savannah is a planned city designed in the 1700s. It’s probably the most walkable large city in Georgia.
busses in my area stopped running at 11p.
Continuing to run some transit late at night is one of the few things NYC and Chicago actually do better than most cities.
Even Tokyo runs some of its last trains before midnight. Some stations don’t get their first trains until 6 am. Missing the last train because of an event that let out at 2AM or 11 and it took awhile to get to the station isn’t that uncommon. It’s not terrible to walk 5km in a more walkable city. But also that’s where ebike and scooter shares, and even taxis fill the gap. You don’t need to destroy the city with parking lots and wide roads to support that.
I think that most of the trains in Chicago run late at night, although far, far less frequently. I remember taking the green line with my bike late at night, drunk, and riding the mile or so north to my home through some moderately shitty neighborhoods (a bit west of Garfield Park, if that means anything to you). I lived in in a pretty rough area; there were definitely no taxis waiting for fares near the train stations (or anywhere!), and there weren’t any e-bike or scooters in that area either. It was just rough getting around the Austin neighborhood in Chicago late at night without a car.
Yeah no I’m not saying Chicago is ideal, only that does 1 better than most cities in that it runs trains late at night. Most cities have ebikes/scooters, and an app that you can use to schedule an uber or taxi.
Being able to take your bike on the subway during non-peak hours is also nice; a lot of the world they don’t let you do that, except on a few special trains.
well yeah but that’s just because modern western urban planning is kind of absolute shit, it isn’t from some sort of hard limit of means.
china has such extensive public transport that it has become a popular political position to advocate building less high speed rails and shit on both sides of their political aisle.
It’s probably not anywhere near the same situation. I lived a year in Nijmegen in the Netherlands and a year in Duesseldorf in Germany. I’ve ridden my bike from Duesseldorf to Belgium and back, including rural areas.
Where I live, the nearest bus route is 7km away, and it only goes downtown. I almost never go downtown except for concerts or sporting events, but that bus doesn’t run after 6pm.
I can’t bike. I’ve been stuck in this house since the market crash that happened in 2007-2008, I’ve been here 18 years and in that time I’ve seen two people try to commute on bikes, they both disappeared after less than a month. I hope they’re alive.
I have seen more than a dozen bikes on the roadside in memorial of people who died. It’s just deadly for bikes. Tons of huge trucks on narrow curvy lanes with no shoulder, just a ditch. And high speeds.
From my perspective, you have to be rich to drive. The so-called poverty line is now what I and everyone I know aspires to one day reach, but secretly know we won’t. If you’re not wealthy and you’re driving, you have made a choice that demands compromise from every other aspect of your like. Though, likewise with not driving… But you can’t be not wealthy AND drive AND be a single parent of three, for example. And since you can’t sell the kids, you WILL figure out how to live without a car.
Where I live 90% of the homeless have cars, or are at least in a relationship with someone who has one. Many of them sleep in them. Because here you can live without a house but you can’t live without a car. Walking or biking the roads is deadly. Like you WILL die. Poor people have cars.
I also live in the Netherlands and live in a commuter town of 80k inhabitants. There are a lot of bus routes in this town but they are all designed for commuters going to Amsterdam or for people going to the town center. If I want to visit a friend on the other side of town by bus I have to take multiple buses and waste a lot of time on waiting. I usually take the bike when I visit them since that’s faster than going by bus. But if I have to bring lots of things or it’s raining heavily or I know that I’m going home after midnight I take the car, since public transportation is just not a good option to take. Or if I want to visit another town that isn’t on route to Amsterdam it takes me twice as long to get there by bus compared to taking the car. Majority of homes in this town have a car since public transportation or the bike doesn’t satisfy every transportation need they have. And I rather want all these cars to be electric since that is conducive for the air quality.
It’s just not cost effective for a town this size to have dedicated bus routes that connect every corner of town to each other. And it’s even worse for smaller towns.
Cost effectiveness is a capitalist concept and as rational people we should eschew it. We ought to construct societies in such a way that they function according to needs and desires. We have people, we have materials, we have locations. Done deal.
I agree. The whole existence of a government is based on the union of people to organize common infrastructure that might otherwise not be cost effective to be operated in a commercial manner. Therefore, public transport should be an easy 1, 2, 3. Unfortunately, it’s not the reality.
absolutely. the debate when we were kids, and some, many in the city wanted light rail, which was ultimately voted down. my buddy who lived out in the sticks argued, it wouldn’t benefit him way out there. I should have pointed out he already benefits from the sewer and water infrastructure extended to far out communities like his. should have asked him to justify why the city supports him living out there.
Rural houses around me are all on well/cistern water and septic systems. I’m not even clear how you’d run sewer way out without elevation gain towards the rural areas, isn’t it largely dependent on gravity?
They could be using lift stations if they run the sewer out that far. If the city annexed a chunk of rural land and was planning on expanding into it over the next few years they may have preemptively investing in sewers and water to help spur development.
yes but… imagine a massive flash flood at high elevation where they built well, but not for that
mass transit enables the individual to travel far and wide at low cost
public transit provides autonomy to the individual to travel without the liability of owning and operating a half-ton missile just to get around
Think tanks say that constantly, what are you talking about?
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You’re not wrong, but Sabine Hossenfelder is not a good source for well, anything (except physics, which she has excellent grounding in).
chinas BYD wouldve destroyed the OVERPRICED ev companies of the us, wish it did.
Tariffs from both Trump 1.0 (~30%), Biden (~100%), and Trump 2.0 (~169%) mean that BYD will never come to the US. An EV from them is ~$30,000 compared to the ~$70,000 they are here. But the US government wants to coddle the oil & gas people while also making it seem like it’s trying to support American exceptionalism.
So. This one is complicated.
Part of the issue is that we want to have an auto industry in the US; being utterly dependent on a foreign country for the majority of your transportation isn’t a great idea. Yes, the big 3 auto companies should be doing basic electric instead of high-end luxury electric (…that usually doesn’t work super well…), but they need to get competitive in that market. Super cheap electric cars from China would undercut the US auto companies so badly that they would likely end up being bankrupted. At that point, Chinese companies could charge whatever the fuck they wanted, because we’d have no options.
And, more than that, the big 3 auto companies directly employ about 600,000 people, and millions more indirectly (as parts suppliers that do nothing but supply the auto companies); losing those companies means losing millions of jobs. And not just jobs, but often union jobs.
There’s a certain value in trade agreements, as well as a certain value in protectionist trade policies. But, in this case, it would make more sense for the gov’t to take partial ownership of the big 3–through stock purchases–and fund development of competitive EVs. Much like China does through their domestic economic incentives and subsidies.
…And then also fund public transit infrastructure.
