Why is General Motors – which only sells one electric car – pushing for a national electric car mandate? Honda and several others, too.
It is not unlike a steak house lobbying for a national vegan menu requirement.
One wonders . . . why?
In the words of Jules from Pulp Fiction, allow me to elucidate.
The federal government has already de facto outlawed non-electric cars, using a kind of slow-acting poison that is already causing symptoms to appear and will shortly fell even the healthiest-seeming non-electric vehicles (big trucks and SUVs).
That poison is the federal fuel economy fatwa known as CAFE, which has been around since the ‘70s but is on schedule to almost double and within about five years. By model year 2025, vehicles – not just cars – will have to average 50-plus MPG.
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This includes trucks and SUVs based on trucks – which GM does sell a lot of.
How do you get a truck or an SUV based on a truck to average 50-plus MPG?
You don’t.
What you do instead is improve your CAFE “fleet average” by folding cars that get infinite MPGs (even though they don’t get many miles down the road) into the equation.
Electric cars.
One EV plus one SUV that averages say 20 MPG equals a lot better than 20 MPG. The more EVs you sell – or rather, give away at a net loss – the more SUVs and trucks you can still actually sell. Which GM – and the others selling them – need to sell, because that’s where the money is.
The problem, though, is that electric cars aren’t selling.
This shouldn’t be any more perplexing than being baffled by diners at a steak house failing to order the soy turkey burger with quinoa from the Vegan menu. Especially when the turkey burger costs twice what the ribeye does.
The government – via CAFE – nudged Americans out of big sedans with big V8s and into big SUVs and trucks with V8s because lots of Americans didn’t want to be nudged into smaller, front-drive cars. The big trucks and SUVs were for a time not affected as abusively by the CAFE regs and so the car companies began to build lots of them to meet the diverted market demand for large, powerful vehicles.
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CAFE now applies to all vehicles – including trucks and SUVs. Uncle closed the truck/SUV “loophole,” as it styles anything which enables people to avoid Uncle’s nudging, which is always done at bayonet-point.
Uncle never suggests.
Anyhow, trucks and SUVs and other larger/stronger vehicles continue to sell – or rather, they’re the types of vehicles which can be sold at a profit, without mandates or subsidies.
Unlike electric cars.
But – given a looming 50-plus MPG CAFE mandate – it is extremely necessary to “sell” EVs, in order to be able to actually sell anything else without incurring colossal “gas guzzler” fines – which is the penalty imposed for not meeting the CAFE mandatory minimums.
