Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Electric Vehicles

Trump Would Destroy the American Car Industry

America and the world have already decided that electric cars are the future.

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Disgraced and multiply indicted former President Trump recently injected himself into the United Auto Workers’ ongoing strike against Ford, GM, and Stellantis. He went to a non-union parts company called Drake Enterprises at the invitation of its owner, where he criticized the decision to strike. “Your current negotiations don’t mean as much as you think,” he said, because electric vehicles are a bigger threat than corporate executives to auto workers. “You can be loyal to American labor or you can be loyal to the environmental lunatics … But you can’t really be loyal to both.” (He also threatened to destroy the UAW if they don’t endorse him in the 2024 campaign.)

It isn’t just Trump taking this line, either. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) recently claimed that the EV transition is harming the auto industry.

Not only is this argument a crock, it is the opposite of true. If Republicans repeal President Biden’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, the effects on the auto industry will be nothing short of catastrophic.

Let me start by admitting there is a small grain of truth in what Trump said. There are going to be some job losses as a result of the EV transition, especially in the parts supply chain and repair industry. The reason is that EVs, for all their whiz-bang technological sheen, are actually much easier to build and require far less maintenance than internal combustion vehicles.

The basic energy transfer system of a gas-powered car involves a vastly complex assemblage of valves, cams, fuel injectors, spark plugs, pistons, a crankshaft, a transmission, and a drive shaft. An electric car, by contrast, has a battery and motor. That means a lot of people who currently work producing or fixing all those finicky and breakage-prone parts are going to lose their jobs over the next 15-20 years. Now, it might even out in the aggregate, Carnegie Mellon researchers have suggested, because the batteries powering EVs are so complicated to construct. But it’s far from settled. (It’s also why job creation programs should prioritize places that have hitherto depended on carbon energy, but that’s a subject for another article).

The possibility that EVs will require less work is just one of several reasons why it’s vital for legacy American auto manufacturers to get ahead of the electric vehicle transition. The flip side of EV simplicity is better performance, cheaper operating costs, and greater theoretical reliability. Tesla might be notorious for manufacturing defects, but as I have previously written, that is just a reflection of Elon Musk’s terrible business management. As soon as the big traditional manufacturers (and possibly Tesla itself) get the kinks ironed out, EVs are going to be a breeze to own.

Performance is even more important. The first thing that anyone discovers when driving an EV for the first time is the rush of that instant surge of torque. Even the most powerful gas engines simply can’t react as quickly as electric current. I recently rented an EV myself for the first time, and even as a committed partisan insurgent in the war on cars, I must admit even the modest Chevy Bolt EUV is very fun.

Put simply, EVs are simply better than internal combustion cars, and their advantages are going to grow over time. Aside from reliability and performance, consider another Trump complaint: that today’s EVs can’t go far enough on a charge. After taking my first EV trip myself, I’m convinced the issue here is not range anxiety per se, but rather anxiety about the availability of chargers. After all, lots of people drive motorcycles with pitiful ranges — the Harley Sportster 883 can go only about 135 miles on a tank — but this is not a problem because gas stations are absolutely everywhere. Anyone who has taken a road trip in an EV recently, by contrast, has likely experienced crowded or broken public chargers, or struggled to get them to connect or deliver the advertised charge rate.

But this problem will certainly be solved over time. As compared to the vast apparatus to find, drill, refine, transport, store, and sell gasoline and diesel, which took decades to construct, virtually every single building in the country is already connected to the electric grid. It’s merely a question of building more and more reliable chargers, and adding a bit more generation capacity. Both of those things are already happening. (A simpler reform would be to just install RV hookups everywhere, as Kevin Williams argues here at Heatmap.)

These manifest advantages, together with the large subsidies for electric vehicles and battery investment in the Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure bill, and CHIPS Act, are why all the Big Three American auto companies have already fully committed to the EV transition. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, they have already laid out some $143 billion in investment. New auto plants, battery factories, charging stations, and so on are being built by the hundreds. If Trump tears the guts out of the IRA, as he has promised to do, most of those will have to be abandoned, and he will have torn the guts out of the Big Three too.

Even if Republicans could somehow compensate for flushing tens of billions in investment down the toilet for no reason, that won’t change the fact that EVs are quite obviously the auto technology of the future, and the rest of the world is in a headlong race to get there. China as usual is way out ahead, with its national champion BYD already dominating the lower end of the world market. America is perhaps roughly equal with European and Korean manufacturers, and a bit ahead of Japanese ones. But the Big Three won’t be anymore if they are gutshot by Trump.

When an eviscerated Ford and GM can’t produce the cars that Americans of tomorrow want, they are going to look elsewhere. To try to stop the EV transition would be to hand the American driver to foreign manufacturers on a silver platter.

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Politics

AM Briefing: Trump’s Big Speech

On boasts and brags, clean power installations, and dirty air

What Trump Said During His Speech to Congress
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Strong winds helped spark dozens of fires across parched Texas • India’s Himalayan state of Uttarakhand experienced a 600% rise in precipitation over 24 hours, which triggered a deadly avalanche • The world’s biggest iceberg, which has been drifting across the Southern Ocean for 5 years, has run aground.

THE TOP FIVE

1. What Trump said during his speech to Congress

President Trump addressed Congress last night in a wide-ranging speech boasting about the actions taken during his first five weeks in office. There were some familiar themes: He claimed to have “ended all of [former President] Biden’s environmental restrictions” (false) and the “insane electric vehicle mandate” (also false — no such thing has ever existed), and bragged about withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement (true). He also doubled down on his plan to boost U.S. fossil fuel production while spouting false statements about the Biden administration’s energy policies, and suggested that Japan and South Korea want to team up with the U.S. to build a “gigantic” natural gas pipeline in Alaska.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Climate

Why the South Is America’s Newest Tinderbox

A conversation with Resources for the Future’s David Wear on the fires in the Carolinas and how the political environment could affect the future of forecasting.

Firefighters.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Wikipedia article for “wildfire” has 22 photographs, including those of incidents in Arizona, Utah, Washington, and California. But there is not a single picture of a fire in the American Southeast, despite researchers warning that the lower righthand quadrant of the country will face a “perfect storm” of fire conditions over the next 50 years.

In what is perhaps a grim premonition of what is to come, several major fires are burning across the Southeast now — including the nearly 600-acre Melrose Fire in Polk County, North Carolina, a little over 80 miles to the west of Charlotte, and the more than 2,000-acre Carolina Forest fire in Horry County, South Carolina. The region is also battling hundreds of smaller brush fires, the smoke from which David Wear — the land use, forestry, and agriculture program director at Resources for the Future — could see out his Raleigh-area window.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Podcast

Why Solar Might Be Better Off Than You Think

Rob and Jesse visit Intersolar and Energy Storage North America.

Solar panels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Longtime listeners of Shift Key will recognize the name Intersolar and Energy Storage North America, one of the country’s premier solar industry conferences. Shift Key was live at this year’s event, hosting a panel on the present and future of the solar industry featuring a pair of marquee panelists: Tom Starrs, currently the vice president for government and public affairs at EDP Renewables, North America, who has more than 30 years of experience in the renewables industry; and Maria Robinson, until recently the director of the Department of Energy’s Grid Deployment Office and now the president and CEO of the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. (Robinson is also a repeat Shift Key guest.)

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with the panelists about the momentum propelling solar energy forward in the U.S. and whether the uncertainty created by the Trump administration could put a damper on that. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.

Keep reading...Show less
Green