EV’s Amount to a Gov’t Wealth Transfer You Pay For

Plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) are great so long as generous taxpayers can afford to buy them for us and we don’t plan long winter trips to visit wayward brother Bubba who barely eeks out enough poultry chicken feed to sell inflationary $11 sandwiches to other country rubes at his local bar and grill.

According to an October 2023 Texas Public Policy Foundation report, “Overcharged Expectations: Unmasking True Costs of Electric Vehicles,” as much as $48,000 of the real cost of an average U.S. 2021 model year EV over a 10-year period will be paid through $22 billion in socialized government charities.

Included are subsidies in the form of tax benefits for purchasers, fuel economy credits for manufacturers, forced premiums for buying otherwise far less expensive petroleum models, and higher consumer electricity charges needed to support them.

The TPPF study notes that these extra costs don’t account for additional prices the industry must charge for more popular internal combustion vehicles as manufacturers are required to build fewer of them, amounting to a government-coerced wealth transfer from affluent EV owners paid by those who don’t want — or can’t afford — to buy them.

As discussed in my earlier April 3 column, great progress in achieving a government-knows-best central control takeover of formerly free markets arrived in the form of a new March 20 EPA tailpipe emission rule first established for cars and light-weight trucks, then more recently extended to heavy duty long-haul semis.

The Biden administration’s earlier rule would phase out 70% of gasoline-powered cars by 2032, with an estimated 31% to 44% of new light-vehicles sold required to be electric for model-year 2030 based on total tailpipe exhausts from all vehicles including gas-electric hybrids, standard gasoline, and diesel models.

This represents a dramatic increase from the 8% of EVs sold in 2023.

In comparison, 84% of all cars in America are powered by internal combustion engines.

And whereas EVs currently make up less than 1% of U.S. heavy-duty truck sales, nearly all of them based in California, EPA’s new rule requires that they comprise 60% of new urban delivery trucks and 25% of long-haul tractor sales by 2032.

By 2030, electric trucks alone are projected to consume about 11% of California’s electricity.

Epoch Times writer Kevin Stokliin observes that behind this lies a political push to transfer wealth from red to blue regions.

Stokliin cites Department of Energy data showing that at 2022 years-end California had 903,600 registered EVs in the state, or 37% of all EVs owned nationwide.

Whereas these states are home to large cities and suburbs, more rural states such as Wyoming and North Dakota host only 800 and 600 EV owners, respectively.

A 2023 University of California Energy Institute report used detailed county-level data on new vehicle registrations from 2012-2022 to measure the degree to which EV adoption is concentrated in the most left leaning U.S. counties, and how this concentration has changed over time.

The study revealed “a strong and enduring correlation between political ideology and U.S. EV adoption,” with 50% of all new EVs being sold into the top 10% that were mostly Democratic.

Twenty counties reportedly bought 40% of all EVs sold in this period, and “most of these counties are urban, high-income, and in Democratic states.”

By contrast, the 10 states with the smallest market penetration for EVs are all red.

Altogether, EVs in seven rural states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Mississippi, West Virginia, Alabama, and Idaho combined account for less than one percent of EV sales.

A February analysis of EV purchasers found that 57%earned more than $100,000 annually, 75% are male, and that 87% are white.

EV buyers are also overwhelmingly Democrats, with 71% of Republicans stating in a Gallup poll that they would not consider owning an electric vehicle.

A recent Rasmussen poll found that 65% of Americans surveyed don’t think they’re likely to make an EV their next automobile purchase, with still another Rasmussen survey finding that only 14% were strongly in favor of regulations to phase out gas-powered cars and trucks, while nearly 60% were against.

Opinions were split along party lines, with 53% of Democrats in favor of the EPA regulations, 76% of Republicans against, and 59% of independents also opposing.

Nevertheless, according to Coltura, an EV advocacy group, several blue states plan to follow California, New Mexico, and Delaware commitments in requiring all new passenger cars and light duty vehicles sold by 2035 be “zero emissions.”

Included are Vermont, New York, Virginia, Washington, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, and Colorado.

Gasoline phaseout policy discussions are also reportedly ongoing or have partially passed in Connecticut, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.

Rasmussen offers a salient observation why a politicized EPA mandate favoring EV cars and trucks make lots of sense for Democrats, concluding that, “EVs may be practical to zip about in the mild weather of the Pacific Coast and over the short distances of the Northeast — Biden territory in 2020.”

But EV batteries run out of charge over long distances, when it’s freezing outside, or when you’ve got your air conditioning on — all common experiences in the South, Midwest and Rocky Mountain states, which Trump carried in 2016 and 2020.”

Not so good for Bubba and many of the rest of us.

Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is “Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design” (2022). Read Larry Bell’s Reports — More Here.