Cars are already expensive due to the pandemic lockdowns, but they’re about to get pricier as Biden hammered consumers with a 55 MPG standard.
Automakers are under pressure to sell more electric cars, but few people want them or need them. And so the pressure mounts to somehow get people to buy cars that they don’t want. One way to do it is to just make actual cars so expensive that electric cars don’t look so bad.
The EPA estimates the companies can comply for model year 2026 with electric vehicle sales at about 17%, and with expanded use of efficiency technology.
U.S. consumers have been slow to warm to electric vehicles, which are on track to account for 3% to 4% of sales this year, according to analysts at Deutsche Bank.
So it’s not happening. Not unless Biden wrecks the auto industry and prices consumers out of the car market.
The standards announced Monday are stricter than those initially proposed by the EPA in August. The package that Mr. Regan signed Monday limits auto makers’ flexibility in how they account for their fleets’ emissions. In theory, this reduces pollution more quickly. It also makes it harder for the companies to comply.
Auto makers, which had cheered the August proposal, have said more hard-line rules are likely to raise upfront costs that could discourage consumer adoption of zero-emissions cars and trucks, a problem that could get worse if Congress fails to approve other subsidies, lobbyists said.
Subsidies are just another way of moving the cost over to consumers, but this is just the usual juggling contest between government and subsidized corporations over who gets what chunk of the tax revenues and consumer spending while the economy dies.
And Americans discover that they can’t buy cars just like they can’t get groceries and won’t be able to get power.
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