I didn’t really have much faith that his EV ideas would get past the auto makers anyway. They are so resistant to making EVs because they think people don’t want them, when the truth is that dealerships either don’t have them or won’t sell them.
Sixty-six percent of US car dealers don’t have any EVs to sell, and 45% said they wouldn’t sell them no matter what, according to a new report from Sierra Club about the EV shopping experience in the US.
https://electrek.co/2023/05/09/us-car-dealers-evs/
The EV bottleneck is the dealers. Laws in many states don’t even allow you to buy a car unless it’s from a dealer. And unless Biden does something about that, which he probably can’t since they’ve successfully lobbied a lot of this on the state level, the bottleneck will continue.
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There’s also a chicken-and-egg problem here. EVs are hard to sell because the infrastructure to support them at scale isn’t there. The infrastructure won’t scale up until there’s sufficient demand to make capital investments in that infrastructure profitable.
A couple years ago, sure, but this just isn’t true anymore. Sure, not everyone’s living situation is ideal for an EV, but let’s take just homeowners. ~60% of Americans own a home, I’d wager a significant percentage of that 60% would either do fine with a standard 120V outlet or add an EV charger in their garage. That’s still a big market.
(I’m a BEV owner who rents and has to use a standard wall outlet)
I’m willing to bet the bigger issue the Biden admin needs to balance is keeping the unions happy, the automakers happy, and not tanking the US automotive industry by nudging them forward.
A shift to EVs means there’s going to be a loss of manufacturing jobs. I can’t imagine the unions being too happy about this, especially going into an election year. That needs to be balanced with the increasing interest in foreign automakers wanting to build factories in Mexico to import vehicles here cheaply.
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“ Laws in many states don’t even allow you to buy a car unless it’s from a dealer.”
Besides being an utterly corrupt stitch-up by auto dealers, can anyone explain what the supposed rationale is for these laws?
