Faced with collapsing demand for all-electric vehicles that has car sellers and consumers alike purportedly questioning his administration’s plans to compel the mass expansion of production and sales of such vehicles, President Joe Biden has made concessions to stakeholders.
In a seeming concession to automakers and labor unions, the Biden administration is apparently ready to scale back its ambitious emissions requirements that would require most cars sold in America to run only on electricity after 2030, The New York Times reported.
The administration may have relented on this highly touted piece of its climate change agenda because of the election year implications of pushing an agenda opposed by auto industry workers who are concerned for their jobs, according to NYT. EV components are often manufactured in plants that are not unionized, and EV assembly requires fewer workers.
Car dealers had already voiced their uneasiness with Biden’s EV production mandates, as reported by The Dallas Express. The UAW, the largest union of autoworkers, had also signaled its membership’s uneasiness with the EV push, even though its leadership ended up endorsing Biden anyway.
Consumers have also not embraced EVs as much as the administration had wished, owing to the high price tag and impracticality of owning a car that requires access to charging stations and sometimes hours to reach full charge.
Former President Donald Trump has been critical of EVs for their shortcomings while also claiming they represent a raw deal for auto workers, per NYT.
While auto dealers have warned that EVs are sitting unsold on their lots, the story is different for hybrid vehicles that combine an electric motor with a gas-powered engine. Toyota, which leads the industry in worldwide sales and recently reported an enviable $30 billion annual profit, said it owes its recent success primarily to its embrace of hybrids over EVs, according to RedState.
In contrast, Ford recently announced that its EV business has resulted in a loss of $4.7 billion.
The administration’s revised timeline for drastically increasing the sales of EVs will be unveiled sometime this spring, reported NYT.
