I Finally Got An Electric Car So Good Luck EVER Getting Me To Shut Up About EVs
BRB, gotta go drive a curvy road so I can write more accurately.
In a fit of bougie consumerism masquerading as concern for climate change, Wonkette blogger Doktor Zoom has gone and leased an electric vehicle to replace the perfectly adequate 2017 Ford Fusion hybrid he bought used five years ago. He just liked the fully electric parts of driving the hybrid so much that he wanted a car that would do that all the time with no internal combustion happening. Besides, the Kia dealer made him a lease offer he couldn’t refuse. They’re just brutal to people with no sales resistance.
Dok has assured his cat Thornton, whom he adopted the same summer as he got the Ford, that no cat upgrades are expected in the foreseeable future.
He doesn’t seem too worried anyway; he knows he outranks Dok to start with.
We figured that since we simply can’t shut up about the new EV, this would be a great chance to update y’all on on where America’s transition to EVs is, where it’s headed, why we leased an EV instead of buying, and how all this might be affected by the return of EV-hater Donald Trump to the presidency. Not necessarily in that order.
Will Trump Be The Death Of EVs? Weren’t They Already Failing Anyway?
Wow, subheadings, you really are a bunch of Debbie Downers! The current (haha) state of the EV transition, in the US and worldwide, is actually pretty good. As we have discussed several times, reports of the EV market’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The market continues to expand, thanks in part to the tax incentives in the IRA. And while certain disinformation outlets seize on any slowing in that growth as proof that EVs were just a temporary fad like “Pogs” or “Taylor Swift,” the reality is that EV sales continue to grow, and remain likely to in the future. In fact, in the third quarter of 2024, US EV sales set another new record as more EVs came on the market, with an 11 percent increase over the same point in 2023, and a five percent gain over the already-growing sales in Q2. EVs’ third quarter share of the overall auto market came to 8.9 percent, the highest level yet recorded.
How badly can Donald Trump embugger that progress? Probably a lot, especially if he follows through on his promise to the oil industry to repeal most of the Inflation Reduction Act, or even if he only kills off the $7,500 point-of-sale tax credit for qualifying new EVs, as his pal Elon Musk is encouraging him to do. (Depending on his daily ketamine intake, Elon may or may not be planning to stay in the EV business going forward; he seems bored with it at the moment and wants to remake transportation policy to favor self-driving cars.)
There again, we still don’t know where or how Trump will ultimately land on strangling EVs; predictions are difficult because he’s both incompetent and easily influenced. Because the IRA has sparked a manufacturing boom in many red states — for EVs, EV components, and other clean energy tech — Trump will certainly be hearing from Republican legislators and governors who don’t want the jobs to go away. The IRA is also so much more than only the tax credit for consumer EV purchasing, so it’s conceivable Trump might kill that, but keep in place the credits for manufacturers, who the fuck even knows? Musk is betting that losing the EV consumer credit will damage Tesla’s competitors far more than it would slow Tesla sales, which auto industry analysts tend to agree with.
Big Business To The Rescue, Sort Of, Part 1
That said, there’s always the possibility that Trump will listen to industry players, like the collection of auto executives who plan to lobby Trump to keep the Biden administration’s fuel-efficiency standards in place, as The New York Times recently reported (gift link). The Biden standards require manufacturers to sharply cut their fleets’ emissions beginning with the 2027 model year, and will ramp up through 2032 to a point where to meet them, zero emissions vehicles would have to “make up anywhere between 30% and 56% of new light-duty sales from model years 2030 to 2032.” Trump has lied that this amounts to an all-EV “mandate” or a ban on gas and diesel, because the financial genius pretends he forgot what percentages are.
Trump pledged to sweep away those emissions rules, but many of the biggest players in the industry, which is already gearing up to meet the early phases, want the rules to stay as they are. That’s not because the auto industry is infected with the Woke Mind Virus, but because it’s still addicted to capitalism: A huge car company can’t make profits if the rules are changing beneath it all the time. As the Times reports,
In a previously unreported Nov. 12 letter to Mr. Trump, John Bozzella, president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents 42 car companies that produce nearly all the new vehicles sold in the United States, wrote that in order for the auto industry to remain “successful and competitive,” it needed “stability and predictability in auto-related emissions standards.”
The auto industry knows that EVs are going to become the norm worldwide even if the US lags behind, and it would far rather have a chunk of that future market than to cede it to Chinese companies. Tossing out the rules now would hurt American companies’ EV market share in the long run, because cars and trucks need to be designed years in advance, and the industry doesn’t want to be undercut by politically fluctuating standards. The Times quotes auto market analyst Stephanie Brinley of S&P Global Mobility, who noted that if a single automaker sticks to “making the cheapest fossil fuel cars to sell domestically, while the other automakers are trying to make these investments to compete globally,” that could screw over the entire industry.
Of course, that may not carry any weight with Trump, who is still sore at the four automakers — Ford, VW, Honda, and BMW, all with US factories — that voluntarily decided to stick with California’s stricter emissions standards in 2019, the last time Trump rolled back emissions rules. Now he wants to punish them and California by revoking the rule allowing California to set higher standards than the rest of the nation — he tried it in 2019, but the revocation was held up in court until Joe Biden took office and reversed Trump.
Big Business To The Rescue, Sort Of, Part 2
So now let me talk more about my pretty Kia EV6 and why I leased instead of buying. When Biden and Chuck Schumer handed the climate bill to Joe Manchin in 2022 so he would definitely vote for it, Manchin loaded up the consumer EV tax credit with a lot of limits on what cars would qualify. To get the credit, vehicles must be built in North America, including their batteries and even the minerals in those batteries, with the percentage of domestic content increasing over time. Manchin justified that as a way to boost US automakers, although it shut out several domestic companies’ EVs in addition to all imports. Foreign companies with US plants were able to take advantage of the deal, and other IRA incentives aimed at manufacturers created a boom in EV battery factories, vehicle assembly plants, and even EV parts plants too. Several of the battery plants are partnerships between US and Korean companies like LG, meaning that more and more vehicles will qualify for both the manufacturer and consumer credits, if they stay in place.
In 2022, Hyundai, which also sells EVs under the brands Kia and Genesis, began building a huge EV assembly plant in Georgia specifically to get in on the credits too; vehicles started rolling off the line there in October and production is slated to keep growing — as long as the various credits continue, which also will take states’ EV credits into account.
But even before it began building EVs in the US, Hyundai targeted American buyers by offering its own $7,500 cash bonuses on several EV models to make up for being left out of the federal tax credits. That’s certainly helped sales, as has the expanding line of hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and full electric models available; Kia’s US-built EV9 is a behemoth SUV with three rows of seating and up to 300 miles range with a larger battery pack.
Then there’s the nifty little secret that isn’t very secret at all: Leasing companies can use a separate provision of the IRA that provides them a $7,500 credit for EVs that isn’t subject to the domestic content rules, and they’re free to pass some or all of that amount on to lease customers. Hyundai has pursued that aggressively, and on some Hyundai and Kia models has run lease promotions combining the federal credit with the cash bonus, slashing the cost to consumers.
Lease deals change all the time, but I happened to walk into a nearby Kia dealership Monday while one of the more generous deals was running: No down payment on a new Kia EV6 “Light Long-Range” model, the base model with a larger battery and all-wheel drive and slightly fewer bells and whistles (you have to lift and close the rear hatch yourself with your hands like an animal). I put down $1000 to bring down the monthly payments on a three year lease, and now I have this new EV in my garage. My very handy landlord has already agreed to install a Level-2 charger, and we’ll split the costs while they take the tax credit on the equipment.
And tomorrow I’ll have another damn EV piece, all about why we even need to do EVs in the first place. Told you I wouldn’t shut up.
OPEN THREAD.
[Cox Automotive / NYT (gift link) / AP / Consumer Reports]
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Also, I will get to all of the "Shouldn't we focus on better public transit instead of remaining fixated on personal car ownership?" questions in the post I'm writing for tomorrow.
The short answer is, yes, decarbonize everywhere, but also go after the biggest sources of emissions soonest and fastest. That means powerplants and cars and trucks, while the other stuff is built out to make cities with very few cars possible. And hooray, people are working on all of it!
I got a catnip banana for the boys. Bear decided it’s mostly his. Can you tell who is the boss?
https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-80113961?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc