Americans deserve an agile, diverse automotive marketplace that responds to their desires, not the fume-addled wish-casting of Beltway mandaters.
Americans deserve an agile, diverse automotive marketplace that responds to their desires, not the fume-addled wish-casting of Beltway mandaters.
I f the Biden administration’s latest emissions standards stand, come 2032, the Toyota Prius, that longtime favorite of environmentalists, will be consigned to the ash heap of history for the sin of having the audacity to use an internal-combustion engine (ICE). The 2022 Prius, in both its plug-in and hybrid versions (~150 g/mile CO2), emits far more CO2 than the new standard (82 g/mile CO2) will allow in 2032.
Before all else, let’s consider the legality. I think the president acts beyond his powers when deputizing an executive agency to advance such a broad agenda without congressional oversight. These regulations would substantively alter the automotive sector beyond simply nudging automakers to increase efficiency — and as such, the law leaves it up to state attorneys general such as West Virginia’s Patrick Morrisey to fight against them. That said, Congress showed itself a willing accomplice in 2022, passing the Inflation Reduction Act with its host of climate directives and related funding.
With the legality of the EPA’s guidance unknown for now, the projections for electric-vehicle (EV) adoption with and without increased regulations help drive home Americans’ suspicion regarding the widespread adoption of what is considered a niche technology. Without standards beyond the already stringent emissions standards set to kick in in 2026, the EPA reckons that only 39 percent of new car sales would be EVs in 2032. With the new 2032 standards, that number would grow to 67 percent. In other words, Americans are not expected to buy new electric cars unless the other options are removed while the feds dangle taxpayer money in their faces. The carrot is the IRS’s $7,500 tax credit for buying a new EV, but only nominally American EVs; the stick is the EPA’s playing Calvinball and drubbing manufacturers with penalties while further tightening the rules every time Toyota or General Motors get within hailing distance of the emissions goals.
What’s especially grating about this is how buried the standards are. From the New York Times to Car and Driver, the coverage of these standards opts to repeat the administration’s lines about how they will increase the widespread adoption of electric vehicles while eliding why that may be the case — namely, that they will make it nigh-impossible to build and purchase a vehicle with an ICE. Those that will be sold are going to be luxury models with fat profit margins and low production numbers offset by the peasantry tooling around in the EV equivalent of the miserable Chevrolet Cruze — a low-cost junk car willed into existence so that GM could balance out its emissions checkbook. On page 39 of the EPA’s new emissions guidelines, after pages of EV salesmanship that can be summarized by Remy’s immortal parody of Elizabeth Warren’s line “People will die!”, the proposal’s authors finally reveal their standards for light-duty vehicles (i.e., the cars and trucks most Americans drive).
“Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light-Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles – Proposed Rule” reads:
EPA is proposing more stringent GHG standards for both light-duty vehicles and medium-duty vehicles for MYs 2027 through 2032. EPA also seeks comment on whether the standards should continue to increase in stringency for future years, such as through MY 2035. For light-duty vehicles, EPA is proposing standards that would increase in stringency each year over a six-year period, from MYs 2027-2032. The proposed standards are projected to result in an industrywide average target for the light-duty fleet of 82 grams/mile (g/mile) of CO2 in MY 2032, representing a 56 percent reduction in projected fleet average GHG emissions target levels from the existing MY 2026 standards.
If it took 39 pages worth of palaver before I explained to my wife that we were no longer turning the thermostat up to her preferred temperature, she’d be rightly miffed. Further, if the press jumped through the dining-room window and repeated all the nice things that we could possibly do (assuming everything went to plan perfectly) because the house was at 52 degrees instead of 68, but never mentioned that the house would have to be at 52 degrees or that the furnace would have to be replaced with a dung fire in the kitchen sink, we would have a problem. The key question that the press seems to be ignoring here is, “What, in concrete terms, is the new rule?”
Perhaps the most excruciating part of this is how the government came to its numbers: It ran cars on treadmills and used those stats to construct its model for future standards. The Times is forthright on this count:
Inside a secretive government laboratory, behind a tall fence and armed guards, a team of engineers has been dissecting the innards of the newest all-electric vehicles with a singular goal: Rewrite tailpipe pollution rules to speed up the nation’s transition to electric cars.
On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to propose ambitious greenhouse gas emission standards for cars that are so stringent, they’re designed to ensure that two-thirds of the new vehicles sold in the United States are all-electric by 2032, up from just 5.8 percent today. And the rules could put the nation on track to end sales of new gasoline-powered cars as soon as 2035. . . .
They’ve driven electric cars on giant treadmills continuously, in 12-hour shifts, to see how many miles they can travel on a single charge. They’ve heated the cars to nearly 100 degrees and then frozen them overnight to assess battery strength. They’ve run hours and hours of computer simulations.
The government rented a dyno and then played Need for Speed: Most Wanted is what I’m reading. Using treadmills and HVAC to determine real-world use cases is positively asinine. For all the flack fundamentalist Christians get for young-Eartherism, I suspect that Liberty University’s science students know more about the scientific method than the EPA’s efficiency squad. Unless you’re testing these cars in the real world for years on end, it’s absurd to think you can know how their batteries and bodies will age.
But let’s pretend that the projections arrived at through lab testing are accurate enough. Let’s pretend that we build all the factories needed to assemble all the new EVs we intend Americans to buy at a cost as high as their annual income. Let’s pretend we get all those EVs to market and Americans to buy them. Where will they charge their new cars?
While some claim that a direct comparison between the number of available fuel pumps and the number of available charging stations (currently, there are about 150,000 charging stations and 1.2 million gas pumps in the country, according to some back-of-the-envelope math) is unfair, I think it’s reasonable to expect comparable numbers for comparable service. It takes around 45 minutes to charge an EV, as opposed to around five minutes to fill up your tank at a gas station, meaning a charging station is employed for longer, increasing demand. So even if there are home charging stations, we should expect many public stations for all of those who wish to charge at work, while shopping, etc. — and those new stations, too, will need to be built.
Complicating the debate further are the vast gradients of charging, with most current chargers being either Level 1 or 2, meaning they add at best only 25 miles of driving range per hour of charging — whereas, again, five minutes at the pump will fill up any car with an ICE. What’s more, the technology for filling up a tank of gas is standardized, so that most ICE vehicles can be fueled at any gas station; electric cars, meanwhile, like their cellular-phone cousins, use a wide variety of connectors. While the government or manufacturers may eventually find a middle ground, we shouldn’t dismiss the market’s need to test various different plug types before declaring a victor. Universality is good only as long as there is room for testing alternatives — and the Biden administration doesn’t appear receptive to such electronic ecumenicism.
This is the heart of the problem with EVs. Progressives have jumped at a fledgling technology — a really fine technology in some applications — and wish to make it more than it can be in the near future. At the same time, regulators are shunting aside incredible progress in the fight to make cleaner ICE vehicles because they feel gross, even if billions of dollars have been invested in incredible hybrids that use the best of batteries (low-speed, high-torque applications) and internal combustion (high-speed, low-torque cruising). When asked how to source, build, power, or finance this fundamental change in how Americans commute, they accuse the questioner of abetting climate devastation and child asthma while suggesting we should thump producers and bribe consumers until the marriage is finalized.
Should Republicans win back the legislature and the executive in 2024, it will be incumbent upon them to shore up a politically reasonable federal policy regarding emissions. Producers deserve consistent standards, and Americans deserve an agile, diverse marketplace that responds to their desires, not the fume-addled wish-casting of Beltway mandaters.