HOW would you like to pay $100,000 for your next car? Not a Mercedes, mind you, but a car that you can’t drive more than a hundred miles at a time (less than that in bad weather); a car that will cost you $30,000 in repairs over its lifetime; a car that would have to sacrifice driving range for luxuries like air conditioning, power windows, and power steering; and a car that, while intended to reduce pollution, may perversely lead to more. If environmental extremists get their way, this is the car of the future. They have already bullied California’s legislature into requiring automakers to sell such cars; the logical next step is to force Californians to buy them.
Why should citizens in the vast, sensible heartland care about an electric-car mandate in California? For one thing, the Federal Government, cheered on by enthusiasts such as Vice President Al Gore, is using taxpayers’ money to subsidize electric vehicles. The U.S. Department of Energy is spending $260 million a year in an attempt to make batteries for these vehicles more efficient. Furthermore, to spread the economic penalties, Congress has approved a 10 per cent federal income-tax credit for anyone irrational enough to buy an electric vehicle.
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