EV’s Have Nothing on the Internal Combustion Engine
It’s a cloudless spring day, made for a country drive. Chartreuse trees explode with pollen and glow to near neon. I wind past pastures and stone and brick farmhouses and amiable old barns that could set the scene of a Beatrix Potter story, elatedly adding to the hum of provincial enterprise by perfecting my rev-matching skills over the rolling hills and 8mph switchbacks that mark PA-74.
The quiet two-lane road spits me out into city limits, and suddenly I’m crawling through a crowd at the Carlisle Collector Car Auction.
I’m here to learn what classic car enthusiasts think of electric vehicles, or EVs. In 2021, President Biden issued an executive order establishing that, by 2030, half of new passenger cars sold must be all-electric or hybrid, going up to two-thirds by 2032. California plans to outlaw the sale of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles completely by 2035. Yet the data-analytics company J.D. Power reports that today, EVs “account for less than 1 percent of the 250 million vehicles, SUVs and light-duty trucks sold in the United States.” In 2022, EVs accounted for just 6 percent of new car sales, despite a $7,500 “clean vehicle” tax credit intended to incentivize consumers to buy electric and hybrid vehicles.
In the shade of a turquoise Ford Fairlane’s three-foot-long tailfin I ask Gary, from upstate New York, his views.
“We don’t have the electric structure to charge where I live,” he says. “If everybody charged their electric vehicle right now, we wouldn’t have heating or cooling in our houses.”
Gary has worked in construction for more than forty years and is concerned about battery waste and how we’ll mine all the lithium we’ll need for an electric future. “You need diesel machines to mine. I’ve run a lot of equipment, and you couldn’t go more than twenty minutes with an electric bulldozer.”
What’s more, Gary is a shade-tree mechanic. His idea of working on an EV? “Not fun. What’s fun about it? You’d need a schematic. I can buy an engine or transmission real cheap, and I can fix it myself.”
Gary finds comfort in his conviction that “Big Oil is not going to stop buying from those sheikhs in Saudi Arabia.”
I turn to a pair of Virginia men admiring a sensational 1970s-era Cadillac Coupe de Ville convertible the color of pea soup — with a matching interior. “I seen a lot of them electric cars catch fire,” one says with a shrug. “I guess they both got their problems.”
I size up the Cadillac’s all-business chrome grill, its sharp chrome bumper and chrome accents, stylized skirt and endless angles, and I think: at least if this thing caught fire, it would take ages to burn up.
Someone who calls himself “the Hillbilly Hoarder” tells me he hopes gas-powered cars become rare and collectible — for obvious reasons. Then Charles Brandon Boyd, a gregarious car dealer from North Carolina with an eagle eye for people wandering car lots in search of something, politely intervenes to share some industry secrets.
Boyd, wearing a Chevrolet polo shirt with the EV emphasized in contrasting thread, has just returned from all-day meetings in Las Vegas with Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and RAM “to talk about the conversion we’re getting ready to see from ICE to EV, and before that, we met with General Motors about the same thing.
“The problem with General Motors,” says Boyd, “is that $26 billion has been spent, and they only have around 2,000 electric vehicles on the road today. The math isn’t working right now.”
Boyd says car manufacturers are experiencing “a lot of R&D struggles. This is new to everybody. The rollout is so fast. Is it premature? Absolutely it’s premature. Are we ready for this? There’s no way we’re ready for this. It’s an exciting time to be alive, and as a car dealer, I’m for this — the right way. Not a cram job. Not push, push, push, push.”
It seems American drivers are themselves duly skeptical of EVs. A University of Chicago Energy Policy Institute poll released in April found just “two in five would consider purchasing an electric vehicle as their next car,” with 80 percent of respondents citing a lack of charging stations as a main reason. The prohibitive cost of EVs, which are 20 percent more expensive, on average, than ICE vehicles, was another big discouraging factor.
Boyd asserts that customers are curious about EVs, but he doesn’t have any to sell. Chevy has ended production of the Volt. Ford’s electric truck, the F-150 Lightning, was on a stop sale for a month this year because of a potential battery problem…
This article is taken from The Spectator’s June 2023 World edition. Read the full piece here.
