“Four Pinocchios”

Washington D.C. – In a scathing fact check published yesterday, The Washington Post gave Donald Trump’s latest EV-bashing campaign ad their worst rating: Four Pinocchios.

“Virtually nothing is correct in this ad,” WaPo’s Glenn Kessler writes. “Harris does not want to end gas-powered cars, there is no electric-vehicle mandate, and there aren’t massive layoffs in the Michigan auto industry — which now employs more people than at any point in Trump’s presidency.”

Highlights from the WaPo Fact Check:

• “But like much of Trump’s rhetoric, the ad is false. Watching it, with its claims of “massive layoffs,” you would never know that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, American motor vehicle manufacturing employment hit a 34-year high in July; that auto and auto parts employment is at a 16-year high; or that the number of people with auto manufacturing jobs in Michigan, a crucial swing state, is at the highest level since before the Great Recession in 2007.”
• “The Biden-Harris administration has promoted incentives for electric vehicles — not the same as a mandate. The Environmental Protection Agency this year finalized new emissions standards, which the agency said could be met by 2032 if as much as 56 percent of light-duty car sales were battery-electric (up from 7.6 percent currently), another 13 percent were hybrid, and gas-powered cars became more efficient. By contrast, the European Union has mandated that all new cars sold will have zero emissions from 2035 — a sign that U.S. manufacturers cannot operate in a vacuum and ignore worldwide trends.”
• “The Trump ad misleadingly cites anecdotal news articles to claim the auto industry has hit a slump, caused by EV manufacturing, despite the actual job numbers cited above showing significant gains in employment under President Joe Biden. As for the EV market, a recent study by University of Michigan researchers, using public datasets, found that automobile plants producing electric-battery vehicles so far require a larger workforce than traditional internal-combustion engine plants.”

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