ICYMI: Heatmap News – “Trump Would Destroy the American Car Industry”

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A new piece from Heatmap News highlights Donald Trump’s anti-union, pro-Big Oil stance on electric vehicles and dismantles his shoddy argument against investing in EV production. President Biden’s clean energy plan has put American auto manufacturing on the cutting edge of electric innovation – Trump’s plan to stop the EV boom is a job killer and a disaster for American manufacturing.

Heatmap New: Trump Would Destroy the American Car Industry

“Put simply, EVs are simply better than internal combustion cars, and their advantages are going to grow over time. Aside from reliability and performance, consider another Trump complaint: that today’s EVs can’t go far enough on a charge. After taking my first EV trip myself, I’m convinced the issue here is not range anxiety per se, but rather anxiety about the availability of chargers. After all, lots of people drive motorcycles with pitiful ranges — the Harley Sportster 883 can go only about 135 miles on a tank — but this is not a problem because gas stations are absolutely everywhere. Anyone who has taken a road trip in an EV recently, by contrast, has likely experienced crowded or broken public chargers, or struggled to get them to connect or deliver the advertised charge rate.

“But this problem will certainly be solved over time. As compared to the vast apparatus to find, drill, refine, transport, store, and sell gasoline and diesel, which took decades to construct, virtually every single building in the country is already connected to the electric grid. It’s merely a question of building more and more reliable chargers, and adding a bit more generation capacity. Both of those things are already happening. (A simpler reform would be to just install RV hookups everywhere, as Kevin Williams argues here at Heatmap.)

“These manifest advantages, together with the large subsidies for electric vehicles and battery investment in the Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure bill, and CHIPS Act, are why all the Big Three American auto companies have already fully committed to the EV transition. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, they have already laid out some $143 billion in investment. New auto plants, battery factories, charging stations, and so on are being built by the hundreds. If Trump tears the guts out of the IRA, as he has promised to do, most of those will have to be abandoned, and he will have torn the guts out of the Big Three too.

“Even if Republicans could somehow compensate for flushing tens of billions in investment down the toilet for no reason, that won’t change the fact that EVs are quite obviously the auto technology of the future, and the rest of the world is in a headlong race to get there. China as usual is way out ahead, with its national champion BYD already dominating the lower end of the world market. America is perhaps roughly equal with European and Korean manufacturers, and a bit ahead of Japanese ones. But the Big Three won’t be anymore if they are gutshot by Trump.

When an eviscerated Ford and GM can’t produce the cars that Americans of tomorrow want, they are going to look elsewhere. To try to stop the EV transition would be to hand the American driver to foreign manufacturers on a silver platter.”