America's eminently mockable Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, went on national TV on Tuesday to mock Americans who find that electric cars don't suit their transportation needs.
"Sometimes, when these debates happen," the failed former mayor of South Bend, Ind. told Fox News, "I feel like it's the early 2000s and I'm talking to some people who think that we can just have landline phones forever."
Spoiler: Nobody was saying that in the early 2000s. Even before the iPhone came out in 2007 and changed phones forever, Americans were snapping up Nokias and Blackberries and wondering if we still needed our landlines at all. As early as 2005, 69% of Americans already owned cell phones, which was pretty much the entire adult population. Six percent of households had even given up their landlines.
But back to SecTrans Buttigieg, who insisted, "Let's be clear, the automotive sector is moving toward EVs and we can't pretend otherwise." This is like telling a death row prisoner that he's moving towards the electric chair and can't pretend otherwise. The prisoner might not want to make the "transition" to the next life, but the government has set a date for him — just like the Biden administration is trying to transition the entire country to EVs.
Even though Americans have to be bribed, browbeaten, and mandated into buying EVs, Buttigieg insisted that Big Government knows best — even when that Big Government is the one in Beijing. EVs are "the economically smart play," he said. "We've been working to make sure that advantage comes back on American soil." China has the opportunity to undercut more established players like Tesla precisely because Washington is trying to force a massive EV market into existence.
Tesla is the most successful electric vehicle company in the West, and its stock was sent plunging on Tuesday after reporting its first-ever year-on-year sales decline last quarter. "Tesla’s deliveries for the quarter fell far below even the most bearish of analysts’ expectations," CNBC reported.
Overall, EV sales growth has slowed since 2022, despite billions spent on incentives and record-high prices for gas-powered cars.
Presidentish Joe Biden can't even bribe people into building EV charging stations. Biden's misnamed Inflation Reduction Act — really the Green New Deal in drag — set aside a massive $7.5 billion in your tax dollars for fulfilling Biden's dream of building 500,000 new charging stations over the next few years. But just seven have been built in two years.
Seven. Even with all those government billions just waiting to be taken.
Maybe that's because, while EV sales hit a record 1.2 million in the U.S. last year, they still represented just 7.6% of the vehicle market. While EV sales are expected to take maybe 10% of the market in 2024, there are so many locations, needs, and situations where EVs make no sense at all. Virtually mandating that they make up two-thirds or more of all sales by 2032, as the EPA did last month, is a quasi-religious crusade courtesy of the most anti-religious White House in history.
Still, at least we'll always have Pete Buttigieg's smug ignorance to mock.
Recommended: Biden's Next EV Mandate Is Out and It's Going to Break America
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