My cousin Rob serves as an anecdotal example of what might have happened if the Biden administration, in partnership with GM and Ford, hadn’t politicized electric vehicles and instead allowed their adoption to unfold organically.
Four years ago, Cousin Rob was in the market for a new vehicle. His friend Dale had just acquired a Tesla and was singing the car’s praises. Years earlier, he had driven Cousin Lorn’s Tesla while visiting him in Hawaii and was impressed with its speed and handling. Cousin Lorn is a genuine environmentalist and was among Tesla’s earliest adopters and loyalists.
After test-driving a Tesla Model Y in Los Angeles, Cousin Rob was smitten and ordered a vehicle on the spot. Two years later, he upgraded to the luxury Model S, a vehicle he quite enjoys. He especially appreciates Tesla’s continuous over-the-air software updates, which provide ever more functionality, such as syncing his vehicle to his Apple Watch—a feat GM’s software engineers couldn’t master.
“The Tesla was a fun car to drive,” Cousin Rob recalled. “I wasn’t trying to make a political or environmental statement.”
Imagine that: someone choosing an EV because they liked it, not because it was shoved down their throat by D.C. bureaucrats or a lecturing auto CEO.
Eliminating choice
The Biden administration, GM, and Ford weren’t prepared to let Americans discover and embrace the advantages of electric vehicles naturally. The administration moved to impose aggressive environmental mandates intended to force the accelerated adoption of EVs. GM CEO Mary Barra announced that by 2035, the automaker would no longer manufacture gas-engine vehicles.
Ford, in September 2021, announced it would spend $11.4 billion to build a massive EV complex in Tennessee and two battery plants in Kentucky—the company’s biggest investment ever, which Ford’s executive chair Bill Ford declared was “a transformative moment where Ford will lead America’s transition to electric vehicles and usher in a new era of clean, carbon-neutral manufacturing.”
As far as the Biden administration, GM, and Ford were concerned, EVs were no longer a choice for Americans; rather, they would drive them whether they wanted to or not. Unabashed, Bill Ford later feigned innocence about the politicization of EVs.
“I never thought I would see the day when our products were so heavily politicized, but they are,” Ford Executive Chair Bill Ford said in a 2023 interview with the New York Times.
Mounting EV policy failures
EV adoption in the U.S. is facing significant challenges, and the failures of Joe Biden’s EV policies keep mounting.
On Thursday, the Senate passed a resolution rejecting a waiver granted to California by the Biden administration’s EPA, which would have allowed the state—and possibly others—to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars, trucks, and SUVs by 2035.
The Senate vote was largely along party lines, with Republicans in favor of rejecting the waiver and Democrats against it. The one exception was Democratic U.S. Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who voted in favor of the resolution, stating she was doing so because she has “a special responsibility to stand up for the more than one million Michiganders whose livelihoods depend on the U.S. auto industry.”
Slotkin notably replaced a seat vacated by Senator Debbie Stabenow, who three years ago remarked at a Senate Finance Committee hearing how she drove from Michigan to Washington with nary a concern for soaring gas prices at the time.
“I just have to say, on the issue of gas prices, after waiting for a long time to have enough chips in this country to get my electric vehicle, I drove it from Michigan to (Washington D.C.) this weekend and went by every single gas station, and it didn’t matter how high it was,” Stabenow said. “So I’m looking forward to moving to vehicles that aren’t going to be dependent on the whims of the oil companies and the international markets.”
GM’s about-face
Slotkin was merely taking her orders from GM, which the Wall Street Journal reported had done an about-face and was encouraging employees to use scripted talking points to lobby senators to vote to overturn California’s EV mandate.
“We need your help!” GM said in an email to thousands of its white-collar employees. “Emissions standards that are not aligned with market realities pose a serious threat to our business by undermining consumer choice and vehicle affordability.”
GM’s revised message du jour: The free market should decide the rate of EV adoption.
“GM believes in customer choice, and we continue to focus on offering the best and broadest portfolio of vehicles on the market,” an unidentified spokeswoman told the Journal.
The Journal had another significant report this week that hasn’t been widely covered. It noted that one of Ford’s Kentucky battery factories is unused, and only part of the other factory is producing batteries for Ford. The active plant will now also make Nissan batteries.
What the Journal neglected to mention was that the opening of Ford’s massive EV operations in Tennessee, originally slated to begin this year, has been delayed until late 2027. The factory was supposed to build electric pickups, which aren’t proving particularly popular.
The Journal also didn’t report that U.S. taxpayers are financially on the hook for Ford’s EV initiatives in Tennessee and Kentucky. Last December, after Donald Trump was reelected by a decisive margin, the Department of Energy finalized a $9.63 billion loan to Ford to cover most of the financing of its Tennessee and Kentucky EV plants.
The loan, which allows Ford to borrow at the same favorable financing rates as the U.S. government, was from the DOE’s Loan Programs Office. What gave the loan very bad optics was that months earlier Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm appointed Ford’s chief lobbyist, Chris Smith, to its Energy Advisory Board.
Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., the ranking member on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, was bothered by what he perceived as a conflict of interest. The optics were further clouded by Granholm’s initial failure to disclose her husband’s Ford stock holdings at her confirmation hearing. Additionally, Ford’s general counsel, Steve Croley, to whom Smith reports, previously served as President Obama’s deputy counsel and as the DOE’s general counsel.
One day after the DOE announced the finalization of the Ford loan, the department’s Inspector General called on the Biden administration to halt its green energy loan program, warning it “poses a significant risk of fraud, waste, and abuse” and claimed that it failed to track conflicts of interest.
In other significant EV setbacks this week, Honda—whose problem-plagued Prologue manufactured in Mexico is among the best-selling EVs—said it will reduce its planned EV investments by $21 billion and will focus on hybrids. Meanwhile, Stellantis confirmed it will postpone the launch of its electric 2026 Dodge Charger Daytona R/T, citing the impact of Trump’s tariff policies.
Common sense dictated that Biden’s green energy policies were doomed to failure given his cabinet choices to implement them.
Energy Secretary Granholm had already established a solid record of green energy failures during her two terms serving as Michigan’s governor. She went on to buttress her dismal record serving on the board of electric bus maker Proterra, which Biden also trumpeted before the company filed for bankruptcy.
Granholm, of course, profited from her failures and questionable track record. She cashed out $1.6 million in stock options she received from serving on Proterra’s board before the company filed for bankruptcy. Just one month after stepping down as Energy Secretary, Edison International, one of the largest electric utility holding companies in the U.S., named Granholm to its board, where directors are paid $127,500 annual retainers.
Granholm’s appointment came less than a year after the DOE under her watch awarded a $600 million grant for power line upgrades to a California consortium that included one of Edison International’s subsidiaries.
Then there was former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a failed Democratic presidential candidate who preferred to emphasize his sexual orientation because he had few real accomplishments to tout. With some 55,000 employees, the Transportation Department was more than half the population of South Bend, where Mayor Pete oversaw some infrastructure projects.
Granholm and Buttigieg were a powerhouse team contributing to failed EV adoption.
In 2021, the duo announced with great fanfare a $7.5 billion joint effort to build a national charging network. As of last June, only seven charging stations under the ballyhooed initiative had been opened, prompting the Institute for Energy Research to dismiss the program as a “debacle.” According to the IER, the program’s many delays resulted from the Biden administration’s order “to force social-engineering mandates and requirements” upon federal funding programs.
Granholm’s and Buttigieg’s failures to build a national charging network impaired EV adoption because Americans wanted the certainty they could travel anywhere without getting stranded because their batteries ran out of juice.
Biden’s choice of Michael Regan to head the Environmental Protection Agency was another failure. Under Regan’s leadership, the agency missed statutory deadlines for setting biofuel blending requirements, leading to legal action from industry groups.
Additionally, the EPA’s allocation of $7 billion to a climate fund in April 2024 came under scrutiny. The fund faced criticism for its management and the selection of projects, leading to allegations of mismanagement and lack of oversight.
Regan’s focus on environmental justice also faced obstacles. Efforts to address systemic environmental disparities were met with legal challenges, particularly regarding the EPA’s use of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to combat environmental discrimination.
The Biden administration’s failures were in sharp contrast to the success of China’s communist government, which in the 90s set out to create an unrivaled domestic EV industry from a standing start, with control of all the critical materials required to build electric vehicles.
That China succeeded where the Biden administration failed comes as no surprise: The initiative was overseen by Wan Gang, who was an Audi executive for 15 years.
By contrast, Granholm, Buttigieg, and Regan never worked a day in their lives at an automotive company. With the possible exceptions of GM and Ford, I’m doubtful any automotive company would ever want to hire them.
Americans might have joined Cousin Rob and embraced electric vehicles in time. The tragedy is that those who tried to force them on us never learned how to build trust—or, in the case of the Biden administration’s green energy champions, how to build anything at all.