Almost 100,000 plug-in vehicles are sitting on dealer lots, and Ford is slashing the price of its electric pickup truck. Demand from drivers is simply not keeping up with the dreams of the corporate and political elites. A recent Bank of America research note suggested that possibly “consumers are happy with their ICE vehicles and don’t want EVs.”We’ve been down this road before.
What is an industry to do in such cases? They lobby to ban the tech that stubborn customers keep buying. In the early 2000s, the three major lightbulb makers began lobbying Congress to set bulb efficiency standards higher than what traditional incandescents could achieve, and to outlaw bulbs that didn’t meet those standards.
Federal law currently allows the Transportation Department to set Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for cars. That is, carmakers can sell cars that don’t meet the 28 mpg standard currently in effect, but the average fuel economy of all their cars sold needs to be 28 miles per gallon. Politicians and the fact-checkers in the news media will insist that gasoline-powered cars aren’t being banned, just as fact-checkers have insisted that traditional incandescents weren’t banned. Here’s what the Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote in 2012: