Finally, our lawmakers are waking up to the Biden administration’s underhanded plans to force Americans to drive electric vehicles — and are actually doing something about it.
According to Fox News, 77 House and 43 Senate Republicans have sent a letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regarding proposed regulations on car manufacturing, arguing that the regulations are a “de facto EV mandate.”
The lawmakers — led by Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan — warned in their letter that the NHTSA’s “corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards proposed in July would raise costs, restrict consumer choice, harm businesses and degrade both U.S. energy and national security,” Fox reported.
So what exactly is the NHTSA mandating?
As explained by Fox, the agency’s new standards would “require passenger cars and light trucks to improve fuel efficiency by 2% and 4%, respectively, beginning in 2027,” with pickup trucks and work vans expected to “boost fuel efficiency 10% every year starting in 2030.”
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Those numbers may seem marginal at first glance, but they belie the massively unrealistic demands the Biden administration is making.
The NHTSA said its new regulations could result in an average fuel efficiency of 58 miles per gallon by 2032. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average model year 2022 car has a fuel efficiency of 26.4 miles per gallon.
“Meaning the proposed standards would mandate automakers to more than double fuel efficiency in less than a decade or face substantial penalties,” Fox noted.
How substantial would those penalties be? The Alliance for Automotive Innovation found that “companies will pay more than $14 billion in non-compliance penalties under the proposal.”
Further, the 120 Republican lawmakers said the regulations are actually unlawful because the Biden administration accounted for EVs in its “regulatory baseline.”
Is the Biden administration trying to force EVs on Americans?
“Nowhere in law did Congress authorize NHTSA to set fuel economy standards that effectively mandate EVs while at the same time force the internal combustion engine out of the market,” their letter read.
“In fact, federal statute expressly prohibits NHTSA from considering the fuel economy of EVs when determining maximum feasible CAFE standards for passenger cars and trucks.”
Never mind the fact that most people don’t want an EV. In fact, EVs only represented about 8 percent of the vehicles purchased in the third quarter of 2023, according to Fox.
“NHTSA’s out-of-touch de facto EV mandate ignores the reality that most Americans still prefer the internal combustion engine vehicle, and the fact there is a lack of consumer demand for EVs,” the GOP lawmakers said.
“We strongly urge NHTSA to withdraw its misguided proposal, go back to the drawing board and reissue new CAFE standards that comply with the law, rather than ones that seek to pick winners and losers in the free market and remake our country’s economy.”
Also calling out the NHTSA is the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers.
In the words of its CEO, Chet Thompson, “the Biden administration is overseeing a whole-of-government campaign to effectively ban new gas, diesel and flex fuel vehicles. … This agenda is bad for American families, bad for our economy and indefensible from a national security perspective.”
Thompson added that, while the AFPM supports “efforts to reduce the carbon intensity of transportation and improve vehicle performance and efficiency for consumers,” at the same time, “we believe successful, consumer-first policies must encourage real competition among all technologies and powertrains, including American-made, American-grown fuels.”
Amen to that.
While the Biden administration’s efforts to force EVs on unwilling Americans are rapidly getting tiresome, we can at least be grateful that there are folks in Washington willing to take a stand.
The major problem with the push for EVs in an unrealistically short timeframe is not so much with the vehicles themselves — though, as these Republicans pointed out, the “various unappealing aspects” of EVs mean they are “not a practical option for most Americans.”
No, the real problem is the top-down attempt to strong-arm the free market into producing the Biden administration’s desired results, regardless of what consumers want and need.
Thank goodness at least some of our representatives are calling it what it is — a de facto mandate imposing something on the American people that they don’t actually want.
