GM and Tesla just publicly admitted that they can’t sell electric cars. Or rather, they need your help via the federal government.
They want the feds to pay people $7,500 each to “buy” their electric cars.
To be paid by those who pay the taxes, which will make up for the taxes not collected from the people who “buy” electric cars. This is the wealth transfer scheme styled “electric car tax credits.”
They have been around for years and may be coming back because electric cars have pull rather than range.
Great sums of money were expended to extract great sums of money via the tax code, which was adjusted to give preferential treatment to the purchasers of electric cars by making electric cars seem more affordable than they are, in fact. This activity created the fiction of a “market” for electric cars, where none — or very little — actually existed.
If that were not the case, then why the need to pay people to “buy” them? In every other case of such massive discounting (an industry term), the need to apply such discounts is taken as evidence that the car being discounted is a flop.
Get rid of them by whatever means necessary by giving them away and then build no more.
Take the GM Aztek, for example. Imagine being paid to buy one. Of course, the difference is that instead of GM paying you to buy an Aztek, the government is making someone else pay for your electric Aztek–or rather, your neighbor’s electric Aztek.
No one would abide such a thing, much less laud such a thing. How come almost no one questions this thing?
That question is hardly ever raised much less answered. Probably because of the answer.
EVs don’t go far on a charge. They cost far more than most people are willing to pay for them and accordingly, most won’t pay for them, if the cost isn’t reduced somehow.
Or by making someone else pay for part of the cost of them.
Since electric cars are very costly even with the subsidy, it is generally wealthy people who buy electric cars, as an indulgence by definition since they aren’t economical.
And to signal their virtue.
It is generally the not-wealthy who don’t buy them because they cannot afford expensive indulgences. But instead, they are asked to pay the full freight in taxes, which help finance the loss of taxes paid by the affluent, to help them afford their still-expensive electric car indulgences.
Of course, Tesla claimed it didn’t need the assistance of government pull to “sell” its electric cars, probably because of what it implies about the mass-market viability of electric cars without the pull.
The problem is that Tesla has never been able to make any money selling electric cars. It takes money, selling “credits” for building them to other car companies, which are under duress to buy them in order to meet their government-required quota for either building a certain number of “zero emissions” cars themselves or handing over money to Tesla in exchange for “credit” equivalent to building them.
When the $7,500 tax credit went away (which happens when a production threshold of 200,000 electric cars made is reached), it becomes much harder to sell more electric cars because now people must pay the full cost, rather than offload a large chunk of the cost.
This has made Tesla more reliant on the taking of cash in exchange for “credits” to keep itself in “business” (in air quotes to emphasize the etymological absurdity of a “business” that is unable to sell its products on their merits).
But the problem now is that Tesla isn’t the only company building lots of electric cars for which there isn’t a natural market.
GM and other big car companies have gone all-in on electric cars–the making of them, in anticipation of a vast “market” for them, created by pull. By the same species of “zero emissions” and similar “green” government mandates that have confected a “market” for Teslas and the company’s “credits.”
When GM and the others are making the required number of electric cars themselves, irrespective of the actual market for them, they no longer need to pay Tesla to make them, instead. This means Tesla has a money problem and GM (and the others) has a sales problem.
The pull of the mandates can cause lots of electric cars to be manufactured. Indeed, the gravitational force of pull can cause everyone making cars to make electric cars because they must.
So far, though, people do not have to buy them.
Instead, they must be “helped” to “buy” them using more of your money. GM and Tesla want the 200,000-car cap lifted, so that everyone who buys an electric car can make other people pay for them.
So, what happens when people are forced to buy electric cars? What happens when non-electric cars (i.e., gas/diesel-engined vehicles) are forced off the market and even off the streets? Is this what’s next?
Eric Peters lives in Virginia and enjoys driving cars and motorcycles. In the past, Eric worked as a car journalist for many prominent mainstream media outlets. Currently, he focuses his time writing auto history books, reviewing cars, and blogging about cars+ for his website EricPetersAutos.com.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
