> A GM spokeswoman said the company has long argued that the U.S. should have a single emissions mandate and that any regulations should factor in market demand.
Yes, let us stipulate that uniform regulations that disregard the federalist design of the constitution are more convenient and profitable for huge corporations with top flight lobbyists to write the one law to be enforced from sea to shining sea.
heresie-dabord · 5h ago
> Rep. Laura Gillen, a Democrat from New York, one of the states to adopt the mandate, said she supports the goal of reducing emissions but that the timeline is “out-of-touch with reality” and an undue burden on consumers facing a cost-of-living crisis.
US consumers are facing hardship directly caused by overtly erratic tariffing. US ICE makers are seeking protections. Consumers will not have smaller vehicles nor the affordable EVs they could use.
The air and water are fine, we never pollute, climate change is a silly leftist slogan, and Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
CaliforniaKarl · 6h ago
If the EV mandate is killed, I could see the California state government making that case before the courts.
Gibbon1 · 4h ago
California should just place an excise carbon tax on gas and diesel cars.
How about $100/ton of CO2.
At 30 mpg that's 60 tons of CO2 so $6k.
lotsofpulp · 4h ago
Why on cars? If carbon emissions are the problem, why not tax fossil fuels themselves (or tax them more if emissions are still too high)?
Gibbon1 · 3h ago
Why should we punish someone that bought a car before EV's were commonly available? That's punishing people after the fact. Which is morally wrong.
The fundamental idea is the state doesn't actually want the money. It wants manufactures to stop making cars that emit CO2. If someone already has a car like that perhaps the state can buy it back.
ponector · 1h ago
Fuel should be heavily taxed to encourage better mpg and less driving.
mullingitover · 2h ago
Just put a vehicle registration fee equivalent to the lifetime carbon tax on new ICE cars sold after a given deadline. After X years, start charging the carbon tax on registration fees for older cars as well if a car’s ownership is transferred. Use revenue from those fees for buybacks.
CuriousSkeptic · 1h ago
One approach is to balance the tax with a mileage deduction.
No increased cost for existing owners, but still an incentive to replace the car for a lower emission one
tzs · 5h ago
I wonder if history is going to repeat itself?
In the '70s the US changed emission standards to be quite a bit more strict, as part of the Clean Air Act of 1970. The problem of smog in major cities was getting out of hand.
Also in the '70s there were periods of gas shortages and high prices due to world events that messed up oil markets, such as the Arab Oil Embargo in 1973 and the Iranian Revolution in 1979. This led to demand for more efficient cars.
US automakers were slow to respond. The often just retrofitted existing engines with emission control equipment that significantly lowered performance and reliability.
Japanese automakers, who at that time had only a small share of the US market and were not really taken seriously by most consumers, were also dealing with new strict emission standards in Japan. But they responded by quickly designing new engines designed with low emissions and better mileage. And they exported those cars to the US.
By the time US automakers finally started making new design decent low emission cars with better gas mileage instead of badly retrofitting existing designs those Japanese makers had established with the public a reputation for making reliable, efficient, low emissions, and affordable cars.
Some people said the Japanese cars were only affordable because of cheap labor in Japan. (Japan in the '70s was like China is today when it comes to manufacturing). But then the Japanese
car companies started manufacturing many models in the US, showing that affordable, high quality, reliable cars that met emission standards and were efficient could be made with US labor.
I wonder if we are going to see the same thing with EVs?
shawnb576 · 4h ago
100% this
I noted below that I have recently moved from US to Australia
The Chinese cars are taking over here: it’s a product people want at a price they like
GM wants to monetize yesterday’s market, and are just going to fall farther behind.
When these cars eventually come in, EV mandate or not, the US car companies will get crushed
chneu · 55m ago
It's worth mentioning Harley Davidson here too.
They basically did the same thing but with foreign motorcycles. Harley lobbied haaaarrddd to get restrictions put on them. Harley got their way and still screwed it up, which left Americans paying more. Harley just declares bankruptcy and starts over cuz their cult of boomers will always buy a new hog with lots of chrome and saddlebags.
happyopossum · 6h ago
> Even in California, America’s EV market leader, sales are below the state’s own targets. Under the rule, in 2026, sales of zero-emissions vehicles should account for 35% of all vehicle sales. Right now, they account for 20% of the state’s automobile market.
Yikes. Sounds like if this mandate doesn’t get changed, Californians are staring down the barrel of a huge car buying crunch in ~7yrs, as people realize they only have a few more years to buy a gas vehicle.
I’m a fan of EVs - I think every family should have one or two, but I’d also never want to be without a gas vehicle. Not having the option to buy one under any circumstances is pretty onerous.
SOLAR_FIELDS · 6h ago
PHEV should be the intermediary solution IMO. It neatly solves 80% of the issues of owning either one or the other.
MBCook · 6h ago
Should have been. 15 years ago. We’re long past that point.
The automakers in the US mostly want to fight a war two wars ago. They’re careening towards international irrelevance fast with this crap.
And we’ll either be dominated by the players that saw the truth, or stuck with overpriced protectionist crap.
Uvix · 6h ago
The US is certainly not "long past that point" in terms of charging infrastructure. So on their home turf, EV-only is a losing proposition.
Which may drive them towards international irrelevance, but if they have to sacrifice one market or the other, that seems like the easier one to choose to lose.
MBCook · 5h ago
It’s long past the point hybrids were a good solution for the majority of cars. They were a good idea to start phasing in 20 years ago, when the Republicans decided that they were proof you were a tree hugger ivory palace stuck up asshole for even considering them.
So we completely missed the entire thing. They were a never very big part of the market. And now people are saying we should transition to the thing that we should have been transitioning off of.
California didn’t mandate EV only tomorrow. No sane person has mandated EV only in the US that soon.
The chose 10 years from now.
People vastly underestimate how much progress we can make in a relatively short time without massive individual improvements. People always think the future is much further out than it actually is, but when we look back it seems like things happened in a snap. Because we always underestimate ourselves.
Every time infrastructure gets better, it enables more EVs. Every time battery technology gets better, it enables more EVs.
It’s doable. Other countries are showing it can be done. If we get 5 or 7 years from now and find out we need to extend the deadlines some they can do that.
Having the federal government come in and force a state to stick their head back in the sand until the political winds change doesn’t help anyone.
Remember: states rights if we’re out of power, federalism if we’re not.
chneu · 52m ago
You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they've tried everything else.
I'm sorry MBCook but this is Murica. We're different. We don't have to do it that commie way because we can do it with the sturs and strips. /s
Narkov · 6h ago
> Californians are staring down the barrel of a huge car buying crunch in ~7yrs
Yay the free market, hey?
kjkjadksj · 6h ago
This is why the automakers will win. People are turning on Tesla. And the rest of automakers offerings aren’t half as good. Automakers can put on the squeeze now by just continuing to let this market segment languish and then the legislature will have to do something in 2035 when not near enough people are switching to EV and there hasn’t been near enough infrastructure built due to the segment underperforming expectations and not getting sufficient infrastructure investment.
It was one thing to mandate emissions when it was just a question of a cleaner gas car. We are retooling with evs effectively. I think the legislature bit off more than they can chew with this unless they start heavily subsidizing this industry themselves maybe even making a public ev company. Hard to do in times of austerity when everything that presently exists is in need of money let alone new expensive ideas.
jkachmar · 5h ago
> And the rest of automakers offerings aren’t half as good.
This was true maybe even as recently as 5 years ago, but it certainly isn’t true now.
Tesla, at the top end, hasn’t been an attractive luxury proposition at least since the Hyundai Genesis & Mercedes EVs started rolling out. They had a shot at capturing the mid- to low-end market, but it looks like they’re in the process of blowing that as well.
> Hard to do in times of austerity [..]
The average American’s lifestyle is hardly austere — it _is_ precarious for very many (most?), but I don’t think that’s the same thing.
You can now get refurb EVs (e.g. a Hyundai Ionia) with <50k miles for <$15k, and that’s in a not-inexpensive part of the US (northeast).
Over the course of the next 10 years that used market is going to only grow, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that a battery swap will be less costly than the sorts of overhauls high-mileage gasoline cars require so there _will_ be a solid used market.
rangestransform · 5h ago
The fact that the existing automakers do not have competitive offerings when the model S came out in 2012 is entirely their own fault. For not figuring out where the wind is blowing and massively reorganizing their entire company, they deserve to die to Tesla, BYD, Xpeng, Nio, and everyone else who figured out how to build a usable EV. They could’ve also built charging infrastructure at their own expense, like Tesla did before the charging infrastructure tax credits.
shawnb576 · 5h ago
I have recently moved from US to Australia and it is 100% clear to me the US automakers will get absolutely crushed by the Chinese companies if/when they are able to access US market.
Especially EVs and PHEVs. This place is awash with them, they are cars people want at the right price.
madhacker · 6h ago
"GM believes in customer choice" when it suits them. The state of EVs in America is akin to food desert, intentionally by design.
myko · 6h ago
Would love to see Chinese EVs in the US to get real competition
Uvix · 5h ago
See also, the recent removal of CarPlay from their lineup.
We can’t keep kicking this can down the road. We are going to have to transition away from ICE vehicles and we should do it asap. At the very least sales of new ICE vehicles should be banned; people can keep their grandfathered ones as long as they work.
genocidicbunny · 5h ago
Unless we also significantly improve charging infrastructure, and more importantly, disallow grandfathering of the lack of charging infrastructure, that's going to be a very difficult sell. If you live in an apartment, you probably do not have reliable charging access at home. Newer buildings might have some charging spots, but you would need _all_ parking spots to have it available. Older apartments would need to somehow retrofit charging infrastructure as well, and it can't just be giving every parking spot access to a 120v socket. In a similar vein, not everyone has the ability to charge at work either, whether due to a lack of infrastructure, or their employer not being willing to pay for the electricity or the cost to install metered chargers.
Chargers also need to get much, much faster; 15 minutes for 80% might be fine if you're at a charging station that doesn't get that much traffic, but think of somewhere like the Costco gas stations. Imagine accommodating that many people charging for 15 minutes at a time instead of 3-5 minutes at a time. Not everyone can afford to spend that much time on charging their car.
There's also the fun bit about how charging an EV in some places is more expensive per mile than an ICE car, though that does often depends on the time of day you charge and what the exact price of gas is.
meroes · 5h ago
Yes ban them so new cars are even more out of reach for many (the cheapest electric cars are too expensive still and might not come with enough base range for long commuters).
And those low earners will keep driving their shit boxes.
What got me to give up my ‘98 emission hog wasn’t electric because they were too expensive. It was a rebate for taking old cars off the road and a cheap combustion civic. Ban those civics and I’d still be driving something horrendous for the environment.
NN88 · 5h ago
Hybrids might be as far as the USA goes given China controls the resources and supply chains.
Uvix · 5h ago
Hybrids need the same rare earth resources for batteries as EVs do, they just need less.
alephnerd · 4h ago
> We are going to have to transition away from ICE vehicles and we should do it asap
How do you do so without making the party that passes such legislation politically toxic for a generation? Heck, 49 Dems broke ranks and voted in favor of repealing California's waiver in the House.
Plug-in Hybrids and EVs require significantly less parts and have fairly automated manufacturing processes, so thousands of voters will lose jobs.
This is why you see the UAW and Teamsters leadership back the incumbent admin.
alephnerd · 4h ago
There will be bipartisan support for this (only 164 Ds voted against repeal in the house) - as long as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Illinois matter, California's EV mandate will be undermined.
Neither party dares alienate the UAW or Teamsters, and thousands of automotive employees.
HN needs to reconcile whether they support unions or whether they support EVs. It's a one or the other decision at this point in the US.
Amongst the younger (Gen Z/Gen Alpha) generations, the choice is unions due to idealism (despite havint positive sentiment for EVs). Amongst high earning members of Gen X (which I think seems to represent HN), the choice appears to be EVs.
stickfigure · 6h ago
This is all so stupid. If we want to move people to EVs, put incrementally severe taxes on gasoline. "Mandates" without economic incentive are pure nonsense.
bumby · 5h ago
That creates a whole different problem. Gasoline taxes are a major contributor to infrastructure. If everyone moves to EVs, we need a an alternative, like a mileage tax.
neltnerb · 5h ago
What we need is fewer roads to maintain, but as you say a whole different problem.
It took a while to find numbers, but it seems like ~$80B in total gas taxes in a year is probably close. Meanwhile state and local governments (alone) spend over $200B on road maintenance and construction while the federal government spent about $60B on the interstates.
$80B is a lot, but if gas taxes covered even just car infrastructure it'd be an extra $1 a gallon already. Even without EVs. In case anyone was under the misapprehension that roads are budget neutral. Frustrating (to get more off track) that other transit is expected to somehow be profitable when roads are subsidized so heavily. I wish it wasn't so critical for our supply chain, EV trucks probably works a lot better between a train terminal and final destination than it does hauling across I-40.
Oh wow I've never thought of it the way you did, that roads are subsidized so heavily vs public transit being expected to break even.
That's a great take. Thanks.
stickfigure · 5h ago
That is an entirely separate issue and would need to be addressed even if the mandates were to be magically effective.
bumby · 5h ago
It’s directly related to your point about increasing gas taxes as an incentive to build demand for EVs (and eventually reduce gas tax revenue). If it gets to the point where the only people paying gas taxes are ICE hobbyists, the scale won’t support the needs of infrastructure.
baggy_trough · 6h ago
The law is an absurd overreach. The EV demand isn’t there, although it’s growing. There will be political consequences for trying to ram it through.
josho · 5h ago
Well if the demand isn't there then I suppose there's no need to have a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, right?
The reality is the legislation was to push industry and it seems industries response was ‘nah dawg we’ll just lobby our way out of this one’
MBCook · 6h ago
The people of California voted for it (through their representatives).
They’re free to change it at any time.
It’s not the federal government’s job to mess with it just because it doesn’t align with head-in-the-sand worldview on electric vehicles.
California didn’t mandate anything for any other state. The fact the automakers don’t want to bother to implement “the winning strategy” for every other state of pretending EVs suck either indicates it’s a terrible strategy or they think there is a benefit to their bottom line to follow demand.
How horrible!
baggy_trough · 5h ago
The representatives of the people of California make many inane and destructive decisions, of which this is one. Once the consequences start to bite, they may come to regret it, and I hope they do.
WWLink · 5h ago
RAM IT THROUGH! Like a drunk ram 2500 driver lol.
jmclnx · 7h ago
So isn't every other fossil fuel based transportation manf.
20 years ago this would upset me a lot.
Now I am resigned to the fact 2 or 3 generations from now people will live through a time that will make the mongol invasions look like a tea party ran by three 7 year old girls :(
No stopping Climate Change now
toomuchtodo · 7h ago
I am hopeful China’s EV, battery, and renewables manufacturing machine steamrolls the world. Developed world fossil fuel and legacy auto will try to slow down the transition, so only overwhelming force solves for it.
Current US admin only has 3.6 years left, ~2M voters 55+ age out every year, etc. Maintain momentum, be ready to spin up faster after regime change.
mulderc · 6h ago
I have zero interest in an any car from an American company and by far the most exciting cars I have seen in recent years come from Chinese companies.
alabastervlog · 6h ago
I’m excited about lower prices from Chinese brands. The hikes in car prices in the US over the last decade or so have priced me out of new cars entirely, and I just about get sick even looking at used car prices these days. Need some price pressure on that crap.
mulderc · 3h ago
I’m pretty happy about being able to live in a place where we rarely need to drive. We have a car but basically just use it for grocery shopping. I dread the day it dies as my partner will want to get a new car and our options are going to suck.
gowings97 · 6h ago
Millennial here, 3x Trump voter.
"Current US admin only has 3.6 years left, ~2M voters 55+ age out every year, etc. Maintain momentum, be ready to spin up faster after regime change."
The majority of Boomers are liberal - the demographic shift you perceive is not going to work out the way you think it will. Gen-Z is increasingly leaning right, especially males.
Most people just want a 2018 era car (there's diminishing returns for vehicle technology at this point and average vehicle selling price trajectory, Post-Covid, is unsustainable) at a decent price - something with a six cylinder engine that can be easy serviced / repaired.
jemmyw · 1h ago
> Most people just want a 2018 era car ... at a decent price - something with a six cylinder engine that can be easy serviced / repaired
I've talked to a lot of people about their cars and car choices over the years, and that's not what people want. You can look up some surveys too, although quite a few results are obviously from one survey, you can dig a bit deeper and find older survey results or segmented surveys. What people don't really mention: engine, maintenance, servicing. I think for most people those things aren't that big of a deal, modern cars have satisfactory performance and longevity when compared to cars pre-2000. What people say they want: heated seats and steering wheels, places to charge their phone(!), car play or android auto(!), space and safety for kids and dogs, something that looks nice.
I don't think price is a mentioned factor because right now it seems like you pay more for pretty arbitrary stuff.
I want what you want, with a manual transmission for preference. It's just not what most people want.
erkt · 5h ago
Yeah, I have zero interest in an electric vehicle, nor a new ICE vehicle. They are all shit boxes designed to monetize everything they can from remote start, to your GPS location, to heated seats. No thanks, I'll take the 2004 Tacoma getting 16mpg that will run until the body rusts off.
pixl97 · 6h ago
So we shut off cheap EVs from China so American car makers can charge as much as they want without changing their behaviors.
America doesn't have competition. You're prices aren't going to get cheaper. Meanwhile in China internal competition in battery chemistry and packs has massively dropped costs.
It's sad when the groups we call commies have a more open market than us.
Unfortunately we're going to wake up to that too late.
gowings97 · 6h ago
Arbitraging US manufacturing to Asia and pocketing the profit has led to current predicament where we have an economy of healthcare workers, people in software, bartenders/service people barely scraping by, and skeleton crew of blue collar labor holding up domestic manufacturing. That manufacturing labor force makes make vastly lower wages than two generations prior. The vast majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck - again, this was a labor arbitrage facilitated by US Companies and politicians from both sides. This is where there is a bit of horseshoe effect between the left and right when it comes to labor/jobs/the economy.
America is a farm - the US consumer is the product. The only thing that has gotten cheaper over the last few decades are consumer goods from Asia. The US auto industry is more or less an oligopoly - none of the OEMS, outside of Tesla, are seriously interested in competing on price.
toomuchtodo · 6h ago
Manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back, it’ll be automated primarily, and Americans don’t want to work the manufacturing jobs that already exist. You’re arguing for status based pay through work identity (“good manufacturing jobs”) when you should argue for living wages regardless of job, unions, and universal healthcare. 80% of US jobs are service based, that is unlikely to change, especially as healthcare grows with 4M Boomers retiring per year.
If American auto companies aren’t interested in building affordable EVs, why are we harming US consumers by preventing them from buying imported EVs? Because, as you said, farming profits for US legacy auto. I want to buy high quality, affordable Chinese products. I don’t want to buy lower quality US products solely because of cronyism and ideology to protect their profits using trade policy.
What’s your perspective on manufacturing capacity being necessary for national security?
The U.S. has moved to service jobs because they tend to have the highest margins and capitalism is going to do what capitalism does. That is, unless specific guardrails are enacted to protect other societal interests.
toomuchtodo · 5h ago
That it’s important, but should be automated and understood to be cost inefficient. The cost inefficiency is a readiness premium. But when you have admin officials saying iPhone manufacturing is coming to the US, that isn’t what is being advocated for. China is the largest producer and buyer of industrial robotics for manufacturing, for example. They are built to build, this is not what the US is advocating for.
Do you think this admin would put the necessary guardrails on public private partnership manufacturing supply chain infra to prevent it from being strip mined or otherwise extracted for profit and not be available when needed? I do not, but I do support treating such manufacturing supply chains as critical national security interests. Maybe we’ll get another shot in a few years when competent folks are in control, but maybe not.
bumby · 5h ago
I agree with most everything you’ve said, but a lot of manufacturing for critical stuff is not automated in the mass-production sense. There are tons of small batch manufacturing in spaces like aerospace, electrical transmission, etc. that are probably considered critical and already difficult to get US companies to manufacture.
toomuchtodo · 5h ago
Agreed! But, again, I ask who is going to work these jobs if Americans have said they don’t want to? The labor market has been propped up by immigrants for the last half decade, and this admin is not friendly to immigrants. There are already not enough Americans who will work the manufacturing jobs that exist today (or the jobs going unfilled are outcompeted by higher wage service work).
Americans are cosplaying, they are not serious in this regard. If they were, they would be filling these jobs they say are so desperately needed, and manufacturers would pay whatever market clearing wage is required to fill said jobs. If they wanted good paying jobs today, they’d unionize. Way easier than waiting for manufacturing to come back (which will take years, if at all) and maybe have a shot at one of the few manufacturing jobs that are created.
China delivers results because they have the will to, Americans just want status and vibes.
(Purpose of the system is what it does, watch what people do not what they say, etc)
>The labor market has been propped up by immigrants for the last half decade, and this admin is not friendly to immigrants
Illegal labor to boot. Huge percentages of construction jobs in the US are (or were) filled by illegal immigrants getting paid low wages. It's not clear how those will be filled in the short term.
chneu · 29m ago
This is a thing that I've noticed that some folks just can't understand: Nobody is going to leave an inside job for an outside job.
At least not a meaningful amount of people.
I now have a great office job but I grew up farming, ranching, doing construction, roofing, worked at dairies so I've seen first hand who is working these jobs.
It's not white Americans. This is something some people just can't understand. They just don't seem to grasp that the folks doing these jobs are either temporary labor brought in from other countries or illegal immigrants. The reason is because there isn't enough domestic labor willing to do these jobs.
morkalork · 7h ago
Worse than choosing to do nothing, people chose to fight those who tried to fix it. Everything that happens will be deserved.
sneak · 7h ago
Collective punishment was banned by reasonable humans for a reason.
Most of the people who will suffer have done nothing wrong.
ninetyninenine · 6h ago
We are all guilty in a way.
ninetyninenine · 6h ago
People don’t like what you’re saying even when it is the statement most likely to be true.
WWLink · 5h ago
GM just making some fucking cars people want to buy. Nobody wants to look like a fat grandma driving a Tahoe or a racist uncle driving a Silverado lol.
I mean I wouldn't mind a corvette if they didn't cost 80 fucking thousand dollars.
California has proven time and again that they are great at economic regulation so I think we should just go with it.
dyauspitr · 6h ago
>Warren Buffet doesn’t know how to manage his money
bluGill · 7h ago
They can and the mandate but consume demand is under your control. If people buy EVs that matters. If enough buy EVs (which likely has happened) politicians dare not ban them.
lmz · 7h ago
Ban EVs? I think most of the work was to ban ICE cars, despite enough people buying them.
happyopossum · 6h ago
Nobody is talking about banning EVs - what are you on about?
linotype · 6h ago
They’re already floating a $200 a year federal fee for EVs.
bluGill · 6h ago
That is a next step. Some people are like that even if the media ignors them
Yes, let us stipulate that uniform regulations that disregard the federalist design of the constitution are more convenient and profitable for huge corporations with top flight lobbyists to write the one law to be enforced from sea to shining sea.
US consumers are facing hardship directly caused by overtly erratic tariffing. US ICE makers are seeking protections. Consumers will not have smaller vehicles nor the affordable EVs they could use.
The air and water are fine, we never pollute, climate change is a silly leftist slogan, and Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
How about $100/ton of CO2.
At 30 mpg that's 60 tons of CO2 so $6k.
The fundamental idea is the state doesn't actually want the money. It wants manufactures to stop making cars that emit CO2. If someone already has a car like that perhaps the state can buy it back.
No increased cost for existing owners, but still an incentive to replace the car for a lower emission one
In the '70s the US changed emission standards to be quite a bit more strict, as part of the Clean Air Act of 1970. The problem of smog in major cities was getting out of hand.
Also in the '70s there were periods of gas shortages and high prices due to world events that messed up oil markets, such as the Arab Oil Embargo in 1973 and the Iranian Revolution in 1979. This led to demand for more efficient cars.
US automakers were slow to respond. The often just retrofitted existing engines with emission control equipment that significantly lowered performance and reliability.
Japanese automakers, who at that time had only a small share of the US market and were not really taken seriously by most consumers, were also dealing with new strict emission standards in Japan. But they responded by quickly designing new engines designed with low emissions and better mileage. And they exported those cars to the US.
By the time US automakers finally started making new design decent low emission cars with better gas mileage instead of badly retrofitting existing designs those Japanese makers had established with the public a reputation for making reliable, efficient, low emissions, and affordable cars.
Some people said the Japanese cars were only affordable because of cheap labor in Japan. (Japan in the '70s was like China is today when it comes to manufacturing). But then the Japanese car companies started manufacturing many models in the US, showing that affordable, high quality, reliable cars that met emission standards and were efficient could be made with US labor.
I wonder if we are going to see the same thing with EVs?
I noted below that I have recently moved from US to Australia
The Chinese cars are taking over here: it’s a product people want at a price they like
GM wants to monetize yesterday’s market, and are just going to fall farther behind.
When these cars eventually come in, EV mandate or not, the US car companies will get crushed
They basically did the same thing but with foreign motorcycles. Harley lobbied haaaarrddd to get restrictions put on them. Harley got their way and still screwed it up, which left Americans paying more. Harley just declares bankruptcy and starts over cuz their cult of boomers will always buy a new hog with lots of chrome and saddlebags.
Yikes. Sounds like if this mandate doesn’t get changed, Californians are staring down the barrel of a huge car buying crunch in ~7yrs, as people realize they only have a few more years to buy a gas vehicle.
I’m a fan of EVs - I think every family should have one or two, but I’d also never want to be without a gas vehicle. Not having the option to buy one under any circumstances is pretty onerous.
The automakers in the US mostly want to fight a war two wars ago. They’re careening towards international irrelevance fast with this crap.
And we’ll either be dominated by the players that saw the truth, or stuck with overpriced protectionist crap.
Which may drive them towards international irrelevance, but if they have to sacrifice one market or the other, that seems like the easier one to choose to lose.
So we completely missed the entire thing. They were a never very big part of the market. And now people are saying we should transition to the thing that we should have been transitioning off of.
California didn’t mandate EV only tomorrow. No sane person has mandated EV only in the US that soon.
The chose 10 years from now.
People vastly underestimate how much progress we can make in a relatively short time without massive individual improvements. People always think the future is much further out than it actually is, but when we look back it seems like things happened in a snap. Because we always underestimate ourselves.
Every time infrastructure gets better, it enables more EVs. Every time battery technology gets better, it enables more EVs.
It’s doable. Other countries are showing it can be done. If we get 5 or 7 years from now and find out we need to extend the deadlines some they can do that.
Having the federal government come in and force a state to stick their head back in the sand until the political winds change doesn’t help anyone.
Remember: states rights if we’re out of power, federalism if we’re not.
I'm sorry MBCook but this is Murica. We're different. We don't have to do it that commie way because we can do it with the sturs and strips. /s
Yay the free market, hey?
It was one thing to mandate emissions when it was just a question of a cleaner gas car. We are retooling with evs effectively. I think the legislature bit off more than they can chew with this unless they start heavily subsidizing this industry themselves maybe even making a public ev company. Hard to do in times of austerity when everything that presently exists is in need of money let alone new expensive ideas.
This was true maybe even as recently as 5 years ago, but it certainly isn’t true now.
Tesla, at the top end, hasn’t been an attractive luxury proposition at least since the Hyundai Genesis & Mercedes EVs started rolling out. They had a shot at capturing the mid- to low-end market, but it looks like they’re in the process of blowing that as well.
> Hard to do in times of austerity [..]
The average American’s lifestyle is hardly austere — it _is_ precarious for very many (most?), but I don’t think that’s the same thing.
You can now get refurb EVs (e.g. a Hyundai Ionia) with <50k miles for <$15k, and that’s in a not-inexpensive part of the US (northeast).
Over the course of the next 10 years that used market is going to only grow, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that a battery swap will be less costly than the sorts of overhauls high-mileage gasoline cars require so there _will_ be a solid used market.
Especially EVs and PHEVs. This place is awash with them, they are cars people want at the right price.
Chargers also need to get much, much faster; 15 minutes for 80% might be fine if you're at a charging station that doesn't get that much traffic, but think of somewhere like the Costco gas stations. Imagine accommodating that many people charging for 15 minutes at a time instead of 3-5 minutes at a time. Not everyone can afford to spend that much time on charging their car.
There's also the fun bit about how charging an EV in some places is more expensive per mile than an ICE car, though that does often depends on the time of day you charge and what the exact price of gas is.
And those low earners will keep driving their shit boxes.
What got me to give up my ‘98 emission hog wasn’t electric because they were too expensive. It was a rebate for taking old cars off the road and a cheap combustion civic. Ban those civics and I’d still be driving something horrendous for the environment.
How do you do so without making the party that passes such legislation politically toxic for a generation? Heck, 49 Dems broke ranks and voted in favor of repealing California's waiver in the House.
Plug-in Hybrids and EVs require significantly less parts and have fairly automated manufacturing processes, so thousands of voters will lose jobs.
This is why you see the UAW and Teamsters leadership back the incumbent admin.
Neither party dares alienate the UAW or Teamsters, and thousands of automotive employees.
HN needs to reconcile whether they support unions or whether they support EVs. It's a one or the other decision at this point in the US.
Amongst the younger (Gen Z/Gen Alpha) generations, the choice is unions due to idealism (despite havint positive sentiment for EVs). Amongst high earning members of Gen X (which I think seems to represent HN), the choice appears to be EVs.
It took a while to find numbers, but it seems like ~$80B in total gas taxes in a year is probably close. Meanwhile state and local governments (alone) spend over $200B on road maintenance and construction while the federal government spent about $60B on the interstates.
$80B is a lot, but if gas taxes covered even just car infrastructure it'd be an extra $1 a gallon already. Even without EVs. In case anyone was under the misapprehension that roads are budget neutral. Frustrating (to get more off track) that other transit is expected to somehow be profitable when roads are subsidized so heavily. I wish it wasn't so critical for our supply chain, EV trucks probably works a lot better between a train terminal and final destination than it does hauling across I-40.
Sources:
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/gasoline/use-of-gasoline...
https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/gasdiesel/
https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2024-03/D...
That's a great take. Thanks.
The reality is the legislation was to push industry and it seems industries response was ‘nah dawg we’ll just lobby our way out of this one’
They’re free to change it at any time.
It’s not the federal government’s job to mess with it just because it doesn’t align with head-in-the-sand worldview on electric vehicles.
California didn’t mandate anything for any other state. The fact the automakers don’t want to bother to implement “the winning strategy” for every other state of pretending EVs suck either indicates it’s a terrible strategy or they think there is a benefit to their bottom line to follow demand.
How horrible!
20 years ago this would upset me a lot.
Now I am resigned to the fact 2 or 3 generations from now people will live through a time that will make the mongol invasions look like a tea party ran by three 7 year old girls :(
No stopping Climate Change now
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/byd-ai...
https://www.iea.org/news/more-than-1-in-4-cars-sold-worldwid...
https://about.bnef.com/blog/china-already-makes-as-many-batt...
https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-renewable-energy
Current US admin only has 3.6 years left, ~2M voters 55+ age out every year, etc. Maintain momentum, be ready to spin up faster after regime change.
"Current US admin only has 3.6 years left, ~2M voters 55+ age out every year, etc. Maintain momentum, be ready to spin up faster after regime change."
The majority of Boomers are liberal - the demographic shift you perceive is not going to work out the way you think it will. Gen-Z is increasingly leaning right, especially males.
Most people just want a 2018 era car (there's diminishing returns for vehicle technology at this point and average vehicle selling price trajectory, Post-Covid, is unsustainable) at a decent price - something with a six cylinder engine that can be easy serviced / repaired.
I've talked to a lot of people about their cars and car choices over the years, and that's not what people want. You can look up some surveys too, although quite a few results are obviously from one survey, you can dig a bit deeper and find older survey results or segmented surveys. What people don't really mention: engine, maintenance, servicing. I think for most people those things aren't that big of a deal, modern cars have satisfactory performance and longevity when compared to cars pre-2000. What people say they want: heated seats and steering wheels, places to charge their phone(!), car play or android auto(!), space and safety for kids and dogs, something that looks nice.
I don't think price is a mentioned factor because right now it seems like you pay more for pretty arbitrary stuff.
I want what you want, with a manual transmission for preference. It's just not what most people want.
America doesn't have competition. You're prices aren't going to get cheaper. Meanwhile in China internal competition in battery chemistry and packs has massively dropped costs.
It's sad when the groups we call commies have a more open market than us.
Unfortunately we're going to wake up to that too late.
America is a farm - the US consumer is the product. The only thing that has gotten cheaper over the last few decades are consumer goods from Asia. The US auto industry is more or less an oligopoly - none of the OEMS, outside of Tesla, are seriously interested in competing on price.
If American auto companies aren’t interested in building affordable EVs, why are we harming US consumers by preventing them from buying imported EVs? Because, as you said, farming profits for US legacy auto. I want to buy high quality, affordable Chinese products. I don’t want to buy lower quality US products solely because of cronyism and ideology to protect their profits using trade policy.
https://www.cato.org/blog/americans-think-manufacturing-empl...
https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/05/13/g-s1-66...
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-tariffs-ma...
The U.S. has moved to service jobs because they tend to have the highest margins and capitalism is going to do what capitalism does. That is, unless specific guardrails are enacted to protect other societal interests.
Do you think this admin would put the necessary guardrails on public private partnership manufacturing supply chain infra to prevent it from being strip mined or otherwise extracted for profit and not be available when needed? I do not, but I do support treating such manufacturing supply chains as critical national security interests. Maybe we’ll get another shot in a few years when competent folks are in control, but maybe not.
Americans are cosplaying, they are not serious in this regard. If they were, they would be filling these jobs they say are so desperately needed, and manufacturers would pay whatever market clearing wage is required to fill said jobs. If they wanted good paying jobs today, they’d unionize. Way easier than waiting for manufacturing to come back (which will take years, if at all) and maybe have a shot at one of the few manufacturing jobs that are created.
China delivers results because they have the will to, Americans just want status and vibes.
(Purpose of the system is what it does, watch what people do not what they say, etc)
https://www.plantengineering.com/manufacturers-grapple-with-...
https://www.axios.com/2024/03/13/immigration-economy-jobs-gr...
https://www.axios.com/2023/05/08/us-labor-shortage-older-wor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Illegal labor to boot. Huge percentages of construction jobs in the US are (or were) filled by illegal immigrants getting paid low wages. It's not clear how those will be filled in the short term.
At least not a meaningful amount of people.
I now have a great office job but I grew up farming, ranching, doing construction, roofing, worked at dairies so I've seen first hand who is working these jobs.
It's not white Americans. This is something some people just can't understand. They just don't seem to grasp that the folks doing these jobs are either temporary labor brought in from other countries or illegal immigrants. The reason is because there isn't enough domestic labor willing to do these jobs.
Most of the people who will suffer have done nothing wrong.
I mean I wouldn't mind a corvette if they didn't cost 80 fucking thousand dollars.