Automotive
Continuing EV Bloodbath Leaves Harris With A Lot To Answer For

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Once the ongoing effort by the legacy media to reinvent presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris as a dynamic leader and competent campaigner passes, we will presumably enter the part of the presidential race in which we actually examine her real record on the key issues.
When — or if — that time ever arrives, the vice president will have a lot to explain where energy policy is concerned.
Last week I provided a high-level overview of some of the radical policies Harris has supported over her time in office in California and Washington, D.C. Today, I will address Harris’s advocacy for electric vehicles and buses, and the expanding bloodbath it has helped to create.
Let’s begin with a speech Harris delivered in Brandywine, Maryland on December 13, 2021. There, Harris spoke to an audience including Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, assorted Maryland officeholders, and workers at the Brandywine Highway Maintenance Facility. As part of her remarks, the vice president delivered a ringing endorsement of electric vehicles and her administration’s plans to try to subsidize them into automotive market dominance.
“The pollution from vehicles powered by fossil fuels has long harmed the health of communities around our country,” Harris said. “But there is a solution to this problem, and it is parked right behind me … electric cars, trucks, and buses — they don’t produce tailpipe emissions that irritate the nose and eyes, that decrease lung function, that increase susceptibility to respiratory illness.”
Harris added: “That means manufacturing millions of electric cars, trucks, and buses right here in our country. That means outfitting thousands of EV — electric vehicle — repair garages, just like this one. And it means installing a national network of EV chargers.”
That speech took place after congress had enacted the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act containing more than $200 billion in clean energy subsidies. Congress passed the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act and its $369 billion in similar subsidies eight months later.
How has all that worked out for America three years down the road? As I pointed out a few weeks ago, every pure play EV maker in the U.S. is now either in bankruptcy or teetering on the brink. Ford reported last week that its EV division, Ford Model e, lost about $50,000 per unit sold during the second quarter, and that was the best quarterly result the company has reported in over a year. Even Tesla has started the year with a pair of disappointing quarterly results amid rapidly slowing consumer demand for electric vehicles.
The Biden-Harris dreams of subsidizing a national fleet of high-speed EV chargers into existence has also come up a crapper. The Washington Post and others reported in April that Granholm’s Energy Department has invested a whopping $7.5 billion to install 5,000 such charging stations around the country but had only managed to activate 7 to that point.
Harris also endorsed a $5 billion EPA-managed program included in the Infrastructure law to fund the adoption of battery electric buses for targeted school systems around the country. Thus far, EPA has released two tranches of federal grants totaling $1.9 billion, but to disappointing results. Of the 389 school districts targeted by the grants, just 23 have reported successful acquisition of a total of 60 buses that have been placed into service. But another 50 of those districts have since withdrawn from consideration by the program.
“EPA anticipates that transitioning to new technology school buses will take time, which is why the project period is two years with an option to extend where needed and justified,” said EPA spokeswoman Shayla Powell.
Oh.
IRA subsidies for EV city buses have created perhaps the worst set of boondoggles of all. The electric buses are so costly, require such high maintenance and have such limited charging ranges that even extremely liberal cities like Austin, Texas and Jackson, Wyoming have quit trying to change over their fleets. The 2023 bankruptcy of heavily subsidized Proterra, the biggest EV bus maker, hasn’t helped.
It is hard to identify any aspect of the Biden-Harris suite of EV-related policies that can honestly be called a success. As her party’s apparent nominee, Harris will have much to answer for — that is, if the media ever gets around to asking the relevant questions.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
2025 Federal Election
Don’t let the Liberals fool you on electric cars

Dan McTeague
“The Liberals, hoodwinked by the ideological (and false) narrative that EVs are better for the environment, want to force you to replace the car or truck you love with one you can’t afford which doesn’t do what you need it to do.”
The Liberals’ carbon tax ploy is utterly shameless. For years they’ve been telling us that the Carbon Tax was a hallmark of Canadian patriotism, that it was the best way to save the planet, that it was really a “price on pollution,” which would ultimately benefit the little guy, in the form of a rebate in which Canadians would get back all the money they paid in, and more!
Meanwhile big, faceless Captain Planet villain corporations — who are out there wrecking the planet for the sheer fun of it! — will shoulder the whole burden.
But then, as people started to feel the hit to their wallets and polling on the topic fell off a cliff, the Liberals’ newly anointed leader — the environmentalist fanatic Mark Carney — threw himself a Trumpian signing ceremony, at which he and the party (at least rhetorically) kicked the carbon tax to the curb and started patting themselves on the back for saving Canada from the foul beast. “Don’t ask where it came from,” they seem to be saying. “The point is, it’s gone.”
Of course, it’s not. The Consumer Carbon Tax has been zeroed out, at least for the moment, not repealed. Meanwhile, the Industrial Carbon Tax, on business and industry, is not only being left in place, it’s being talked up in exactly the same terms as the Consumer Tax was.
No matter that it will continue to go up at the same rate as the Consumer Tax would have, such that it will be indistinguishable from the Consumer Tax by 2030. And no matter that the burden of that tax will ultimately be passed down to working Canadians in the form of higher prices.
Of course, when that happens, Carney & Co will probably blame Donald Trump, rather than their own crooked tax regime.
Yes, it is shameless. But it also puts Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives in a bind. They’ve been proclaiming their intention to “Axe the Tax” for quite some time now. On the energy file, it was pretty much all you could get them to talk about. So much so that I was worried that upon entering government, they might just go after the low hanging fruit, repeal the Carbon Tax, and move on to other things, leaving the rest of the rotten Net-Zero superstructure in place.
But now, since the Liberals beat them to it (or claim they did,) the Conservatives are left grasping for a straightforward, signature policy which they can use to differentiate themselves from their opponents.
Poilievre’s recently announced intention to kill the Industrial Carbon Tax is welcome, especially at a time when Canadian business is under a tariff threat from both the U.S. and China. But that requires some explanation, and as the old political saying goes, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
There is one policy change however, which comes to mind as a potential replacement. It’s bold, it would make the lives of Canadians materially better, and it’s so deeply interwoven with the “Green” grift of the environmentalist movement of which Mark Carney is so much a part that his party couldn’t possibly bring themselves to steal it.
Pierre Poilievre should pledge to repeal the Liberals’ Electric Vehicle mandate.
The EV mandate is bad policy. It forces Canadians to buy an expensive product — EVs cost more than Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles even when the federal government was subsidizing their purchase with a taxpayer-funded rebate of $5,000 per vehicle, but that program ran out of money in January and was discontinued. Without that rebate, EVs haven’t a prayer of competing with ICE vehicles.
EVs are particularly ill-suited for Canada. Their batteries are bad at holding a charge in the cold. Even in mild weather, EVs aren’t known for their reliability, a major downside in a country as spread out as ours. Maybe it’ll work out if you live in a big city, but what if you’re in the country? Heaven help you if your EV battery dies when you’re an hour away from everywhere.
Moreover, Canada doesn’t have the infrastructure to support a total replacement of gas-and-diesel driven vehicles with EVs. Our already-strained electrical grid just doesn’t have the capacity to support millions of EVs being plugged in every night. Natural Resources Canada estimates that we will need somewhere in the neighborhood of 450,000 public charging stations to support an entirely electric fleet. At the moment, we have roughly 30,000. That’s a pretty big gap to fill in ten years.
And that’s another fact which doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it should. The law mandates that every new vehicle sold in Canada must be electric by 2035. Maybe that sounded incredibly far in the future when it was passed, but now it’s only ten years away! That’s not a lot of time for these technological problems or cost issues to be resolved.
So the pitch from Poilievre here is simple.
“The Liberals, hoodwinked by the ideological (and false) narrative that EVs are better for the environment, want to force you to replace the car or truck you love with one you can’t afford which doesn’t do what you need it to do. If you vote Conservative, we will fix that, so you will be free to buy the vehicle that meets your needs, whether it’s battery or gas powered, because we trust you to make decisions for yourself. Mark Carney, on the other hand, does not. We won’t just Axe the Tax, we will End the EV Mandate!”
A decade (and counting) of Liberal misrule has saddled this country with a raft of onerous and expensive Net-Zero legislation I’d like to see the Conservative Party campaign against.
These include so-called “Clean Fuel” Regulations, Emissions Caps, their war on pipelines and Natural Gas terminals, not to mention Bill C-59, which bans businesses from touting the environmental benefits of their work if it doesn’t meet a government-approved standard.
But the EV mandate is bad for Canada, and terrible for Canadians. A pledge to repeal it would be an excellent start.
Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.
Automotive
Trump Must Act to Halt the Tesla Terror Campaign

Christopher F. Rufo
The Left’s splintering violence threatens a veto over democratic power.
Elon Musk finds himself at the fulcrum of American life. His companies are leading the field across the automotive, space, robotics, and AI industries. His ownership of the social platform X gives him significant influence over political discourse. And his DOGE initiative represents the single greatest threat to the permanent administrative state. Musk is arguably the most powerful man in the United States, including President Trump.
The Left has taken notice. Left-wing activists have long practiced a tactic called “power mapping,” which entails diagramming the opposing political movement and identifying “chokepoints.” They have designated Musk as one such chokepoint. This month, activists claimed to have organized 500 protests against Elon Musk’s Tesla—dubbed the “Tesla Takedown”—with demonstrations outside sales lots and a series of incidents of vandalism, property destruction, and fire bombings. A pattern has also emerged of individuals scratching or spray-painting parked Teslas, looking to intimidate owners and potential owners or just to express hatred of Musk.
Precedents exist for this kind of escalation. In the 1970s, following the frustrations of the civil rights era, left-wing splinter groups launched targeted terror campaigns and symbolic acts of violence. They bombed the U.S. Capitol, assassinated police officers, and even self-immolated in imitation of Buddhist monks. We may be entering a similar phase today, as the collapse of the Black Lives Matter movement gives rise to radicalized left-wing factions willing to embrace violence. If so, Musk’s Tesla may be the Number One target.
What, exactly, motivates this campaign? At its core, the Left appears to be shifting from an “antiracist” narrative to an anti-wealth one—from a racial frame to an economic one. The sentiment driving the Tesla Takedown is rooted in economic resentment and a desire for leveling. Musk has become a symbol of everything progressives oppose: oligarchy, capitalism, wealth, and innovation. These, in their view, are marks of the oppressor. They scorn the futuristic Cybertruck, SpaceX rockets, and Optimus robots, believing that such creations should be dismantled and repurposed into chassis for public buses or I-beams for public housing.
A certain element of left-wing Luddism is at work here, but the greater part of these activists’ motives is resentment. Musk represents the triumph of the great man of industry, something the Left believes should not exist.
Unfortunately, the Tesla Takedown may succeed. The Left has likely identified Tesla as a chokepoint because it’s easier to dissuade consumers from buying a car they associate with a malevolent political cause—or fear might be vandalized—than it is to persuade them to buy one in support of Musk and DOGE. When it comes to purchasing a Tesla, fear among the average American is a more powerful motivator than enthusiasm among the MAGA base.
Some evidence suggests that the campaign has made an economic impact. Tesla stock peaked around the time of President Trump’s inauguration and since then has lost approximately 40 percent of its value. Musk has accumulated more power than any other American, but that means that he has more points of vulnerability. His wealth and power are tied to his companies—most importantly, his consumer car company, which depends on individual purchases rather than institutional contracts (like SpaceX).
Trump has signaled that he understands this dilemma. He appeared at the White House in a Tesla and has voiced support for Musk’s firms. Justice Department prosecutors—and their allies in state government—must translate this support into policy by identifying and punishing those who destroy property as a means of political intimidation.
The administration needs to make clear that radical left-wing factions cannot use violence to wield a veto over democratic governance. If the partnership between Trump and Musk is to produce meaningful results, it must be backed by the full protection of the law.
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