Power Outages due to Hurricane Brings EV Buyers' Remorse

As it happened, my wife, Nancy, and I had our return flight cancelled from a conference we attended in El Paso, Texas, on the day before the storm hit.

Accordingly, we drove a rental car across hundreds of miles of very hot desert sparsely populated with distant small towns and no apparent charging stations for unfortunate EVs.

The terrible thought of being stranded with a dead battery occurred to both of us.

We then stayed a couple days with a friend about two hours away from Houston waiting for word that our home had power again.

Many other less fortunate neighborhoods are still waiting for precious electricity previously taken for granted to be restored.

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We aren’t the only ones who — for many reasons — prefer traditional petroleum-fueled cars.

A survey conducted by the McKinsey Center For Future Mobilityfound that 46% of U.S. electric vehicle (EV) owners plan to switch back to internal combustion engine cars.

The biggest reasons cited by for wanting to return to gas-powered models was a lack of available charging infrastructure (35%), closely followed by excessive total cost of operation (34%).

Whereas it was once cheaper to fuel up an EV than a gas-powered car, this is no longer true.

Nearly one third (32%) said EVs were too impactful on planning long-distance trips.

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As Brian Moody, the executive editor at AutoTrader.com, told NewsNation Now, “I think the main driver of this is that an electric car adds a complexity to your daily life that I think most people are trying to eliminate. They’re not trying to make their lives more complicated. They’re trying to make things more simple.”

Much of that hassle, Moody said, is dependent on where one lives. For example, 25% of California car owners drive electric vehicles compared to only 1% of those living in Wisconsin.

Unsurprisingly, EV owners tend to live in urban or downtown areas and have higher than average disposable incomes ($6,230 monthly).

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The McKinsey poll of nearly 37,000 worldwide EV owners discovered that only two countries, the United Kingdom and Australia, indicated larger percentages of likely switch-back consumers than the U.S. (49%).

Other countries included in the survey were Brazil, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Norway; they averaged 29% who wanted to ditch their EVs.

Across all countries, only 11% of the EV owners said the infrastructure where they live is well set up in terms of charge points, 40% said there were not enough chargers along highways and main roads, and 38% said there were not enough chargers in close proximity to them.

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Although the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed in 2021 included $7.5 billion to build 500,000 public charging stations across the U.S., as of April, only eight had been built from that public money.

Alexander Laska, deputy director for transportation and innovation in the Climate and Energy Program at the Third Way think tank attributes this slow progress to a complicated regulatory environment whereby that federal cash "comes with dozens of rules and requirements around everything from reliability to interoperability, to where stations can be located, to what certifications the workers installing the chargers need to have."

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Meanwhile, in early May the Biden administration announced it is easing requirements for EV purchasers to receive tax credits up to $7,500 per vehicle with a goal of having half of all new sales be electric by 2030.

By comparison, 84% of all cars sold in America are powered by internal combustion engines.

Another Biden administration term will restrict that share to 64% by 2027.

Political pushback against federal EV subsidy spending is occurring on the Republican sides of the House and Senate of Congress.

Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wy., coauthor of a February House bill titled “Undoing Nationwide Programs and Limiting Unnecessary Grants for Electric Vehicles (UNPLUG EVS) Act,” charges that “the Biden Administration has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars to prop up the EV industry.”

Her coauthor, Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., added, “The average American family is priced out of expensive EVs, yet those same taxpayers are forced to foot the bill for EV infrastructure.”

In May, Sens. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D.,  and John Barrasso, R-Wy., cosponsored an “Eliminate Lavish Incentives to Electric (ELITE) Vehicles Act,” which would, among other things, repeal tax credits for both new and used EVs and take away the federal investment tax credit for charging stations.

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And whereas anti-EV subsidy proposals are currently an uphill push under the present Biden administration and Democratic-controlled Senate, we can expect this to change with a 2024 hurricane of a different sort than Houston just experienced.

I’m referring to an election sweep headed by a President Trump who will most certainly curtail such spending in favor of letting free markets rather than big-government-knows-best diktats determine consumer vehicle choices.