The Biden Administration’s policies to accelerate the U.S. auto market toward an all-EV future are now under fire from automakers, the United Auto Workers and the President’s Republican detractors.
This poses a challenging and expensive dilemma for the White House and for Detroit. And that’s without factoring in presidential politics.
Let’s do that just for a minute: Michigan is a crucial 2024 swing state, and auto industry workers are swing voters across the Midwest. GOP challengers to Biden are not waiting until next year to start their attacks. But if the Biden administration backtracks on one of its biggest climate initiatives, it could lose support among voters worried by increasing signs of stress in the environment.
Ruptures in what once looked like a Washington-Auto industry consensus on EV policy broke open on Wednesday. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the trade group representing the Detroit Three and most other major automakers in the United States, called the Biden Administration’s proposals to push EVs to two-thirds of the U.S. market by 2032 “neither reasonable nor achievable.”
To understand what’s behind the Alliance message, look at the $3 billion Ford says it will lose on EVs this year alone.
Less than a week before, United Auto Workers union President Shawn Fain blasted the Biden administration for giving Ford and its battery partners $9.2 billion in low-cost, federally-subsidized loans to build three U.S. battery factories.
Those joint venture plants, so far, are not UAW-represented and there’s no assurance they will be given their locations in union-optional states.
Fain and the UAW have not endorsed President Joe Biden’s re-election, citing EV policies which union workers fear threaten their jobs.
The Biden Administration is trying to calm those fears, including proposing this week that the Energy Department deploy $2 billion in new grants to help re-tool auto factories to build electric cars.
Between the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, the Biden administration is offering automakers billions in subsidies – by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence’s reckoning as much as $370 billion – to offset the capital costs of tooling up mass production of EVs and batteries, and the operating losses the legacy automakers expect as they ramp up.
It turns out the subsidies are not enough to convince automakers and the main U.S. auto workers union to stay on the EV bus – at least not if the administration sticks to emissions rules that effectively require two-thirds of new vehicles to be powered by batteries.
The Alliance proposed returning to a 50% EV goal with more flexibility to allow for plug-in hybrids and account for obstacles such as inadequate charging or lack of domestic battery minerals. Read the Alliance’s summary of its position here.
U.S. consumers will be central to all this – as soon as anyone can predict for certain how rapidly middle-income, mass market car buyers embrace EVs. A new study from Cox Automotive finds that 51% of consumers are considering buying a new or used EV.
But when it comes time to write a check, only about 7% or so of U.S. vehicle buyers are driving home an EV. That gap is what has automakers and auto workers so anxious.
