Turns out President Obama’s prediction about American drivers embracing electric cars was about as accurate as his prediction that Obamacare would lower health insurance premiums.
The Fort Worth Star Telegram reports that GM plans to spend more than $1 billion, yet again, expanding its Arlington, Texas, assembly plant that builds the company’s biggest SUVs.
The factory has 3,800 hourly workers on three shifts and it still can’t fill consumer SUV demand.
The Wall Street Journal reports that June truck sales, which include large SUVs, are up 11.4 percent over June 2014—and 10.3 percent year to date—while car sales are down 3.7 percent.
Analysts claim that one reason for the dramatic uptick in truck and SUV sales is the decline in gas prices, which no doubt has played a role. But it misses the point: When gas prices are less of a restricting factor, people buy what they really want, and that tends to be large trucks and SUVs—exactly the opposite of what Obama wants people driving.
Hey, doesn’t Obama get to ride around in a large, tricked-out SUV himself?
The president had optimistically, and wrongly, predicted there would be 1 million electric vehicles on the road by this year. And yet out of 1.5 million new vehicles sold last January, CNBC notes that GM sold only 542 of it Chevy Volts, while Nissan sold about twice as many, 1,070, of it’s all-electric LEAF.
That’s 1,500 electric cars out of 1.5 million new vehicles—not counting Elon Musk’s all-electric, high-end Teslas, which unlike most electric cars seem to be popular, though I suspect more for their looks and cool factor.
The only reason most car manufacturers even try to build Obama cars is the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) mandate that requires cars and trucks to meet government-specified mileage standards—the latest being 54.5 mpg in 10 years.
But because the fuel standards are across a fleet of cars, manufacturers will waste a lot of their money—as well as your tax dollars—building an electric or hybrid car that relatively few people want in order to lower their overall CAFÉ rating and allow them to build more of the highly profitable SUVs that people are eager to buy.
The irony in all this is that U.S. car companies like Ford are shipping U.S. jobs overseas in order to get cheaper labor so that it costs less to build Obama’s green machines. And those high-paying manufacturing jobs that Obama wants to brag about are making the very kind of vehicles—large gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs—that Obama doesn’t want people driving.