This is what happens when you let the oil industry and their lobbyists have unfettered control of the narrative and legislation .You get a huge number of politicians falling into their pockets, and progress is stymied at every turn.
It's actually kind of surprising America has made the limited progress on EVs that we have. But it's nowhere near enough. And now we are paying the piper.
American voters are doing their part to "help," crying about "high" fuel prices (less than half of what they are here) when one of the big issues is that undertaxation of petrol has led to underinvestment in alternatives.
This has very little to do with oil industry lobbyists, and a whole lot to do with the whole world outsourcing their production and labor to a country with no worker protections.
The headline suggests it’s a problem that the USA is working on. Evidence suggests that in fact the approach being taken is to imitate an ostrich, and bury the collective head in oil and gas money.
While the government might be doing that, the US auto manufactures are taking a different approach. GM makes some nice EVs.
Genuinely, have they? All the EV news I hear from the US is projects stalling or getting cancelled.
Those are what make the news. GM has a lot of EVs that look just like the ICE of the same name and they don't get much news.
Any sedans and hatchback, or only more gigantic trucks?
I don't want an electric "vehicle", I want an electric car.
I got an answer, give up and let the Chinese EVs in. or just reinvent public transportation for the future and stop wasting ungodly amount of resources for Ford F-150s everywhere
If we let the Chinese evs in they would out sell too many ice or hybrid cars and reduce our consumption of oil, as well as bring too much competition to our "free" market. We can't have that, think of all the money spent in lobbying to keep us dependent on oil! And people might not buy electric cars from their favourite eccentric Nazi if there's an alternative and that absolutely cannot fly! Ugh it's the same story over and over again with American companies. Perform like dog shit, piss and moan that sales are tough because of those pesky foreign doing it better, tarrifs the competition out of competition and beg big govt for a nice bail out. Been happening over and over since at least the 60s in at least automotive industry. People who use USA as an example of capitalism = bad are totally missing the point that USA is socialism for rich people at the expense of capitalism, as a real capitalist would love to buy BYD in USA. Capitalism needs to be constrained with regulation sure, but not in a way that benefits your "representatives" favourite private corpo
US won't have an answer. Obama invested in battery research, Trump shut it down, Biden invested in battery manufacture, Trump shut it down. During this time, Chinese industry secured a supply chain from raw ore mining to making batteries with patents. US has no IP in batteries.
Same thing is happening with drug discovery, it's all China for the next decade.
The answer continues to be: do everything it can to ignore China exists, and insulate the industry from having to compete.
How very free market of them. Seems like it would be so shitty to be a real republican - their party has totally abandoned those ideals.
I'm sure his answer will be tariffs because he's not about to invade China for their oil.
Make decent vehicles that don't spy on people or track them.....fucking morons
No, our answer is that EVs are dumb and that oil is the only energy source that matters in this century and every century to come.
Of course they “have an answer to EVs”. It’s to crush them or make them so outrageously expensive only the very wealthy will afford them.
And you know why? Because that’s how we voted.
I got to ride in a Li Auotmotive i9 Ultra the other day and it was amazing. Ridiculously luxurious and far ahead of tesla. Cheaper too. It had a fridge and microwave, and big screens everywhere. Its Lidar view of everything around the car was vastly superior to Tesla's, and it has about 15x the computing power of my model 3.
Seems like the simple solution is to buy their cars and focus on producing something else.
The USA isn't exactly known for their cars. But even Germany has trouble making good cars nowadays.
It's kind of 30th trimester. Too late for abortion Steve - China domnitates and we have no answer
Was a loyal Ford (european) customer but I don't want an SUV version of the mustang, a massive truck or whatever the new 'Capri' is (its not a Capri).
And why are they all so ugly??
Wtf happened to Ford??
Ford seems to be taking from Tesla's design language and trying to mix it with their own and the results are really fucking ugly
The US also has huge trade deficits in mangoes and sports shoes. So what?
Only idiots like Trump think all bilateral trade flows should balance.
The solution is putting their fingers in their ears, screaming "No one wants EVs anyway" "America no1!" "USA! USA! USA!".
You know, same solution they've always used.
The US has actively worked against EVs for over 100 years….
Oh It does... They prevent China EV makers from partaking in their "free market" and force you domestic suckers to keep slurping up the status-quo.
Of course not, the current US government is actively hostile toward EVs and green energy. Why do all these headlines frame this as if it's so surprising?
US: shoots itself in the foot "WHY ISN'T CHINA LIMPING AS HARD AS I AM?!?!?!?"
Of course they do:
Sure they do. It’s double down on ICE and block the import of foreign EV.
Greed, bad organization, bad design, too costly, invasive of owner's data, friends in the oil biz. Those are some answers, but not all.
Whenever the US car industry seems to be moving towards EVs a major correction takes place and more huge vehicles appear instead. They obviously aren’t serious and will go the way of the buggy whip if they can’t replace management with people who can plan for the long term.
Are owners want us to use oil
Setting aside fascism, the solution is expanded train infrastructure.
People in here are talking about battery IP but that's not as important as simple BEV production capacity. An EV is dead simple mechanically but you've gotta have the raw resources and factories to keep up. Even then, the US would need to do some major infrastructure upgrades to support a bunch of heavy and plug-hungry EVs.
Trains are a big investment but getting track laid and a few hundred thousand running is much more manageable than trying to replace ~280 million ICE vehicles (97.9% of all US vehicles in 2023).
I predict China is going to feel the same car dependence pain in a few decades if they continue to ramp production and climb the cars-per-capita leader board. It's crazy expensive to keep millions of people puttering around in multi-ton metal boxes.
I don't see what that answer could be even hypothetically and if Trump wasn't a moron.
USA is not the world leader in production anymore, that ship has sailed. Now China is the leader in production, and USA is mostly a service based economy.
So cars isn't even the major problem, technology is.
Before the Japanese entered the market, and put a serious dent in US car manufacturing, American automakers were the biggest in the world, now the biggest American car manufacturer is GM at no. 5 internationally down from no. 4 in 2024.
Most likely USA will decline further because of the Chinese makers, that have not entered top 5 on production yet, but almost definitely will very soon.
USA is still significant with Ford following directly after GM. But the current home market GM and Ford are operating in, could make it even harder for them to compete internationally, as USA is somewhat held out of international trade by the Trump Tariffs, and those tariffs make production in USA more expensive.
So international competition by GM and Ford will be from factories outside of USA. But still disadvantaged because they can't make international deals to cover all their factories.
Be careful of those numbers - while the US isn't world leader in production, the US has continuously gone up in production, just that others have gone up even more. You don't see this because employment in manufacturing is way down, but production is still up. It no longer looks like we make anything, but the numbers show we make more than when we were world leaders.
The answer for what? Is clear that the current policy is short term gains in selling huge overpowered gas trucks that are impossible to sell in the rest of the world, leave door open for Chinese EV, disappear into irrelevance in long term
Well, we've artificially inflated the price of steel, electronics and consumable resources like fuel and electricity required to build cars in the US. I can't imagine that we would even be competitive building anything right now.
Don't forget years of short sighted manufacturing enabled by the insane dealership system.
And, I guess enough research and development to realize that you're a decade or so behind the competition.
And it never will!
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
