The Biden administration’s electric vehicle push has not been well received by the American people. Few want the expensive, unreliable cars that require planning trips around charging stations and waiting around for the battery to recharge. Gas-powered vehicles are simply more reliable, no matter the weather, and are much more convenient. That’s why Hertz, which once said EVs would make up a quarter of its rental fleet by 2025, changed course earlier this year, selling about 20,000 of them to buy more combustion engine vehicles.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday where he was pressed on the issue, particularly why taxpayers have spent so much money to see only a handful of charging stations go up.
When the topic turned to EVs, host Margaret Brennan played a clip of former President Trump criticizing the Biden administration for forcing them on American consumers.
“Do you notice he's trying to save the electrical vehicle but not the gas powered, which is the vehicle that everybody wants," Trump said recently at a New Jersey rally. "They're going crazy with the electric car, costing us a fortune. We're spending hundreds of billions of dollars subsidizing a car that nobody wants and nobody's ever gonna buy.”
"He not wrong," Brennan emphasized, though Buttigieg disagreed.
"Obviously, it's resonating for [Trump], because he wouldn't bring it up so frequently if there wasn't some anxiety that he's tapping into," she said. "And let me ask about a portion of this that I think does fall under your portfolio and that's the charging stations you mentioned. The Federal Highway Administration says only seven or eight charging stations have been produced with the $7.5 billion investment that taxpayers made back in 2021. Why isn't that happening more quickly?"
Buttigieg argued it's more difficult than it sounds to install a charging station.
"So the president's goal is to have half a million chargers up by the end of this decade," he replied. "Now, in order to do a charger, it's more than just plunking a- a small device into the ground, there's utility work, and this is also, really, a new category of federal investment. But we've been working with each of the 50 states, every one of them is getting formula dollars to do this work--"
"Seven or eight, though?" Brennan pushed back.
"Engaging them and the first handful- again, by 2030, 500,000 chargers. And the very first handful of chargers are now already being physically built. But again, that's the absolute very, very beginning stages of the construction to come," Buttigieg said.
"Right. But- but that gets to the point about not being able to make long distance travel possible quickly, if you don't have the infrastructure there to support it," she countered.
Pete Buttigieg can't explain why only 8 EV charging stations have been built with $7.5 BILLION in taxpayer funding.
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) May 28, 2024
Margaret Brennan doesn't believe a word.pic.twitter.com/yzKs8qFyb3