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The End of Private Car Ownership

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You will drive nothing and you will be happy.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

The term “pedestrian” has a derogatory meaning because peasants walked while nobles were “equestrians” and rode horses. The industrial revolution eliminated this class difference, as it did so many others, by making car ownership available to the masses until eventually Herbert Hoover was able to boast that “Republican prosperity has reduced and increased earning capacity” to “put the proverbial ‘chicken in every pot’ and a car in every backyard to boot.”

Democrats have spent two generations trying to get those cars out of every backyard.

Biden is trying to bring back Obama’s mileage standards that were estimated to raise car prices by 20%.The goal is to “nudge 40% of U.S. drivers into electric vehicles by decade’s end.”

Will 40% of Americans be able to afford electric cars that cost an average of $54,000 by 2030?

Not likely. Nor are they meant to. Biden’s radical ‘green’ government, which includes Tracy Stone-Manning, the former spokeswoman for an ecoterrorist group as the head of the Bureau of Land Management, isn’t looking to nudge drivers into another type of cars, but out of cars.

Gas prices are a way to price Americans out of car ownership under the guise of pushing EVs.

Biden’s Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm responded to American concerns about high gas prices by urging them to buy electric cars. Granholm, who had promoted a green energy tycoon who spent years in prison for fraud, who had served on the board of directors of an electric battery company, and made millions divesting stock in an electric vehicle manufacturer, is a fan.

“Most electric vehicles are now cheaper to own than gas-powered cars from the day you drive them off the lot,” Granholm tweeted.

That isn’t actually true, but actual cars have become more expensive to own, largely because of efforts by the Biden administration, and by various states, including California. That hasn’t however made electric cars any more affordable for ordinary Americans.

The average price of an electric car shot up to $54,000 in May. Car prices in general have risen in the Biden economy, but electric cars are naturally expensive. The raw material costs for an average electric car are up to over $8,000. That’s compared to $3,600 for an actual car.

When your raw material costs are that high, electric cars will be inherently unaffordable.

The Obama administration pumped billions in taxpayer money into battery and electric car manufacturing, the majority of which failed, on the theory that enough government subsidies would lower battery costs. Not only was much of that money lost, but currently electric battery costs hover around the $160 kilowatt-hour mark. Green boosters cheer that’s far down from over $1,000 per kWh a decade ago, but that still adds up to the reality that an electric car capable of traveling for even short distances needs a battery that alone costs thousands.

The Nissan Leaf, which approaches $30,000 once the reality of MSRP in the current sales market is taken into account, is one of the cheapest electric cars around, and has a range of only 149 miles. Replacing its battery can set back car owners $6,500 to $7,500. And that’s even when you can manage to find one or someone willing to replace it. In less than 3 years, Leafs lose 20 miles of range. By the fifth year, they have lost 30 miles. And it’s all downhill from there.

The Nissan Leaf was initially a hit, but car manufacturers quickly realized that anyone willing to overpay that much for substandard performance had money to burn. The electric car market is now thoroughly dominated by luxury vehicles subsidized by taxpayers. And the Leaf went from 90% market share to less than 10%. The EV market is now a taxpayer-funded status symbol.

The dirty truth about the “clean” car market is that it consists of traditional car companies and Tesla frantically trying to unload a limited share of luxury electric cars on wealthy customers to cash in on the emissions credits mandated by states like California. Tesla makes more money reselling these regulatory credits to actual car companies than it does selling cars. Taxpayers and working class car-owners pick up the bill for the entire luxury electric vehicle market.

A market that they are shut out from by design.

The “green” vision is not a world in which everyone has their own electric car. It’s one of collective transport, of buses, light rail, and car-pooling through shared rides and roving self-driving cars. The only vehicle the average consumer is supposed to own is a bicycle.

While the Biden administration is still pretending that it’s out to “encourage” electric car ownership by making actual cars too expensive for much of the country to afford, others are saying the quiet part out loud.

“Car-lovers will doubtless mourn the passing of machines that, in the 20th century, became icons of personal freedom. But this freedom is illusory,” an Economist article predicted.

“There will be fewer cars on the road—perhaps just 30% of the cars we have today,” the head of Google’s self-driving car project predicted.

“The days of the single occupancy car are numbered,” Brook Porter at G2 Venture Partners, a green energy investment firm, thundered in an article titled, The End of Cars in Cities.

Dan Ammann, the former president of GM, claimed that “the human-driven, gasoline-powered, single-passenger car” is the “fundamental problem” in a post titled, “We Need to Move Beyond the Car”. He has since gone to work for Exxon-Mobil.

Predictions are cheap, but car bans are expensive and all too real. The European Union voted to back a ban on the sale of non-electric cars by 2035. California is also pushing for a similar 2035 ban on the sale of new actual cars in the state. Officials noted that the ban would push more than half of mechanics out of work and leave much of the state unable to afford cars.

Canada has its own 2035 car ban. Last year, Governor Newsom and Governor Cuomo, along with 10 other governors, urged Biden to impose a 2035 car ban on all Americans.

Electric cars aren’t actually “cleaner”. The mining processes that produce “green” technologies are as dirty, if not dirtier, and trade dependence on oil for dependence on rare earth metals, and dependence on the Middle East for dependence on Communist China. The one thing that they decisively accomplish is to make it impossible for ordinary Americans to own cars.

And that is what environmentalists really want. But not just them.

The vision of a nation in which private car ownership is a luxury good, in which cars have been priced out of the reach of most people through environmental measures that concentrated on gas-powered vehicles, and then added more taxes and fines for the waste” and “inefficiency” of an individual owning a vehicle is not very far away.

The technocratic sales pitch is that ride-sharing and self-driving cars will make car ownership unnecessary. Why own a big clunky machine when you can own nothing and be happy?

The reality is that car ownership offers mobility and independence. That is exactly what the leftist radicals making social policy want to eliminate. Gas prices are not Putin’s price hike, they’re the green dream. And that dream isn’t to put you in a Nissan Leaf. It’s the Pol Pot dream of dismantling civilization and rolling back the industrial revolution.

Once the dark age norms of their dark enlightenment are restored, peasants will go back to being pedestrians and only the progressive philosopher kings will ride.

Comments

  1. The more that green energy is pushed the more the common man will suffer. Fossil fuels, which come out of the Earth and with the newest technology are actually not very polluting at all, have made life far more comfortable for untold millions. Well, the elites can’t have the common man comfortable, now can they? Besides, green energy has it polluting effects too, as mentioned by Daniel Greenfield in this article, including the rotting of no longer useful electric batteries.

    Seen from a larger perspective the entire green energy rubbish is part of a larger agenda to substitute environmentalism for standard religion. It is a secular religion and will take mankind down a rabbit hole with no exit allowed. It is stupid, not rooted in true science and highly destructive of liberty. Amazing how the elites of our era get almost everything ass-backwards.

  2. “The reality is that car ownership offers mobility and independence.”

    The car created the suburb. Without private cars, Americans will be forced out of single-family detached houses in suburbs, and into high density rental units in the urban cores, which we can see are being built en mass before our eyes. These are not the low-income housing units that the country desperately needs, but high priced rent-traps to extract income from working Americans.

    Commuting to work will become far more difficult, but remote work will partly fill that gap. It’s going to be a very different country.

    • Agreed. They have openly said they’re targeting suburbs. With kill switches in vehicles currently sold, they’ll step it up. They clearly want to hold more open, productive land among themselves. Netherlands farmers, case in point.

  3. This is my biggest beef w/ not just Tesla, but most electric cars. When they were first debuted in the early 00s, one thing I noticed in their deals: they were not for sale, only for lease. This is the problem w/ Tesla and others: they’re solving an invented problem: self driving cars, and in the process, making cars so expensive that nobody would be able to buy them. It would have been one thing if he managed to make a car that could derive its energy exclusively from solar power, but that’s not practical given the amount of energy incident on a car vs what it needs to run

    Aside from all that, to make enough batteries for this supposed market, one would have to get rare earth minerals from places like Chile, Argentina, Congo, et al, some of which are labeled “Conflict Materials” b’cos they are procured in corrupt dictatorships whose rulers get a cut in all sales. Also, the lifespan of these materials once processed ain’t infinite, and then disposal of these materials is another problem. A better solution would have been a hybrid car running on a combination of gasoline and solar

    I won’t be in the market for any of these cars. I’ll stick to purely gasoline powered cars, hoping that their mileage improves w/o me paying the cost of 5 cars to get 1

    • All true and expensive even with taxpayers carrying the burden.

      There was work on mining lithium in the US under Trump. Not happening in my area any longer.

      Spent battery disposal is more hazardous than nuclear waste, according to a knowledgeable engineer we just discussed the issue with.

      Further, the very dirty procurement of these elements pales in comparison to what is to come, because all the easy sites are the initial phase.

      Neither the energy input into building the equipment necessary to mine and process the rare earths, nor the process energy input, go into fuel efficiency calculations. Complete scam. Estimates for the earth-moving load per vehicle are very high.

      Not one of these EVs filters out coal-fired electricity in order to reject it, of course.

      Then there are the issues of standards for gasoline engines. The eco-warriors are so righteous they can’t be bothered with the problems, like the harshness of ethanol and the damage it does to engines. And certainly not the amount of food removed from the global supply. Nor do they account for the energy to process food into fuel. The rainforests stripped to grow this “green source” don’t matter.

      Too many scams; too little time.

  4. The End of Private Car Ownership
    ……………………………

    This article from Daniel Greenfield is all too true.

    During the worst of the pandemic many “environmentalists” actually lauded their being fewer cars on the road, never mind the misery behind this phenomenon, of fear, unemployment, and shutdown businesses.

    There were also streets that allowed restaurants to block off lanes of traffic so that patrons could eat outside when it was deemed too dangerous to have customers eat inside. Many “environmentalists” have wanted to continue this practice, not so restaurant-goers have the choice of dining al fresco, but so these streets will remain off-limits to cars.

    Never mind the inconvenience to the public, or what this does to the mobility of many aged and disabled people.

    “What the Pandemic’s ‘Open Streets’ Really Revealed”

    Covid-inspired traffic restrictions and street changes have swept scores of U.S. cities since the start of the pandemic. But not all communities have welcomed them.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-03/the-unequal-geography-of-covid-s-open-streets

    (This article is pretty “woke”, but still outlines the basic issues, so I linked to it)

    Now some of this, like allowing restaurants to set up tables on wide sidewalks, I actually like and in many cases support–and so do many others. But that is not what shutting down streets to automobile traffic is all about.

    Now, I don’t drive–but I live in a large urban area with nearby shopping and services, good transit and easy access to Ubers and taxi cabs. Not driving should be a choice, not something forced on people by high gas prices and political social engineering, which is what is happening more and more.

  5. The only electric vehicle I’m willing to spend crazy amounts of money on, is an electric back hoe to bury all these greenie liberal nut jobs.

  6. We should all remember the “clunker” thingy during the first fraudulent reign of “bo.” “cash for clunkers” used taxpayer’s money to entice taxpayers to part with their used car and buy a new one. Many did.

    Then the used car…labeled a ‘clunker,’ but not necessarily one that needed to be crushed…was. by the thousands.

    A lot of poorer people depended on used cars…buying one and driving it as long as possible before buying another one. Used car lots went the way of the Dodo bird. And the poorer, became the new riders of buses and bikes to get to work or the grocery or the doctor.

    But, that didn’t satisfy the power-mad, money-hungry, lying creeps. Criminals are always thinking up new ways to destroy, to steal, to kill.
    Just as the “thief” of whom Jesus spoke.

    • Thanks for reminding us about that bizarre debacle, Somehistory.

      Not only did this target the poor–ugly at the best of times–but it is also pretty questionable even from an environmental standpont. While some old cars do indeed have lower standards on emissions or have become less efficient over time, the idea that trashing them and putting new cars on the road instead is somehow more ecological is often false.

      In fact, even from an environmental point of view it often makes more sense to continue to use something that is working well.

      But then, most of this is not really about protecting the environment at all.

      Here’s a salient article:

      https://qz.com/1042742/why-did-cash-for-clunkers-fail-a-new-paper-explains-how-obamas-stimulus-program-backfired/#:~:text=Around%2060%25%20of%20the%20subsidies,for%20Clunkers%20and%20those%20not.

      And we don’t even drive, but had our tax money used to subsidize the purchase of fancy hybrid cars.

    • Yes, g, it was all about putting the poorer ones on foot, or dependent on public transport while using up the money on a pretense of something good.

      Now, the car thing is all about putting the middle class ones on foot or dependent on public transport, using up money…mostly right out of our pockets…on a pretense of something good, while blaming it on a guy thousands of miles away who is in the process of his own evil.

      They’ll keep on flying, and if they choose to, driving gasoline-powered cars, while the rest spend their money re-charging, waiting, and walking if they can’t pony-up for the battery.

      Why doesn’t someone invent a car that runs on perspiration? it’s getting awful hot and a lot of people are sweating…a lot.

      • All true, Somehistory. And you are right about Putin–he is evil but the price of gas was skyrocketing here long before Russia invaded Ukraine. This is all about shutting down American production, additional taxes, and social engineering.

        Russian hijinks around oil probably don’t help–but they didn’t cause this mess.

  7. I lived happily without a car for many years in US cities with good public transportation. I have one now. It is convenient, but costly.

    Yes, the electric cars frenzy is a boondoggle. Their electricity comes from a power plant somewhere. In New Jersey, half of it is (or was) nuclear. Most of the rest is from gas. I’m all for experiments with wind, solar, tidal, thermal, garbage, etc. But they don’t have the density and reliability needed for reliable public utility service.

    • True, Roland. Many act as though electric vehicles run on magic pixie dust. They still use energy, and that energy is not free.

  8. Let’s face it the guy who can afford the high dollar luxury car and private jet will enjoy the freedom of the open road and air travel in the future and feel great about his seeing the rest of us doing are part to keep the world green while we walk and use the bike trails. It’s good to be the king and see l those happy little people from afar.

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