Orange Man and EVs, by Eric Peters

Maybe Trump can take a chain saw, Javier Milei-style, to the auto regulators and to a whole bunch of other regulatory agencies. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

The Orange Man has said he will end the federal government’s use of the regulatory regime to effectively force the manufacture of electric vehicles (which are the only kinds of vehicles that can be made to comply with the regs) and that’s good.

But it’s not enough.

The apparat itself must be ended – else the best that Orange Man will be able to do (assuming he is elected rather than planted and assuming he’s well intended) is to temporarily impede what is already a fait accompli.

The car industry has become a sovietized industry that takes its cues from what the government does and what it expects the government will do. That is why, to cite one case-in-point, all new vehicles already have the “kill switch” you’ve likely heard or read about embedded in them even though we’re still almost two years shy of 2026 – the year when the “kill switch” becomes a government-mandated safety feature.

Such features cannot be designed, tested and installed overnight – or even in a couple of months, usually. It takes several years to design them, integrate them, test them and get them ready for production. In other words, the industry is obliged to anticipate. The battery powered devices that flooded the market over the past going-on-four years did not get designed after the passage of the Green New Deal. They were already years in the works because the industry understood that they’d have to produce such devices in order to comply with the regs that were coming because they were already in force.

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