Here Come the Electric Rednecks

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, May 27, 2021

 

With the introduction of Ford’s new battery-powered version of its popular F-150 pickup truck, the electric vehicle has reached an important milestone for any great American consumer product: Formerly a fetishized item of conspicuous consumption for the high-management caste, the EV is now, finally and unquestionably, déclassé.

 

Hide the liquor and lock up your DC fast charger — here come the electric rednecks.

 

It probably was already in the cards — Elon Musk’s physical and spiritual relocation to Texas bruised some tender feelings in California. But Tesla still enjoys a great deal of goodwill, while Ford is . . . so 20th century. Ford belongs to a time of smaller dreams: If you want to know who is really packing the heat on the great American scene a.d. 2021, consider that Elon Musk could, on a good day, personally buy the Ford Motor Company three times over, even though Ford sells about twelve times as many vehicles a year as Tesla, which still loses money on its automobile business — its profits in the first quarter of 2021 came from Bitcoin investments and from selling emissions credits.

 

Ford sells boatloads of trucks, but it gets no pop-culture love: The F-Series truck in its familiar form may be a modern design masterpiece up there with the Eames lounge chair and the Case Study houses, and the new all-electric version offers a fearsome demonstration of what a truly motivated multinational corporation can make available for less than $40,000, but it is, nonetheless, a Ford — which makes it a kind of ancient artifact even as it rolls new off the assembly line.

 

Joe Biden loves them.

 

But a slick car is a very Baby Boomer and Generation X status symbol. The Millennial status symbol is living in a place where you don’t need a car, where you can pick up your plant-based burgers from an independently owned local shop staffed by Amish-looking Bryn Mawr graduates. And so you can expect the metropolitan turn against the F-150 Lightning to be . . . fast and furious, if you’ll forgive the reference to the very successful fossil-fuel-fed movie franchise in which the original F-150 Light­ning (a gasoline-powered hot rod) once played a starring role.

 

Writing in Slate, Henry Grabar opens up what is sure to be the leading criticism of the F-150 Lightning and others like it: It is heavy, as EVs tend to be, because those batteries weigh a ton — a nonmetaphorical, literal ton in the case of the Ford truck, which comes with a basic battery pack that weighs in at 1,800 pounds and offers an extended-range battery that is even heavier. The new F-150 Lightning, Grabar writes, “will wear down roads, eat into air-pollution improvements, and harm whoever is unfortunate enough to get in the way.”

 

Never mind that getting run over by a regular truck is not exactly breakfast in bed; Grabar is correct that weight does matter a great deal from an environmental point of view, because — and here is something worth knowing that our greenie-weenie friends rarely mention — most of the air pollution associated with cars and trucks does not come from burning gasoline or diesel.

 

For legal and public-relations reasons, environmentalists have for years been describing greenhouse-gas emissions as “air pollution,” by which they mostly mean carbon dioxide, i.e., the stuff you exhale when you breathe. But genuine pollution — the stuff that makes the air around you unpleasant or un­healthy to breathe — is a largely localized phenomenon, and it mostly is caused by friction: tires on pavement throwing up clouds of toxic dust, brakes throwing off particles of pads (once made of asbestos), that sort of thing. Heavier cars put more stress on their tires and on the blacktop, and slowing them down takes more force from the brakes. If every gasoline-powered car and diesel-powered truck in the world were replaced by an electric alternative tomorrow, then greenhouse-gas emissions would, in theory and barring any other changes, decline by something like 8 percent. (According to the World Resources Institute, transportation as a whole is responsible for about 11 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions, and cars and trucks account for about three-fourths of that 11 percent, the rest being airplanes, ships, etc.) That would be a real improvement from a climate-change point of view, but local air pollution would get worse — possibly much worse — especially near highways.

 

While we are ready to move heaven and earth to address climate change, the innovation on roadside pollution has moved at a statelier pace: If you’ve ever seen a truck that appears to be salting a road when there’s no winter weather expected, it probably was applying a surface treatment meant to reduce road dust, something we’ve been doing since the 1930s.

 

Using electricity to move people and goods is not a new idea, either. Way back in 1837, Robert Davidson’s “Galvani,” a battery-powered locomotive, was towing more weight than the new Ford F-150 Lightning is rated for. William Morrison’s patented electric carriage was the star of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. In the early 1900s, you could hail an electric cab in New York City, Boston, or Philadelphia. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford built a prototype electric car. Ransom Eli Olds actually sold a few. Both General Electric and Ford showed electric prototypes in 1967, and both argued that everything was ready to go except battery technology.

 

And things stagnated.

 

Elon Musk today is to high-tech entrepreneurship what Newt Gingrich once was to politics: He has 10,000 ideas a day, two of which are absolutely brilliant and the rest of which are absolutely mad — and he himself has no idea which is which. But he had two insights for Tesla that really changed the course of automotive history: The first was that the suits were right back in ’67 — electric cars are, at heart, a battery problem and a battery business — nerd stuff. The second — and key — insight was that you needed the cool kids on your side if you wanted to raise the capital that the nerds needed to solve the battery problem.

 

Electric cars before Tesla were acts of contrition on four wheels (or, ye gods, on three). They were penance. The Honda EV-Plus, the General Motors EV1 — these were cars that only a bureaucrat could love, cars for people who really and truly hate cars, birthed in the same era that gave us Arianna Huffington’s war on the SUV. Even Ford’s own earlier attempt at an electric truck, the Ranger EV, discontinued 20 years ago, was about as exciting to operate as a vacuum cleaner. In contrast, the first Tesla model, the Roadster, was a repurposed Lotus Elise. It had an open top and went from zero to 60 faster than a Corvette. It wasn’t a way for utility companies and municipal governments to improve their average fuel-economy numbers — it was cool.

 

Tony Stark had a Tesla Roadster.

 

And so the environmental movement was roused. American environmentalists have never been particularly good at saving the planet and all that sort of thing, but they are world-beaters when it comes to subsidizing the household consumption of upper-middle-class Americans of the sort who support environmental organizations. And soon Silicon Valley worthies were buying $100,000 sports cars with tax credits and indirect subsidies paid for by less affluent schmucks across the fruited plain. Scrupulously not talked about is the fact that the real game-changer in owning an EV isn’t environmental but social: When it is time to top it up, you plug it in at home, in your garage, rather than running a gauntlet of hobos down at the local 7-Eleven. It’s one more part of coastal progressives’ effort to build a gated community that none of them ever has to leave — or admit that they live in.

 

Because of the way the tax credit is structured, it is no longer available to those buying a new Tesla. But it will take $7,500 off a new electric Ford, something that surely has influenced the development of not only the F-150 Lightning but also the all-electric Mustang Mach-E, and of vehicles such as the Lincoln Aviator Grand Touring, a plug-in hybrid that is eligible for a slightly smaller subsidy.

 

The Ford ethos is not the Tesla ethos. The F-150 Lightning will offer up to eleven AC outlets for plugging in power tools, and Ford boasts that its battery pack can power a home for three days in the event of an extended blackout — something of interest in Texas, the heart of pickup country, where winter storms earlier this year left millions without power. At some point, the left-wing doomsday environmentalist bumps into the right-wing Doomsday prepper, and the F-150 might turn out to be that point. “The Electric Vehicle of Dystopia,” Wired calls it.

 

Naturally, there is snootery afoot. These trucks are “hefty, dangerous vehicles,” charges Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic. “The new Ford F-150 Lightning is not the electric vehicle we’ve been waiting for,” writes Vox, where Umair Irfan recommends instead “not driving at all.” On our national course of moral improvement, Irfan writes, “electric trucks can be part of the journey, but they’re not the destination.” The new Ford is a truck pitched at people who are “not usually the kind of consumers who worry about their carbon footprints,” Michael Grunwald sniffs in Politico, a truck that might “appeal to the conservative/Republican/rural team of Fox News and country music and Chik-Fil-A” and fool them into exhibiting a little more green virtue as such virtue is understood by people who don’t even know how to spell “Chick-fil-A.” Meanwhile, the electric rednecks are whooping it up on their new electric Harley-Davidsons with $2,500 in extra beer money in the pockets of their surely not plant-based leather jackets thanks to EV subsidies. Virtue, baby!

 

Just wait until the new electric Hummer hits the market next year.