By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
One of Joe Biden’s notable digressions when getting
deposed by Special Counsel Robert Hur was about driving his beloved 1967
Corvette Stingray convertible.
Which wasn’t surprising — the president genuinely loves
his car. And why not? It’s a thing of beauty and, for its time, it was a
splendid feat of engineering.
A paradox of the Biden administration is that the
old-school car enthusiast is — in the name of the future and of saving the
planet — waging a war on the internal-combustion-engine cars that he so admires
and that have helped define American life over the past 100 years.
The internal-combustion-engine automobile ranks as one of
the modern world’s most transformative innovations. Prior to the advent of
trains, travel by land was an absolute misery, even for the wealthy and
privileged. Then, the car, in effect, took the train and put it in the hands of
individuals.
It was a revolutionary leap ahead for personal freedom
and mobility. It changed where we live (catalyzing the growth of the suburbs)
and how we work (making it easier to commute). It obviously made it possible to
go more places and gave rise to new types of businesses catering to a newly
footloose population, including motels and fast-food restaurants. It knit the
country together via a road network that facilitated untold economic activity
and created the auto-manufacturing industry, as well as industries providing
parts and fuel for cars.
To an unusual extent, people feel bonded to their cars.
There are car enthusiasts, but not enthusiasts for other 20th-century
implements that changed our way of life. No one speaks wistfully of the
refrigerator they owned 40 years ago, or reads fan magazines devoted to
plumbing. Even for consumers who aren’t devotees of cars, what to buy is an
intensely personal choice; this is a why there is a dizzying array of brands
offering an immense range of choices.
The Biden administration push to get people into
electrical vehicles is running directly into the chief advantage of
internal-combustion-engine cars, which is the sheer convenience.
One area of resistance to electric vehicles is
“range anxiety,” or the fear that an electric vehicle will run out of its
charge. That’s often exaggerated; electric cars have acquired more range now,
and most people aren’t driving 300 miles in a single trip. Nevertheless, there
are reasonable concerns about the ability to find a charging station and
how long it will take to recharge the vehicle compared to filling up at a gas
station.
Gas stations already exist (about 145,000 of them with a
million gas pumps), and no one had to subsidize their creation. They are
convenient, cost-effective, and make economic sense.
Making charging stations available on a comparable scale
will present formidable obstacles. As Mark Mills of the National Center for
Energy Analytics points out in a paper on electric cars, transporting the large
amounts of energy at the necessary scale using electric energy via wires and
transformers is much more expensive than doing it with oil via pipelines and
tanks. Installing the super-chargers necessary to make charging somewhat rapid
— but still slower than gassing up — will require “a grid power demand
comparable to a small town or steel mill.”
This isn’t to say electric cars aren’t attractive to some
consumers, especially those with their own garages for overnight charging and
with the resources to spend on a fun, interesting second or third car. Tesla
has made major inroads in the upscale category. Good for them. More choice is
better.
An all-electric-car future is very far off, though, and
internal-combustion-engine automobiles aren’t embarrassing artifacts of the
past. Their cost, convenience, reliability, and size — more than half of
automobiles sold in the U.S. are SUVs — make them hugely appealing. They are
also getting constant upgrades. According to Mills, since 1975, “the average
automobile today has 100 more horsepower, weighs 1,000 pounds more, and has
doubled in fuel efficiency.”
Joe Biden’s corvette is now an antique, but the basic
technology is as important, and incredibly user-friendly, as ever.
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