The leading advocates of mandatory electrification evince a profound hostility toward cars and the people who like them.
The leading advocates of mandatory electrification evince a profound hostility toward cars and the people who like them.
L ike many Americans, I have all manner of problems with the Biden administration’s ongoing attempt to coerce us into electric vehicles over the next decade. I object to the federal government presuming that its role in our lives includes telling us what we may drive; I am unpersuaded that the law the White House is using accords Washington, D.C., the power to remake the car industry; and I am bothered by the false assumption that, because upper-middle-class people seem to like Teslas, the average citizen is yearning for his Ford Explorer or Toyota Corolla to be converted into a glorified golf cart. But, in addition to all of these more reasoned explanations for my opposition, I have another: I like cars.
Does that seem irrelevant to this debate? If it does, it shouldn’t. This is a free country, and one of the good things about free countries is that the people who live in them are allowed to decide how they want to live without apologizing for it. America is a complicated place, and it can be hard to put one’s finger on exactly what makes America so American, but, for me at least, one of the things that springs to mind when I try is that it is full of gasoline-powered cars. It is true that, if those cars went away, America would not instantly perish, but that is also true of baseball and jazz and hamburgers and the Rocky Mountains and rollercoasters and the Statue of Liberty, and that it is true is not an argument in favor of rapidly phasing those things out either. Properly understood, conservatism consists of a great deal more than reaction, but, within reason, there is a place for reaction within it. I like America, and because I like America, I do not wish to see America as it is currently constituted go away. Petrol engines are part of America. I wish to keep them.
I do not believe that I am alone in this. Indeed, it is telling that, during his chat with Robert Hur, the primary architect of our glorious EV future, President Joe Biden, wanted so badly to talk about his 1967 Corvette Stingray that he resorted to making engine noises in the interview room. The setting aside, most of us understand this instinct. Automobiles make noises, and those noises are pleasing to us. At the most elementary level, they provide feedback that makes us feel at one with the vehicle; at a more exotic level, they help us to appreciate the engineering brilliance that has gone into the ride. Think about how many movies we make about high-end cars — Ferrari, Days of Thunder, Talladega Nights — and how instrumental the sounds are to their success. There is something visceral and appealing and real about gasoline engines that excites onlookers. When playing pretend, little kids say “vroom-vroom,” rising up through each note and then dropping down as they feign the changing of gears. Moving at high speed in the manner that we now do is unnatural, and the roar of the car keeps us aware of that. To take it away is to sterilize that experience in a way that consumers tend not to like.
For some, however, that sterilization seems to be the point. I am by no means a Luddite or a technophobe — in fact, the opposite — but I am also not blind, and I have detected in the leading advocates of mandatory electrification a profound hostility toward cars and toward the people who like them. Nobody involved in this project much cares that a great culture will be lost if the EV brigade gets its way, because nobody involved in this project values that culture in the slightest. For some, it is an indulgence that pales in comparison to the importance of fighting climate change. For others, it represents antediluvian resistance to the necessary commodification of travel. Look at a 1965 Ford Mustang, and then look at the aesthetic abortion that is the EV that is now called the “Ford Mustang,” and you will see what I mean. One of them is a work of love; the other is an anodyne computer with wheels. If our self-appointed arbiters of taste get their own way, that shift will be universal.
When pressed, the Biden administration insists that it is not banning petroleum cars. But this — in the long run — is a lie. The most recent federal edict demands that, by 2032, 69 percent of all new cars must be either entirely electric or plug-in hybrids or similarly green, but, of course, there is nothing special about that number. That a 31 percent market share would help to destroy the petroleum-car industry is both obvious and deliberate, but, even if it were not, the next stage would involve the raising of that threshold to 75, and then 85, and then 95, and then . . . kaput. Contrary to the bleating of the slippery-slope skeptics, “We already do X” is one of the most powerful rhetorical devices in modern political life. If Biden’s rules go into effect, the march toward prohibition will be ineluctable, and everyone involved with their promulgation knows it. In resisting, there will be time for objections that are practical and objections that are legal and objections that are rooted in a deep-seated discomfort with the micromanagement of private life, but, before we get to that, I wanted to speak up for an underappreciated virtue in the realm of regulatory policy: fun. I like gasoline-powered cars, and you’ll take my ability to buy them at will from my cold, oil-stained hands.