The collapse of the climate scold, "green energy" agenda, sure looks to be growing nearer. The Trump administration has gone in for coal and drill, baby, drill. Reality has a way of asserting itself, and unreliable, low-density energy sources will always lose, in the end, to a reliable, high-density source.
The same applies to automobiles. American car companies are abandoning their electric vehicle (EV) lines - because they aren't selling. Stellantis, the parent company of Chrysler, is the latest to change course. They recently released information that the company was writing down $26 billion - and they made an interesting statement in support of the move.
An editorial over at Issues & Insights has details.
When Stellantis last week announced it was writing down $26 billion, the CEO of the car company that now owns Chrysler, Antonio Filosa, said it was “part of a decisive process we started in 2025 to once again make our customers and their preferences our guiding star.”
Which begs the question: What was Stellantis’ guiding star before if not its own customers?
For that matter, who or what has been guiding General Motors (which announced a $7.6 billion writedown last month), Ford ($19.5 billion), and other automakers that’ve written down a total of $140 billion in just the past three years?
Anyone who has followed the auto industry over the past decade knows the answer. All of these losses are the result of automakers chasing the phantom known as “zero emission” cars.
It was doomed to fail from the beginning.
Oh, there is and always was a market for these things. Our youngest daughter has a Ford Fusion hybrid, which she uses primarily for a 5-mile commute to and from work. It's a plug-in hybrid, which means she buys gasoline pretty much on every other leap year. (OK, that may be a slight exaggeration.) For people like her, EVs and hybrids can be a pretty decent deal.
And that's what it should be - a choice, made by the consumer, not the government; no subsidies, direct or indirect; no governmental thumb on the scale. If there's a market, a free, open market for these cars, then someone will build them.
But the glowing promises made by the car-makers are now evaporating, just like the other claims of the climate scolds. EVs are the future, they claimed, just as they claimed the Earth was about to actually catch fire (OK, that may be another slight exaggeration) if we didn't immediately surrender our comfortable, modern lifestyles.
They were, of course, wrong.
Just five years ago, GM promised to go all-electric by 2035, and just two years ago, its chief executive, Mary Barra, said “we believe in an all-electric future.” Honda, Volvo, Ford, and others laid out plans to be 100% “zero emission” within two decades.
It was all supported by Big Environment, which brayed that EVs were the only way to save the planet from “climate change.”
But none of it worked out as planned.
Of course it didn't. People learned. And the facts came out. No moving vehicle, after all, is really "emission-free." An electric vehicle just moves the emissions to another source, and that source is still almost certainly a coal or natural-gas-fueled power plant.
No, these things were an expensive boondoggle, at least on the scale that the climate scolds and liberal politicians tried to force on us.
And keep in mind that the $140 billion in combined auto industry losses is just the tip of the iceberg. Those are just the costs incurred by shareholders and employees of these companies.
Taxpayers have forked over hundreds of billions in federal and state tax dollars in subsidies that were designed to “kick start” the EV car market. They paid thousands toward the cost of each EV sold. They paid companies to build battery factories. They paid for charging stations.
Subsidies, direct and indirect, were responsible for a significant portion of the EV sales. President Trump is de-subsidizing all of this horse squeeze, and it's no surprise that the bottom is falling out of the market.
Read More: Ford Now Dropping All-Electric F-150 Lightning Amid $13B EV Losses.
Markets are frequently messy. Look at the United States alone: Every day, millions of people make trillions of economic decisions, ranging from buying a candy bar to buying a company. Government shouldn't - mustn't - be picking winners and losers.
Here’s all this in a nutshell: When government meddles in the economy, the economy always ends up screwed up. That's what the various levels of government, with subsidies direct and indirect, have done to the EV market.
The Constitution prohibits the federal government from interfering with markets - it's not an enumerated power of the federal government, and hence, under the Tenth Amendment, is prohibited from doing so. Everything else is interference. And meddling in markets, picking winners and losers by diktat, is massive interference. When they do, you get situations like this.
Left on their own, markets usually get things right. The same would apply to the EV market. Some people will choose them without the government addling things with a long-handled spoon. That's how it should work. That's the only way it will always work.
