MORNING RANT: The EV De-Transition Accelerates as Volkswagen Permanently Cancels EV Production in the U.S.

It was exactly five years ago this week that I published my first anti-EV piece at the Ace of Spades blog. I mocked Volkswagen for putting out a press release to celebrate its new ID.4 electric vehicle being able to drive from New York to Sacramento in just 18 days. I wrote, “Phileas Fogg of ‘Around The World In 80 Days’ might be impressed. I’m not. This isn’t 1872. Heck, the Pony Express was able to get mail from Missouri to Sacramento in only 10 days. In 1860. On horseback. But Volkswagen is very excited about their electric cars. With 21st Century technology they are able to make what was once a 4-day drive with quick and easily-available refueling, into a multi-week ordeal where you must obsess about fuel availability.”

I’ve followed Volkswagen’s EV debacle from a front-row seat here in Tennessee. VW, along with Ford, took the bait as hard as any legacy auto manufacturer during peak-EV hype. Both announced all-new Tennessee EV plants to much fanfare in the late ‘teens and early ‘20s. Both of them built costly new plants, with much Tennessee taxpayer assistance. And both are now left with big, empty plants that do not produce EVs.

Ford officially killed its flagship EV, the F150 Conflagration Lightning pickup truck, a few months ago. And now, Volkswagen just followed suit, killing off U.S. production of its flagship ID.4. Volkswagen fully expected this to be its new mass-market vehicle in the tradition of the Beetle and the Golf. By the time the ID.4 was killed off, it was the slowest selling car in the United States. ID.4 sales are averaging about 100 units per month right now. VW anticipated initial demand of 7,000 units per month, and only growing from there.

Five years ago, an all-EV future was not even considered a hypothesis by most journalists and politicians (including too many Republicans.) They considered it a fait accompli. Their religious fervor in service to the Church of Climate, along with their zeal to stamp out personal liberty, had many people thinking the only question was the timeline to 100% EVs. But some of us chose to fight back, and conservative media played a huge role. But most importantly, conservative consumers came to understand that not buying an EV was an important political act, no matter how much an EV might be subsidized by tax dollars or discounted by the auto manufacturer.

I’m going to make a quick Civil War analogy to the war we have fought against the “EV transition.” The defunding of EV mandates in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act along with the removal of emissions penalties by Lee Zeldin’s EPA were like Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Momentum was reversed, and the new task for the EV army was defensive - to hold out and hold on until the tide turned again. The tide never turned back. When first Ford threw in the towel on EVs, and then Volkswagen followed, it was like the fall of Atlanta and Richmond. Team EV is in a state of total collapse. Perhaps Rivian’s impending cessation of operations will be Appomattox for electric vehicles.

I often hear it said that legacy auto manufacturers had no choice but to try to go all-EV due to government mandates. That is not true. While Joe Biden and his EPA were certainly trying to use the coercive power of government to steer auto manufacturers in that direction, Ford and VW announced their grand EV strategies well before Biden tried to tighten the screws further on gas vehicles. But several mass-market manufacturers resisted. Honda and Toyota received blistering criticism from the left-wing auto media for going slow with EVs, continuing instead to focus on traditional internal combustion vehicles and gas-hybrids instead. The CEOs of Ford and VW, by contrast, were worshipful disciples of Klaus Schwab. They wanted to lead the EV transition. In 2019, VW’s CEO, Herbert Diess, promised an all-electric future for VW, but having nearly destroyed the company in service to his eco-leftist belief system, he was forced out in 2022. Inexplicably, Ford’s destructor, Jim Farley, is still its CEO.

One way I can tell that the morale of Team EV is in shambles is that my hate mail from EV fanboys has evaporated. I’m starting to miss those diatribes instructing me to “educate yourself” on the superiority of EVs, and advising me that they’ll be laughing when I have no choice but to buy an EV.

Another criticism I often hear is that those of us fighting to defeat the EV transition are going to cost a lot of jobs throughout the “electric vehicle belt” in Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina. I don’t care. Those were always make-believe jobs in service to a socialist economic model. It required that money be redistributed from taxpayers to government-favored corporations whose business models rely on government subsidization. In addition, the jobs to be created at new EV plants were to be offset by killing-off jobs at legacy auto manufacturers. It was at best a zero-sum game.

But I’ll go even further and state that if a manufacturer is engaged in an evil enterprise, those jobs should not exist. If Volkswagen announced that it was building a new foundry in my town to produce slave shackles, I would oppose it. Once built, I would advocate for it to fail, even though it might cost some people their jobs. The government-funded EV transition was the flagship project to deny people their basic liberties, including freedom of movement. It was also part of a plan to kill off the jobs and wealth-creation of the petroleum industry. Given a trade-off between a job at a Rivian plant or a job in the oil patch, I’ll side with keeping the roughneck employed.

The failure of Ford’s and Volkswagen’s electric vehicle ventures is something to celebrate. Ideally, they’ll both successfully repurpose their EV factories now to build vehicles that real-world consumers want to buy.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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