Republicans have introduced a bill to eliminate the US EV tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act, with the effect of slowing US progress on EV manufacturing, thus handing the lead in EV manufacturing to China.
How the Inflation Reduction Act helps American health, economy & manufacturing
The Inflation Reduction Act included hundreds of billions of dollars of climate spending, much of which was allocated to EV tax credits, both for personal and commercial vehicles. These credits were an extension and expansion of the $7,500 EV tax credit first introduced in 2008.
But those credits were limited to 200,000 cars per manufacturer, a cap which some manufacturers had hit and more were going to hit. So the Inflation Reduction Act improved access to those credits, removing the cap and setting up a way for the credits to be available upfront at the point of sale, meaning that lower-income buyers can qualify for the credits and get them immediately instead of waiting to file their taxes.
However, it limited the credits in some important ways as well – namely, by ensuring domestic production of electric vehicles in order to qualify, and setting limits on high-income buyers so the credits go to people who need them rather than those who don’t.
It also added a $4,000 used EV tax credit, which is limited to even lower income groups.
These commitments stand to make the US into an EV manufacturing powerhouse – we’re already doing pretty well in EV production, largely led by Tesla. But Chinese EV production and demand are rising rapidly and automakers are waffling in the face of it – so government must be clear that we are committed to building this industry long-term.
The IRA also represents the largest climate commitment made by any country in the world, ever, by dollar value. The hundreds of billions of dollars allocated, largely to EV-related tax credits but also to many other climate programs, are a commitment still unmatched by any other country. As an added bonus, the bill actually brings in more revenue than it costs due to tax reforms targeting wealthy corporate and individual tax cheats.
The new act, fittingly called the “ELITE” Vehicles Act (surely named for republicans’ elite fossil fuel donors which it aims to benefit at the expense of everyone else), aims to eliminate the clean vehicle credit for new, used, and commercial electric vehicles.
The act was introduced by John Barrasso, a republican senator from Wyoming who has received $526,425 from the oil & gas industry in this senate election cycle. Not only that, but Wyoming’s main industries are all tied to oil, putting the lie to the assertion that this act is intended to do anything more than benefit an industry which is responsible for millions of deaths per year.
The act’s advocates say that IRA credits – which are limited to lower-income buyers, particularly the used EV credit – are a giveaway to the wealthy (who don’t qualify for them), and that the credits allow Chinese EVs into the US (which they in fact explicitly disallow through the domestic manufacturing provisions mentioned above).
The actual effect of rolling back these credits would be to make EVs less affordable for Americans, to ensure that those same Americans have more misery forced on them by pollution from the industry that bribes Barrasso, and to discourage American EV manufacturing and consumer uptake which would have the effect of handing over the lead in global EV manufacturing to China.
How Chinese auto benefits and the US is harmed by repealing the EV credit
Chinese EV manufacturing and consumer demand are both currently skyrocketing, and China is rapidly increasing exports of EVs to overseas markets – particularly Europe at the moment.
But Chinese companies would love to sell EVs in the US, and would likely love to see the government tack $7,500 onto the price of US-built EVs, which would only make Chinese-built EVs much more competitive to the pocketbooks of the American consumer. Barrasso’s bill would do exactly that – make Chinese EVs more competitive, and the US auto industry less so.
And since EVs provide local air quality benefits, which stands to reason and which we’ve already seen in areas with high penetration, reducing EV adoption would also make Americans sicker and fill up American hospitals more.
While Barrasso claims that the bill would do the opposite of the things that it would actually do, it’s hard to believe that anyone would be ignorant enough to believe it would actually have the effects he claims. We don’t think that even he thinks that – we think he’s just playing politics, and saying whatever will make his fossil overlords happy.
In short, John Barrasso, author of the act, is lying to protect the industry that bribes him.
So far, the act has only been introduced in the Senate, and has not made it through committee or to a vote. It is sponsored by 19 republican senators, many of whom come from states with significant oil industry presence. If somehow passed, it would almost certainly be vetoed by President Biden, so it is not likely to make it into law under the current government (though that could change in November, which is something to keep in mind when filling out your ballots).
But even if it doesn’t make it into law, it still functions as a way for republicans to show their intent – to cost you money, to harm your health, and to hand the keys of the future of the auto industry over to the country which the US considers its main geopolitical rival.
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Electric bikes are a menace. They go almost as fast as a car (if the car is parking), they’re whisper quiet (which makes them impossible to hear over the podcast playing in your headphones), and worst of all, they’re increasingly ridden by teenagers.
By now, we’ve all seen the headlines. Cities are cracking down. Lawmakers are holding emergency hearings. Parents are demanding bans. “Something must be done,” they cry at local city council meetings before driving back home in 5,000 lb SUVs.
And it’s true – some e-bike riders don’t follow the rules. Some ride too fast. Some are inexperienced. These are real problems that deserve real solutions. But if you think electric bikes are the biggest threat on our roads, just wait until you hear about the slightly more common, slightly more deadly vehicle we’ve been quietly tolerating for the last hundred years.
They’re called cars. And unlike e-bikes, they actually kill people. A lot of people. Over 40,000 people die in car crashes in the US every year. Thousands more are permanently injured. Entire neighborhoods are carved up by high-speed traffic. Kids can’t walk to school safely. But don’t worry – someone saw a teenager run a stop sign on an e-bike, so the real crisis must be those darn batteries on two wheels.
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It’s amazing how worked up people get over a few dozen e-bike crashes when many of us step over a sidewalk memorial for a car crash victim on the way to the grocery store. We’ve been so thoroughly conditioned to accept car violence as part of modern life that the idea of regulating them sounds unthinkable. But regulating e-bikes? Now that’s urgent.
To be clear, this isn’t about ignoring the risks that come with new technology. E-bikes are faster than regular bikes. They’re heavier, too. And they require education and enforcement like any other mode of transport capable of injuring someone, be it the rider or a pedestrian bystander. But the scale of the problem is what matters – and the scale here is completely lopsided. Let’s take New York City, for example. It’s got more e-bike usage than anywhere else in the US, and there are still only an average of two pedestrians per year killed by an e-bike accident. That number for cars? Around 100 per year in NYC. It’s not complicated math – cars are 50x more lethal in the city.
And yet, the person on the e-bike is the one getting the stink eye.
We’ve become so numb to the everyday destruction caused by automobiles that it barely registers anymore. Drunk driving? Distracted driving? Speeding through neighborhoods? It’s just background noise. But the moment someone on an e-bike blows through a stop sign at 16 mph, it’s front-page news and a city council emergency.
Here’s an idea: If we want safer streets, how about we start by addressing the machines that weigh two and a half tons and can hit 100 mph, not the ones that top out at 20 or 28 and are powered by a one-horsepower motor the size of an orange.
But we don’t. Because cars are familiar. Cars are “normal.” Cars are how we built our entire country. And so we turn our attention to the easy target – the new kid on the block. The same old playbook: panic, overreact, and legislate the hell out of it.
Sure, an e-bike might startle you on a sidewalk. But a car can climb that sidewalk and end your life. Which one do we really need to be afraid of?
This isn’t a strawman argument, either. Cars are literally used as mass casualty weapons. It happens all the time. It happened last night in Los Angeles when a disgruntled car driver deliberately plowed into a crowd outside a nightclub, injuring over 30 people. And that wasn’t the only car attack yesterday. Another car rammed into pedestrians on a sidewalk in NYC yesterday morning, leaving multiple pedestrians dead. These aren’t exceptions. This is the normal daily news in the US. It’s depressing, but it bears repeating. This is normal. These are everyday occurrences. Twice a day, yesterday.
While we’re busy debating throttle limits and helmet rules for e-bikes, maybe we should also talk about how tens of millions of drivers still routinely speed, blow stop signs, or scroll Instagram at 45 mph in a school zone. Or how car crashes are the number one killer of teenagers in America. Or we can continue to focus on the kid who forgot to put his foot down at a red light while riding an e-bike to school.
This isn’t satire anymore – it’s just sad. It’s a collective willingness to avoid a real, genuine threat to Americans while simultaneously scapegoating what is, by comparison, a non-threat.
The truth is, electric bikes aren’t the menace. They’re a solution. They’re one of the few glimmers of hope in a transportation system drowning in pollution, congestion, and daily tragedy. They make mobility cheaper, cleaner, and more accessible. And yet we treat them like an invasive species because they disrupt the dominance of the automobile.
It’s time to stop pretending we’re protecting the public from some great e-bike emergency. The real emergency is that we’ve accepted cars killing people as a fair trade for getting to Target five minutes faster.
So yes, let’s make e-biking safer. Let’s educate riders, build better bike infrastructure, and enforce traffic rules fairly. Those are all important things. We absolutely SHOULD invest in training programs to educate teens on safe riding. We absolutely SHOULD cite and fine dangerous riders who could threaten the lives of pedestrians. But let’s stop pretending that e-bikes are the problem when they’re clearly a symptom of a much bigger one.
If you’re really worried about the dangers on our streets, don’t look for the kid on the e-bike. Look for the driver behind them, sipping a latte and going 20 over the speed limit.
Now that’s the menace.
Image note: The first and last images in this article were both AI-generated, and represent everyday car/bike interactions
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The first all-new compact Mopar since the malaise-era K-Car, the Dodge Neon was a revelation. Its fun, approachable face, its “Hi.” marketing campaign, all of it was pitch-perfect for the uncertain times it was launched into. Now, a generation later, Stellantis faces similarly uncertain times – and a new Neon could go a long way towards helping the old Chrysler Co. do what it does best: come back from the brink.
If they wanted to, Stellantis could make it happen tomorrow.
Today, Stellantis is in trouble. Much like it was in the early 90s, the company is hemorrhaging cash, fighting with the unions, and struggling to sell higher-end cars. Today as then, what the company needs is an affordable, simple new car to get people in the showrooms – and in 1994, that new car was the Neon.
In the mid-late 1990s, the Dodge Neon was everywhere. It was affordable, fun to drive, and more or less reliable. It was also economical and fuel-efficient, but it wasn’t that way. It was sold as a fun, smiling face with funky round lights. In R/T and ACR spec, it was sold as an even more fun, smiling face, and offered serious performance chops that still get the grizzled Gen X guys at the SCCA/NASA track days excited.
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Stellantis is selling a car right now, today, that meets all that criteria. It’s the right size, it’s reasonably affordable, and it’s got the right tech – available as both a PHEV and a pure EV – for its time.
Check out the original launch ad for the 1995 Plymouth Neon, below, and tell me they couldn’t do a shot-for-shot remake with a rebadged Ypsilon and make it immediately relevant to car buyers in 1995 in the comments.
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Faraday Future unveiled its upcoming FX Super One MPV on Thursday, which appears to be a rebadged Great Wall Motors Way Gaoshan.
Which brings us to the question: is this how we might see more Chinese EVs make their way to the US?
The EV market in China has grown rapidly in recent years, not just in terms of total sales and revenues for its largest companies, but also in terms of the hundreds of EV companies vying to survive the current highly competitive market there.
But despite massively rising EV sales in the country, EV production is still scaling even faster. This has led to a price war within China due to this glut of cars, and also to Chinese companies seeking more buyers overseas.
BYD has also put out feelers about building a factory in Mexico, but those plans are on pause, ironically because BYD doesn’t want its technology to be stolen by the US (put that one on for some perspective about how far we have fallen behind on EVs, fellow Americans).
But we haven’t yet seen the kind of Chinese EV that the rest of the world is getting – one of those many eye-openingly cheap numbers that could finally bring true affordability to the US market (or bring it back, that is).
That’s due to tariffs, and it’s intentional. There are various arguments given for tariffs’ existence, but they boil down to: the US can’t make cars as cheap as China, and wants to protect its auto industry, and therefore making Chinese EVs more expensive will forestall their entry into the US while we try to get better at making them. I personally find these explanations wanting and consider these tariffs unwise (and they have only gotten more unwise).
But in a world where these tariffs exist, and depending highly on what final form they take, companies will look for ways to minimize their exposure to them and to still bring cars into the US. Much of the EV industry is sourced through China (again, one of the issues the Inflation Reduction Act tried to remedy), so parts will have tariffs on them, in various amounts.
This is where I speculate that the Faraday Future FX Super One could come in. At last night’s unveiling event, it became quite clear that the car is strikingly similar to the Great Wall Motors Wey Gaoshan.
This similarity is not coincidental – Faraday told us that it is working with “a Tier 1 Chinese automotive supplier,” one that we have heard of, to build the FX Super One. That supplier will send stamped bodies to Faraday’s US factory in Hanford, CA, where Faraday will take care of the final assembly.
Faraday didn’t let us take pictures of the interior, even from the outside, but what we saw of the interior on a short ride around the parking lot looked quite similar to the interior of a Wey Gaoshan, just with different controls (for example, the the pull-out fridge in the bottom of this photo is identical to the one I saw in the FX Super One).
Faraday said the interior hasn’t been finalized yet, but also said that it thinks it can have 100-150 cars built by the end of the year. Which is less than half a year away, for a company that has to date built 16 cars (though those it built on its own). So there’s not a lot of time for further changes at this rate.
So, here we have a company that intends to sell a car in the US, much of which originated in China. This seems like it would run afoul of tariffs.
But, depending on how (or if…) these tariffs get edited or finalized, they might be much lower for parts and/or for vehicles that undergo final assembly in the US. So Faraday might be able to get away with importing something very similar to a GWM, doing enough to it here to qualify its way past tariffs, and getting it on the market at a price that doesn’t incorporate the however-many-hundred-percent the US has ridiculously decided to tack on this week.
Faraday also mentioned during its presentations about the FX Super One that it has a US-based software team, which has been at work for some time.
The software in Faraday’s previous vehicle, the FF91, is pretty good, despite being such a low volume vehicle. And it’s gotten much better between the first time I sat in it and when I had a short demo this month of Faraday’s newly-upgraded voice recognition system (now supporting 50+ languages) and swipe gestures for setting volume and HVAC.
We didn’t get to interact with the software on the FX Super One at all, but we would be cautiously optimistic about it based on prior showings.
But more importantly for the purposes of this article, Faraday’s software team is based in the US. And given current US threats to ban any and all Chinese software from vehicles, this too would allow Faraday to swap out some chips and memory cards and make a car perfectly legal from a US perspective.
So it’s possible that Faraday is on to something here, and has found a reasonable way to get Chinese EVs into America, while complying with US law, and while giving the company a much easier way to increase its scale than trying to get numbers up for the slow-growing FF91 project. Faraday does not have the resources to build out mass market manufacturing currently, so this is another option.
Now… this is no $11k Dolphin Seagull, the Wey Gaoshan starts in the mid-$40k range in China, and is considered a luxury model. And here in the US, Faraday is positioning the car as a premium model as well, though hasn’t yet announced pricing or really gotten its messaging straight on whether it’s a mass market vehicle or a VIP/Cadillac Escalade competitor.
But if this is Faraday’s plan, and if the plan works, it could give the US a taste of the EVs that the rest of the world is getting access to, and could show a potential way of getting those cars across the border. There are both pros (competition good, cheaper prices good) and cons (race to the bottom for manufacturing, loss of important American industry) for the US auto market here, so you’ll have to decide which side of that equation you land on, but this could be a harbinger of one way cars from the now-biggest auto exporting country in the world could make their way out into markets that have exhibited hostility to that idea.
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