| How electric vehicles became the latest political football |
There's a new topic for heated political debates around the dinner table this holiday season: electric vehicles.
Likely the largest factor driving this uptick in EV chatter is the 2024 election, where Republican presidential candidates including Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy have lumped the pro-electric vehicle crowd with coastal elites, socialists and other rhetorical targets of the political right.
Ramaswamy said EV incentives championed by President Joe Biden are "using our taxpayer money to subsidize some other guy to feel cool about himself because he doesn't have self-esteem, so he wants to own an electric vehicle."
At the other end of the table are EV proponents who see the technology as an existential issue and argue that the U.S. needs to dramatically slash carbon emissions to slow global warming. Trading fossil fuel vehicles for their electric counterparts is one of the fastest ways to slash greenhouse gas emissions and achieve that goal, they say.
The discussion also encapsulates a host of issues dominating the nation's political conversation: the cost of living, reliance on Chinese manufacturing and cultural factors such as the feasibility of the cross-country road trips that remain an element of American identity.
"There's certainly been a large uptick in the amount of polarization around EVs," said Robert Fisher, domain principal of electrification at SBD Automotive, a research and consulting firm. That polarization "is a very credible, serious threat" to wider adoption.
—Molly Boigon
What you need to know
