Ford Scraps Major Electric Vehicle Plan, Declares 'We Will Pivot'
Have you ever noticed that government officials never seem to pay the price for their wretched policies?
The same holds true for the affluent liberals whose terrible ideas often drive those policies.
According to the Wall Street Journal, executives at the Ford Motor Company have decided to “pivot” away from their electric vehicle business, which they project will cost the company around $5 billion this year.
As we have seen with other EV manufacturers, numbers that bad often entail job losses. Unfortunately, terrible ideas can have consequences for the workers who did not implement them.
In this case, Ford Chief Financial Officer John Lawler cited one major factor shaping the company’s decision to delay the launch of new EV vehicles or scrap them altogether.
“Based on where the market is and where the customer is, we will pivot and adjust and make those tough decisions,” Lawlar said.
Another company executive has also bemoaned stiff competition from the Chinese EV industry.
“We believe that the fitness of the Chinese in EVs will eventually wash over our entire industry in all regions,” Ford Chief Executive Jim Farley told analysts last month.
Still domestic demand poses the biggest problem. According to the WSJ, “consumer interest in EVs has waned after a burst of enthusiasm.”
For instance, the sales growth figure for fully electric vehicles has plummeted from near 50 percent in 2023 to only 6.8 percent in the first half of 2024.
We should note, of course, that conservatives do not object to electric vehicles themselves.
After all, free-speech champion Elon Musk has built part of his massive fortune through the EV company Tesla. And we wish him continued success.
In fact, according to the WSJ, Ford has entrusted former Tesla executive Alan Clarke with the production of a new electric midsize pickup. We wish him well, too.
Aside from reliability concerns, the problem with EVs stems from their connection to what author Rob Henderson called “luxury beliefs.”
As the name suggests, luxury beliefs tend to percolate in the minds of those who have social and economic advantages. In myriad ways, those beliefs can both reflect and confer status.
For instance, purchasing an EV for the sake of fighting climate change amounts to a luxury belief. Billions of people around the world cannot afford to make such a purchase, but those who can afford it may thereby indulge their fantasies of saving the planet.
For this reason, some of America’s most affluent communities have moved from diesel to electric buses. Predictably, the results have proven disastrous.
To each their own, however, as long as the luxury beliefs do not trample the rights of others.
Unfortunately, those same affluent liberals have also proven most willing to fight climate change through authoritarian remedies.
With that in mind, President Joe Biden’s tyrannical administration turned to EV mandates.
Thus, as conservatives and anti-establishment populists, we face a terrible choice.
On one hand, we root for innovators and wish the best for American workers.
Likewise, because we hate authoritarianism, we cheer every failed government mandate.
On the other hand, we know that the only people likely to suffer from failed government policies and affluent liberals’ idiotic ideas are the workers who had nothing to do with either of them.
Thus, one solution presents itself: rid our government of this corrupt establishment and free public policy from affluent liberals’ ideas.
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