“All around us, the automakers around the world are engaged in a humiliating retreat the likes of which we haven’t seen since, uh, August of this year in Afghanistan. In this case, however, there’s no Taliban rushing forward to take pictures with swimming pools and Blackhawk helicopters. Rather, the manufacturers are rushing to kneel before the “EV,” a device which has yet to prove itself more than a toy for rich people and city dwellers. There is no clear pathway to a national EV infrastructure, nor is it clear just where the materials for all of the batteries will be sourced. In any event, the vast majority of the batteries and electric motors will come from China, so this spectacular act of cowardice isn’t just stupid, it’s also suicidal. Should the people who are “on the right side of history” have their way, tomorrow’s automotive market will have the worst of all worlds: Cars will be cheaply built from ecologically catastrophic materials by slave labor in a manner calculated to primarily benefit a Communist dictatorship, but they’ll also be massively expensive and about as long-lived as a BIRD scooter. Good times ahead, I tell you. [Emphasis mine]

This slouching towards a particularly moronic take on Gomorrah could be stopped in a heartbeat if the automakers were helmed by people with courage, vision, and a willingness to work together. They could declare, as a group, that they have no interest in fulfilling any EV mandates, whether state-based or national, and that any governmental entity that published such a mandate would have to figure out a way to keep going on the cars they have now, like Cuba in 2010. We’ve seen this coordinated behavior out of American corporations for any number of social-justice goals in the past few years—but they won’t do it to ensure their own survival. More precisely, they won’t do it to ensure the survival of their employees, because it’s obvious that all the CEOs will receive a golden handshake on the way out the door of whatever EV-policy has to be unwound by their successors once the realities of supply and demand set in. To wit: There’s not enough supply of the batteries, and there’s statistically zero demand for the cars.”