Senate Republicans cannot force the U.S. Postal Service to scrap thousands of electric vehicles and charging equipment in a massive tax and budget bill, the Senate parliamentarian said late on Sunday.
The U.S. Postal Service currently has 7,200 electric vehicles, made up of Ford e-Transit vehicles and specially built Next Generation Delivery Vehicles built by Oshkosh Defense.
USPS warned on June 13 that scrapping the electric vehicles would cost it $1.5 billion, including $1 billion to replace its current fleet of EVs and $500 million in EV infrastructure rendered useless and “seriously cripple our ability to replace an aging and obsolete delivery fleet.”
Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, whose role is to ensure lawmakers follow proper legislative procedure, said a provision to force the sale could not be approved via a simple majority vote in the Republican-controlled chamber and will instead need a 60-vote supermajority, according to Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee.
I’ll never understand how the EV thing became a political issue. I mean I understand how politicians can exploit it as one, but I don’t understand how voters came to see this as a political issue.
These are American made EVs that will lower costs on maintenance and therefore on deliveries why the hell would anyone want to stop this?
Even if you look at it from the angle of protecting the oil, natural gas and coal industry it doesn’t make sense because the energy used to charge cars is generated from those sources.
I think at first it was viewed as a threat by both the Domestic Auto Industry including the UAW. Tesla was selling an increasing number of vehicles, which is what the Big 3 cared about, and they weren’t a Union Shop, which is what the UAW cared about. So they fought the rise of EVs out of self-protection.
It’s really the oil industry fighting it now because it’s an existential threat. The United States generates almost zero electricity from oil, to them it’s all about fuel. Coal has been in steep decline for two decades and as an industry its nearly done. They were replaced by the Natural Gas folks for electricity generation and you won’t find many NG folks who are actually against EVs. When you do it’s because their parent company is an Oil Company.
Toss in the rise of China as the current best source for EV batteries and the threat that Chinese companies like BYD present to the Big 3 and its easy to see why things are still all knotted up.
This is great context too, it’s easy to forget that until recently only Tesla made EVs.
I remember also that Tesla said that all their designs would be open source. Whatever happened to that?
Tesla is the Apple equivalent to the car world. They were not the only ones making EVs, they just made EVs popular and more widely accepted.
I don’t remember anything about all their designs being open source but they DID open source(*) the Roadster.
They also open sourced(*) their charging connector which has now become an increasingly used standard called NACS.
I’m putting that asterisks by open source because that’s only sorta-kinda what they did. More precisely they made the Roadster and TCC royalty free to use and released all of the engineering documents necessary to use & recreate them.
What you’re probably remembering is their Patent Pledge from 2014. At this point Tesla holds nearly 1,200 patents worldwide so that Patent Pledge isn’t a small thing. They’re surely not going to make all of their vehicle designs open source but they do seem to be holding to their Patent Pledge and its underlying “Open Innovation Framework”.
This doesn’t mean Musk or his companies are good, it’s just a review of the facts.
Because oil money, and it’s tied to environmentalism.
Jokes on them, environmentalists don’t even like EVs these days.
Seriously about the only argument in favor of EVs that is not true is that they are cleaner. The air in the cities might be cleaner but at a net level they still produce ungodly amounts of pollution due to lihium mining.
Why spend the money to change, when they could just buy a congressman?
The problem is that they’ve started changing and to un-change it would waste a shitload of money
Or if you look at it from a jobs perspective, a lot of those jobs are still in the US (until you shut them down): do you really want to not only not have those jobs but also not have that industry?
Or if you look at it as a gadget for the well off …. You could decide to just not spend your own money there
There’s really no point in opposing EVs except if you think it will win you elections for some reason because your voters think EVs are woke or some shit.
I can understand opposition to EV mandates like in California because it is heavy handed market intervention. But this? This is like forcing federal agencies to continue doing things on pen and paper instead of computers.
Ok But even then …… I live in a state that elected to follow CARB rules and everyone I know realizes EVs are inevitable and wishes we’d transition faster. Im probably in an echo chamber like everyone else, but the states that were moving most aggressively were also the states that predominantly want to move aggressively…… and vote blue.
It could be one reason we were only 61% blue instead of 65% as in 2020, but there’s really no significant reactionary politics here
My brothers live in purple states, following EPA standards, and resistance to EVs is pretty solid. Why do they care if they’re not even following the more aggressive standards? If they think it’s heavy handed or wastes money, feel free to laugh at “owning the libs” and vote in what you think is your best interest. That’s what I don’t get: not only how it turned political but how are people so strongly against something that doesn’t affect them?
Yeah no I agree but at a federal level, especially with the outsized economical power California has, you would have to look at if a regulation that they pass could have shockwaves that could be problematic in other states. Like let’s say the top 5 economies in the US decide that ICE engines are banned so now the car manufacturers decide that they can no longer sustain their ICE manufacturing anymore and will only sell EVs. What happens to states that do not have the infrastructure to support only EVs on their roads? So that’s why I say that at a rational level I can understand opposition to that sort of lawmaking.
But actively stopping any organization from adopting a technology that is objectively superior is just stupid. It’s actually anathema to free market capitalism.