The Coming Dominance Of Electric Cars (And the Death of Ethanol?)

Electric cars continue to rise. I still see conservatives hating on them, and as I said a few months ago, I still think that hate is increasingly misplaced.

I still see conservatives hating on electric cars for the government subsidies being poured into them. As I said before, that’s a very good reason to hate on them; the arbitrary favor means we’ll never know what better innovations we might be forfeiting. But I was recently reminded of a similar subsidy for good ol’ oil-and-gas cars that doesn’t tend to generate as much outrage: ETHANOL.

The government’s terribly excessive ethanol subsidies and mandates arguably cause far more damage, and – in the classic spirit of overactive government programs contradicting themsleves – every subsidized electric car reduces the demand for subsidized ethanol. Since ethanol is just so terrible, I find that hard not to celebrate.

I still see conservatives hating on electric cars for the energy it takes to charge the batteries, but it still requires comparing the most energy-efficient oil-and-gas cars to the least energy-efficient electricity sources, which is still an increasingly losing argument.

But there’s one losing argument that might be officially lost. I used to see conservatives hating on electric cars for how poorly they were selling (here’s a random diatribe from April). This was a reasonable argument while the facts supported it; the government was spending a lot of money to stimulate demand for these things and the public still didn’t seem to really want it.

But we may be turning a corner. It appears that the public may really want these things after all.

Electric vehicles barely existed in 2010. Last year’s sales tripled from the year before, and this year’s is on pace to double to somewhere around 100,000. Range anxiety? What range anxiety? Remember the alleged chicken-and-egg problem of not enough demand for electric cars to sustain electric charging stations to sustain demand for electric cars? Well somewhere between the market and the subsidies that seems to be solving itself too:

If these trends continue, the old conservative mocking of such-and-such brand only selling so many hundred models in such-and-such quarter will increasingly look like petty tribal banter. It seems like every week now we hear about a new car manufacturer working on adding an electric vehicle to their lineup; apparently it’s not just Elon Musk that’s onto something with Tesla – which, by the way, is getting ready to release its electric SUV.

Does all this mean the government subsidies were worth it? Of course not. But I said it before and I’ll say it again: Conservatives need to stop arguing we should stop subsidizing electric cars because they’re so bad that they don’t do any good, and start arguing we should stop subsidizing electric cars because they’re getting so good that they don’t need the subsidies anyway. And while we’re at it, let’s cut the cord on ethanol. Although, if we don’t, I’m starting to think electric cars might just do it for us.