Want to End the EV Culture Wars? Make EVs Affordable.
Culture warriors and industry lobbyists have turned electric vehicles into a proxy battle for deeper anxieties about class, control, and who might be left behind in a green economy. But most people just want a car they can afford.
The cultural and political war over electric vehicles is a distraction that elites are all too happy to foment. Cheaper vehicles would allow us all to move on to more pressing concerns. (Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images)
As Donald Trump pushes to dismantle electric vehicle (EV) incentives and roll back California’s EV mandate, the struggle over what powers personal transportation has become both an economic and cultural war. American automakers are pulling back from earlier commitments to electrification, betting that the end of California’s trendsetting mandate will slow the transition throughout the country and relieve them of regulatory pressure.
Trump is promising that the repeal of the California mandate will reinvigorate the American auto industry, particularly when paired with his tariff program. The tariff program, after all, is a cornerstone of MAGA efforts to bring manufacturing back to the country after decades of globalization-friendly policies that prioritized the free flow of goods and services across borders and offshoring jobs while the United States deindustrialized.
In Canada, automakers are taking a similar line. Last spring, CEOs sent a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney demanding the new government repeal Canada’s EV mandate. “If the mandate is not urgently repealed,” they warned, “it will inflict serious damage on automakers, the dealership network, and the hundreds of thousands of Canadians employed in the sector.” The Canadian auto industry is already under pressure — from Trump’s proposed steel and aluminum tariffs, now set at 50 percent, to persistent uncertainty in a deeply integrated North American supply chain. Ottawa’s EV mandate could soon become another bargaining chip in cross-border negotiations, like defense spending, border security, and the now-defunct digital services tax.
A Cross-Border EV Culture War
Predictably, EV sales are down in Canada and the rate of growth in the United States has slowed. The Canadian case is playing out as a toned-down version of the American one, with the Conservatives preparing to attack mandates and raising familiar concerns about jobs and manufacturing. In the face of these pressures, the Liberal government may cave, which would be a mistake. Much of the resistance to scaling up EVs stems from the fact that the fossil fuel industry and automakers alike are uninterested in being told what to do and have structural interests in maintaining the status quo. But the state has every right to set standards and expectations in line with collective goals.
As things stand, repealing mandates and ending subsidies will slow the development of EV technology and infrastructure, which will slow consumer uptake. For some EV skeptics, the issue runs deeper than range anxiety. Their objections point to thorny debates over urban design, car culture, and whether personal transportation will continue to loom large in North America for a long time to come. Add to that the real environmental, labor, and human rights concerns tied to EV production, especially the mining practices involved, and the picture grows more complex. These are very real concerns that ought to be tackled concurrently, but if we’re putting cars on the road, we need to also grapple with the immediate reality of what internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles mean for our present and our future.
Assuming we’re stuck with personal car culture for the time being, we have a very real problem to solve on the roads. ICE vehicles contribute to air pollution that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, and accelerate climate change, which threatens upheaval, destruction, and death at an even greater scale. Recent analysis finds that Canada’s EV mandate on light duty vehicles alone would save eleven thousand lives and $90 billion in costs related to health and health care over a quarter century. Assume a similar scale in the United States, with roughly ten times the population, and we’re talking hundreds of thousands of lives and the better part of a trillion dollars — not to mention various quality-of-life improvements.
Taken together, these tensions form the basis of a sprawling, multifaceted struggle — some of it cynical, some driven by profit, some by public good. But the real struggle will play out between self-interested capitalists intent on maximizing returns and culture warriors who treat EVs as proxies in a broader conflict: the righteous, enviro-maxxing behaviors of the enlightened against the atavistic urges of flyover country. Meanwhile, elites who have economic or cultural axes of their own to grind will be all too happy to fan the flames on either side.
“One Small Trick” To Rule Them All
A dual economic and cultural struggle over EVs may be unavoidable — the temptation too great, the structural factors too easy to exploit. But it’s worth trying, and there’s one surefire way to do just that: make them cheaper to buy. There’s nothing inherently coastal-elite or smug about a vehicle with zero emissions, even if the sound of a roaring engine is coded as the heartland come to life. For most people, the sound of engines doesn’t matter at all in the day to day.
The real barrier is cost. EVs are expensive, and making sure affordable vehicles are available to those who need them is essential to mitigating claims that they’re simply chariots for suburban strivers with more money than sense — the types who are more interested in virtue signaling and tut-tutting others than anything so noble as lowering emissions.
Right now, the battle over affordable EVs is itself playing out along nationalist-economic and domestic-cultural lines. The nationalist-economic dimension includes a domestic auto industry averse to competition — with both Canada and the United States fighting to keep cheap Chinese vehicles out, citing unfair trade practices and state production support. Canada has slapped a 100 percent duty on Chinese EV imports, matching a Biden-Era tariff policy that, under Trump, is set to rise to 250 percent.
But without affordable EV imports, domestic subsidies, or cheaper manufacturing at scale — including a way to make batteries more affordable — the economic-culture war over vehicles is only going to get worse. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg challenge: lower prices are tough to achieve without political and cultural buy-in, yet affordability is the most direct path to shifting perceptions. Cracking that puzzle should be priority number one.