President Joe Biden visits Ford’s Dearborn electric vehicle plant and test drives a Ford F-150 pickup truck. May 18, 2021, Michigan, USA
President Joe Biden showed up for his $174 billion electric vehicle plan Tuesday (May 18), urging automakers not to build zero-emission vehicles overseas for U.S. customers and personally test-driving a new zero-emission pickup truck. Biden is said to want the plan to push the U.S. to overtake China in the global electric vehicle market share.
“We need car manufacturers and other companies to continue to invest in the United States and not take the benefits of our public investments overseas and expand production of electric vehicles and batteries overseas,” Biden said during a visit to Ford’s electric vehicle plant in Dearborn, Michigan, where he later also viewed an electric version of Ford’s best-selling F-150 pickup truck. electric version.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) criticized GM’s announcement of a $1 billion investment in Mexico to produce electric vehicles and Ford’s choice of Mexico, rather than Ohio, to produce some of its electric vehicles.
President Biden argued that the U.S. electric vehicle industry is falling behind China, which sells more electric vehicles, as quoted by Reuters.
“We will set a new benchmark for electric vehicles,” Biden declared. He vowed to reverse the “short-sighted” policy of lowering vehicle emissions standards under the Trump administration.
Biden also reportedly test drove Ford’s electric truck, which will be launched on Wednesday. Security officials don’t usually let the U.S. president drive.
“This thing is really fast,” Biden told reporters, adding that the electric truck accelerates from zero to 60 mph in 4.4 seconds. “It feels fantastic.”
The White House issued a fact sheet indicating that Biden would not introduce consumer incentives to encourage the purchase of high-priced luxury electric vehicles, and that he advocates massive government spending to prompt Americans to buy electric vehicles.
At the heart of Biden’s electric vehicle plan is a $100 billion consumer rebate, according to Reuters. Biden supports a further $10 billion in new tax incentives for zero-emission medium and heavy-duty work vehicles.
However, Biden’s electric vehicle plan faces resistance from many Republicans in Congress. Republicans are preparing a counter-proposal to Biden’s infrastructure plan, and Republicans will meet with Biden’s commerce and transportation secretaries later in Congress.
Biden wants to invest $15 billion to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations by 2030 – including in apartment buildings and public parking lots – and $45 billion to replace a large number of school buses and busses with electric vehicles. He also wants to invest in increasing the percentage of electric vehicles in the federal fleet, including getting the post office to start using electric trucks for deliveries.
Separately, President Joe Biden said the future of the auto industry is the manufacture of electric vehicles, and the U.S. cannot afford to lose out to China, according to the Voice of America. China, for its part, said it was happy to see the U.S. develop and progress, but objected to the U.S. “talking about China at every turn.
China currently has the world’s largest electric vehicle market and owns 80 percent of the world’s electric vehicle battery production capacity, to which President Joe Biden said during a visit to Ford’s electric vehicle plant in Dearborn, Michigan: “They [China] think they’re going to win, but I have news for them: they’re not going to win this competition, and we’re not going to let them win. We have to move fast.”
White House spokesman Sachs further told reporters accompanying him that in order to change the situation where the U.S. is temporarily lagging behind China in the electric vehicle industry, President Biden has proposed a $174 billion “American Jobs Initiative” that would enable the U.S. to surpass China in the global electric vehicle market share.
The Voice of America reports that Beijing has consistently opposed Washington’s use of China as a backdrop for U.S. domestic policies. A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said earlier that China is happy to see the U.S. develop and progress, but “resolutely opposes the use of China as the backdrop to target China” and urged the U.S. side to “look at China’s development rationally.
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