Trump set to kill EVs despite Elon Musk and Tesla lovefest

Why do old people hate electric vehicles so vehemently?

It’s a question I’m forced to encounter on an almost weekly basis and while I try to put it down to a general fear of anything that’s new, and thus frightening to their shrinking brains, they do seem to like new Metro lines, mobile phones that prevent them from getting lost and the comment sections under stories on the internet. In fact, they love those and venting their twisted spleens on them.

The world’s most famous senile dribbling idiot, Donald Trump, really hates EVs, too, and if things go as badly as the betting markets are predicting, his attitudes towards them could torpedo the shift to emissions-free motoring, and indeed the fight against climate change generally.

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Now, before the corpulent commenters attack me below, I should posit that it’s possible possibly President Again Trump is the very stable genius he claims to be.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously declared that the test of a first-rate intelligence is “the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”. 

Just yesterday, Trump accused Democrats of behaving like the “gestapo” by forcing people to adopt electric vehicles (he’s also previously claimed that offering incentives to buy them is “lunacy” and that anyone who buys an EV should “rot in Hell”). 

He went on to claim that trucks made 50 years ago were better than the electric versions the Biden administration is forcing poor Americans to buy today. 

“So, I said, did you explain that to the authorities as they burst into your office to demand that you go all electric?” Trump said, referencing one of the many imaginary conversations he has daily with “someone”. 

“He said: ‘I explained it.’ ‘What did they say?’ ‘We don’t give a damn. We want you to go all electric.’ This is what we’re dealing with. It’s like gestapo stuff, OK? They use that term. It’s like gestapo stuff. What they’re doing to our country is unbelievable.”

So, it’s pretty clear how old Trumpty Dumpty feels on the issue, except that currently his biggest backer is Mr Tesla himself, Elon Musk. While they have had issues in the past, Musk has recently pumped multiple millions into the Trump campaign and leapt around on stage like a badly wired robot at his rallies. 

And lo, Trump has declared: “I’m for electric cars, I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly.”

Now, this might be confusing to some of his supporters, if they had the time or energy to listen to everything he says, and it might suggest that Trump does have the ability to hold two opposing ideas in his mind and yet retain the ability to function, but I think you’d really have to closely look at the word “function” in that sentence. And then watch that video of him swaying to a 78-year-old man’s playlist on stage for 40 minutes.

It would be funny, almost, but the fact is that no matter what Musk wants, Trump will surely roll back vehicle pollution standards, just as he has constantly pledged to “drill baby drill” for more coal and oil and gas from day one in office, because he believes climate change to be either “a hoax” or just not his problem because he’ll be dead soon. He will also repeal any and all tax rebates that encourage people to buy EVs. 

He wants electric vehicles wiped out, undone, eliminated and because America is so powerful and influential, what he does matters. Sure, petrol cars, trucks and other forms of CO2 producing transport are the largest contributor to climate-heating gases in the United States, but the bigger issue is that the decisions made there effect the markets, and the lives, of people globally. 

What Trump reflects, of course, are the feelings of his voters, many of whom are old people, who hate change, and EVs (and foreigners), and want to hold on to their big, gas-guzzling, gun-rack fitted pick-up trucks. 

Yes, a lot of this does make me feel helpless, and occasionally infuriated, but I’m happy to share something that made me feel slightly less desperate to punch certain people, because it’s just possible it’s not entirely their fault.

It turns out that some brain research that involved that paragon of science, Colin Firth, was recently reconfirmed by a subsequent study. You should read the detail here, but in short, it seems likely that conservatives and liberals don’t see eye to eye because their brains are wired differently.

Conservatives brains make them more frightened, more change averse, more likely to hate new things and new ideas, and probably more selfish, while the brains of liberal thinkers are far more open to new ideas and less frightened of change. And electric vehicles.

Be in no doubt, however, if you believe that electric vehicles have any part at all to play in our transport future, Tuesday in America, and Wednesday here, is going to be extremely consequential.