The US Refuses to Fall in Love With Electric Cars

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In December 2021, sales of electric vehicles overtook sales of diesel cars for the first time in Europe, as 176,000 EVs rolled out of car dealerships across the continent.

At the same time in China, the country’s automotive industry announced that EV sales for the year had ballooned by 158 percent compared with 2020, as more than 3.5 million vehicles took to the roads.

In Europe, EVs made up an estimated 14 percent of all new vehicles sold in 2021, according to the banking and financial services company ING.

In China, it was 9 percent?

EVs made up just 4 percent of vehicles sale last year.

Now President Joe Biden, who said in August 2021 he wanted EVs to make up half of all sales by the end of the decade, is building on the work done by the ZEV Alliance, a lobby group of 10 US states, and several countries to promote zero-emission vehicles.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s revised greenhouse gas emission rules for passenger vehicles, finalized in December 2021, simply returned the standards to what they were under the Obama administration in the mid-2010s.

This contrasts sharply with China and Europe, which have aggressively pursued carbon-reduction policies that incentivize the production of EVs.

Sales of that single model in China reached 138,790 in the last three months of 2021.

More than 2.3 million EVs were sold in Europe in 2021, according to estimates by research firm BloombergNEF.