PROBLEMS: You can't run a large modern nation on Stupid!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 3, 2024

One news org is willing to try: How well has the electric vehicle industry been faring of late?

That isn't the sort of thing we normally keep track of. Recently, we were inspired to try.

It isn't easy to get the answer to that question, or to any other. Even in these days of the Internet, acquisition of actual knowledge is hard.

That said, our search did lead us to this report in the November 10 New York Times. The report was written by Jack Ewing, who says he "write[s] about the auto industry with an emphasis on electric vehicles" at this particular point in a long journalistic career.

How well has the industry been doing? Somewhat dangerously, Ewing's news report started like this:

EWING (11/10/23): Normally a 50 percent increase in sales is considered very good. But when the number of electric vehicles sold in the United States grew that much during the third quarter from a year earlier, it was a disappointment.

Carmakers and analysts had expected more. Instead of celebrating, auto executives worried that demand for electric vehicles was slackening, raising questions about their plans to invest tens of billions of dollars to develop new models and build factories.

[...]

Still, electric vehicle sales are growing faster than any other major category of automobile, and Americans will buy more than one million of them this year, a record. From July through September, battery-powered cars accounted for 8 percent of the new cars sold in the United States, up from 6 percent a year earlier, according to Cox Automotive. 

The hardest factual claim in that initial passage was this:

In the third quarter of this year, EV sales increased by 50 percent as compared to the same period last year.

Normally, some such growth in sales would be "considered very good," Ewing wrote at the start of his report. In this report for The Atlantic, that was pretty much the tone adopted, just last week, by Saahil Desai:

DESAI (12/29/23): [E]lectric cars are already upending America. In 2023, our battery-powered future became so much more real—a boom in sales and new models is finally starting to push us into the post-gas age. Americans are on track to buy a record 1.44 million of them in 2023, according to a forecast by BloombergNEF, about the same number sold from 2016 to 2021 total. “This was the year that EVs went from experiments, or technological demonstrations, and became mature vehicles,” Gil Tal, the director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis, told me. They are beginning to transform not just the automotive industry, but also the very meaning of a car itself.

So wrote a highly enthusiastic Desai. The Associated Press seemed to be working with similar numbers when Alexa St. John published this report as Thanksgiving drew near:

ST. JOHN (11/23/23): Electric vehicle sales are expected to hit a record 9% of all passenger vehicles in the U.S. this year, according to Atlas Public Policy. That will be up from 7.3% of new car sales in 2022.

It will be the first time more than 1 million EVs are sold in the U.S. in one calendar year, probably reaching between 1.3 million and 1.4 million cars, the research firm predicts.

Although the numbers show significant progress for electrification, the nation is lagging behind countries like China, Germany and Norway.

EVs reached 33% of sales in China, 35% in Germany, and 90% in Norway for the first six months of 2023, according to a BloombergNEF EV outlook published in June. 

Our conclusion? EV sales are apparently rising in this country. In Norway, they rule the world, from the fjords to the sea!

Reports like these can only tell a person so much about the ongoing effort to replace the internal combustion engine. Meanwhile, we said that Ewing's report was "dangerous" because his data suggested the possibility that, while the growth in sales has been string, the rate of growth had perhaps started to slow.

Given the limits of human cognition, danger lurks when any such tidbit of conceptual complexity enters the picture. And sure enough! Before he was done, Ewing had mentioned this:

EWING: Some conservatives have seized on recent data to argue that electric vehicles are overhyped. Republicans like Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio have claimed electric vehicles are destroying auto industry jobs, and have proposed rolling back policies designed to encourage people to buy battery-powered cars.

Are electric vehicles destroying jobs? We have no idea. But it was a bit of pushback from "some conservatives" which led us to investigate this unfamiliar topic last week. 

We refer to a gong-show pseudo-discussion we watched in horror, just last week, on The Five, a daily Fox News Channel program with extremely high viewer ratings. We linked you to that particular segment in one report last week. 

The Five is built upon a format which is Hunger Games-adjacent. In that format, "some conservatives" (four in number) chase the program's single liberal panelist around and around and around and around, generally in the course of conversations during which many brain cells will die.

Fill disclosure! Given the nature of current "cable news," this four-to-one ratio counts as an example of extremely high viewpoint diversity! On the competing blue tribe channel, you very rarely see any viewpoint diversity at all.

That said, what sort of discussion did we watch on The Five that day? The discussion on this particular "cable news" show was conducted, on the "conservative" side, by the following cast of characters:

Dramatis personae:
Kennedy, a former MTV VJ

Tyrus, a former professional wrestler

Johnny Joey Jones, an (extremely genial) ex-Marine who suffered grievous wounds while serving in Afghanistan.

Katy Pavlich, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution who was named "conservative blogger of the year" when she was 23.

To see what was said, just click here.

Full disclosure! There's no reason why a former VJ, or a former professional wrestler, couldn't serve, at a later point, as a highly intelligent news analyst.

People of some such descriptions could create highly intelligent discussions of such complex topics as the state of the electric vehicle industry. It's just that, objectively speaking, these four characters didn't.

Their conversation that day on The Five was one of the dumbest ever seen. We say that as someone who admires Jones for his extremely genial demeanor, and while noting the fact that Tyrus, the former professional wrestler, is a talented raconteur.

Having said that:

The conversation that foursome launched that day went beyond the merely dumb to the uncharted realm of The Stupid. As a general matter, we regard that as a word which should almost always be avoided, but we're forced make an exception this time.

Tomorrow, we'll show you some of what this foursome told millions of your neighbors and friends on this "cable news" program that day. As we continue, we'll connect this to a new approach to "cable news" which is now being explored on Fox.

Increasingly, Fox News is moving away from the realm of the old-time political dogmatist into the brave new world of the former professional wrestlers and the endless stream of lower-grade comedians. This is the world of "the juggler and clowns" once described in a world-famous song.

As our nation sets sail on this fateful year, we're willing to make a certain claim. We're prepared to employ an unhelpful word, one we'd normally avoid:

You can't run a large modern nation on Stupid! Before the week is done, we'll shift our gaze from the cable world of our nation's red tribe and turn instead to the cable world of the blue.

You can't run a nation on Stupid, but you also can't run a large modern nation on Pompous. As a nation, we're now assailed by these problems "all day long," as the Everly Brothers once said.

Tomorrow: The heavyweight champion's tale