Welcome to 2024! Since New Year’s Day one year ago, the “electric vehicle transition” has gone from being a foregone conclusion to being a rolling failure. Auto manufacturers who bought into the hype are looking at a catastrophic financial miscalculation, and typical car drivers have gone from being curious (at best) to being generally negative about purchasing EVs. I believe that the conservative media’s pushback against EVs has had a considerable impact.

In other words, 2023 was a very good year – a year in which we turned opinion against electric vehicles. The people who want a boutique, status-symbol EV can continue to buy Teslas. (But can we please kill off the taxpayer subsidies for Tesla?) For all the rest, let 2024 be the year when legacy automakers throw in the towel on the eco-communist EV experiment. …

Although I’ve enjoyed writing about how emphatically consumers have rejected Ford’s flagship EV, in fairness I should point out that the Ford F150 Conflagration Lightning is a spectacularly awful vehicle. Aside from its tendency to burst into flames, it performs poorly at towing, hauling for distance, and operating in the cold – the basic functionalities that are expected of a pickup truck.

[As I’ve often argued, I have no problem with EVs and hybrids, as long as the demand for them comes organically rather than through government mandates and subsidies. However, the pickup market seems even more unsuitable for EV-only vehicles for the reasons Ace lists here. EVs have a place in urban passenger driving. Any other use becomes impractical, and the lack of enthusiasm from consumers even with heavy subsidies demonstrates just how impractical they are for most applications. Hybrids would be a smarter choice, but you can’t eliminate fossil fuels as a social engineering goal with hybrids. — Ed]