Has Biden’s EV revolution ALREADY lost its spark? Experts say motorists are rejecting White House push for  electric vehicles – as Ford and GM both scale back on production of their eco pickup trucks

Efforts to electrify America’s most popular and influential car class are underway, but appear to be failing due to reluctant drivers.

This week, Ford said it would lay off about 700 workers at the Detroit plant that produces the electric F-150 Lightning pickup, and GM has cut production of the Chevrolet Silverado EV due to declining demand.

And Tesla CEO Elon Musk told investors during an earnings call Wednesday that “we dug our own grave” when referring to the company’s long-awaited Cybertruck electric pickup.

Pickups have long been the crown jewel of the American auto industry. In 2022, they accounted for about 79 percent of vehicles sold in the country, according to the American newspaper National Association of Automobile Dealers.

And thanks in part to the billions in EV subsidies that President Biden has issued, automakers have launched ambitious projects to conquer the market. The White House has pledged to make all car sales electric by 2030.

But despite initially promising sales, Americans now seem less and less interested in trading in their combustion-engine trucks for electric equivalents.

‘Electrification is an initiative of the government and the environment. It’s not consumer-oriented,” said Joe McCabe, president and CEO of automotive consultancy AutoForecast Solutions.

“Demand for electrified vehicles is not meeting or exceeding supply, so we are at a point where (manufacturers) may have to cut back on this EV initiative because the new group of buyers will be a more difficult obstacle to overcome, he added.

At the end of last year, the F-150 Lightning was the best-selling electric truck in the U.S., but Ford recently reported that third-quarter sales fell 46 percent year-over-year to about 3,500 vehicles.

“There are early adopters, and the early adopters have adopted,” McCabe said, suggesting that those adopters tended to be wealthier city dwellers, sometimes called “urban cowboys.”

But he said more typical mass-market consumers are held back by costs and “range anxiety” — the fear that they can travel far enough in an electric truck without having to find a charging station somewhere.

Electric pickups generally compete with luxury, high-end gasoline trucks and can cost an average of $10,000 to $20,000 more, according to McCabe.

According to Ford, the range of an F-150 with an extended battery is approximately 320 miles. For comparison, a gas-equivalent F-150 has a range of about 550 miles.

To account for declining sales, McCabe also pointed to interest rates, which are now higher than last year, increasing the cost of financing a new car.

In a statement about the layoffs at the Lightning plant this week, a Ford spokesperson emphasized that its decision was not influenced by ongoing auto worker strikes and instead pointed to other factors.

“We are adjusting the schedule at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center due to multiple constraints, including supply chain and processing and delivery of vehicles held for quality checks after restarting production in August,” they said.

But according to McCabe, these strikes are forcing automakers to think about the efficiency of their labor, which indirectly impacts electric truck production.

‘Manufacturers need to take a closer look at the unions, their competitive position in the market and shareholder value. And if the product doesn’t move as expected, they have to reconnect that product,” he said.

Also complicating matters for Detroit manufacturers is that electric vehicle factories are overwhelmingly non-union. That’s an issue the UAW strike is trying to address.

According to McCabe, full-size pickups also generate the largest profit margins for automakers.

“They can’t just walk away from an internal combustion engine buyer wholeheartedly because they would all have to walk away at the same time,” he said. “GM is not going to walk away and leave the opportunity for Ram companies or Ford companies to consume pieces of the market.”

Tesla’s upcoming Cybertruck also threatens to eat up some of the existing electric truck market.

“It doesn’t matter if you think this is the most beautiful vehicle or the ugliest vehicle ever designed, they’re going to sell,” McCabe said.

But even Musk seemed less confident on Wednesday. He told investors he wanted to temper expectations and warned that Tesla could face “enormous challenges” in making the Cybertruck exercise profitable.

He said Tesla has the capacity to make more than 125,000 Cybertrucks annually, with the potential to increase that number to 250,000 by 2025.

Manufacturers “still have a very, very high hill to climb, but it’s a ‘too big to fail’ proposition,” McCabe said. ‘They are going to make it happen.

“The problem is there are governments involved who have a four-year period to prove themselves, or maybe an eight-year period, but the car industry is moving at glacial speeds.”

The question that remains is how and when – whether this involves smaller trucks, plug-in hybrid vehicles or fully electric EVs is unknown.

“The manufacturers that are putting electric cars on the market are targeting our children and grandchildren,” says McCabe. “This will be a slow, multi-generational shift.”