President Donald Trump (Photo courtesy Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)
President Trump hasn’t minced his words—or his policy—in declaring that he doesn’t think electric cars are a good idea.
At a Thursday night rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump took his electric-car criticism to a new (and somewhat hard-to-follow) level, jumping from jabs about the Green New Deal, to suggesting that the policy will limit the number of vehicles per household.
“No more aeroplanes, no more cows, one car per family,“ he said, adding: “You know, I don’t think one car per family in Michigan plays too well, do you?”
Trump then sounded for a moment like he was channeling some thoughts of his own about range anxiety: “And it’s got to be of course an electric car, even if it only goes…160 miles? What do you do with 160 miles…Darling, where do I get a charge?”
2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV pre-production
The Trump Administration has already been on the offensive against GM. The automaker announced a wave of manufacturing changes in November, and followed that this month with the announcement that it would invest $300 million in its Michigan plant that assembles the Chevrolet Bolt EV, to bring a second electric vehicle there that had originally been planned for manufacture outside the U.S.
“All-electric is not going to work,” Trump said late last year, as part of a criticism of GM’s strategy to transition to more electric cars.
“It’s wonderful to have it as a percentage of your cars, but going into this model that she’s doing I think is a mistake,” said Trump at that time, referring to GM CEO Mary Barra.
[Ed note: There is no such mention of any attempt to limit the number of cars a family might have (or to limit the number of cars or vehicles) in the full text of the Green New Deal, which you can see here.]
