The Biden administration’s EPA is moving forward with aggressive pollution limits that will require two out of every three cars made in the US to be electric by 2032.
But even this aggressive push probably isn’t enough to convert two-thirds of vehicle owners in Wyoming to driving electric cars, considering EV market penetration in the Cowboy State is a fraction of a percent .
Wyoming had 828,439 cars and trucks registered in the state in 2020, including those in state and local government fleets. Of these, 338 were electric vehicles, or 0.00041%.
Last year, the number of electric vehicles registered in Wyoming rose to 657. More than half were in Laramie and Teton County. Hot Springs and Johnson counties have no registered EVs, and every other Wyoming county has at least one.
Will people buy electric vehicles?
Nothing in the EPA regulations will require consumers to buy these cars.
The first Teslas were sold in 2008 and the first Nissan Leafs were offered for the first time in 2010. Today, about 6% of cars on the road in the United States are electric. The Biden administration believes it can increase that 11 times in nine years.
Even electric car enthusiasts are skeptical.
“Government mandating anything is generally bad, and trying to force the market will only hurt things,” said Aaron Turpen, a Cheyenne-based automotive writer and supporter of electric vehicles.
Turpen said that with the target date well past when Biden will be president, the proposed rules are “more grandiose while ultimately getting closer to the can.”
Vince Bodiford, editor of Cheyenne-based TheWeekendDrive.com, told the Cowboy State Daily that automakers will have no problem retrofitting their production to meet EPA requirements. The question is: Will electric vehicles just sit on lots collecting dust?
“That’s a gigantic question for the car-buying public to answer,” Bodiford said.
What dealers are saying
Car dealers report little interest from their customers in electric vehicles.
Mike VanVleet, new car sales manager at Laramie GM Auto Center, told the Cowboy State Daily that they don’t have many assigned for the dealership to order. He now has about three electric vehicle orders on the waiting list.
“That will probably change as the vehicles start coming in, but right now, we don’t see a huge demand,” VanVleet said.
He said the charging infrastructure in Wyoming isn’t very suited to electric vehicles, so that could discourage sales.
“Eventually, I think there will be that infrastructure, but I don’t know when or how,” he said.
There are a number of other issues for Wyoming drivers, including cold winters, which can significantly reduce the range of an electric vehicle battery.
Taylor Thorton, a sales associate at White’s Mountain Chevrolet in Casper, told the Cowboy State Daily that he has had some customer interest in electric vehicles, but not much.
“It hasn’t been anything crazy,” Thornton said.
Brad Follensbee, general manager of White’s, told the Cowboy State Daily that there is a small demand and they have sold a few EVs.
“They fit a niche, but the niche is not that big in the Wyoming market,” Follensbee said.
The consumer is always right
Bodiford said the EPA mandates could have an impact on the price of new gas-guzzling cars.
If the demand for internal combustion engine cars remains high while the supply is low, the effect will be that gasoline cars will sell well above the manufacturers’ suggested retail price.
“The consumer is always right and the government is always wrong. They never get it right,” Bodiford said.
Follensbee said it’s unclear how the mandates will affect the inventory of Wyoming dealerships. However, consumer preference does play a role in which cars are on the lot.
The SUV market share in White’s, Follensbee said, is much higher than in states with warmer climates where all-wheel drive isn’t in as much demand as snowy Wyoming.
dictatorial attack
Energy expert Alex Epstein argued in a Twitter thread that the EPA rules are a “dictatorial attack on American drivers and the American power grid.”
Epstein said that if electric vehicles were the superior cars that advocates say they are, they wouldn’t require subsidies, much less mandates. Most EV owners are wealthier, Epstein said, because they can afford the higher purchase prices, so the mandate will hurt the poor.
There’s also the question of whether the network can handle the extra load, especially as companies plan for it stop reliable coal-fired power generation and replace it with intermittent solar and wind power.
A report released Monday by the North American Electric Reliability Corp., a nonprofit that monitors the reliability of the U.S. and Canada’s main grids, warned that more collaboration is needed between utilities and electric vehicle equipment industries to reduce the potential for “catastrophic consequences to electrical system reliability, such as cascading blackouts and widespread power outages.”
The goal of EPA regulations is to reduce emissions, but even if drivers switch to electric cars, the impact on overall emissions will be negligible.
According to physicist Mark Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a single EV battery requires mining 500,000 pounds of rock to produce it. Mills estimated that if half of all vehicles on the planet were electric vehicles reduce oil consumption by 15%.
