President Biden had visited a vehicle factory and given a policy speech, but he couldn’t leave Michigan without trying out a new electric pickup truck. He drove an electric version of Ford’s iconic F-150 pickup around a test track, demonstrating features that he and his administration believe will help persuade Americans to embrace a low-emission, electric-car future that stretches from suburban driveways to rural back roads.
Before hitting the gas, Mr. Biden told reporters through an open window of the prototype truck, “This sucker is quick.” However, the transition from gas guzzlers to plug-in powerhouses that he advocates will be anything but quick. Mr. Biden and Republican members of Congress are at odds over the president’s $4 trillion economic agenda and the best way to help America compete with China in the decades ahead.
Mr. Biden called for spending hundreds of billions of dollars on domestic manufacturing, electric vehicle deployment, and research into emerging technologies like advanced batteries during remarks at the Ford Rouge Electric Vehicle Center on Tuesday.
He was flanked by trucks from the country’s best-selling vehicle line, and cheered on by Detroit automakers and autoworkers who want the government to assist the industry in leading what they see as an inevitable but difficult global competition to replace gasoline-powered cars with electric vehicles. Supply chain snags and autoworkers’ fears of job loss have already hampered the transition, which the president hopes to alleviate with his infrastructure push.
Conservatives continued to put the brakes on President Biden’s electric-vehicle ambitions in Washington, where two of his cabinet secretaries met with Senate Republicans in an attempt to broker a bipartisan deal on infrastructure spending. Senate Republicans say their counterproposal to Vice President Biden’s infrastructure proposal will include some funding for electric vehicles, but they are unwilling to match Mr. Biden’s dollar amounts.
Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and a co-author of the Republican infrastructure proposal, said, “The Biden administration is pushing expensive fantasy jobs while killing real ones at a time when America cannot afford to lose these jobs.”
Mr. Biden’s $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan focuses heavily on physical infrastructure and federal spending in order to accelerate the transition to an economy that is less reliant on fossil fuels in
order to combat climate change. The plan includes tax incentives for low-emission vehicles, money to convert one-fifth of the nation’s school bus fleet to electric power, money to build 500,000 electric charging stations across the country, and a variety of other spending to promote electric vehicle research, production, and deployment.
Mr. Biden has pledged that by 2030, the United States will have cut its climate-warming emissions by half from 2005 levels, an ambitious goal that would necessitate a radical transformation of the country’s economy, including a rapid shift by American drivers from cars and trucks powered by internal combustion engines to zero-emission electric vehicles.
