“Government motors” is a pretty funny nickname if you’re stuck in 2008.

The government subsidizes the food you eat and the roads you drive on, maybe you should stop doing those activities if you hate the government so much.

Energy independence is a national security issue. BEV development is a worthy investment, and the government’s infrastructure law incentivizes domestic production.

It will turn out just like the ethanol boondoggle. Copper, lithium and countless other materials are already in short supply with out factoring in bev production.

Government should not subsidize anything not food and certainly not EV's

>>the government’s infrastructure law incentivizes domestic production

False in incentives north American production for GM most of that investment is in MX not the US

I love how whenever this argument comes up, everyone gives a free pass to oil, as if its supply is infinite and extracting it is preferable to mining battery materials. Somehow, burning a larger quantity of oil in inefficient individualized engines is better than building batteries that are have potential to be recyclable.

Lithium mining is supposed to be bad but we all seem to gloss over the fact that oil extraction is no different than mining. BEVs plain and simple use less total energy per mile by a long shot, and you can generate that energy however you prefer.

Compare replacing the weight of your battery every 10 years with the weight and volume of all the fuel you’ve burned in 10 years of ICE driving. There’s no such thing as recycling gasoline.

The charts in this article illustrate the issue nicely. Even with non-ideal unimproved current-state EV technology, the massive amount of oil burned in your gas tank is the biggest problem:

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/ev-battery-recycling

The issue I, and many others have is not in the idea of BEV's but more in the current state of Battery technology. Lithium is infact "scarce" in the since that the total quantity available is less than what would be needed to replace all vehicles. Honestly though Lithium nor cobalt is the issue, cobalt will likly be replace with LiFE chem batteries anyway.

Copper is a greater issue, also the economical longevity of BEV's are another issue. You seem to focused on the idea of battery recycablity which has yet to be proven to be ECONOMICALLY viable (much like everything else beyond Aluminum) yet do not talk about all the other limited materials that go in an EV outside the battery like copper.

It is not uncommon for environmentalist to simply ignore economics as an inconvenient truth, or an irrelevant topic that does not need consideration but BEV's have all kinds of economic issues including a lower expected life due tot he cost of battery replacement, resell issues on the used market, etc.

That is with out getting into the technological problems with BEV's in winter..

If anyone is "glossing over" anything it is the BEV proponents that want to hand wave all of these things with whataboutisms (like you have in your comments) or simply pretending those are not issues, or worse that government can hand-wave a solution

This really goes back to my other points I've made on this thread: if we focus on the economics, if everything you're saying is 100% is true, why are multiple major automotive companies spending so much money investing in EVs and visibly disinvesting from ICE vehicle development? If this knowledge is so available and the conclusion is so inevitable, why are multiple automotive companies abandoning ICE investment so completely?

These automotive companies lobby endlessly to sway various regulations in their favor, but they've seemingly rolled over and given up on the issue of EVs. They don't protest at California or Europe planning to ban ICE vehicle sales, and yet they have no difficulty discouraging the government from pursuing public transit and passenger rail investments. Why is that?

Why is Amazon building a custom EV delivery van with Rivian and outfitting their warehouses with expensive space-eating charging stations if the economics don't work and they expect battery materials to dry up? Are you accusing Amazon of acting against shareholder interests? Do you know of any public companies making investments of that scale without doing basic research? [2]

I'll tell you why it's happening: economically, EVs are less complicated to manufacture, more profitable, less expensive to fuel, and more desirable to consumers. I think that if we read between the lines, automakers aren't worried about securing enough batteries and finding enough materials. They're probably more worried about the way gasoline prices can fluctuate suddenly like in 2021, and how that fluctuation discourages sales of the most profitable types of vehicles (SUVs and trucks).

Economically, the US government knows that high gas prices alone can act as a trigger for recessions, and they most certainly have the data to know whether BEVs are a viable solution. 38% of Republican Senators voted for the infrastructure bill that introduces subsidies for electric vehicles. [1]

We can cynically look at that legislative action as a handout to corporations, but I see it as an admission that the world will change to BEVs whether any outside action takes place or not, purely due to the economics of the situation, and that incentivizing a domestic supply chain is necessary for economic stability and possibly even national security (i.e., shoring up energy independence: congress doesn't want the country's transportation infrastructure to be handcuffed to a new OPEC in the form of foreign battery suppliers).

I'm just following the money here.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/08/10/1026486578/senate-republican-...

[2] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/rivian-amazo...