I dont believe this (but I’m open to being wrong). I think giving the same amount of money invested into EVs to public transit and ebikes instead, we’d be better off.

I’m all for investing in public transportation, and ebikes certainly have their place as well. But realistically, those will reduce the need for cars, not replace them entirely. We aren’t going to have trains and buses constantly running between every small town in the US. People will still need to haul big items or large amounts of stuff. And even where public transit is readily available, there is still going to be an advantage to being able to go where you want, when you want, in a vehicle you already own. Unless we ban private ownership of cars, people will still buy them because they offer much greater flexibility than public transportation.

I also don’t like that most incentives aren’t set up in a way to support poor people buying EVs. But that wasn’t going to be a realistic possibility until cheaper EVs hit the market and enough older EVs declined in value to the point that there could be truly cheap options out there. Unfortunately, the political will does not exist to simply mandate the switch to EVs. And even if we had done it that way, without developing the market for EVs the transition likely would have meant raising costs at the low end instead of gradually lowering costs at the high end.

Regardless of how we accomplish the transition from internal combustion to electric, it is better for everyone if the vehicles we use are electric. Even if we ignore the environmental side of things, EVs are much cheaper to operate and are much lower maintenance. If that first beat up old rust bucket that someone buys is an EV, that car will cost less to own and maintain, and will be less likely to die because of some hidden mechanical issue.

And of course, there’s also the massive amount that we as a society spend supporting ICE vehicles. There’s the obscene amount of money that goes into finding, extracting, refining, and distributing oil, and the billions in profits that the fossil fuel companies pocket on top of that. And then there’s the added cost to everything else because of the increased transportation costs. And the geopolitical costs. Every dollar saved by someone driving an EV is a dollar not being drained out of us by the fossil fuel industry.