A senior economic advisor for former President Trump has warned that waning demand for EVs suggests that they’re poised to be a massive market flop.
Stephen Moore, senior economist at FreedomWorks and once a senior economic adviser to former President Donald Trump, has issued a grim prediction about America’s electric vehicle (EV) market, saying EVs are poised to be automakers’ “next big flop.”
Mr. Moore’s grim prediction for the EV market came in an interview on Fox News’s “Varney & Co.” program on Oct. 30 and an op-ed in The Daily Caller on Oct. 29, in which the economist compared the current EV push to the failed rollout of the Ford Edsel.
“One of the textbook marketing flops of all time was the Ford Edsel sedan, which was heralded as the hot new car in the late 1950s,” he wrote in the op-ed.
At the time of the Edsel launch, automotive experts widely expressed the view that the sedan—named after Henry Ford’s son—would be a sure thing. However, instead of sales in the hundreds of thousands, as experts generally predicted at the time, the Edsel sold a paltry 10,000 or so units and was discontinued.
A key factor behind the Edsel’s flop is, according to Mr. Moore, that the car was pushed on a public that didn’t want it.
“The obvious lesson for the industry: you can’t bribe Americans to buy cars they don’t want. Given the all-in approach mentality for EVs at Ford and GM, it’s clear that Detroit never got this message,” he wrote.
Even though the Biden administration has been pushing EVs on the public, including an offer of a $7,500 subsidy, less than 10 percent of all new car sales over the past two years were electric, according to a study published in early September by GOBankingRates.
More recently, executives at General Motors, Ford, and Mercedes-Benz conceded that there’s weakening demand for EVs, with some announcing they would pull back on their own EV targets.
Mr. Moore says that waning EV demand is a possible signal that, aside from a relatively small fraction of early adopters of new technologies, buyers on the whole are simply not that interested.
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