Donald Trump goes after electric vehicles: ‘all-electric is not going to work’

You can’t expect a lot from someone who thinks coal is the future, but Donald Trump is pushing his lack of vision a step further by now going after electric vehicles.

Trump says that automakers who go all-electric will fail and calls GM CEO Mary Barra’s latest restructuring ‘nasty’.

In an interview with Fox News (embedded below), Trump went after GM for shutting down factories in the US and then blamed it on electric vehicles:

“They’ve changed the whole model of General Motors. They’ve gone to all-electric. All-electric is not going to work. … It’s wonderful to have it as a percentage of your cars, but going into this model … I think is a mistake.”

The president said that Barra’s actions were “nasty.”

At first, Trump threatened to kill GM’s electric car subsidies over the factory closures, but a senior advisor in Trump’s administration later said that they plan to end the electric car federal tax credit altogether.

Here’s the interview:

Electrek’s Take

Alright, we really shouldn’t care about what a former TV reality star with 6 bankrupted business ventures has to say about electric vehicles, but he happens to also be the president of the United States, which makes him quite influential.

It’s a real bummer that the first time he happens to be talking about EVs is in a very negative light.

The craziest thing is that his complaints make no sense.

GM is not closing plants because they are going “all-electric”. GM is not even going “all-electric”. They claim that they are but they plan for only a minority of their sales to be electric over the next decade – much like what Trump is saying with “a percentage of your cars.”

Therefore, Trump’s whole reason for going after EVs makes no sense when it comes to GM.

GM did announce an accelerated investment in EVs at the same time as the factory closures, but they weren’t really related.

I have to say that I agree with Trump about the move being “nasty”. They told 15,000 people that they will be losing their jobs just weeks before the holidays, which is already an often financially stressful period.

But Trump is also going after EVs in general, which is even stupider in my opinion.

Unlike what Trump thinks, the entire automotive industry is going all-electric. It’s inevitable at this point. It’s all about how fast we get there.

The US is already falling behind China and other markets when it comes to EV adoption.

If Trump thinks that GM’s job cuts are bad now, he will be shocked if American automakers miss the boat when it comes to electrification.