Oh dear. That dreadful Donald Trump. The New York Times emails us that “Trump’s war on climate is thumping Detroit”. His war on climate. So evil that his merely destroying Detroit seems almost beside the point. But, we ask, what really hammered American car companies, a president who cut back on subsidies for products customers didn’t want, or CEOs steering billions of dollars into worthless investments based on political and activist hype? Alas, you guessed it.

According to the NYT opinion piece to which that overheated email pointed:

“$25 Billion. That’s What Trump Cost Detroit.”

And how did the Orange Climate Demon cost them so much green by being anti-green? The author, “a business journalist and a former editor at Fortune and Time”, informs us patronizingly that:

“It is a critical part of every chief executive’s job to anticipate the future. Failing to recognize and adapt to change can be the difference between thriving or disappearing. That’s why corporate leaders are continually bracing their companies against a host of possibilities – another pandemic, global conflict, rising interest rates, climate change and competitors that arise from nowhere.”

Colour us unimpressed already, because the main reason you brace your company, or your personal self, against “a host of possibilities” is precisely that anticipating the future is notoriously difficult. For instance “competitors that arise from nowhere.” But never mind. He goes on:

“But it is pretty difficult to futureproof your company against stupid. This is exactly what the American automobile industry is facing as a result of President Trump’s gratuitous war against electric vehicles, which is forcing manufacturers to return to an increasingly outdated past.”

Well, yes and no. It is hard to protect yourself against stupid, especially your own. But the stupid in question here is that car companies bought the hype about internal-combustion vehicles being “increasingly outdated” and EVs as the gleaming George Jetson moon-meeting future. Which was itself coming from politicians, activists and academics whose opinion of their own capacity to foresee and indeed dictate the future was not based on any actual evidence. So stupid met stupid and companies (who were warned) gambled billions on stuff that doesn’t work well enough to impress customers and now they’re sorry and, just possibly, wiser as well as older.

Indeed, the New York Sun reports that:

“Ram is moving forward by shifting into reverse. The truck brand eliminated the famous Hemi V8 engines from its light-duty pickups last year to meet increasingly ambitious government emissions targets. Instead, it offered its customers a new lineup of more powerful and more efficient ‘Hurricane’ turbocharged inline-six-cylinder engines. They weren’t all happy and let Ram know it. Even before President Trump returned to office and rolled back the Biden-era push for electric vehicles, new leadership at Ram heard the outcry and started working to revive V8s for ‘cylinder counters’ who will settle for no fewer than eight.”

Even before. And what comes after?

Well, according to a Canadian Department of the Environment memo, the repeal of American EV mandates set back the EV industry “at least 15 years.” How they know, how they even count, is unclear. But what is clear is the inadvertent admission that people won’t buy EVs unless they are forced to. And do you need an IQ of 160 to understand that point? Or to grasp that at some point someone might decide, for political, economic or even environmental reasons, to repeal those mandates?

As that NYT article continues, without seeing the obvious implication:

“Ford Motor has mothballed production of the all-electric version of its flagship F-150 pickup truck and last month announced a $19.5 billion charge related to restructuring its E.V. business. General Motors, citing the loss of tax incentives for E.V. buyers and laxer pollution regulations, switched production at its Orion, Mich., plant from E.V.s to full-size S.U.V.s and pickups powered by internal combustion engines (ICE, in industry parlance). In doing so, G.M. last week announced that it was taking a $6 billion loss in the fourth quarter — on top of a similar $1.6 billion hit the quarter before.”

So the companies took massive walloping losses not because Trump was so stupid he stopped subsidizing failing technology but because they were so stupid they bet the firm on it. They, and all those who depend on them from employees to shareholders, lost billions by being the s-word.

If the author is so smart, why doesn’t he make EVs that sell without subsidies?

The latter point deserves emphasis. Tesla came whining to Canadian MPs that:

“The Government of Canada has begun dismantling its environmental policies, citing the need to respond to the economic impacts imposed by an evolving geopolitical and economic landscape.”

We wish it had. But with Mark Carney, strong polysyllabic gusts of wind so often take the place of concrete policy that we really don’t know what is going on. (Having promised to think about whether to do something about the EV mandate, they recently promised to keep thinking about it, possibly for an entire year. Meaningful decisions aren’t really their thing.) What we do know, and so does Tesla, is that it needs someone to refill the trough. Their submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development said:

“Maintaining a strong Electric Vehicle Availability Standard will be especially important for Canada in achieving its commitment considering other environmental step backs by this government.”

But as Adam Smith warned, can it be a quarter-millennium ago, those who plead for government economic favours as in the national interest are “by no means such fools as they who believed it.”

What Tesla says is:

“A strong Electric Vehicle Availability Standard remains a vitally important part of Canada’s strategy to address global climate change and reduce domestic air pollution of all types.”

What it means is please give us money. Because if Canadians wanted EVs, or agreed with this assessment of the national interest, they’d buy them without mandates.

The Chinese firm BYD has passed Tesla to become the world’s largest EV brand. But it doesn’t prove North American governments lack the keen entrepreneurial spirit and economic foresight of the Politburo in Beijing. It means EVs are at bottom a political industry not an economic one.

The Carney administration, currently snuggling up to Beijing because of that awful Donald Trump, seems to like that approach to prosperity. Which is probably why as Dan McTeague reminds us their investments in EVs have done even worse than US car companies’ but they’re not stopping (even though municipalities that hopped on the green electric bus are now sitting there immobile making voom voom noises). But as even Bloomberg Green recently warned, even the Chinese Communist Party cannot sustain huge losses indefinitely:

“Growth in global sales of electric vehicles is expected to slow this year as China winds down some subsidies, Europe wavers on its phase-out of combustion engines, and US producers and policymakers make a U-turn from the segment.”

Heatmap Daily actually emailed us about “2026’s Most Exciting EVs” and claimed “Last year was a doozy for electric vehicles in the U.S. Will next year be any better?” But the article dangling limply from this promo said:

“This was the year of the fire sale. With the $7,500 federal electric vehicle tax credit expiring at the end of September, buyers raced to get good deals on EVs and made sales numbers shoot up. Then, predictably, sales fell off a cliff at the end of the year, when those offers-you-can’t-refuse disappeared. Now that a new year has arrived, the word might be “uncertain.” Tariffs and the loss of federal incentives have tossed a heavy dose of chaos into the EV industry, causing many automakers to reconsider their plans for what electric cars they’re going to build and where they’re going to make them.”

We’re tempted to say with Sudolus that “There’s no way to make it sound like an achievement.” And when the article continues “And yet, at the same time, some of the most anticipated new electric models we’ve seen in years are supposed to be coming to America next year” we say yeah, told you so. Followed by hey, why don’t you buy shares in those vehicles and we’ll do something safer with our money, like set it on fire and dangle it out the window in a strong wind.