In the U.S., former President Donald Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination haven’t come close to matching the frequency or vitriol of his broadsides against electric vehicles. | Mike Mulholland/AP PhotoFormer U.S. President Donald Trump and a chorus of conservative politicians in Europe are sharpening their attacks on electric cars, turning the economic disruption caused by the shift away from gasoline into a campaign issue on both sides of the Atlantic.
“Joe Biden’s Green New Deal agenda is good for Beijing and bad for Detroit,” former Vice President Mike Pence said during the second GOP presidential debate on Wednesday.during a Labor Day weekend town hall in New Hampshire. Biden’s policies, he said, are “using our taxpayer money to subsidize some other guy to feel cool about himself because he doesn’t have self-esteem, so he wants to own an electric vehicle.
By July it was clear which way Sunak was leaning. The prime minister tweeted a picture of himself sitting in an old Rover car, in a tribute to former Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher, highlighting a July interview with the Telegraph in which he announced he was reviewing so-called “anti-car schemes.”, now called X. “Earlier I spoke to @Telegraph about how important cars are for families to live their lives. It’s something anti-motorist Labour just don’t seem to get.
Other Conservatives have latched onto broader criticisms of electric vehicles, including MP Craig Mackinlay, who has cited the risks posed by battery fires and minerals mining as elements of the “electric car con.”