WAPO Trashes Electric Car Subsidies

The Washington Post published an astonishing (at least to me) editorial this morning, praising the Congress for allowing both the ethanol subsidy and the $0.54 per gallon ethanol tariff to expire at the end of the year, by way of getting to their main gripe, the subsidy for both home and commercial chargers for chargeable electric cars ($1,000 and $30,000 dollars respectively - expired), and the $7,500 subsidy for the purchase of electric vehicles (not expired):

As a means of reducing carbon emissions, electric cars and plug-in hybrid electrics are no more cost-effective than ethanol. What’s more, only upper-income consumers can afford to buy an electric vehicle (EV); so the charger subsidy is a giveaway to the well-to-do...

Evidence is mounting that President Obama was overly optimistic to pledge that there would be 1 million EVs on the road by 2015. Electric cars are not likely to form a significant part of the solution to America’s dependence on foreign oil, or to global warming, in the near future. They simply pose too many issues of price and practicality to attract a large segment of the car-buying public. More prosaic fuel-economy innovations such as conventional hybrids, clean-diesel cars and advanced gasoline engines all show much more promise than electrics.

A rare moment of common sense.