Americans are saying ‘no’ to Biden’s EV revolution: Bob Nardelli

Former auto executives warning that companies should pump the brakes on the EV push, saying that the transition to electric happened, quote, too soon and too fast. Former Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli is one of those executives, and he joins us now. Bob, it’s great to have you on the program. And you were interviewed for our digital platform along with Bob Lutz, who’s a former executive at Ford, Chrysler and GM. He echoed your sentiments as well. At the end of the day, I think it’s fair to say when it comes to E VS in this country right now, now the cart was put before the horse. Your thoughts? Well, Jackie is no, no question about that. You know, when I was running Chrysler back in 7-8 nine, the Obama and Biden administration tried a very similar tactic. It was called the CAFE standards and basically was restricting the size of the vehicles we could produce. In other words, putting a cap on SU VS and trucks and forcing us into a smaller vehicles to improve the average gas mileage. Now we did a lot of work, Bob Lutz I and, and and all the folks at the OEM did a lot of work to improve gas mileage. But the consumer said stop, you’re not going to force me to buy something I don’t want. So there’s about 278,000,000 cars on the road today. It’s called the car park. A small majority of those are electric. And what happened here, Jackie, is the consumer went from about 11 years of average age of of their vehicles is now up over 12 1/2 percent, 12 1/2 years. So they basically said I’ll keep my car, I’m not going to buy electric and we’ll see what happens. Well, the other thing about this Jackie, is if you think about the number of gas stations available for ICE engines, internal combustion engines, it’s about 196,000. Now compare that to EV charging stations, there’s about 64,000. And oh, by the way, Jeff knows this from his trip. Sometimes they don’t work, sometimes they’re not booked to a grid. And so we see that dilemma. You know, this is a case where where it used to be range anxiety, now it’s charging anxiety. So consumers, you know, when you have the governor of California say, please don’t charge your truck tonight because we won’t have enough grid power to keep air conditioning on. And the majority of the people who drive trucks today do it for an earning or that’s how they make their living. And we’ve seen Ford cut back on their Lightning 150. There was over 100 days of inventory that the dealers were choking on. On that, Jackie, to be honest with you, we saw General Motors cut back on billions of dollars of expansion. It now offer a $10 billion stock buyback. You see, you know, some of the major like Rivian had lost about $5.4 billion last year. So most of the EV startups are failing. Lordstown, you just go through the list and this is this is a case instead of evolution, this Biden administration tried a revolution and the consumers are saying, no, not me, Jackie. That’s what’s happening. It makes a lot of sense. Bob, we’re running out of time, but it’s always great to see you. We’ll have you back on again soon. Thank you for being here.