Speaking during a Tuesday, April 2 interview appearance on Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” Biden Administration Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg mocked Americans who aren’t interested in shelling out the money for an electric vehicle, claiming that they’re like those who thought there would only be landline phones in the early 2000s.
Buttigieg’s comments on the matter came after “America’s Newsroom” co-host John Roberts noted that companies producing electric vehicles, both EV-focused automakers like Tesla and traditional vehicle-makers like Ford Motors. Particularly, Roberts noted that Ford recently laid off much of the workforce at its F-150 Lightning plant.
Roberts, noting those troubles and travails in the electric vehicle industry right now, told Transportation Secretary Buttigieg, “Tesla sales fell 8.5% the first quarter of this year. Ford this week is laying off two-thirds of its workforce at the F-150 electric Lightning plant. It’s also scaling back a battery production facility because of sagging sales.”
Continuing, Roberts asked Buttigieg why the Biden Administration is so intent on pushing Americans toward buying electric vehicles if the public is obviously less than interested in them than traditional, often less expensive vehicles. He asked, “EV sales are nowhere near what this president wanted or expected, yet the administration continues to shove them down consumers’ throats. Why?”
Buttigieg, dismissing the data regarding Tesla’s slowing sales numbers, claimed without much evidence to rebut the points made by Roberts that American consumers do, in fact, want to purchase electric vehicles. Then, after making that claim, he proceeded to mock those who do not want to purchase an electric vehicle, saying that it’s like thinking mobile phones would never outplace landline phones.
Claiming as much, the haughty Transportation Secretary told Roberts, “Let’s be clear that the automotive sector is moving toward EVs, and we can’t pretend otherwise. Sometimes when these debates happen, I feel like it’s the early 2000s and I’m talking to some people who think that we can just have landline phones forever.”
Watch Buttigieg here:
Matt Whitlock, a conservative political commentator, gave a different analogy as regards EVs and combustion-powered vehicles, saying, in a post on X, “This is the problem – Democrats think EV’s are to gas-powered cars what cell phones were to landlines.” He added, “In reality, EV’s are to gas powered cars what Fyre Fest was to music festivals. Sounded cool, had potential, but was built on false promises and artificial market forces.”
Another commenter noted that EVs are, regardless of cost and range, impractical for people in certain situations, such as needing to park on the side of the street, away from a potential charging plug. That commenter said, “I lived most of my life in Philly and my block only had parking on the other side of the street. How could I have charged an electric vehicle? There are millions of people like me.”
Still another commenter wrote, “People switched to cell phones when calls stopped costing $5/minute and handsets weren’t the size of a brick. In other words, cellular technology had gotten dirt cheap and convenient — over the course of approximately three decades — to the point that average people could afford to rely on them exclusively. Never did the government forcibly push people out of landlines and into cell phones based on an arbitrary timetable set by politicians seeking to please a constituency. Nor did the government deliberately make landlines artificially expensive and subsidize cell phones to force a premature ‘transition’. And you can still call up the phone company and get a landline today, cheap as ever, if you so choose. So no, Secretary Mayor Pete. It’s not actually the same thing at all. Is ANYONE in the Biden Administration qualified for their jobs in any way at all? Do any of these people have even a basic knowledge of history?”
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