- JD Vance, a critic of electric vehicles, received Elon Musk's endorsement.
- Vance has expressed support for the oil industry and has proposed cutting EV subsidies.
- Musk also opposes EV subsidies, although Tesla has benefited from past subsidies.
For years, JD Vance has criticized the switch to electric vehicles and said Teslas aren't his thing. Elon Musk endorsed him anyway.
The Ohio senator, and now the Republican vice presidential candidate, has the backing of Musk and other Silicon Valley tech billionaires like Peter Thiel and AOL founder Steve Case, even as Vance became a vocal critic of EVs and the tech industry during his first two years in office.
"If you have a Tesla — and I think they're kind of cool. I don't own one, they're pretty fast. But not my thing," Vance told The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show in 2022.
Vance said his anti-EV stance stems from what he sees as hypocrisy in the charging and manufacturing of the vehicles. While the US doesn't import many EVs directly from China, the country does dominate the supply chain for batteries and the critical minerals inside them. Back in the US, cars are also charged up on a mostly dirty power grid, Vance added, saying, "The whole EV thing is a scam."
"If you plug it into your wall, people think there's Keebler elves back there making energy in the walls," he said. "It comes, of course, from fossil fuels. So you're manufacturing cars in the dirtiest economy in the world. You're still relying on fossil fuels to produce energy."
Vance has also criticized President Joe Biden's tax incentives to encourage more Americans to buy EVs and introduced his own tax credit for gas- and diesel-powered vehicles manufactured in the US.
But none of this seems to be a problem for Musk. On Tuesday, he also voiced opposition to subsidies for EVs, noting that taking them away "will only help Tesla." Musk in past interviews has said Tesla's advantage over its competitors would widen if federal subsidies ended. Yet Tesla has received subsidies amounting to nearly $3 billion, such as in 2010 when the company got a $465 million federal loan.
On Monday, Musk committed to donating $45 million per month to a pro-Trump super PAC, even though Trump has similarly disproved of EVs, calling the Biden administration's support for EVs "ridiculous."
Why Vance doesn't like EVs
Vance's opposition to EVs aligns with his recent pivot to being a climate denier.
As recently as a 2020 speech at Ohio State University, Vance said, "a climate problem exists in our society," noting the benefits of solar energy.
However, by 2022, he had changed his mind following his campaign for the Senate, for which the oil and gas industry was a top donor.
Campaign finance watchdog Open Secrets found that since 2019, Vance has received over $340,000 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, the New York Times reported.
In 2022, in an interview on conservative talk radio, Vance said he didn't think there was a climate crisis. And even if there was, he said, it wouldn't be solved by buying "Chinese manufactured electric vehicles."
Vance has argued that EVs are enriching China at the expense of the American auto industry.
Vance's opposition is rooted in how the EV supply chain, including batteries and the critical metals they are made with, is largely controlled by China — "the dirtiest economy" in the world, he said. Then in the US, EVs are getting charged up on a power grid mostly composed of fossil fuels anyway.
Vance's position ignores the fact that tailpipe pollution from cars and trucks is the largest source of US greenhouse gas emissions that are rapidly warming the planet.
Some $250 billion worth of investment by the federal government and private sector is pouring into North America's EV supply chain, from minerals to batteries to assembly, following passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure law — two of President Joe Biden's signature climate laws.
In Vance's home state of Ohio, Biden's Inflation Reduction Act is helping fund a $3.5 billion project to produce lithium batteries for electric vehicles and a new clean steel plant in the state run by U.S. steel giant Cleveland Cliffs.
Despite a blip earlier this year, Americans have been buying more EVs throughout the pandemic, which could comprise over 10% of all new cars sold nationally. According to a Kelley Blue Book analysis, Americans bought nearly 269,000 new EVs in the first quarter of 2024, down from the fourth quarter of 2023 but the first downturn since 2020.
Compared to 1.1 million EV sales in the US in 2023, the International Energy Agency estimates sales will grow to 2.5 million in 2025.