But if you want to get into particulars, I disagree with this part:
If someone wants to buy a Ford F-150 Lightning which starts at $49,500 with a $7500 credit, are they still going to buy it at $57,000 if that $7,500 tax credit is not there? Of course not.
I submit to you that without the EV tax credit, but all else being equal, the up front price of the EV would be $7,500 less (would be $49,500 in this case). Why? IMHO the EV tax credit artificially inflates the up front costs just like subsidies inflate everything else (i.e. college tuition, medical costs).
For example, I saw it happen with my own eyes in 2022 when the Inflation Raising Act increased the solar tax credit from 26% to 30%. That was the year I not only bought the EV, I also added onto the solar system. Most of the solar equipment was bought before the IRA, so I got lucky. But some was bought after the IRA, and those prices jumped by 4% to absorb the extra tax credit.
The IRA also changed the EV tax credit to include EV's made from car manufacturers that had already exceeded their tax credit limit. (The old EV tax credit was good for only the first 200K or so EV's made by a manufacturer. So it'd been a while since you could get the EV tax credit for buying a new Tesla or GM EV.) Thus, the passage of the IRA included Tesla's and GM's and Ford's. Thus the prices of those EV's immediately jumped up by $7K and the EV forums were full of people who were livid. One EV forum I frequent to swap tips for optimizing the throughput on my EV is full of lefties like most EV forums. I posted there what I'm posting here that the tax credit doesn't help consumers because it just artificially inflates the up front price. Some of them are now believers that maybe the free market is best -- well only a few of them LOL.
I would agree that the price would drop to $7500 less if there were no tax credit, but...if you are already losing $130,000 on some model (I still cannot wrap my head around that, and wouldn’t believe it except it was Car and Driver I saw it in)...well.
I guess the difference between losing $130,000 and $137,500 on each one sold would be a spit in the wind.
I really cannot fathom this. Are all the shareholders complete and total Leftists, where this kind of loss on each vehicle is okay if it pushes an agenda?
I am not embarrassed at all to say I don’t get it.