Our Perspective: A Modern Economy Must Be An Electrified Economy

By Americans for a Modern Economy

May 2, 2019

America is on the cusp of a transportation revolution. Forces are converging right now (a series of intertwined technological leaps and social trends that include carsharing... ridesharing... micro-transit like e-scooters... the increasing viability of electric and alternative transit... and the growth of connected and, ultimately, autonomous vehicles) that are going to profoundly reshape the way people and goods travel from one point to another. The resulting new mobility ecosystem has the potential to positively impact nearly every single person who lives in the United States.

A wholesale shift to autonomous and electric vehicles would not just change the entire transportation industry, but also our daily lives. General Motors CEO Mary Barra refers to this future as “zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero fatalities.”

While there are still plenty of big questions to be answered about the speed at which we’ll see this revolution play out, what is not in question is the fundamental foundation for America’s modern mobility ecosystem: electrified transit.

The current transportation sector accounts for more than 70 percent of America’s oil consumption and is 92 percent reliant on petroleum fuels. An electrified transportation system is powered by a wide variety of domestic sources: natural gas, nuclear, coal, hydroelectric, wind, solar, and geothermal. Additionally, electricity rates are low and stable, insulating consumers and commercial or public fleets from volatile oil markets. To put things simply: it only makes sense that the modern transit ecosystem is powered by the most modern sources of energy (as opposed to the 140-year-old internal combustion engine).

Expediting the large-scale “electrification” of America’s fleet of vehicles and its associated infrastructure will have profound benefits to our country’s economy by allowing drivers to reduce their fuel costs, helping to reduce greenhouse gases and other pollutants and enhancing our energy security through fuel diversity.

That’s why a large, bipartisan coalition in Congress introduced the Driving America Forward Act earlier this year, an effort to keep our country on-track to this electrified future. Under current law, the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit phases out once an automaker sells 200,000 EVs. The Driving America Forward Act, H.R. 2256 & S.1094, seeks to increase the cap on qualifying EVs for each automaker by an additional 400,000. Expanding the EV tax credit would continue that upward trend in the deployment of these vehicles and support the increased investments that the domestic and global automakers have made in EVs which will ultimately reduce costs for consumers.

We encourage readers to support this effort and TELL CONGRESS TO SUPPORT THE DRIVING AMERICA FORWARD ACT.

We must continue to support policies that modernize our economy. Nothing fulfills that goal more than the electrification of our national transportation system as the foundation for a truly autonomous future.