President Biden burned some rubber in Detroit Wednesday — taking the wheel of an all-electric Hummer during a visit to a new General Motors factory.
“Anyone want to jump in the back, or on the roof?” Biden asked reporters after flooring the vehicle’s accelerator.
“These suckers are something else!” Biden said before taking the car for another spin.
Although traditional Hummers are one of the worst emitters of greenhouse gases — with city mileage of 14 miles per gallon — the reworked vehicle is a plug-in.
Biden said if he’d “been asleep for the past 50 years” and awoke to the vehicle, he’d swap “title for title” with his favorite Corvette, according to a pool report.
Biden visited the factory to promote the infrastructure deal he signed Monday investments in electric vehicles as part of his $1.75 trillion Build Back Better spending bill that has been stalled by his own party in Congress.
Biden previously test-drove an electric Ford F-150 in May in Dearborn, Mich., and cruised around the White House driveway in August in one of Chrysler’s electric Jeep Wranglers.
Biden’s just-signed $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package contains $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations and $5 billion to buy electric and low-emission buses. And his proposed social spending plan contains $555 billion for environmental initiatives including $12,500 rebates for the purchase of electric vehicles.
But Republicans, even some of those who voted in favor of the infrastructure package, are criticizing Biden for being preoccupied with electric vehicle technology at a time when Americans are contending with a spike in gasoline and natural gas prices.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell took the Senate floor Tuesday to make the case that “the Biden administration doesn’t have any strategic plan to snap its fingers and turn our massive country into some green utopia overnight.”
“They just want to throw boatloads of government money at things like solar panels and electric vehicles and hope it all works out,” said McConnell, one of 19 GOP senators who voted in favor of the infrastructure bill. He added, “American families are staring down the barrel of skyrocketing heating bills, and the Democrats’ response is to go to war against affordable American energy.”
Meanwhile, White House counselor Steve Ricchetti’s brother, Jeff Ricchetti, was paid $160,000 this year to lobby for GM, according to public disclosures.
Biden has snubbed the largest US electric car maker Tesla because it doesn’t have a unionized workforce — including not inviting the Elon Musk company to a White House expo this summer.
According to government data, companies in the US sold nearly 327,000 electric vehicles in 2019. Almost two-thirds of those sales were Teslas.
The cost of electric vehicles tends to be higher, but Biden argues that the US can use the might of federal tax credits and purchasing power to make environmentally friendly options more competitive.
— with Post wires