Do you think that's not also going to involve laying off thousands of employees as they retool factories to build cars for which there is little demand?
17.5 million cars were sold in the US last year. GM, for example sold nearly 200k cars in March. Just March. If they went from that to selling 400k cars every 2-3 years, that would be a horrendously precipitous decline in sales with massive layoffs.
Not to mention retooling factories. They can't just spin around on a dime and start making electric cars instead of gas ones.
Oh, and where's the charging infrastructure for everyone to drive an electric car? The Tesla stations are great, but they still take 30 minutes or so to fully charge a car. Go look at the throughput at a busy gas station and imagine every one of those people waiting 30 minutes. They'd basically never get to leave the gas station.
You're going to see a drop in auto sales regardless with autopilot and ridesharing services reducing the need to own a car. Note GM investing in Lyfy (smart; they see the writing on the wall).
Auto jobs are going away, but that's an argument for basic income for another day.
Retooling factories can be done quickly. It only took Tesla ~10-14 days of downtime to retool from Model S-only production to Model S and Model X. Electric vehicles are so so much easier to produce than an internal combustion vehicle, as its only a battery and electric motor for a drivetrain.
Charging infrastructure? Every home with at least 100amp/220V service is a charging station. Not to mention every Tesla destination and Supercharger station.
I don't disagree with any of that. The poster I was originally replying to above was saying we shouldn't shut down the automakers because it would put thousands of people out of work in one sentence and then saying we should forbid them from making their primary source of revenuein the next. I'm just pointing out that these are effectively the same thing.
You can't taking a company with a 50+ year infrastructure built around doing one thing, tell it to stop doing that overnight and expect it to stay in business and continue employing 100,000 people. It just doesn't work that way.
Without a vastly better charging infrastructure most people in cities, where the current pollution problems really matter, can't buy an electric car because they have nowhere to charge it.
Geez, that's a weak excuse not to build them. The government did a deal with VW, I think their deal should've been to produce and sell electric cars with a certain price, as well as (or...) to provide the charging infrastructure for them. Obviously not throughout the whole country, maybe e.g. in big cities. There were talks of 18 billion dollar fines, how many charging ports would that build.
