Trump's EV Rollback Could Cost Taxpayers $1B | Hacker News Reader

Trump's EV Rollback Could Cost Taxpayers $1B

thedrive.com

61 pointsdashundchen15 comments

From the article "Furthermore, selling 25,000 EVs would flood the market"

From https://www.kbb.com/car-news/america-set-ev-sales-record-in-... "Americans bought 1.3 million electric vehicles (EVs) in 2024,"

Would 25.000 cars, 2%, really flow the market? I couldn't find number of used EV sales.

The problem is usually never with one. It's trying to sell 25,000 at once.

Things like transportation, paperwork, storage, and depreciation add up to real numbers.

> sell them at around 25% of their original value

This does not seem likely as even by adding this many cars to the market, there’s no way they would sell at 25% of value unless there’s shenanigans.

Yeah let's say they they magically go on the market for 25% of their original value ... the demand would be pretty damn absurd.

This whole situation is dumb, but 25% of original value doesn't make much sense.

Rental car companies ended up selling teslas for under $25K back when that was unusually low for an EV.

These days, a decent used EV costs less than that, so I imagine the government will have to dump whatever model they have 25K of for $20k or less. That’s probably still more than 25% msrp, but not by much.

If they bought 3s for $40k then it’s way more than 25%.

I’ve been looking for low price teslas and haven’t found a drop yet. But I hope it comes soon.

Omitting that would still leave the additional cost at $800M.

That might be more accurate.

As it is not, this journalist does not have credibility with me.

> This does not seem likely as even by adding this many cars to the market, there’s no way they would sell at 25% of value

agree.

and how does decommissioning 2200 chargers cost $50M - $100M? that's $22K - $44K each.

you turn the breaker off. you don't need to rip the chargers out.

regardless of whether or not you think it's a good idea, breathlessly inflating it to "might be" a billion dollars does not convince me more.

I'm thinking they might sell/license the rights (not sure if that's the right phrasing) to these charging stations along with the maintenance/repair costs to a private company. If they spend $100M to decommission them, I will be very surprised.

> a billion dollars does not convince me more.

Buying up gasoline vehicles and buying fossil fuel for them will cost money. But I don't think that'll be a billion dollars.

This will now be a prime example of how silly the cutting Federal spending narrative is.

And that's just the upfront cost.

> As pointed out by InsideEVs, investment consulting firm ICF claims that the federal EV fleet was going to cost $6 billion less than a conventional combustion fleet over the lives of the vehicles.

Culture war garbage over actual governance.

Not silly when the whole RTO mandates and removing EV is about selling more oil.

As well as commercial real estate value preservation, which is in direct conflict with DOGE cutting federal government leases amusingly enough.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-02-28/doge-gove... | https://archive.today/Dp4sR

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