Along with apple pie, baseball, and tipping, the automobile is classically American. But when it comes to the 21st century passenger car, automakers in the United States — save for Tesla — have been playing catchup, scrambling to counter the rise of China’s electric vehicle boom. Sure, both EVs and internal combustion cars have seats and four wheels, but it’s not so simple as American automakers swapping in a few parts and calling it a day.
Soon after the announcement, Grist sat down with Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm to talk about why domestic EV manufacturing is so important, how those EVs could actually help the grid instead of destroying it, and why even children will benefit from the $1.7 billion even though they can’t drive.Q.
We want to make sure that there’s the infrastructure so that people don’t have range anxiety, and that’s what the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s charging funding for states is doing, to fill in the gap where the private sector hasn’t been installing chargers. So on transportation corridors every 50 miles, we want to see a high-speed charger, and we want it to be not more than a mile off the transportation corridor and app-enabled.