Buttigieg on EV charging, competition with China, and protecting US jobs

Ahead of President Biden’s State of the Union address last night, Tech Brew caught up with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg about the administration’s efforts to build out a national EV charging network, competition from China, why he’s excited about what AI could mean for the future of transportation, and more.

The Biden administration’s goal is to have some 500,000 EV chargers available by 2030, backed by $7.5 billion in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Another one of Biden’s signature pieces of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, made available consumer tax credits of up to $7,500 for EVs that meet certain sourcing, assembly, pricing, and other requirements. That’s just one prong of the administration’s strategy to help spur adoption of EVs as it seeks to meet its climate goals, including having EVs make up at least half of new-vehicle sales by 2030.

Buttigieg told us he was looking forward to Biden’s SOTU address because “it’ll be a chance for him to lay out the practical, everyday improvements that are coming from these policies.”

“It’s not just about some abstract view on how infrastructure ought to work or where we’re headed with climate; it’s that everyday life is getting better and is changing in concrete ways because of the measures this administration has taken, whether it’s in the healthcare space, lowering costs, or in the transportation space, fixing roads and bridges, and setting us up for the technology of the future.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The EV transition has been bumpy recently, with demand slowing down and automakers pulling back on investments. Are further policy solutions needed to help spur adoption?

It’s important to recognize that EV growth continues to be very strong. There are going to be year-by-year, or even quarter-by-quarter, ups and downs, but the trajectory is unmistakable and it has not changed.

The big question I think we face is: Will the EV future be led by American firms and American workers? Or will it be dominated by another country like China? The last administration allowed China to build an advantage in EVs. We are making sure that America has the lead. That’s why we’ve found two major obstacles and worked to tear them down.

One obstacle is the upfront price or cost of EVs; the IRA is helping with that. The other is the availability of charging. And that is why we are investing in chargers around the country to meet the president’s goal of half a million chargers by the end of this decade. If we succeed in those two efforts…I think the US is very well-positioned to lead the EV future. But we’ve got to keep pushing, because so many jobs are at stake. And that’s something I take very personally, as a product of the industrial Midwest, having seen how important these jobs are and having seen what happens if you lose them.

How is the rollout of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) funding going, and what is the Department of Transportation doing to speed up the process of building out this infrastructure?

We’re impatient to get more chargers in the ground, and that’s something that I think you’re going to see accelerate this year and certainly going into next year.

This is a completely new program. So it took a little while to get it up and running. And it is down to each state to deploy those funds according to their customized plans. We knew at the outset that a one-size-fits-all strategy wasn’t going to work. There was a cost to that, which meant that there’s more complexity in the program. And I think that’s affected the timeline. But I also think that making sure that each state can pursue its own version of the vision is still the right thing to do, and I think it’s going to lead to us getting this right. We’re now starting to see the first NEVI-funded chargers going into the ground; the very first was in Ohio. We’re going to see announcements now, I think almost every week, picking up the pace. But we do need to accelerate that in order to meet our marks.

On the price side, as you noted, the consumer EV tax credits in the IRA are supposed to help address this. Is that program working as it’s supposed to?

The latest round of numbers that I saw from Kelley Blue Book suggests that the cost of an EV is now within about 4% of the typical price of a traditional combustion engine car. So we’re getting close to the point of price parity, in terms of what you see as a consumer. And that’s important, because if the price is even close, then the consumer is going to come out ahead in the end, because even if your car payment was a little bit higher, your cost of fuel would be lower, and so would your cost of maintenance.

So we see that we’re on a healthy trajectory here, but we still want to bring those costs lower. Costs of cars in general, and the cost of EVs, are higher than what you would want them to be for many people to be able to take advantage of those savings.

The other issue, of course, is we didn’t just do a blanket tax credit for any and all EVs. It was very important that they have American content, because of this priority of making sure there are American jobs. Car companies are still figuring out how to comply with that, and that’s created some complexity, but I think it will be a long-term successful policy.

There’s been some speculation that if former President Trump wins in November, we could see the IRA significantly altered or even repealed. What’s at stake in this election in terms of transportation policy and what might we expect from President Biden if he wins reelection?

I can’t speak to the election or the campaign, but I’ll tell you why I think it’s so important for this policy to continue, and I can sum it up in one word: jobs. I saw a facility going up in Glendale, Kentucky, that will have thousands of good-paying jobs creating batteries for the American EV supply chain. In the county where I grew up, St. Joe County, Indiana, there is work underway on a GM-funded EV battery plant that represents the largest manufacturing investment in or near my hometown since John F. Kennedy was president. And it’s very much needed after everything that community went through when Studebaker closed its doors just after the end of the Kennedy administration.

So a reversal in policy would destroy good-paying manufacturing jobs across the Midwest, and it would really sentence us to be living in the past as a country. The reality is, you can’t win the fight for the future by holding onto the technologies of the past. A policy reversal would endanger American economic leadership as well as so many jobs, including in the industrial Midwest, where I come from.

What’s the plan for making EV charging more accessible in rural areas or for people who don’t have the option to charge at home?

The solutions in a dense urban area are very different from long stretches of road, where people are going to need to charge up, as well. That’s why our EV charging funding is set up in a way that doesn’t assume that all states are the same, but really invites states to develop their own plans. We do have some basic standards, like expecting there to be charging available every 50 miles along our key corridors, but we know that can be a particular issue in rural areas with more spread-out roadways.

On the other hand, rural areas have a higher rate of single-family homes. And single-family homes tend to already have at least basic charging infrastructure in the form of a plug in the wall. That’s what we use at my home in rural Michigan right now. And so we also need to recognize that there’s a level of informing consumers about what’s available to them right now, potentially with the resources they already have, in addition to filling the gaps with things like fast charging on spread-out roadways.

What transportation tech innovations are you most excited about right now?

The most important transportation technology of the last decade turned out to be the smartphone, which isn’t even part of the vehicle, and yet it changed everything in transportation. So we don’t always see the big developments coming, and they’re not always coming in the ways you would think.

There are some things we do see coming: advanced air mobility, which is another way of talking about, basically, flying cars. Or electric vertical take-off and landing, or eVTOL, craft is something that I think will be arriving very quickly in American airspace and could make a big difference for a lot of people.

The continuing trend toward automation of vehicles is something we’re watching closely, mainly through the lens of safety, because we have a crisis on our hands in terms of roadway deaths and crashes. And if technology can help with that, we need to make sure that technology meets its potential.

But I also think AI, more broadly, is going to change transportation in ways we can’t always guess. Even things as unglamorous as speeding up the paperwork associated with delivering infrastructure projects might actually be a meaningful use case for AI, in addition to things that people probably do think of that are more in the realm of more advanced vehicles.