audio version of the segment here > Making Cars Affordable Again
Jay Weber Show transcript 12-4-25
Oh- this is awesome: the wins never stop coming in this second Trump term. The president and his administration are going to give the American people another great gift right before Christmas here- And i think it’s safe to say that most Americans won’t even realize what a gift it is.
The president, himself, is apparently going to hold an oval office event later today to announce that he is gutting the Biden-era cafe standards. These are the car emissions standards that the government originally put in place to ...quote. Encourage better gas mileage.
These cafe standards weren’t even meant to be a smog reducer, so much as they were meant to be about getting better gas mileage.
They are a mandate on car makers that says the overall fleet of vehicles that they are selling in America has got to get an average of ‘x’ miles per gallon. As in- if you, Ford, want to sell pickup trucks that only get 20 miles per gallon -and the cafe standard is 30 miles per gallon…then you also better be making a car that gets 40 miles per gallon. Get it? And the standards don’t even stipulate that a carmaker needs to ‘sell’ the right number of vehicles to meet the actual standard. It just says: in any given model year’s fleet- it needs to meet ‘this standard’.
Again, it was originally put in place decades ago to try to force car makers to make vehicles that get better miles-per-gallon. But the eco-zealots and democrats of the global warming era quickly latched onto it as way to ‘save the environment’ and force us into electric vehicles.
For example- under Obama- his radical team hiked it up to, I believe…about 37 miles per gallon. And hiking it up that high…represented a number that today’s car makers still aren’t matching. The current batch of vehicles-even with more EVs and hybrids on the market…is still only around 24 miles per gallon. That’s an official dept of energy figure: cars now get an average of 24.4 miles per gallon. That’s it. But Obama and Biden bullies were insisting on 50.
And so, the point is: todays’ car makers still aren’t meeting the Obama-era cafe standard…which trump relaxed a bit during his first term…only to have joe Biden ratchet it up to 50 miles per gallon for all 2030 fleets of vehicles. Good Lord. There are no way today’s car companies can attain that- and its’ only 5 years away. Right?
That was the point: Biden’s bullying regime was going to try to ensure that every single blasted. Vehicles sold by 2030 were going to need to be an electric vehicle. Now consider that-even as things stand- this rush toward electric vehicles coupled with Biden’s inflationary policies and supply chain problems…etc. Has driven up the cost of the average new car to 50 thousand dollars.
50-thousand dollars is the average price of a new car in America today- and car dealers say consumers are at the end of their rope: they have finally hit the wall on being able to afford today’s car prices.
But on this glorious day…. President Trump announced that his team is stepping in to snuff out Biden’s idiotic 50 mile per gallon cafe standard.
This is great news- and the best part of it might be taking that additional step to end this nonsense in which the state of California gets a federal waiver to set its own standards and basically force them onto the rest of the country. I’m telling’ you, that reform is huge and I bet it’s the one that the car companies are the most excited about.
This is great stuff. And it’ll be interesting to see ‘how far back’ the trump administration decides to roll these cafe standards. One story I read said they plan to get this law and this measure back to its original intent. Great.
And this news comes as EV sales simply crashed in October. Just. Crashed. And why? One big reason was that the long-standing federal subsidies of 75-hundred dollars on every car sale expired.
This was another ridiculous attempt to rig the economy and the car market by the democrats that has finally ended. Thank heaven. And the crash in sales in October proves that the taxpayer giveaway is what was propping up nearly all EV sales.
Ford was losing something like 37-thousand dollars per vehicle on every EV they were making. I never saw that figure for Stellantis or GM, but it must be tens of thousands of dollars. Which is another reason that the price of the ‘other’ cars in their fleet is so high, right?
And whether the end of the EV subsidies relates to the overall sense that consumers have finally ‘hit the wall’ on simply absorbing these new car prices or whether it’s a coincidence.
There’s only so much you can ask people to pay for ‘any’ product before they start to say ‘no’. For some of us, it might be the 9-dollar rotisserie chicken…or the five-dollar box of Triscuits.
Nope. I’m not paying for that. For others, it’s the restaurant breakfast that Is now fifteen dollars when it used to be five.
Nope. I’m not paying for that.
There’s a point that-even if more Americans are feeling better, financially, and/or have always been financially well off…as upper middle class. There’s a point at which everyone eventually says: nope, I’m just not paying ‘that price’ for ‘that item’. And 75 for a new pickup truck or 50-grand for a midsize SUV appears to be bumping into that ceiling for a lot of people. Regardless of how much money they have.
photo credit: Getty Images