While the Genocide Games are playing out in Beijing, the Hypocrisy Bowl took place in Los Angeles. The Hypocrisy Bowl was actually Super Bowl 56, but our Kim wrote about the maskless celebs at SB56 and it was epic. Creepy Joe Biden’s handlers saw SB56 and decided that the corporate advertising indicated that electric vehicles are the future of the automotive industry. They don’t know that advertising isn’t consumer desire.

The pertinent tweet from the account of Joe Biden:

The ads during last night’s Super Bowl were clear: The future of the auto industry is electric. My Administration is making historic investments in electric vehicles and is building a nationwide network of EV chargers — creating good-paying, union jobs.

— President Biden (@POTUS) February 14, 2022

So much to unpack in that tweet.

Generally, companies want to get the most bang for the buck. Eyes, clicks and product units purchased are the metrics that matter. For the Super Bowl, I am not sure that’s entirely true. Corporate vanity and the pride of having a Super Bowl ad plays a part. Probably the most effective SB 56 ad was the floating QR code from Coinbase. It crashed the servers. The Bidenites would have us believe that cryptocurrency is the future of currency. Maybe?

As to the advertising for electric vehicles, the ad for the all-electric Chevy Silverado was riveting for fans of The Soprano’s. We know that Meadow and AJ didn’t die in that diner. Was it an effective ad for electric vehicles? Get outta here.

The ad for the BMW all-electric SUV starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and Salma Hayek as Zeus and Hera seemed like more of a lifestyle ad than one for electric vehicles. You judge:

Using the taxpayers hard earned money to build charging stations and “investing” in electric vehicles is picking winners and losers. Not a way to endear oneself to the taxpayers. The government bureaucrats have forgotten about Solyndra fiasco during the Obama/Biden administration.

There are bigger problems with electric vehicles as Politico pointed out:

But as the shift to EVs speeds up, three big challenges stand out. One is the mining and supply chains to support that shift. Batteries require a lot of minerals, and that means a lot of mining and transporting of materials. According to mining and energy specialist Mark Mills, a thousand-pound electric car battery requires the moving of 500,000 pounds of earth in the course of mining. But battery costs have come down enormously. A step-up in government and private sector research will drive costs down further and improve performance.

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The second challenge is ensuring the infrastructure to support EVs in the post-gasoline era. That means the building of a ubiquitous EV charging infrastructure and the modernization and expansion of the electric grid. The grid also needs to be 100 percent reliable — a requirement that the recent major power disruptions in California and Texas underline. As the futurist Peter Schwartz puts it, the entire electric system becomes part of the electric automobile supply chain.

Mining rare earth metals is not popular with Greta Thunberg-types. Nor are they fond of expanding and improving the electric grid. No modern electric grid, no electric cars.

The third problem in the Joe Biden prediction about electric vehicles is an age old advertising and marketing problem:

The third challenge involves the public — the people who buy automobiles. For most people, their biggest capital expenditure, after their homes, are their cars. It is simply too soon to know how eager people, beyond early adopters, will be to shift away from something they have always known — gasoline-powered cars — to something that is new for them: electric vehicles. And that’s true even as battery improvements extend driving range. But confidence will grow as they see EVs on the road and in their neighbors’ driveways, as the choice and range of models and features increases, and as automakers step up their commercial drive to push buyers to make the switch.

I am for an “everything” strategy for energy and powering vehicles. And, let the market decide. The following is a story I heard a long time ago:

There’s an old joke about a pet food manufacturer that mounts an all out marketing campaign for its new brand of dog food. It pulls out all the stops. Celebrity endorsements. Super Bowl Ad. You name it. But sales tank. The CEO calls the head of marketing onto the carpet and demands an explanation for the appalling sales. The marketing guy answers: “It’s those damn dogs. They just won’t eat the stuff.”

Joe Biden can declare that Super Bowl ads predict the future, but if we “damn dogs” won’t eat it, it won’t happen.

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