Guess How Short Electric Car Sales Are From Obama 2015 Goal Of 1.5 Million
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The free market, not government mandates, determines the success of a product. That’s the lesson from the failure of consumers to buy electric vehicles at the rate President Obama desired.
President Obama’s promise to have 1 million electric or hybrid cars on the road by 2015 has been an abysmal failure, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg, as private and government purchases of such vehicles have only reached 31 percent of the president’s original goal.
Obama made his promise in 2009, but as it became clear electric and hybrid car sales would never reach one million units the president scaled back his ambitions in March. Though, Obama has failed to even meet his scaled back goals, according to Bloomberg.
“The U.S. bought about 24,816 electric and hybrid vehicles during Obama’s presidency, or about 7 percent of government purchases in that time,” according to government data obtained by Bloomberg. “U.S. consumers bought about 286,814 of those models from 2009 to 2014, or 3 percent of overall sales.”
In total, electric and hybrid car sales have only hit about 31 percent of Obama’s original goal of having 1 million such vehicles on the road by 2015. He’s still about 690,000 vehicles short — if government purchases are included.
Let’s not forget that government purchases helped boost the sales numbers by almost 25,000.