Obama and the Electric Car Gap

For the better part of the last year we’ve been tracking President Obama’s progress toward his promises to double exports by 2015 and to add 1 million manufacturing jobs by July 2016. Needless to say, in both cases he’s well along the way toward abysmal failure. But the fail doesn’t stop there – oh no.

I’ve been wanting to track his progress toward his plan of adding 1 million electric cars to American roads by the end of 2015, but I could never find the complete set of data. Fortunately my buddy Ironman at Political Calculations noticed that you can compare the Obama administration’s prediction of Chevy Volt sales to actual sales. That comparison is pretty representative of the entire electric car industry, since the Volt was supposed to be 500K out of 1.2 million electric cars predicted to be sold by 2016.

I would have just linked to Ironman’s post (which I urge you to read), but I didn’t think his graphics drove the point home. So I made my own chart, following the format of the export and manufacturing jobs charts. Here you go:

As you can see, we’ll be lucky to hit 100K Volts sold by the end of 2015. We’re only a bit more than halfway through 2013, of course, so you can imagine at least another 10K in electric car sales this year. Which won’t make a bit of difference in closing the gap between the administration’s hopelessly optimistic projections and the reality the rest of us live in.

I believe the term is SCOAMF?