I think we all remember sitting in a drivers ed class in high school with the teacher telling us that driving was a privilege not a right. At one level, we got it. You can’t have motorists that rack up multiple DUIs remain on the road. On the other hand, none of us believed that statement. To us, driving was a right. As rights go, it ranked above freedom of speech, right to due process, and all the others that we were taught. We were just high school kids, but most Americans, in the same way, believed driving as a right to be self-evident.

The car was transformational for America where large distances often separated the populace. The car made those distances shrink. More than anything else, it dictated the way America looked by the second half of the 20th century. It nurtured the growth of the suburbs and road culture. The car reflected Americans’ emphasis on utility, convenience, and individualism. Europe may have its cathedrals and cafes, but America has its interstates and fast food.

Americans developed a love-hate relationship with the car. It had come to define American life so thoroughly that unless one lived in a dense urban setting like New York City, driving was an essential part of your life. To go anywhere, one needed a car and to some, that seemed like a tyranny. Among us, were those who stubbornly rejected everything the car and road culture had imposed upon us. They rejected it primarily from an aesthetic perspective wishing that America could look more like the European Old World. They demanded more mass transit, a return to the day of the street trolley, but most Americans had gotten used to a life wedded to their car and wanted nothing to do with it.

Starting in the 1960s, political opposition to the car emerged with a focus on regulating car exhaust elements like nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxides, and particulate matter, what we commonly called smog. Eventually, catalytic converters, changes in engine design, and new blends of gasoline eliminated most smog emissions, but by then, the environmental movement had moved on to a bigger issue, a global, existential one as they saw it. Climate change alarmism dictated that the CO2 emission was a pollutant, but there was no simple fix for eliminating it. A completely new type of propulsion was needed if that was to be the new goal.

This is when the E.V. made its debut, but it turned out not to be a substitute for what Americans needed. Primarily, they required utility, convenience, and affordability. E.V.s failed to fit the bill on all counts. To those advocating for it, that did not matter. Whether they voiced it or not, they hated the car and the American culture that it spawned. It was vulgar and they had enlightened plans to reengineer it and, if necessary, push the culture away from its crass emphasis on the needs of the individual.

On Wednesday, President Trump, who personifies much of what the haters believe to be vulgar about American culture, struck at their plans with a vengeance. He announced a relaxation of the onerous federal fuel standards imposed by the Biden administration on American car manufacturers. He bluntly stated, “Combined with the insane electric vehicle mandate, Biden’s burdensome regulations helped cause the price of cars to soar more than 425%, and in one case, they went up 18% in one year. Today, we’re taking one more step to kill the Green New Scam.”

Now whether he got the math right, I don’t care. He certainly knows what most of us understood sitting in that high school drivers ed class. Driving is a right that all Americans should be allowed to exercise and enjoy.

Image generated by ChatGPT.