Excerpts: U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on ‘The Future of E-Mobility’ with Axios

Secretary Buttigieg and Axios reporter Nathan Bomey. Photo Hector Emanuel/Axios

WASHINGTON - U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg joined Axios reporter Nathan Bomey for a conversation on the future of electric mobility in the country. During the interview the Secretary highlighted the Biden-Harris Administration's investments to grow the Made-in-America national EV charging network and help ensure more reliable publicly accessible chargers. There are nearly 200,000 publicly available chargers today. States and communities now have more than $2.4 billion in funding to start work on setting up sites across the nation.

Thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Biden-Harris Administration is supporting good paying jobs across the country installing, maintaining, and repairing EV infrastructure, and make our current charging network more reliable.

Below are excerpts of the interview:

"What we know is that every year, more Americans buy EVs than the year prior. And there are really two things that we are doing to facilitate that process. One is to make them cheaper-that's what the tax credit is all about. The other is to make sure that you can find a charger when you need one. Even though 80% of EV charging happens at home, it remains very important for those whose homes don't have a garage or an easy place to plug in a car, and for those longer use cases, those longer trips, that we have the kind of EV charging network that would be consistent with that.

Look, it took us 100 years to get the network of gas stations that we have today. We just don't have that long for EV charging network."

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On the EV charging network:

"It is moving fast enough to meet the President's goal, and I think we're actually going to come out ahead of the President's goal of having half a million chargers across the country by the end of this decade. Just since Joe Biden took office, the number of publicly available chargers has nearly doubled, it's at 188,000. That has been driven by the private sector. Now, we are going to begin coming in with federal dollars to help fill in some of those gaps, respond in some of those places where it is not yet profitable for the private sector. The bulk of those chargers will be installed in '26, '27, and '28-but the first handful of them are already going into the ground and will soon be in use."

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On EV chargers:

"[...] a lot of it is what goes into developing a site for a charger, especially these fast-charging, high-capacity chargers. It's not just like the thing you hook up in your garage. It requires procurement, site work. We're talking about doing in a matter of years what took decades to build up in terms of America's network of gas stations-and it's not the same as gas stations. They don't belong in the same places. Precisely because, unlike gas, a lot of the fueling of electric vehicles-a majority of it, in fact-at homes and workplaces. And yet, we can't leave it only to homes and workplaces and expect to have the equitable and widely available network that America needs."

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"I think it's frustrating anytime something that should be totally nonpolitical somehow gets an ideological valence. I would have said-and would say-the same thing about public health and vaccinations. There should be nothing ideological about that, and yet it became almost a partisan thing, with really disturbing results in terms of some prediction that your political party could be a predictor of whether you were protected from something like COVID.

I think it's a little more scrambled in the case of EVs. I think the reason it ultimately will not be a barrier for the long-long-term is that there are so many various benefits to having one. So, you don't have to be a Democrat or a Republican to want to save money. And now that we have reached a point where the data show that for an equivalent model between an EV and a gas model, you're now pretty much the same price-maybe even a little bit better-on the EV."

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"We're recognizing that this is not an overnight transition. Our expectation and goal is that about half of new vehicle sales will be EVs by the end of this decade. We don't have the grid or the charging network to accommodate some kind of overnight switch. We're not driving one, we're definitely not mandating one, and we're not expecting one.

For some people, it will be the right answer to have a hybrid. That's actually what our family has. Our family has a hybrid. It's a plug-in electric for the first 30 or 40 miles, and it gets us to daycare, it gets us to Target. But if we gotta, you know, if I gotta drive the dog between D.C. and Michigan, then the gas engine kicks in.

So, people will figure out the right answer for them. What we are doing is making it more affordable for those who choose to move in that direction."

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On China's unfair trade practices:

"[...] it's not fair competition. We're talking about a, I can't even call it an industrial policy, it's really a market distortion policy, driven by China. By the way, not because the Chinese Communist Party is populated by environment buffs, right? I mean, they're doing this because it is strategic. Because they understand the strategic value of trying to dominate the EV market, because the EV market is where the entire automotive sector is going. This is why it really harmed our economic security when the Trump Administration all but deliberately gave China the advantage in the EV market, and now we are working to reclaim it onto American soil.

And this is really personal for me, precisely because I grew up in the Industrial Midwest. I grew up not realizing it was unusual to have acres of collapsing factory buildings on either side of the road when you went to school until I left to go to college. And having seen firsthand what can happen not just to a company but to a community when industry fails to keep with the times and fails to innovate, we have got to make sure that as the industry shifts to EVs, it's an America-made EV revolution. That's been a big focus for President Biden."

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