Durham Reporter

Higher gas prices are putting the squeeze on Americans with limited disposable income, and the upward trend at the pump has the Biden administration touting this as yet another reason to promote electric vehicles (EVs).

"Today's announcement that the electric vehicle maker VinFast will build an electric vehicle and battery manufacturing facility in North Carolina — $4 billion to create more than 7,000 jobs and hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles and batteries — is the latest example of my economic strategy at work," President Joe Biden said, according to the White House Briefing Room. 

While that might look good on paper, not all Americans are climbing on the EV bandwagon, a recent poll showed.

The Senate Opportunity Fund national poll indicated that a majority of American voters disagree that the best solution to high gas prices is urging Americans to buy EVs. The poll, conducted March 15 to 17, surveyed 800 voters who are likely to vote in the November general election. When asked, 55% of them disagreed with the idea of encouraging the purchase of more EVs to solve gas prices, while 38% agreed and 8% had no opinion. 

The price of gasoline is a leading driver of the consumer inflation that has gripped America for months. A recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report showed gas price inflation is up 38% from a year ago.

Democrats have often used the country's energy problems as an opportunity to call for more EVs after Biden's August 2021 executive order that calls for half of all new cars sold yearly to be zero-emissions vehicles by 2030, along with the deployment of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations in that same time frame. 

In January, Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) required the registration of 1.25 million EVs by 2030 and said that EVs will account for half of all car sales in his state by that year.

The supporters of the push toward EVs cite Russia's lack of dependability as a steadfast global partner in the energy industry as a reason to curtail U.S. reliance on gas-powered motor vehicles.

"If we want to reduce Putin's power… then we need to double-down on alternatives, not on the same old failed policies of the past," U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) told The Hill. "We have the historic opportunity to charge forward on EVs." 

VinFast, a Vietnamese startup, has plans to invest at least $2 billion into a plant to be built in Chatham County, North Carolina. The company will start building electric crossovers in 2024.