(Bloomberg) — Stay on top of the electric car revolution by signing up to our Hyperdrive newsletter here.It was inevitable. President Joe Biden finally said the word “Tesla” at a White House briefing on Tuesday. Not only that: he mentioned Amazon-backed Rivian and electric bus maker Proterra, too.
“Since 2021, companies have announced investments totaling more than $200 billion in domestic manufacturing here in America — from iconic companies like GM and Ford building out new electric vehicle production to Tesla, our nation’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer, to innovative younger companies like Rivian building electric trucks or Proterra building electric buses,” Biden said during a speech touting domestic auto manufacturing.
Biden has long called himself a union guy and a car guy, and he’s embraced electric vehicles as vital to his economic and climate ambitions. For months, he focused on GM and Ford but ignored Tesla, a snub that sparked increasingly exasperated public reactions from Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk.
But Biden also refrained from mentioning all the other startups in the EV space — which is perplexing given that these companies are creating manufacturing jobs. They also employ a growing number of people who care deeply about climate change and probably vote in elections.
Biden has long enjoyed the support of unions in his political campaigns, including the United Auto Workers. Many of the EV startups, including Tesla and Rivian, are non-union but offer employees equity in their companies.
In 2021, Tesla delivered over 936,000 cars globally and is about to open a new factory in Austin, Texas (as well as Berlin). The company’s annual report, released this week, notes that it now has 99,250 employees globally. It’s no longer a scrappy Silicon Valley startup, having been a public company for over a decade.
While that’s a success story worth celebrating, Tesla also carries with it a lot of baggage. Among the issues facing the company:
- The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has an ongoing defect investigation into Autopilot, looking into how the company’s driver-assistance system handles crash scenes and whether it’s ineffective in preventing collisions with fire trucks and police cars;
- The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing informed Tesla on Jan. 3 that it issued a notice-of-cause finding involving race discrimination and harassment, and a lawsuit is apparently imminent;
- The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sent another subpoena to Tesla in November regarding whether it’s been complying with the settlement springing from Musk’s tweeting in 2018 about taking the company private.
Musk, 50, is the richest person on the planet. His politics are complicated, which is yet another reason Biden may not have been in a hurry to praise him.
The transition to electric vehicles began with the help of government policies and is now being widely adopted by consumers, who have increasingly more models to choose from. Biden finally mentioning companies besides Ford and GM is a big step toward acknowledging this reality.
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