The Wrong Way To Fight the Democrats’ Electric Vehicle Push

Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) recently introduced the RENT Act of 2024, a bill to disallow covered rental car companies to rent electric vehicles (EVs) without first obtaining affirmative consent from their customers. Absent such consent, a covered company would need to notify customers if it “believes that it is more likely than not that the only motor vehicles available to rent are electric motor vehicles” (excluding last-minute rentals). If the rental company has only EVs available when the customer arrives for the rental, the bill proposes to guarantee that customers may break their rental reservations at no cost.

Despite its marketing, the RENT Act does not promote freedom of choice. It instead seeks to arrange markets to reflect the sensibilities of Sens. Cotton and Cramer. The bill would interfere in Americans’ private contractual agreements and would dash blindly past the myriad federal interventions that encourage companies to prefer EVs to gas-powered vehicles.

Supporters of the RENT Act would likely claim that Washington’s wildly costly (and likely quixotic) interventions on behalf of EVs demand a muscular policy response. Perhaps without copious subsidization and anti-combustion-engine regulation, they might argue, lawmakers could content themselves to let markets function freely. They might say that, considering these distortions, government must provide some counterbalancing consumer protections against environmentalist overreach.

These arguments diagnose well, but their remedy goes wrong. Combatting Democrats’ byzantine and market-distortive pro-EV regulatory architecture with new layers of market-distortive regulation (as the RENT Act would do) seems imprudent and feebly insufficient. Washington’s myriad subsidies and mandates — not rental car companies’ preferences — bear primary responsibility for EVs’ outsized representation in today’s market. Instead of allowing this architecture time to calcify, and papering over it with poorly conceived half measures, Republicans in Congress could actually attempt to dismantle it. To solve a wasp problem, destroy the nest — merely picking off individual wasps won’t do. 

To defend their interventionism, Cotton and Cramer resort to profoundly unconservative arguments. “Consumers who book a standard gas-powered car should not be forced to rent electric vehicles they don’t want simply because the rental company says so,” Cramer said in a press release (Cotton made a similar case). The senators seem to suggest that customers enjoy an affirmative right to have the option to rent a gas-powered car if they so desire and, consequently, that rental companies have an obligation to make such vehicles available.

Nobody has been “forced” to rent any vehicle. Each rental company chooses to offer certain vehicles at various prices. Customers may assess whether the services offered merit paying those prices. If both parties find the terms sufficiently satisfactory, the parties transact, and no government may rightfully interfere. However, just as no rental car company can rightfully compel a prospective customer to rent against his will, no customer can rightfully dictate the vehicular demographics of companies’ rental fleets — other than by expressing preferences in the market. The public at large ought not do so through the collective power of state action. The question for consumers is whether the transaction terms — as they are, not as one might wish they were — are acceptable, not whether they are perfect.

Of course, the free-market position offers no immediate relief to costumers frustrated by an unpleasant and unexpected experience renting an EV. It thus makes for poor political fodder and unexciting campaign clips. However, as American conservatives once understood reflexively, governments are not instituted among men to eliminate every consumer inconvenience.

Even with Democrats’ best efforts to disadvantage traditional cars, markets have objected strongly. Most consumers do not want EVs (whose prolific production has cost manufacturers dearly and continues only due to the federal intervention), leading several car manufacturers to revise overly ambitious EV production quotas. EVs cost too much and break down too frequently to gain broad market support — without substantial government support, that is. End the interventions, and EVs will resume their proper position on the periphery of the auto industry and American politics.

Likewise, rental-car customers harbor reservations about EVs — as do rental companies. In January, Hertz announced plans to replace a third of its EV fleet — some 20,000 vehicles — with traditional cars (EVs then accounted for just above 10 percent of Hertz’ total fleet). The company expects to sustain a roughly $245-million loss. 

Although hampered by Democrats’ interventions, markets are doing their best to discourage a wholesale EV transition. Reform should excise the distortions, not add new ones. Clumsy partial fixes — particularly those predicated on suspect positive-rights theories — will not restore genuine market freedom.

David B. McGarry is a policy analyst at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.