Unplug electric car subsidies

For the first time in a few years, electric cars are mostly an afterthought at the auto show in Detroit.

To be sure, electric cars and hybrid electric models are on the show floor and still being promoted at various intensity levels by Detroit's automakers as well as Japanese companies and upstarts building — but not selling many — high-priced, electric sports cars. But the niche vehicles are not as prominent this year as in past years.

That's a good thing.

Electric vehicles aren't the answer to curbing America's dependence on foreign oil or putting a dent in climate change.

That is evidenced by lackluster sales of the vehicles that came propped up by generous taxpayer subsidies and corporate purchases that distort the actual demand by everyday consumers.

General Motors Co., for example, sold 7,671 Volts, far fewer than its goal of 10,000 and the company didn't break down how many of those sales were to showroom shoppers or to government or corporate fleets. Nissan Motor Co., another big promoter of electric vehicles, sold 9,674 all-electric Leafs, according to Autodata Corp.

By now, you'd think that the government would have stopped forcing American taxpayers to subsidize the electric car. It really never should have picked one automotive technology over another in the first place.

Subsidizing the electric car has been a devil's bargain, making the development of other alternative technologies such as conventional hybrids and advanced gasoline engines all the more difficult.

Though it's certainly the case that electric cars and trucks are part of our automotive future, taxpayer subsidies for EVs should be phased out as an unneeded cost at a time of enormous federal budget deficits. The national debt has surpassed $15 trillion.

There seems little doubt that the Obama administration's prime justification for subsidizing electric cars and plug-in hybrids — the fear that U.S. oil imports would keep rising — was way off base.

Oil imports were down to a 16-year low of 45.4 percent of domestic consumption in 2011, from a high of 60.3 percent in 2005.

And American refineries are so flush with gasoline, diesel oil and other petroleum products that the U.S. became a net exporter of fuel last year for the first time since 1949.

Subsidies for electric cars were also supposed to lower their operating costs so that popularity of the vehicles could reduce global warming. President Barack Obama predicted that 1 million electric cars would be on the road by 2015.