Thanks for saying what I was trying to say.

I think the EV subsidies have essentially just changed into additional profit margin.

I would probably say that was their purpose from the beginning. Companies aren’t going to do something unless there is profit to be made. The subsidies exist to create that profit.

Now you could say that manufacturers are charging more and the customers are paying more because they know part of the cost will be reimbursed with the subsidies. But that doesn’t seem sustainable for long, because all it take is one manufacturer to start dropping prices to attract customers. Then everyone would drop prices to match. We weren’t really seeing that previously because everything was supply constrained. But now we seem to be seeing that happen with Tesla at least, they’ve been dropping prices in the USA recently.

There’s at least one company recycling EV batteries already, and that’s even with the small amount of end-of-life batteries out there (most are still on the road): https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/03/heres-what-redwood-learned-in-its-first-year-of-ev-battery-recycling/

Recycled stuff gets dumped into some poor third world country.

That’s definitely the case for low/zero value materials like plastics. But the materials in EV batteries are way too valuable to just throw away.

And that’s a bad thing? Isn’t the entire purpose of that government money to spur development? Seems like it is working as intended then?

There’s no shortage of reasons to hate Elon, but using government subsidies for their intended purpose seems like a strange one.

But once it’s out, it’s out. It can then be recycled and reused “forever”.

You extract oil once and burn it once; then that carbon is stuck in the atmosphere “forever”. Now you have to extract more oil and do it all over again.

That’s the big difference, EVs don’t consume lithium; they borrow it.

He’s not competing on the free market.

Those subsidies are exclusively available only to Elon’s companies?

Come on, he’s a massive douche; but Tesla/SpaceX are in the same market as all their competitors. They’re not special, they just chose to do things others weren’t. Why didn’t GM build BEVs sooner to suck up all those subsidies? Why didn’t ULA land their boosters to reduce launch costs and secure more launch contacts and grants?

What happens to lithium after it’s mined? What happens to oil after it’s mined?

There’s no comparing how much worse ICEs are compared to EVs.