Jesse Watters was called out Wednesday by his female colleagues during a discussion on electric vehicles for claiming that in relationships, “usually the women don’t control which car to buy.”
In the segment on The Five, the Fox News host also interpreted thousands of car dealers signing a letter to President Joe Biden on Tuesday urging him to scale back his electric vehicle mandates as evidence that the only people in the market for that mode of transportation are “liberal, suburban house husbands.”
Enthusiasm in electric vehicles “has stalled,” more than 3,800 dealers told the president, and the supply of such vehicles “is surging” despite “deep price cuts, manufacturer incentives, and generous government incentives.”
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In April, the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a proposal to have two-thirds of new passenger cars be electric by 2032. Since transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., that effort is a key part of what the Biden administration pledged to do under the Paris Agreement by 2030: cut emissions by 50 percent below 2005 levels.
Electric vehicles comprised 5.6 percent of new car registrations in the U.S. in 2022—a steady increase from 2021 (3.1 percent) and 2020 (1.8 percent).
Yet Tuesday’s letter from concerned dealers led Watters to argue that there’s only a small demographic that would buy electric cars.
“I was trying to find where the market is to buy a green new car, and I couldn’t figure it out,” he explained. “Because if you live in the city, where are you charging it if you park on the street? And if you happen to be able to afford a garage… they don’t have chargers in garages.”
The Biden administration has proposed a national network of a half million electric vehicle chargers. Last week, the Federal Highway Administration unveiled its greenhouse gas emissions tracking and reduction tool, which gives states $5 billion to build the network.
Watters remained skeptical of the feasibility of electric vehicles in rural areas as well.
“Are you actually going to buy an electric car in the countryside, where you have to drive miles and miles and miles?” he asked. “You won’t be able to charge it. Then I’m thinking [that] if you do happen to be able to charge it, it takes 20 to 40 minutes to charge. Who has that kind of time to sit around at a charging station?”
“So now you are only targeting the suburbs,” figured Watters, who then rejected the notion of older people buying electric vehicles. “It’s just too different… They can barely do email.”
“And then you have suburban housewives, alright? And suburban house husbands. Usually the women don’t control which car to buy,” Watters said, prompting swift backlash from co-hosts Jeanine Pirro and Jessica Tarlov.
“Wrong, wrong, wrong! Let it go!” Pirro exclaimed, as Tarlov could also be heard voicing her disagreement amid the crosstalk.
Watters conceded: “Sometimes it’s a collaboration!”
“Anyway,” he continued, “let’s just say the women that I know, at least, aren’t tech people. They’re not like, ‘Oh, let’s get an electric vehicle!’ No, that’s not what they’re about.”
“So the men in the suburbs—a lot of them drive pickup trucks. If they don’t drive a truck, they’re a conservative, and they’re not buying an electric car. So now you’re just having this market here: this is liberal, suburban house husbands. Those are the only people in the market for an electric car. That’s not a big market!”
