Pete Buttigieg desperately tries to defend absurd EV costs to Elon Musk and Don Jr

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has butted heads with Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr. over the Biden Administration's costly electric vehicle program.

President-elect Donald Trump is being pushed to reverse Biden's 'radical' electric vehicle (EV) policies within the first 100 days he's back in the White House. 

The Biden administration issued one of the most significant climate regulations in the nation's history in 2022.

It was designed to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032.

The Department of Transportation, led by Buttigieg, launched the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Program to build EV charges around the country in 2021.

Buttigieg, Don Jr. and Musk got into a spat over the program after the president-elect's son commented on the transportation secretary's legacy. 

'Does not seem like a great return on investment… but hey he checked a woke box so it’s totally worth it,' Don Jr. said as he re-shared another tweet that claimed $7.5 billion had been spent on just eight charging stations.

Buttigieg replied, 'The tweet you quoted is false.'

That is when Musk weighed in with, 'Well, please post the rebuttal. Then, Community Notes will take care of the rest.'

'To start with, $7.5B has not been spent, nor anything like that. That’s the entire program budget for the NEVI program, which is to help build out a national charging network by 2030,' Buttigieg said.

'Secondly, there are chargers now operational in nine states (which does not mean 9 chargers, to be clear). These are only the first handful though. Most are to be built in the 2nd half of the decade. 

'Third, in this program the chargers are built by the states, not the federal government. And while it takes time to get a novel multi-billion dollar program going across 50 states, the states are on track.' 

NEVI's total budget is $7.5 billion with $5 billion allocated to building charging stations on highways across the country and $2.5 billion for grants, according to PlugInAmerica.

As of October, 20 NEVI-funded chargers are operational nine states including Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah and Vermont, reported Atlas EV Hub.

The Biden administration's EV invasion by 2035 could hit a roadblock with America's already stressed power grid, experts have warned.

That is because America's electrical network has not been updated in over 25 years, and is in need for more transmission lines to power millions of new green energy-powered vehicles - all of which could cost more than $2.5 trillion.

The demand for power will account for about one-third of electricity growth within the next decade as Princeton University projected the nation will use up 3,360 percent more electricity to meet the president's goal.

'In our projections, EVs cause electricity demand in the transportation sector to grow between five-fold and 10-fold by 2035,' an EIA spokesperson told DailyMail.com. 

There were roughly 2.4 million registered EVs in the US at the end of last year, which isn't enough to overwhelm the electrical grid yet but could cause major problems in the future if the infrastructure isn't updated, experts warn.

The International Energy Agency's Global EV Outlook predicted that EV sales could reach 17 million in 2024 and projects that electric vehicles will likely account for half of all cars sold by 2035.

IEEE Spectrum, a publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, published a report on EV transition, published a study in 2023 that found that 8,000 power-generation units and 600,000 circuit miles of AC transmission lines will need to be replaced or improved by 2035.

In addition to 70,000 substations to support increased renewable energy and battery storage - brining the cost to more than $2.5 trillion.