US President Joe Biden announced yesterday the approval of an initial USD 900 mn funding tranche to build EV charging stations in 35 states, the White House said. Biden’s announcement came at the annual Detroit Auto Show. Under the terms of Biden’s USD 1 tn infrastructure act — signed into law in November last year — some USD 5 bn is being allocated over five years to give grants for states to build thousands of EV charging stations.

“You all are going to be part of a network of 500k charging stations — 500k — across the country,” the US president said. “It used to be that to buy an electric car you had to make all sorts of compromises, not today.”

Detroit will see an on-brand EV push from Biden: Biden’s banking big on EVs in general and is expected to announce that US government EV purchases have increased rapidly over the last two years. He’s targeting 500k new EV charging stations by 2030 and wants 50% of all new vehicles sold by then to be electric or plug-in hybrid electric models. (Reuters | CNN | Washington Post | Fox Business)

EVs have had a big week in the global business press, with the Guardian warning earlier that “soaring costs could threaten the future of electric cars” while the Financial Times says that the switch to electric vehicles could be “held back by costly leasing deals.” The salmon-colored paper also notes that EVs “will have to wait [as much as a decade] for solid-state battery ‘game-changer’” because of both technical difficulties in making solid-state batteries — and because standard lithium batteries are getting better.

NOT GOING ELECTRIC: The Ford Mustang. A new model unveiled yesterday in Detroit sticks with a petrol engine, as the automaker “isn’t ready to abandon loud, powerful engines that have been critical to the Mustang’s appeal,” the Wall Street Journal reports.