My then-new gasoline-powered 2022 Ford Escape and my wife’s new 2023 Ford Maverick hybrid, each one level down from Ford’s top tier, each cost in the low- to mid-$30 thousands. Joanna Stern, The Wall Street Journal‘s Senior Personal Technology Columnist, evaluated a number of battery-operated cars under $60,000 to see which one of those she liked best. The ones she looked into were the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Tesla Model Y, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia EV6, and Volkswagen ID.4.

The prices of these, as tested, were—oh, wait; she didn’t discuss equipage in any detail, nor did she name the price of those cars as tested. Accordingly, here are the prices I found after an arduous five minute Bing search. All prices, save Tesla, are via Edmunds; Tesla’s prices are per Tesla.

• Mach-E: $42,500-$60,000, depending on how gussied up you want it
• Model Y: $52,900-$66,000, depending….
• Ioniq 5: $47,700-$59,400, depending….
• EV6: $45,900-$60,200, depending….
• 4: $40,300-$56,500, depending….

Assume, arguendo, that Stern’s evaluations are reasonable (noting that some of her criteria are matters of taste), and truncate the gussying to Stern’s $60,000 cap. This is the cost of transportation that the Progressive-Democrat Biden administration is trying to force us to pay in the name if its—and the Left’s—climate funding industry and related artificial hysteria.

This is just to get into the car, too; the comparison elides questions of range; the availability of charging stations outside the home garage; the long time to charge to the battery-operated cars’ 300-ish miles range (my Escape reaches 400+ miles on a tank of gas, and the tank fills in three minutes, or so); and of special importance to the Left (except when inconvenient to them); the environmental damage done by mining the raw materials and disposing of the spent batteries.