Damned if you do...

Imagine that investigative journalists found that car manufacturers were earning really high margins on EVs and low-emission vehicles. 

The headlines write themselves. Car manufacturers gouging customers who want to help the environment. Surely the gallows would be too good for them!

Fun counterfactual.

Now imagine instead that car makers earned hardly anything on their EVs while competing for market share and instead were gouging the bad people who drive bad cars that use bad fuels. 

They'd be praised for it right?

Right?

Car companies are spending almost four times more advertising large, gas-guzzling vehicles than small cars, despite publicly pledging to combat climate change.

...

Tim Welch, a senior lecturer in urban planning at the University of Auckland, said part of the push towards SUVs and utes was the profit margin, which was much higher when compared to a typical sedan, or an electric vehicle.

The car manufacturers are going to be damned by Radio New Zealand no matter what they do. 

If they earned high margins on EVs, they'd be damned for gouging. 

If they instead earned higher margins on utes, they'd be damned for advertising those models instead of praised for having far lower margins on EVs. If Welch is right about the margins anyway.