The electric car dream has transformed into a requirement that, in 2025, appears to require a shift in the federal approach.
“I don’t like giving Trump a win,” said Representative Lou Correa (CA D-46) , of California. Even so, he joined thirty-four Democrats recently on a Republican effort to repeal his state’s landmark requirement that all new vehicles sold in California needed to be electric or non-polluting by 2035. “We just finished an election where every poll I’m seeing, everybody I talk to, says, ‘You guys need to listen to the working class, the middle-class people,’” Mr. Correa said. “I’m listening to my constituents who are saying, ‘Don’t kill us.’”
In a very complex political moment, politicians who support an energy shift are finding themselves precariously sifting through public opinion to determine the pace of that transition and how government regulation should be used to help. Simultaneously, they are faced with a new administration that seems to have a clear view of the future of American cars.
What Should We Take From This Vote?
The 246-to-164 vote in the House was a bolt from the blue for many environmentalists. Some observers credited intense lobbying from the oil and gas lobby. Others attributed the vote to changing views of such federal regulations in the new administration.
Transportation is the biggest source of global warming pollution in the nation, generating approximately twenty-nine percent of the country’s total carbon emissions. California’s ban, which had also been adopted by eleven other states, was presented as a model that would jolt the nation’s shift toward cleaner electric vehicles.
But this recent vote calls into question just how much American manufacturers—and consumers—can be counted on in this shift.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright described the new administration’s plan this way: “…to reverse the destructive mandates, forcing everyone to buy EVs that have been wreaking havoc on our auto industry and forcing higher prices and reduced choices on consumers.”
This, the administration urges, will stimulate a renaissance for American automakers to continue to emphasize gas vehicles. And tariffs will diminish or preclude foreign-made EVs from being purchased by American consumers.
Stepping Into the EV Void
While the American market sputters in its shift, China is leapfrogging the United States by increasing the availability of cheaper and more advanced EVs. The Trump administration has cut subsidies, has frozen billions of dollars in spending, and has even ripped out charging stations from government buildings. It has even cut the funding that was targeted for new factories and set out to eliminate the $7,500 tax break to consumers for EV purchases.
Trump’s policies have paved the way for other nations to produce vehicles and sell them around the world. Of the seventeen million EVs sold in 2024 globally, seventy-six percent are already reported to have been made by Chinese companies. European consumers have already begun to flock to Chinese EV manufacturers, such as BYD, which has brought their cars’ sticker prices to nearly $20,000. Their newest EVs can be charged in just five minutes!
Globally, the share of EVs and plug-in electric vehicles being purchased has catapulted from four percent five years ago to nineteen percent today. Chinese models make up seventeen of the top twenty selling models of EVs. Tesla is the only U.S. company that breaks into the top twenty—and their deliveries dropped thirteen percent over the last few months.
In Brazil, sales of EVs spiked by eighty-five percent in 2024 just as Ford pulled out and BYD took its former factories. A local lawmaker has proposed changing the factory’s address from Henry Ford Avenue to BYD Avenue. Similarly, BYD is building plants in Hungary, while other Chinese EV makers are moving into Poland and Spain.
Connecting the Political Winds With Market Trends
Criticized for years of focusing on gas-guzzling SUVs, Detroit manufacturers are trying to catch up with market shifts while also negotiating a precarious political moment at home. In a division walled off from the company’s legacy production lines, Ford, for instance, is reportedly focused on efforts to replicate the Chinese model of high-tech vehicles that can be produced at a low price. Even some fans of Trump’s industrial policies have been left unnerved. And politicians have become exposed in a nation in the midst of an active energy transition.
“We are all going to EVs globally,” said Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, a former chief global economist at Ford. “It is just a question of when.” Another industry consultant has said, American car makers are “…on an island, vulnerable and not playing offense anymore.” In conclusion, he added, “We cannot remain on this island here in North America and just hope for the best.”
“The shortsightedness of the industry,” says Ann Carlson, former chief counsel of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “in not seeing the trend … has put them in a precarious position. Now, Trump blocking every effort to assist that transition leaves us in a very dicey place.”
In that “dicey place,” politicians are left to discern the pace and role of American car makers in our future path regarding transportation. In 2025, we also appear to need to negotiate a shift in the federal approach: from empowering and facilitating an energy transition to resisting it.
About the Author: Brian C. Black
Brian C. Black is Distinguished Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Penn State Altoona and author, most recently, of Ike’s Road Trip: How Eisenhower’s 1919 Convoy Paved the Way for the Roads We Travel. (Godine, 2024). ENERGY TRANSITION 2025 is an ongoing series to place details of our current energy shift into historical context.
Image: Shutterstock/Aliaksei Kaponia
