This comes not long after the end of the $7500 federal E.V. incentives and the gutting of fuel economy requirements. Cleaner cars are out, and it’s back to big, dirty gas guzzlers.
Meanwhile China and Europe keep investing in them, but US consumers aren’t allowed to buy many of the cheaper options available there.
Tesla is pivoting away from EVs towards robots and AI. Smaller brands like Lucid, Rivian, and Slate are still around, but will they be able to survive without the larger ecosystem? Will charging networks continue to be built and maintained, or will they gradually fall into (even more) disrepair and abandonment?
Do you think this will altogether be the end of the EV market in the US? Or will it only be viable in certain states (namely California)? Will it grow despite the Detroit and federal government pullbacks?
ISTM that there’s no possible future in which EVs don’t eventually take over the private passenger vehicle market entirely. Like that Technology Connections youtuber says on a video that’s made the rounds here lately, electricity from renewable energy is always going to have a major intrinsic advantage over single-use fossil fuels. (Even without taking into account environmental benefit or the mechanical upsides of not needing to keep a combustion engine in your vehicle.)
How far that takeover can be delayed by reactionary pro-petroleum initiatives is an open question, but I’m betting not forever. The delay could be prolonged if increased EV adoption in other countries depresses petroleum markets and makes gas cheaper in the US, though.
The technology might be there, but the culture isn’t, and IMHO there’s no guarantee it will ever catch up (in the US, at least).
It’s one thing to see rapid EV uptake in the civilized world, but in the US we face a lot of additional challenges aside from just EV tech:
We’re a huge country, geographically, super spread-out and not very dense (making range a much bigger issue, and charging networks harder to build)
We’re traditionally allergic to public transit and taxpayer subsidies for improving infrastructure (like rural charging networks or smarter grids) — now more than ever, especially for the redder half of the country, which is also often the rural and impoverished (so no local economy to encourage charger construction without outside incentives)
We still have this Wild West mentality where your car is a proud emblem of your personality, individuality, and masculinity, and some significant portion of the populace doesn’t want some efficient, aerodynamic, “sissy” little car
Those who do want those smaller cars face real safety hazards from the much bigger trucks all around them
The US doesn’t have the same trove of raw battery minerals that China does
Many US auto factories are located in the same states and regions that support conservative policies, creating a positive feedback loop between their needs and federal government trade barriers & nationalistic protectionism. They would (and already are) propping each other up, even at the expense of the typical US household
We’re pretty luddite compared to the developed world, especially for any sort of national infrastructure project, whether it’s high-speed rail, fiber internet, electronic medical record systems, chip-based credit cards, non-SMS messaging, tax filing, etc. We’re very often way behind Europe and Asia in taking up those sorts of less-sexy everyday technologies, despite also being at the bleeding edge of some other things (cloud infra, AI, etc.) — most of the investment is concentrated in the Silicon Valley high-risk-high-reward business opportunities rather than the everyday techs for the everyday person
EVs require the sort of shift conservative Americans hate the most: A lifestyle shift (and ways of thinking, too). It’d take a lot more than mere feature parity with gas cars to overcome that sort of traditionalist inertia, IMO…
Eh, they’re already making EV pickup trucks. I don’t deny that all the attitudes and factors you mention are going to have some impact in delaying EV acceptance, but I just can’t see them delaying it forever.
Yes, it’s a huge country, but most of us, most of the time, really aren’t going very far. Remember that on average, Americans drive less than forty miles each day. (And I fully expect someone here to say their daily drive is much more than that.) And for many people, those miles are close to home, so that most of the time, charging can be done at home at night.
We’re a pretty highly urbanized country, though, so a simplistic national mean is going to skew the data toward urban and surburban dwellers, at the expense of rural areas and people living in colder-than-average climates (where both range issues and the lack of chargers are more significant).
That means, both technologically and culturally, a national average lumping together the SF Bay Area and rural red counties isn’t going to be very meaningful. That matters not just in a day-to-day usage sense, but also in terms of how it affects electoral behavior, rulemaking, incentives, infrastructure buildouts, etc.
The EV US market is on hold for now until after the next Presidential election. They are still developing vehicles for overseas markets, but the domestic vehicles that were being developed for the US market are on hold and pretty much shelved. Technology will advance quickly, so new systems will need to assessed.
The future for now will be in hybrid electric vehicles, which realistically are a better fit for a large country with extensive existing fossil fuel capacity. I don’t expect that EV production will over take ICE vehicles until 2034 or later.
I think that there will be a much extended period of time where there’s an acceptance of hybrids (traditional) are the dominant option. Tesla, who has the most complete charging infrastructure, has been clawing back investment in it for years, and with the federal government similarly clawing back funds to invest in charging infrastructure, there’s going to be little to no increase in nationwide networks, and possible/probable disrepair for existing networks. It won’t get rid of EVs, but as has already been seen, the functional increase in cost is going to create sticker shock, which is already rough as many new vehicles are increasingly out of reach of working class individuals.
“Traditional” hybrids are far cheaper than EVs, and fuel efficient compared to BEV only options, and since the political “hate” had been piled onto true EVs, they seem to be looked at as just “normal” cars by most.
But even IF we get a more sane government in the future, the damage is done. We’re probably going to be a full generation behind the world-wide response to ever-more-perfected EVs. Even with a sane government, they’re going to be fighting (possibly literally) the reactionaries that have been so grossly empowered for a long time to come.
If/when we have a new generation of EV’s with supplemental gas generators to recharge (something like modern PHEVs but with the reverse emphasis) I think that’ll be much more attractive to the range-anxious, and that could be the gateway to a BEV-friendly USA - but we won’t be the ones building them.
So yeah, Detroit is throwing away their chance to compete in the future.
Someone taught me (in another thread) that these were called EREVs, or extended-range EVs. It does appear that Stellantis is working on some (Scout, Hyundai, Jeep: Every Extended-Range EV Coming To The U.S.), but the US ones are mostly big trucks and SUVs I wish they made a sedan or subcompact instead…
Norway has the most EV by % of drivers. They dont drive cheap, unsafe China versions. In fact few in Europe do- they drive Tesla Y , Volkswagen, Skoda Eynaq (made by VW), etc. The tesla and most of the VWs are available here.
A good reason.
Also that now EVs are political. The MAGAs hate them, and now that Musk turned traitor, the left dont want Teslas. Two of my friends- both with Solar- drive EV as a basic commuter car.
Yep, even right wingers like hybrids, as they also give better power.
Much of the word is rushing headlong into the future and half our country desperately wants to return to the Dark Ages. Much like much of Iran did back in 1979. In both cases the really fervent ones were driven by wild-eyed ideology and firebrand propaganda.
Anyhow, the USA was never going to be fully EV. Now it’s unlikely to be more than a few percent EV for decades to come.
? If this was an unsuccessful previous launch at some point, it doesn’t seem to have prevented the manufacture and sale of the EV 2026 F-150 Lightning. Chevy and General Motors also have 2026 model EV pickup trucks.
I’m not denying that there have been glitches and course changes along the way, but I think you are seriously underestimating major automakers’ willingness to provide the EVs that so many customers want.
Welllll, depends how you define “a few”, I suppose. Even with the subsidy withdrawals, EV new car sales in 2025 in the US remained at nearly 8% of all new car sales, which I would call already more than “a few percent”. That’s more than 1 in 13 of all new cars purchased.
Will that level of EV adoption stagnate or even dwindle for the next few decades? Maybe, but as I said, analysts and automakers at present don’t seem to think so.
Pardon the snip, but to make this point further, my wife and I are part of the PHEV crowd. 95% of our driving is under 50 miles a day (about half that most days) and our Toyota PHEVs handle that just fine on all electric. But but realities of living in the Southwest mean that flying requires going out of DIA, or just driving 630 miles to NM for a trip that would take the same time as to fly where a true BEV would be more challenging. By no means impossible, but with enough extra delays to make it difficult.
But when I was buying my Prius PHEV, it was extremely noteworthy that other than the Prius, there wasn’t a single PHEV sedan cheaper than it’s MSRP of $35k, and the next cheapest was over $50k.
[ aside, got mine before the end of Federal EV incentives, and with slightly increased state incentives, so just shy of $12k off in total - lacking that I -would- have been buying a traditional hybrid despite my preferences]
I totally get that PHEV buyers are choosing an option that is best and worst of both worlds, and they are the least dominant option of the ICE/Hybrid/PHEV/BEV spectrum, but cars being sold in the US in general have lost most of the cheap and cheerful options, ceding that role to used vehicles.
In general, I’d say that Musk kicked off a fascination with electric cars before the chemistry to do it well enough to compete with internal combustion engines was really there.
Ultimately, you end up with a massive metal bar that doubles the weight of your vehicle (but is necessary if you want range that’s anywhere close to what you get with an IC car), requires hours and hours to properly charge, and needs to do a bunch of extra stuff like regenerative breaking (which is annoying), have tiny side mirrors and no door handles and the profile of a Prius - again - in order to almost keep up with the range of an IC car, and a potential chemical bomb if your vehicle ever ends up in a house house fire.
Realistically, the only upgrade that Tesla gave to car owners was better software. Otherwise they were and are just buying a worse vehicle for more money.
The EV market should be a relatively niche market. Personally, my office provides free charging, I also have solar panels, and we just barely need two cars so having some small, minimal range electric vehicle that I can just use to go to work and back makes some sense. For almost all other situations, there’s no reason to go electric.
HOWEVER, that all changes when solid state batteries start to roll out.
Once you can start cutting down the size and weight of the batteries, and reduce the chemical bomb factor, you start looking at a world where you’re asking, “If gasoline is so great then we should just burn it in a power plant and wire the juice out to charge all the cars.”
If you can hold as much or more power as gasoline in a smaller and lighter form then EV cars swap from being worse to being better.
EVs are the future, but that future is coming in the next 2-3 years, not in the last decade.
I would rate the likelihood of these scenarios as follows:
Most likely: The current model of “giant, fixed-in-place battery that must be charged at a fixed location for hours” is replaced with “smaller battery that can be swapped for a fully charged battery by an automated process in about the amount of time it takes to fill a gas tank,” which, along with using cars designed by reliable manufacturers rather than Tesla shitboxes, solves 90% of the consumer-level problems with EVs.
Less likely: Investment in functional public transportation (which means lots and lots of buses with enforcement of fare and safety provisions, not rolling homeless shelters or masturbatory fantasies about trains) and driverless taxis means that more people can go without owning cars and we don’t need to solve the charging problem.
Least likely: Everyone continues to own their own personal car and use it for everything and we somehow generate enough magic pixie dust to solve the thusfar totally intractable problem of charging for people without private garages or who need to drive full-time and can’t stop for three hours to charge every 300 miles.
You mean, the auto market that was moving ever onward to demand for gigantic gas-guzzling land yachts in the 60s and 70s while manufacturers in other countries were developing the smaller more fuel-efficient cars that we see today?
No, the US EV market is not dead. It’s just currently in a coma. Once again.
The Big Three automakers have a huge litany of flaws and bad decisions and abject abandonment of common sense in order to make short-term profits. But they didn’t kill the EV market. Trump did.
He did so deliberately. If Musk wasn’t insane, he might have had a chance to nudge this course - remember when Trump bought a Tesla on the White House lawn - but I think he finally realized that his own actions destroyed Tesla’s reputation in every other country and alienated all his previous supporters in this one, which is why he seems to be going all in on SpaceX and AI.
A decade of engineering down the drain. Thousands of American manufacturing jobs tossed aside. Millions of children doomed to less healthy lives. Billions of dollars lost with billions more erased from the future. All because we have a deranged child in charge. We’re living in “It’s a Good Life.”
I agree that in the long term EVs of some kind, perhaps many kinds, are the world’s future. Short of a miracle, they won’t be made in the US.
I wish they made a sedan or subcompact instead…