Will Congress Wake Up and Save the U.S. Auto Industry?

“The way I’d put it,” the auto journalist Martin Padgett told me recently, “is that we pulled a U-turn while the rest of the world was pushing forward.”

The largest U.S. automakers have backed away from electric vehicles, even as global sales are booming. The decision may make them obsolete.

According to the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based policy group, one of every four vehicles sold globally in 2025 was battery-powered. Analysts with Bloomberg have predicted that in the next decade, that number will more than double, putting gas-powered cars — for the first time ever — in the minority of overall new vehicle sales.

Under the second Trump administration, the E.V. tax credit was eliminated and tailpipe-emission standards were gutted, which more or less instantly drove down sales of new battery-powered vehicles and encouraged the so-called Big Three — Ford, G.M. and Stellantis North America, the maker of the Dodge, Chrysler, Ram and Jeep brands — to refocus their considerable resources on trucks and plus-size S.U.V.s.

Many thanks to Donna W. for sharing