A parent repeatedly prods her reluctant teen to do his homework, reminding him that he needs to ace that important test. Frustrated by his intransigence, she throws up her hands and says, “I’m done. Do whatever you like.”
“Wait!” protests the youngster. “I’ve put in all this time. I might as well stick with it.”
Big car companies sound like that teenager when it comes to electric vehicles.
Seventeen states, led by California and including Massachusetts, will require that at least 35 percent of the cars sold in the 2026 model year be EVs or plug-in hybrids, which run on electricity and gasoline. The carmakers have been protesting that the 2026 mandates are “impossible” to meet, as Toyota puts it. But when Donald Trump said he’d wipe out a $7,500 tax credit for US-made EVs and get rid of the federal requirements on pollution that the Biden administration put in place with the aim of getting more EVs on the road, several carmakers panicked and asked him to reconsider those changes.
It isn’t that they love EVs. But in the expectation that they’d eventually be forced to sell EVs, they spent billions to comply with the rules. So what they really want is regulations that stick. And they don’t want to look like dinosaurs in the face of China’s dominance of the EV industry, whether or not the Chinese are able to sell their automobiles in the United States.
Globally, China is in the driver’s seat of the EV market. About half its market this year will be EV sales, versus about 10 percent in the United States.
The best any state has done is California, where 26 percent of sales in the first half of 2024 were EVs. (Massachusetts was at 11 percent.) In late December, the Biden administration approved California’s plan to ban new gasoline-powered vehicles in 2035, a step Trump opposes.
But Donald Grimes, an economist with the University of Michigan, says no state is likely to reach the 2026 target. Historical foot-dragging is part of the reason.
Throughout the past half-century, car companies grumbled about federal and state requirements before stepping up to meet them because they couldn’t afford to lose sales and didn’t want to pay fines. That happened with fuel economy rules in the 1970s and seat belt requirements in the 1980s and 1990s.
With the Biden administration’s rules, car companies knew they’d eventually have to introduce more EVs, which is the bigger reason why they asked Trump to keep those rules in place. The carmakers and their suppliers have spent billions to get ready for an electric future that they figure will come eventually. States have invested millions to attract EV battery plants that will create an estimated 65,000 jobs.
The transition from gas-powered cars to EVs was a key issue in last year’s negotiations with the United Auto Workers union, which won the right to represent workers at some of the plants making EV batteries.
Even as the companies have continued pushing sales of big SUVs and pickups, EV plans for the future “have been locked and loaded across the industry for some time,” says John Krafcik, a long-time industry executive who sits on the board of Rivian, an EV manufacturer.
It takes automakers about four years from start to finish to develop new vehicles. “Changing the rules now would reward the laggards” and punish car companies and parts suppliers that have gotten on the EV train, he says.
“We’d see financial distress across the industry. I hope we don’t go down that road. It would be a dark and bumpy road to nowhere for this industry and our country,” Krafcik told me.
With other carmakers tarrying, Chinese EV companies like BYD (Build Your Dream) and Geely have branched out elsewhere in Asia and into Europe and Latin America, inching ever closer to the US market.
President Biden fueled the perception of a threat from China before the election, when he ordered 100 percent tariffs on Chinese vehicle imports. Trump intends to go further, threatening not only China with even higher tariffs but also Canada and Mexico, despite trade agreements that govern imports of cars and automobile parts.
Those penalties would cause chaos for Detroit and international companies with North American plants. There would be no incentive for automakers to develop anything that couldn’t be sourced and built solely in the United States — a nearly impossible goal in this global marketplace.
That might be Trump’s point, but while he is an isolationist, carmakers cannot afford to be. No matter Trump’s preference for fossil fuels, the rest of the world is on a zero-emissions train.
We already knowwhat happens when Detroit carmakers fail to respond adequately to market shifts that favor cars from international companies: They lost half the American market to nameplates like Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai, and General Motors and Chrysler eventually went bankrupt.
If the car companies want clarity on EVs and want to move forward with their plans to build them, Trump shouldn’t stand in their way. America’s competitiveness and consumers’ choices are at stake.
Micheline Maynard, a contributing writer for Globe Ideas, is the author of “The End of Detroit: How the Big Three Lost Their Grip on the American Car Market.”