Why Trump’s Positions on EVs Would Shoot America in the Foot

From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Aynsley O’Neill with green transportation journalist Jim Motavalli. 

As part of his Day One executive order titled “Unleashing American Energy,” President Donald Trump rolled back the Biden administration’s goal for half of vehicles sold in America by 2030 to be electric.

Getting rid of the $7,500 EV tax credit and federal funding for charging stations may take acts of Congress, but already this effort to shift EVs into reverse is making for uncertainty in the U.S. auto industry. 

Jim Motavalli writes about green transportation for Autoweek and Barron’s. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

AYNSLEY O’NEILL: You’re in sunny San Diego, where you just test drove an electric Jeep. What did you hear from the folks at Jeep about this executive order? 

MOTAVALLI: Well, I don’t think they’re really thrilled about the idea of losing the federal income tax credit. They’re concerned about keeping EV prices down. Everybody who puts out EVs, basically what they’ve told me is they’re going to wait and see what happens, whether [the tax credit] really goes away. They’re going to see what other automakers do and how they handle it, and that will determine their response. Everybody is at the same time selling EVs and trying to compete with Tesla and facing all these competitive pressures, and the business climate keeps changing. 

The demand for EVs has not really gone down, but it’s not rising as much as they had hoped. So there’s a lot of challenges in trying to get out a new EV and knowing how many of them to build, where to build it, all those things. It’s a very, very tough market right now.

O’NEILL: What would you say is the overall impact of eliminating Biden’s electric vehicle executive order, which Trump has been referring to as the EV “mandate”?

MOTAVALLI: What I think is going to happen as a result of this is actually contrary to what Trump himself has said he wants. If he wants to be competitive with China, it seems like this is the wrong way to go about it. 

His approach is going to be putting tariffs on Chinese imported vehicles. But by taking away the income tax credit—which, under Biden’s IRA, very much encourages automakers to build cars in the United States and also to have their battery packs built in the United States—[Trump’s order] makes it less likely that automakers will consider the U.S. as a place to locate their battery plants and their car plants. That’s exactly the opposite of what he wants. So I don’t quite understand, unless you’re operating on some kind of visceral hatred of electric vehicles, why you would take that approach.

O’NEILL: What do you make of the president’s decision to enact all these orders against electric vehicles?

MOTAVALLI: I think part of it has to do with seeing them in a sort of political light, which to me is a mistake. They’re just cars. They’re not left or right, they’re not red or blue, and you can put whatever bumper sticker you want on them. They’ll represent you whatever your position is.

O’NEILL: California has been a force when it comes to policy that promotes electric vehicles. How will Trump’s executive order impact California’s EV policies?

MOTAVALLI: Well, under Trump one, in his first administration, he tried to take away California’s exclusive right to set separate fuel economy standards, which it has, and other states have the right to follow California rather than the federal policy. 

Trump spent four years trying to get that taken away. He met California in court; it didn’t happen. And I think California is going to be ready. They will have their guns primed and ready. They will take them to court. What [will be] the ultimate outcome of that, I couldn’t say, but it’s not an executive order that will take that away.

O’NEILL: President Trump has also put a pause on billions of dollars in funding allocated for EV charging stations through the Inflation Reduction Act. What impact is that pause going to have on America’s electric vehicle landscape?

MOTAVALLI: I think it could be blown out of proportion. You could think that would have more of an impact than it does. 

To date, as a result of that $5 billion [in infrastructure funding for EV chargers], not a whole lot of EV charging stations were opened up. It was moving fairly slowly. A lot of them would have been opened up if he hadn’t instituted that order. But it’s not like EV charging stands still without federal funding. It’s not the critical thing. 

Tesla, as a matter of fact, has already installed a pretty robust electric charging network around the whole country. If you have a Tesla right now, you could drive it to California from New York, you could drive it from New York to Florida. You wouldn’t have too much trouble. That network is easily going to get you there. 

Now, every other automaker is signed on with the Tesla charging standard. That means within about a year, just about every car on the market will be able to charge at Tesla stations. So that makes it a lot better for charging nationally. 

There’s a number of independent companies that have pursued this as a business, and we have a much more robust national network of all kinds now than we had a few years ago. 

It’s still not quite adequate. I recently had a fairly painful experience on the New Jersey Turnpike where I started to charge there, and they were all shut down, and I ended up trying to find a charger in the middle of the night, but it eventually worked out OK.

O’NEILL: Trump also pledged to impose a 25 percent tariff on all imports from Mexico and Canada. What kind of impact would that have on car pricing?

MOTAVALLI: It’ll make cars more expensive. Right now, American automakers have plants in Mexico. They’ve put them there because they can produce cars at a cheaper rate, and they can also end up charging less for them. That’s why they moved to Mexico; to a lesser extent, it’s why they build in Canada too. In the long run, it will mean that automakers will want to locate in the United States if there’s no financial benefit to locating in Mexico. 

But for consumers, it’s definitely going to push up car prices, which are already very high. The average car today is something like $48,000—that’s a lot of money. This is what people pay. The prices are already high; people are feeling the pinch of that, and adding those tariffs is going to make that worse.

O’NEILL: You’ve been covering electric vehicles for most of your career. How much have we advanced in EV technology and adoption over the years? 

MOTAVALLI: It’s remarkable. If you go back to 2005 or so when the first EVs came out, they were essentially the same technology we had when EVs disappeared in 1920, and they had lead-acid batteries in the same kind of range, maybe 40 or 50 miles, because there’d been essentially no real research into electric technology for automobiles in 100 years. 

When the industry started applying its full force into making better batteries and making vehicles that were designed to carry batteries, the pace of improvement and the pace of innovation [was] just remarkable to see. Batteries have come way down in cost, cars have gone way up in range. The prices have come way down. The amount of packaging the batteries take is much smaller. The battery packs are now routinely placed under the car, where they give the car a lower center of gravity and better handling. 

EVs are just so much more fun to drive than gas cars, and they’re just better. In a very short time, the EV has become better than the internal combustion car, and that improvement will just continue as every automaker introduces EVs.

O’NEILL: Overall, how are these most recent presidential actions going to impact U.S. electric vehicle competitiveness?

MOTAVALLI: I think it will make us less competitive. If you look at the Chinese and how they’re moving, they currently have over 50 percent EV adoption. Some other countries in Europe, Iceland and Norway are two examples, they have over 90 percent EV penetration. So effectively they don’t have non-EV sales anymore. China is moving in that direction, and really fast, and because they have, they can pretty much command what’s going to happen. The pace at which new EV companies are arising in China is just amazing to see. 

I was just at the Consumer Electronics Show, and there was another new Chinese EV maker exhibiting there. So I think the U.S. is in danger of falling behind Europe and China in terms of EV adoption and EV leadership. You could say the world EV leader has been Tesla up until this point, but there are Chinese automakers that are threatening that.