Former US president Donald Trump has vowed to immediately reverse the current Biden administration’s electric vehicle policies and end federal support for them should he be elected as president for another term, Bloomberg reports.
“I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day one, thereby saving the US auto industry from complete obliteration, and saving US customers thousands of dollars per car,” he said in his address at the Republican national convention last week. He also called the current’s administration drive a “green new scam.”
Trump has made no secret his disdain for EVs, claiming they don’t work and will benefit China and Mexico while hurting American autoworkers. “The cars don’t go far enough. They’re very, very expensive. They’re also heavy,” he told Bloomberg in a previous interview earlier this month.
In contrast, Joe Biden has made the shift to battery-powered cars one of his top climate and industrial policies and has set a goal of having 50% of all new vehicle sales be electric by 2030. While the outgoing president’s administration doesn’t have a mandate on EVs, it does hava a few policies in place that promote EV adoption.
One of these is a current federal EV tax credit that grants consumers who purchase qualifying EVs a $7,500 (RM35,150) year-end tax rebate. Another is a new EPA regulation limiting tailpipe pollution that is so strict, it would compel automakers to sell far more electric and hybrid models over the next few years.
While automakers have a choice in how they comply with the pollution limits, they’re expected to meet them by selling more lower-emission hybrids and zero-emission EVs. The report adds that a scenario modeled by the EPA projected that around 56% of sales of new cars and light trucks in 2032 would be electric and an additional 16% would be hybrids.
Trump has also vowed to scrap the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which currently offers tax credits to foreign battery makers that produce batteries in North American plants. Korean battery-making firms have poured billions of dollars into building battery plants in the US in recent years. While it is unlikely that the IRA will be scrapped completely, incentives could be reduced considerably.
That shift away from electrification could also have an impact on automakers such as Hyundai Motor and Kia, which have invested in building EV-dedicated facilities in the country. The growing possibility of Trump winning another term as president could see Hyundai and Kia having to alter their game plans and restructure their ongoing portfolio to focus more on hybrid cars, some Korean news agencies have reported.
Meanwhile, Tesla doesn’t seem fazed by all the rhetoric. Asked about Trump’s apparent intention to stop supporting EVs, Elon Musk said that “it will be fine,” and that his company does not need subsidies to survive. “A surprising number of people think that Tesla survives on subsidies. That is true of our competitors, but not of Tesla,” he wrote in a post on X.
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