Whatever else he’s done – and may be about to do – Donald Trump has done a marvelous thing with regard to pulling the plug on EVs. Which he didn’t do, really. Not exactly. What he did do was end the federal $7,500 tax rebate that effectively subsidized EVs. That gone, people stopped plugging in to (buying) EVs.
Dramatically.
The latest new vehicle registration data shows a near 50 percent year-to-year drop, from November of 2024 to November of 2025, when 56,072 new EV registrations were issued. That is about 49 percent fewer than were issued a year prior during the same period, according to S&P Global Mobility.
For some, it is worse than it is for others. Nissan’s EV sales have plummeted by more than 94 percent. This past November, only 154 new Nissan devices were registered nationally. That’s less than three per state.
Even Tesla is having trouble. New registrations are down 35 percent. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the market.
Automotive News breaks the heartbreaking news that this means EV’s market share has fallen to back down to 4.6 percent – which isn’t much of a “market” to divvy up between a lag-time effect tsunami of brand-new EVs that were designed three or four years ago in anticipation of a “market” that no longer exists. Every major car brand now has EVs for sale because every EV manufacturer expected them to sell. That assumption was based on a willingness to buy them and that assumption depended greatly upon that $7,500 tax rebate that’s no longer available.
But that’s only part of the story.
The bigger story is that word about the realities of living with an EV percolated past the media screen of lies, half-truths and omissions about EVs.
First, they lied about electricity being cheaper than gas. It isn’t. It costs just as much to “fast” charge an EV as it does to fuel up a gas-engined car with premium. Home charging isn’t cheap, either. People found out about this after they bought in – via their utility bills.
Then there’s the half-truth about how “fast” an EV could be recharged at public “fast” chargers. Figures of as little as ten or 15 minutes were touted. It was true, if you plugged into a charging apparatus of sufficiently high-voltage capability. The truth they rarely mentioned is that such high-voltage charging capability (800 volts or more) is essentially nonexistent, outside of the laboratory. In the real world, it is possible to recover some charge – but not a full charge – at the available “fast” charging stations in 15-20 minutes or so.
This is of course absurdly unacceptable when one can fully fuel a gas engined vehicle in less than five minutes. It is delusional to believe that most people would willingly put up with waiting 15-20 minutes to get a partial charge when they do not have to.
This latter is key.
The fatal mistake the EV pushers made was allowing people the choice to not have to wait. This choice could be exercised by choosing not to buy an EV. If the EV pushers had been smarter, they would have seen to it that gas pumps were slowed down to parity with EV “fast” chargers, so that people would have to wait just as long to get a quarter tank of gas as it takes to put 80 miles of range back into an EV.
The EV pushers might also have taxed gas such that most people could no longer afford to gas up while also dangling that $7,500 rebate in their faces, to nudge them into an EV. Or they could simply have decreed that cars with engines are no longer permitted on “public” (that is, government owned) roads because the “climate” is “changing.”
If you wanted to drive, you’d have to drive an EV.
We can thank the Motor Gods that the EV pushers weren’t smart enough to do any of those things. And because they didn’t, the contrast between EVs and other vehicles became glaringly apparent; so much so that it punched through the half-truths and omissions about EVs. People could see with their own eyes that EV drivers had to queue up – and wait – at “fast” chargers. Most people won’t do that unless they have to do that. Especially the affluent, which is interesting because it is the affluent who are the primary EV buyer demographic.
People who have money don’t generally appreciate waiting in line, especially when they can see with their own eyes that people who don’t have money don’t have to wait. Imagine being the owner of a $50,000 EV sitting in said EV at a “fast” charger watching the proletariat come and go while you sit and wait.
That’ll fly like a lead balloon.
The affluent also do not like losses. So when word percolated out that EVs depreciate 30-40 percent more than non-EVs, it became a major disincentive to buy an EV. A rich leftist might say he believes the “climate” is “changing” – and may even believe it. But not many are willing to lose $20,000 or $30,000 over three or four years in depreciation. Just as not many of them are willing to live in a 300 square foot “sustainable” apartment, either.
So now the dealership lots of pretty much every brand of vehicle are filling up with EVs that can only be “sold” by practically giving them away. The losses are staggering. Ford admits to having lost $20 billion – which makes GM’s admitted losses of $7 billion seem like a small price to pay.
It’s going to get worse, too, before it gets better – because just like it takes a while for a train wreck to be felt at the caboose., it is taking awhile for the full combined effect of the end of the $7,500 tax rebate and the truth about the half-truths and omissions about EVs to be fully felt.
And now they are being felt.
The harder, the better.
. . .
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EV passenger vehicle registrations dropped because those who wanted one hustled to buy before the hefty federal tax credit expired.
Going forward EVs won’t disappear but we’ll see more commercial versions since fuel is a much larger component of total operating cost for a commercial fleet versus an individual passenger vehicle.
“If the EV pushers had been smarter, they would have seen to it that gas pumps were slowed down to parity with EV “fast” chargers…”
Don’t give them any ideas Eric!
Such things may well yet be introduced by whoever happens to be selected as the next President…
What I personally find the most remarkable in this debacle is the fact that Tesla is STILL apparently the most valuable car company in the world – and it’s not even a close contest.
For a long time ‘the story’ was its ‘dramatic growth’. Now that has turned out to be a fairly tale, it’s moved on to ‘Optimus robot’, ‘robotaxis’, ‘energy storage’…you name it.
I am quite convinced by now that not only Elon is the greatest conman to ever have lived, but the contacts with and protection from the government side he clearly enjoys are also at quite another level.
How else, and who else, can one have gotten away with so many lies for so long? With insider trading via his ‘tweets’?
Who gets to test alpha-level software on open roads, with almost zero consequences when people get killed?
Who can get tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, deliver little to nothing, and then be given still more subsidies?
With the proposed IPO of SpaceX – yet another ‘business’ funded almost entirely by the taxpayer – it is entirely likely he WILL become the world’s first trillionaire.
And the enormity of that feat really hits when we realize that none of his companies needed to even be profitable to get him there.
Are we at peak clownworld yet?
We’re getting absolutely bombed at the dealership with warranty repairs of our ‘Acura’ ZDX EV’s (re-branded GM) Then you ‘update’ the software and it ends up bricking various control modules. Two battery packs have already been replaced (under 10k miles) because one of the control modules inside it failed. None of the technicians want to work on them.
The other fun thing customers don’t realize is when one of the various sensors fail it won’t charge until it’s fixed. They are a huge pain in the rear. Luckily it was only a ‘one and done’ model year.
The reality deniers may have stopped buying EVs after feeling the sting, but they will NEVER admit to being duped. Just like with kewwwwvid, they have removed the masks, but STILL advise the rest of us to “get vaccinated”.
The main burners may be off, but the pilot light is still there, ready to reignite.
The marketplace is reality, and reality is cruel especially to the deluded who refuse to accept reality.
Related to EV’s, in an environmental save the planet political movement in the construction industry, are the deluded guardians of the environment true believers *architects* who were pushing LEED certification in green building design for the last 25 years. Architects were selling these add on’s to their design claiming these will work efficiently and they are cost free, in that they pay back in savings at the electrical/gas/water meter. (They didn’t tell clients that this would take 10-years or more) This was sold especially to public institutional clients who were told they are saving the planet, therefore these elements became mandates not options.
I was working at a major University on the Left coast on a stadium project. The University asked my firm to look at another completed project that was not performing well. It was a small health building where they had doctors performing examinations on students (don’t ask). The problem was the rooms were too cold for students. The Architect designed a *green* system that used a small exhaust fan to make the room pressure negative and passively pull outside air thru a louver with a heating coil to reheat the air. The entire system (heating source water, coil performance and air movement) were all flawed. My recommendation: go down to Home Depot and buy a window heat pump and mount it in lieu of the louver. When I met the architect, he claimed his system as designed will work and they will *force* the general contractor fix the problem at his expense. My final thought was “good luck” in your righteous indignation that your belief in your green design will somehow force success.
Ford and GM were thinking the same.
Canada’s weather is a factor that EV owners will quickly learn that affect EV performance and charging. In sub-zero temperatures, charging takes a back-seat to keeping the batteries at optimum temperature. Canadians will find out in a hurry that their “gasless horseless carriage” is next to useless.
What’s also a curiosity – in addition to the staggering losses by Ford and GM – is how the people that decided to lose the money keep their jobs.
Are these not for-profit operations with shareholders who demand accountability?
Guess that ship sailed.
In addition, what happened with all those Ford dealers that were essentially forced to upgrade their facilities to accommodate the inevitable electric future – lest they not be shipped any product?
Or those Cadillac dealers who opted out of the future “electric only” lineups and had GM buy back their stores?
Does any of this forced malinvestment get litigated?
And the employees that were let go… I lost my job because a certain company ceo decided that gas and diesel powertrain engineers were no longer needed. Every engineer at the working level knew that ev’s were not economically sustainable unless ‘someone else’ paid for them. I’m estimating that 10k engineers were let go in the first wave in 2022. Most of the jobs in southeast Michigan. The governor has kept her job same as the ceo.
Looking back five years, it’s hard to fathom the nutcase fatuity of EeeVee Fever at its high tide. Govco entities ranging from the senile scarecrow ‘Joe Biden,’ to the benighted socialist EU, to ‘Gavin from Commiefornia’ counseled us that death-dealing IC engines were being phased out by 2035. So we’d best just flop down, spread ’em, and then lie back and think of Israel … or some similar doomed Govco project.
Project EeeVee’s fatal error was failing to notice that cars are — wait for it — a DISCRETIONARY purchase. Incentives were dangled. But people can’t be compelled to make large discretionary purchases of a baaaaaattery technology that is demonstrably inferior to IC-engined vehicles in cost and convenience.
And so Govco’s grandiose, idle delusions have gone up in smoke, like its $150 billion ‘investment’ to ensure victory in Ukraine [sarc, LOL]. EeeVees hold a tiny share of a moribund auto market, which hasn’t grown in forty (40) years. What were auto execs such as Jim ‘Meatball’ Farley and EeeVee Mary thinking? Probably it is a conceptual error to attribute ‘thinking’ to these inert, maladapted lifeforms.
After 125 years, the auto industry is senescent. It needs a total reboot. The populist approach, which I favor, would feature its giant factories burning on the horizon like bombed power plants in Kyiiiiiiiivvvvvvvv.
I have seen the sunset, the sea on fire
Ships burn off the coast of Orion
Dreams of peace wait on the horizon, oh yeah
Clouds filled with blood rain on the water
While nighttime’s fingers clench the light shut
Our sister rides the horse, Apocalypse
Now is the closing
C’mon, shake ya sinners!
— The Cult, Soldier Blue (1989)
I could see having an EV as a second car IF they were inexpensive, say less than $20k. Most of my driving is local so that would work, as long as I had a real car for taking longer trips. With the average car being $50k now very few people can afford that plus a similarly priced EV.
I think there are two, possibly three EV buyer types. First is the early adopters. They’ll try anything and convince themselves it is better than before. Second is the true believers. They include the jet set rich who invested in wind and solar projects to green up their portfolios, attend useless rallies on Earth Day and “speak out” against climate change. The third type is not-quite rich, but is aspiring to look the part. They love the tax breaks and “cheap” electricity from their home charger (cheap because there’s no road tax).
All three of them likely own two or more vehicles. So if the EV won’t go, just take the Wagoner. I imagine anyone but the true believers will take a one-and-done approach when it comes time to trade in their EV, especially when they see the depreciation due to the clapped-out battery bank. They lived with the things for years, and know all the deficiencies. They watched as that range meter swung down as they climbed Vail Pass and didn’t ever seem to recover. They sat at the rest stops on I-80 for what seems like an eternity, watching gassers stop long enough to take a piss and top off the tank. And now they’re watching as their electric utility comes up with new schemes to apply demand surcharges for high draw applications like EV charging, washing out much of the total cost of ownership.
The only people left will be the true believers, and they were never numerous enough to stand up the market. If cars were still built like they were in the 1980s, light and small, they could easily be served by conversion companies (they existed in the 1980s, converting Datsun and Toyota pickup trucks into EVs using lead acid golf cart batteries). But not with today’s heavy and large vehicles.
Well said, RK.
I am now quite sure in my view that the affluent don’t really buy the climate change narrative. The fact that the affluent are rejecting the EVs they once so eagerly embraced is yet one more reason why.
EVs, as you mentioned, mean waiting and inconvenience: Affluent people don’t like waiting and inconvenience, and they’re willing to pay—a lot—to avoid it. EVs also mean losses—losses of money, and losses of time. Affluent people are affluent because they avoid and mitigate losses. And when push comes to shove, affluent people will drop the whole climate change narrative when it means waiting, inconvenience, and losses.
Speaking of losses, society actually found a way to make significant reductions in emissions of all kinds and significant reductions in fossil fuel consumption: Remote work. One good thing to come from the Covfefe Virus was the widespread adoption of remote work. We used a lot less gasoline and diesel fuel, and the skies did get noticeably clearer. And remote work made people’s lives easier and less expensive.
But that created losses in commercial real estate, and, well, we can’t have that, can we? So Mother Nature has to take a back seat to affluent people’s
commercial real estate values.
However, anything expensive and inconvenient, particularly for the non-affluent, to address climate change, like EVs, tiny apartments, and eating ze bugs, we must do!
While America appears to be returning to sanity at least as far as cars go; I read on ZeroHedge that Canada is cutting tariffs on Chinese EVs in return they promise to buy more Canola from Canada. Knowing as we all do the value of a CCP promise it should be interesting because they’re a lot more expensive than the stuff off of Temu. Your cheap blender breaks and you throw it away.
Your EV breaks and the parts aren’t available what do you do? I’m guessing that “creative” repairs on an EV will be a lot harder. Apparently their ruler thinks that importing foreign built EVs will create a domestic EV industry.
Well they’ll learn and it will be funny to watch.
The Emperor’s New Clothes – Hans Christian Anderson
“It’s easier to fool a man than convince him he’s been fooled.” – Mark Twain
“Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.” —Henry David Thoreau
I would contend that corporations and bureaucracies failed when Credentialed Class that was to lead this Modern Society took control. Out of touch with reality and humanity they went to the Right Schools and got the Proper Degrees. They possess and arrogance and hubris that seems to think that the world MUST comply with their wishes because…well…they WISH it. Others are tasked with making their fever dreams come true, reality be damned. If their commands do not result in the Utopia they seek it is the fault of the little people that lack their vision, desire and skill. IT’S NEVER THEIR FAULT!
From the unsinkable Titanic to the Titan deep water sub that ran on electronics from Wal-Mart, they leave a trail of corpses in their wake. And the rest of humanity has to clean up their mess.
Morning, Mark!
Yup. It calms me down to work on the Trans-Am. Seeing the parts come together – and putting them together – gladdens my heart and takes my mind off of the ugliness and stupidity abounding all around us.
Wait until you feel the new trans input shaft slide snugly into the clutch on its way to the pilot bearing. Heavenly.
Indeed, Mark!
I’m hoping to have the shekels to order the bellhousing this coming week; got a guy coming to potentially buy the old automatic – which will cover that. Then it’s just the T-10 and linkage yet to go!
Hurst shifter? I hope?
Brothers ‘67 GTO, Hurst shifter for the four speed manual, click click, and sturdy!
“The Credentialed Class” is a fantastic description. The information desert was a wonderful time for the people who were keepers of it. The dusty old volumes in the back of the library weren’t off limits, just not worth the effort. When all that stuff got digitized and put online it suddenly made the man on the street a scholar.
When the man on the street began producing their own content, maybe at first because they were rejected by the credentialed class, perhaps because they felt a strong desire but didn’t want to go through the process, it steeply discounted the traditional texts. Here was a new teacher, a new volume, and often times a better source. The iPhone TV reporter is willing to go out and find their own assignments instead of waiting for the editor to send them out for the story. And more often, the credentialed reporter is using the same tools that the iPhone reporter is using, because newsroom budgets ain’t what they used to be.
Meanwhile, the credentialed class is shooting themselves in the foot by buying into the idea of flooding the zone with useless content. When ATSC television was foisted on the nation, one of the selling points to the broadcaster was that they’d be able to offer sub-channels. They quickly started sub-network programming, mostly dusty old reruns from the golden age, because the content was cheap and it looked like a way to beat cable at its own game. Too bad they ended up further diluting their voice, leading to even fewer people watching the main channel because viewers found the old programs more appealing than the current faire (nostalgia is a powerful emotion).
So now here we are, with the full brunt of the old legacy media types (don’t even mention the mess of publishing these days, or whatever’s left over of the magazine and newspaper business) withering on the vine mostly thanks to their own doing. And now in a desperate attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, restricting access to their content. Soon they’ll be like the old monarchy, a sort of figurehead that’s a drag on society but we keep them around because of the occasional pomp and regalia.
Idiots.