I have always held that if someone wants to buy a plug-in electric vehicle, if he can afford one, he has every right to do so. Alas, Our Betters in the former Biden Administration — and I do so love referring to it as the former Biden Administration! — thought that no, it ought not to be a matter of personal choice or preference, but that people should eventually be required to buy a plug-in electric vehicle. Our American left are pro-choice on exactly one thing.

Trump ended the EV mandate. Here’s what it means for the auto industry.

The transition to electric vehicles is a years-long process that is already underway and faces fierce competition from abroad.

By Lauren Kaori Gurley | Wednesday, January 22, 2025

President Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order undoing Joe Biden’s multibillion-dollar effort to usher in a transition to electric vehicles, has rocked the auto industry, environmental groups and other stakeholders as they grapple to understand the likely impact.

Trump’s order ending Biden’s “electric vehicle mandate” will slow — not stop — the long-term transition to electric vehicles, experts say.

“This transition cannot stop,” said K. Venkatesh Prasad, senior vice president at the Center for Automotive Research. “We’ve seen long-term investments in [EVs]. Those things don’t change.”

Car manufacturers can, of course, continue to develop and build EVs: such would be their individual, corporate choices, and from a business and economic standpoint, would be based on their projections of what American consumers would choose to buy.

The changes could give companies more leeway while adjusting to the transition and consumers more reason to buy gas-powered cars. Environmentalists warn that a slower transition endangers efforts critical to cutting greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change.

Well, of course they would say that, because they Know Better than you. As Jonathan Edwards sang to us, “He can’t even run his own life, I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine!”

On Monday, Trump also halted the distribution of federal funds for EV chargers. And he signaled that he will seek to cancel tax credits of up to $7,500 for people who buy new EVs and to revoke a waiver granted to California last year that allows it to ban sales of gasoline-only cars by 2035. Some of those standards have been adopted by more than a dozen other states.

That’s the right thing to do. We have gasoline stations all across the country, and every last one of them is there because private companies and individuals believed that they could make money by building them. The same should hold true for those who want to run EV charging stations: invest their own money, and not have our tax dollars pay for or subsidize them. Tax credits for people wealthy enough to buy new electric cars? That’s just welfare for the well-to-do! If someone wants to buy an EV, that is and should be his choice . . . and it should also be his money, and not taxpayer dollars.

There’s a lot more at the original, most of it concerning the economics of the situation, given that American car manufacturers have already invested billions in setting up to produce new electric vehicles. But Ford has already scaled back EV production, because they are simply not selling well. With the hoped-for end of the tax credit for buying them, sales might drop even further.