Donald Trump has never had much use for electric vehicles. The EV industry, meanwhile, has relied on government subsidies to get a jump-start in America. So what happens now that Trump is returning to the White House?
Wall Street observers have a “widespread belief” that Trump will target the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles, said Al Root at Barron’s. That’s the bad news for the EV industry. The better news is that those same analysts expect Trump to leave other parts of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act intact — the law has enabled a manufacturing surge that has benefited red states. But those are just guesses. “Trump isn’t a fan of EVs,” said Root.
If Trump ends the EV tax credit, “Elon Musk and Tesla would reap the rewards,” said CNN. That might seem counterintuitive, as Tesla only makes electric vehicles, but Musk’s company is currently the “only automaker making a profit on its U.S. EV sales.” Ending the credit might reduce Tesla’s profits, but other automakers could see their losses increase. They might even leave the EV market, CNN said, which “would mean less competition among EV buyers for Tesla.” That means Musk’s political alliance with Trump could affect the entire auto industry.
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Electric vehicles “won’t tank under Trump,” Emily Dreibelbis Forlini said at PCMag. That’s because EVs have a “strong base of suburban drivers who love them” for their ability to accelerate so quickly. The tax credit requires automakers to source their batteries domestically — erasing the credit could prompt American automakers to seek out cheaper Chinese batteries, which would “lower the vehicle cost, and put more zero-emission vehicles on the road.”
Ending the EV tax credit would result in an “earnings bloodbath” for companies like Ford and GM, Liam Denning said at Bloomberg. They’ve already spent billions of dollars on the infrastructure to build electric vehicles. Now they just need to “sell more EVs in order to reap economies of scale on existing investment.” That’s less likely to happen if the credit goes away, Denning said. Those companies now have to hope that “Trump won’t make good on everything he says.”
What next?
It’s not just the tax credit that will determine the future of EVs in the United States. Trump has also threatened ultra-high tariffs on auto imports from Mexico, which “could be a problem for Tesla,” said Business Insider. Musk’s company last year announced a new factory near Monterrey, Mexico, a project that has been “hit by delays and uncertainty” amid the U.S. presidential campaign. But it could be a bigger problem for Tesla’s competitors: One investment bank warned that the proposed tariffs would be “highly disruptive” to the U.S. automakers that already have plants in the country.
EVs could get a “Trump bump” before the inauguration, said Axios. Consumers could race to take advantage of the tax credit before the new president has a chance to get rid of it. Trump’s election victory “could kick fence-sitters into action,” said Edmunds analyst Jessica Caldwell.
