Election Year Politics Roil The Ev Transition

Mike Magner and Valerie Yurk | CQ-Roll Call (TNS) WASHINGTON — The U.S. auto industry faces a triple threat on the road to cleaner cars and trucks: lagging consumer demand for electric vehicles, a potential glut of cheap electric vehicles from China and the possible rollback of Biden administration moves if Donald Trump becomes president again. All of that is raising questions about whether the EV revolution in the United States could end before it really begins, especially if a victorious Trump follows through on promises to rescind regulations and financial incentives for zero-emission vehicles. Still, many industry analysts are confident the transition will continue even in a new Republican administration because so many billions of dollars have been invested and the global market is shifting rapidly toward EVs in response to climate change. A slower pace for EVs in America would further the lead for China, which dominates the global market at 60 percent of worldwide EV sales, according to the International Energy Agency. “If we don’t continue to incentivize both the purchase of the vehicles domestically and the creation of the infrastructure, the charging stations, we run the risk of falling behind in the technology,” said Alan Taub, a former auto executive who now heads the Electric Vehicle Center at the University of Michigan. The stakes are too high to let that happen, said Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, senior resident fellow in the climate and energy program at the left-center think tank Third Way and a former chief economist at both Ford Motor Co.