The plan would redirect money to national defense priorities.
“Incoming U.S. President Donald Trump’s transition team is recommending sweeping changes to cut off support for electric vehicles and charging stations and to strengthen measures blocking cars, components and battery materials from China,” reported Reuters, based on an internal transition team document Reuters has reviewed.
The recommendations come as the U.S. electric vehicle transition stalls and China’s heavily subsidized EV industry gains strength, in part because of its “superior battery supply chain,” wrote Reuters.
On the campaign trail, “Trump vowed to ease regulations on fossil-fuel cars and roll back what he called President Joe Biden’s EV mandate.”
The transition-team’s plan would redirect money now allocated for building charging stations and making EVs more affordable into national-defense priorities, including securing supplies of batteries that aren’t from China as well as the critical minerals to build them, reported Reuters.
While batteries, minerals and other EV components are “critical to defense production,” electric vehicles and charging stations are not, Reuters wrote that the document states.
The transition team document also calls for eliminating the Biden administration’s $7,500 tax credit for consumer EV purchases.
Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said voters gave Trump a mandate to deliver on campaign promises, including stopping “government attacks on gas-powered cars.”
“When he takes office, President Trump will support the auto industry, allowing space for both gas-powered cars and electric vehicles,” Leavitt told Reuters in a statement.
The proposal also recommends blocking California from setting its own, stricter vehicle emissions standards, which more than a dozen other states have adopted, according to Reuters.
Trump “barred California from setting tougher requirements during his first term, a policy that Biden reversed.”
The U.S. Supreme Court last week granted the petition filed by NACS and its coalition partners in a case challenging the state of California’s Advanced Clean Cars I rule.
That means that the Court will accept briefs and hear oral argument in the case—and should decide it by early July 2025.
“We are pleased that the Supreme Court will hear this case,” said Doug Kantor, NACS General Counsel. “The question of who decides vehicle standards for the nation is too important for courts to hide behind unsupported legal technicalities of ‘standing.’
We need a federal standard that makes the entire nation’s interests in lower emissions and a strong economy its priority rather than arbitrarily picking one technology over others, regardless of results.”
The California rule set standards requiring 22% of new vehicles sold in the state to be “zero emission” in model year 2025.
The rule is a precursor to pending California rules that over time would require 100% of new vehicles sold in California to be “zero emission.”
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