Hippie Cars

I've been somewhat of an EV skeptic. I don't mean I was against them, just that I thought that adoption timelines were a bit optimistic and that the emphasis on replacing gas cars with electric ones distracted from the more important goal of reducing auto dependency.

We need to create built environment such that it isn't difficult to be without one car per driving age household member. We need to create more places where many more people can satisfy most of their non-commute daily needs without a car, at a minimum. It isn't actually difficult.

Still I didn't doubt that EVs were inevitable. Whether or not the Biden push for them was overall a good use of resources is one question, but certainly reversing course, nullifying promises, and actively fighting them is ridiculous.

This is the kiss of death for American car sales in Canada. You can get a Chinese Xiaomi sedan with 300-plus miles of range, more than 600 horsepower, and extremely fancy luxury trimmings for the equivalent of about $42,000 in China; or you can get a Chinese BYD Seagull with 190 miles of range for about $11,000. I would bet that the next step for Chinese automakers is to build a factory in Toronto or somewhere nearby so Canada can get a slice of the jobs and production.

More broadly, the American EV transition has clearly hit the skids, thanks to Trump. Sales plummeted by about 46 percent when the tax credit for purchase expired at the end of September. Ford took a $19.5 billion bath on a planned battery factory investment, canceled its F-150 EV, and is now reportedly in talks with—wait for it—BYD to pick up batteries for its hybrid cars sold abroad. GM is doing better, but its EV sales are still down sharply, as are Tesla’s.

Contrary to the triumphalism of various EV critics, all this horrendous waste does not mean that the global EV transition is now in question. As I have previously detailed, in 2025 a quarter of global car sales were EVs, led by Southeast Asia, where the EV share of new car sales in several nations has soared past the 40 percent mark, with many more nations just behind. China, the largest car market in the world, went from almost zero to more than half in just five years. America’s failure to gain a serious toehold in EV production—particularly very cheap models—is a major reason why the Big Three’s share of the global auto market has fallen from nearly 30 percent in 2000 to about 12 percent today, while China’s share has risen from 2 percent to 42 percent.

For various reasons, the rest of the world will soon be buying cheap BYD EVs and... Americans won't.