President Donald Trump is taking aim at what he calls the “electric vehicle mandate,” issuing a series of executive orders unraveling Biden administration policies and programs that tried to encourage growth in the zero-emissions vehicle market.
Among the orders Trump signed Monday is one that terminates the waiver programs that allow states including Colorado to enforce vehicle emissions standards. The order says the Trump administration will also consider ending “unfair subsidies and other ill-conceived government-imposed market distortions that favor EVs over other technologies.” It also revokes a dozen Biden-era actions aimed at mitigating climate change.
Colorado, meanwhile, has been pulling ahead of other states in the widespread adoption of zero-emission electric vehicles, hybrids and plug-in hybrids.
A large part of that adoption has been driven by buyers’ ability to stack federal incentives onto state and Xcel rebates. Last year, a sales push by automakers resulted in a big boost to sales of fully electric vehicles, even while the national market slowed down. The jump in sales was enough to dry up Xcel’s $5 million pool of rebates in November, which Colorado Automobile Dealers Association CEO Matthew Groves told The Colorado Sun was “a good thing,” noting that it signaled efficient adoption of EVs.
Colorado has also pumped millions of dollars into expanding EV infrastructure, such as installing fast charging stations throughout the state to alleviate “range anxiety,” the fear of running out of battery power before finding a charging station.
The state has also passed rules requiring auto dealers to offer more EVs for sale. In 2023, Colorado renewed and expanded its mandate for EVs to make up a larger share of dealer lots and set new standards requiring auto manufacturers to ramp up their electric and plug-in hybrid vehicle offerings, beginning with model year 2027 and increasing each year until 2032.
The resulting Colorado Clean Cars standard aims for 82% of new light-duty vehicles to be electric by model year 2032 — more ambitious than the federal benchmark of 50% of new car sales by 2030, but less ambitious than California’s goal of achieving a 100% electric vehicle market by 2035. The standard does not ban gas-powered autos and does not apply to used or off-road vehicles.
What does it mean to “revoke the electric vehicle mandate”?
The clean cars standard is part of a multistate effort headed by California to reduce emissions from passenger vehicles and scale up sales of zero-emission vehicles. The states rely on a waiver from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to enforce their standards. Those waivers would be relatively simple to revoke, according to Travis Madsen of the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, who suspected they could be one of the new administration’s “obvious targets” even before Trump issued his executive orders.
There will have to be a rulemaking process in accordance with the EPA’s Administrative Procedure Act, “so it’s not going to happen overnight,” Madsen said. “But Congress wouldn’t be involved in that, so there’s not a lot that anyone can do to stop the process from happening.”
He’s also noticed some policymakers start to take a more defensive stance with the new administration’s antipathy in mind. Last week California withdrew a pending waiver for its “advanced clean fleets” program, which would require a transition to zero-emissions for medium- and heavy-duty fleets.
“I interpret that as a defensive maneuver,” Madsen said of the withdrawal. “To take that proceeding out of being actively considered at the EPA so that they don’t get tangled up in a big fight over it, it’s about preemptively shifting the focus away from advancing new policies to defending the ones that are already in place.”
Trump could further target pro-EV policies by eliminating money spent on federal rebates that used to drive down their purchase price, according to Groves, of the Colorado Automobile Dealers Association.
Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was the largest infusion of federal money into the electric vehicle industry to date. That money came to the EV industry through many avenues, like subsidies for automakers to build battery factories, and popular consumer rebates — including a $7,500 tax rebate for new EVs, and a $4,000 rebate for used EVs.
Those rebates could be stripped from the market in Trump’s pursuit of leveling the “regulatory playing field for consumer choice.”
“That is a change, but it only exacerbates the change at the state level,” Groves said. The state rebate dropped to $3,500 from $5,000 at the end of last year, and the Xcel rebate program ran out of money in November.
“So, we were already dealing with diminished tax credits, it’s just worse than we thought it was,” Groves said.
But dealers will continue to sell EVs, Groves said, and added that the market is not exclusive to the U.S.
“These auto manufacturers are global companies,” he said. “The U.S. is changing, yes, but Europe is not, and Asia is not, and those are still really big customer bases.”
The bottom line is, dealers will sell what people want to buy, and right now there is a demand for EVs, Groves said — though there will almost certainly be slower growth and adoption in the industry under this administration.
“I think it’s inevitable that the auto industry is going to switch to EV tech for almost everything. It’s just a more effective technology and it saves people a ton of money,” Madsen said. “It might slow down the transition a little bit if Trump is withdrawing support for market transformation, but fundamentally this is happening. I guess I think the president is just wasting time by rolling back EV policies. It’s just about how fast we’re going, not about whether we’re going that direction at all.”