President Donald Trump is ending the Biden-era electric vehicle mandates, announcing revised mileage standards that he says will make new cars cheaper to buy. Manufacturers, he contends, will respond by building more vehicles in American factories.
Writing online Saturday, Trump promised to “TERMINATE” what he calls a requirement to go electric imposed by his predecessor. He claimed the streamlined rules would cut waste from domestic production and leave households thousands of dollars better off. Figures for the new targets were absent from the post.
The mandate label overstates what the policy does, since no federal law compels Americans to buy battery-powered cars or blocks dealers from selling gasoline ones. What the rules regulate is the average efficiency of each automaker’s sales.
Lawmakers created the system, known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, back in 1975, and it works by averaging results across a company’s entire lineup. A brand that sells a fuel-hungry pickup can therefore balance it with a thriftier model.
Regulations finalized in 2024 would have lifted the required average from 39.1mpg to roughly 50.4mpg, with 2031 as the deadline, and Biden’s team said the goal was to cut emissions and fuel use while trimming drivers’ costs. However, Republicans in Congress stripped away federal buyer credits last year through Trump’s signature tax law, which weakened demand from another direction. Vehicle manufacturers now have little incentive to build electric cars while high prices are discouraging drivers from switching to EVs.
The latest move fits a wider campaign against Biden’s climate agenda. Shortly after returning to office in January 2025, Trump signed an order attacking the electric vehicle push and freezing spending tied to the Inflation Reduction Act, including money for a national charging network. Congress later revoked California’s authority to set stricter tailpipe limits, a waiver that several other states had followed.
That same tax law reduced the fines for automakers that miss mileage targets to zero, which drained the older rules of much of their force. Administration officials have also cancelled clean-energy grants and questioned whether the Biden standards had a sound legal basis.
Where the replacement targets will land remains unclear, though Trump’s proposal from December 2025 envisioned an industry-wide average near 34.5mpg, to be reached in 2031. That figure sits nearly a third below what the Biden regulations demanded. Internationally, the shift pulls Washington further from governments that are embracing electric models. China, for one, is speeding up its own transition as gasoline costs jump following the conflict with Iran.
Just as American EV makers like Lucid Motors (NASDAQ: LCID) were starting to think the policy environment in the U.S. couldn’t get any worse, Trump just threw a spanner in the works with this new announcement.
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