China speeds ahead on electric vehicles as Trump pulls back incentives

Michael Bickford was excited to get behind the wheel of a Ford F-150 Lightning, but after experiencing the dismal state of the U.S. charging network on a recent road trip, the Portland, Maine, retiree reconsidered.

“I had planned to go fully electric, but I gave up on that when the realities of how difficult that would be here set in,” said Bickford, who is sticking with his hybrid. After pulling his name off the list for the plug-in pickup, he’s holding out for the day the United States catches up to China. He’s in for a long wait.

China is leapfrogging the United States with the availability of more advanced, cheaper electric vehicles, while President Donald Trump is cutting subsidies and making other moves that could leave the U.S. behind. The president’s antipathy toward plug-ins, combined with the U.S. domestic auto industry’s slow rollout of new clean-energy vehicles, is frustrating U.S. motorists who hunger for clean transportation.

“You read about the cars and charging systems they are making in China and think to yourself, ‘Geez, why don’t we have that here?’” Bickford said.

Trump has declared that the Biden administration’s support for electric cars was a Marxist “hoax” that hurt U.S. autoworkers. He is freezing billions of dollars of spending on electric vehicle infrastructure, ripping out charging stations in government buildings, and reversing regulations that incentivize automakers to focus on plug-in innovation. Subsidies for factories that make batteries and other parts have been blocked, triggering a wave of canceled projects. Tax breaks of $7,500 for purchasing plug-ins are targeted for elimination, although Congress will be required to act on the president’s request.

Amid the president’s trade war, meanwhile, Chinese electric cars are unlikely to roll into the United States anytime soon.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, an oil executive before his nomination, said in a speech in March that the administration’s plan is “to reverse the destructive mandates, forcing everyone to buy EVs that have been wreaking havoc on our auto industry and forcing higher prices and reduced choices on consumers.”

He and Trump argue the policy reversals will usher in a renaissance for U.S. automakers, now free to focus on the gas cars that still generate the bulk of their profits.

But the policy will also ensure the U.S. remains behind in the global EV race. Of the more than 17 million EVs sold in 2024 around the world, according to the China Passenger Car Association and research firm Rho Motion, 76% of those cars were made by Chinese companies.

The same U.S. auto companies that for years complained vocally about aggressive government actions aimed at speeding the transition to EVs now worry damage from federal abandonment of the transition will be long-lasting.

“We are all going to EVs globally. It is just a question of when,” said Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, a former chief global economist at Ford. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the industry group representing all the major U.S. vehicle manufacturers, urged Trump in a November letter to preserve the tax breaks for EV buyers and emissions rules that push automakers to innovate and sell electric models. Plug-in technology is advancing so rapidly, with longer battery ranges and expanding charging networks, that analysts expect consumer preference for the cars to eventually overtake that of gas vehicles.

It all puts an industry crucial to the U.S. economy in a precarious place, with analysts warning there is only so long U.S. auto giants can rely on tariffs to wall consumers off from Chinese offerings. Europe has already bent to consumer demand, with drivers eagerly buying up reliable EVs with sticker prices as low as $20,000 from red-hot Chinese EV makers like BYD, short for “Build Your Dreams.” Last month, BYD announced it had fulfilled a dream of many motorists by unveiling electric cars that could be fully charged in five minutes.

The starting price of the new fast-charging BYD cars sold in China is under $28,600, more than 10% cheaper than a Tesla Model 3 there.

“If those products were to come to the U.S., the auto industry here would be in deep trouble,” said Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision, a market research firm that advises automakers. They could lure masses of motorists who right now have no interest in going electric, he said.

Electric vehicles, including plug-in hybrids, now account for 19% of all cars sold worldwide, up from just 4% five years ago. Chinese models account for 17 of the 20 top-selling plug-ins globally, according to CleanTechnica. The only U.S. company that ranks on that list is Tesla, and it is fast losing market share. Tesla vehicle deliveries plunged 13% the first quarter this year.

“We’re on an island, vulnerable and not playing offense anymore,” Michael Dunne, a prominent auto industry consultant, said at a recent Washington gathering of energy and Western auto officials hosted by SAFE, a nonprofit focused on U.S. energy security. “We cannot remain on this island here in North America and just hope for the best.”

Detroit executives, criticized for years for focusing on gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks, are now trying to catch up while navigating the shifting winds from Washington.

Soon after the president signed an order directing a pivot away from EVs, Ford CEO Jim Farley was warning shareholders that the company needs to urgently lean in on electric. He highlighted in a call how motorists around the world are rapidly shifting to EVs, and markets where American vehicles were long king are now being “dominated by the Chinese.”

He said Ford is retooling its strategy around EVs with a moonshot-like effort to replicate the Chinese model of innovating cheap, high-tech vehicles in a division walled off from the company’s legacy production lines.

General Motors says it is racing to develop a breakthrough in battery technology that would reposition it as a major player in the EV race.

Both Ford and GM did not answer detailed questions from the Washington Post. But the companies have consistently said they need to see more U.S. consumer EV demand to expand their offerings. And consumers here often won’t consider them because the U.S. charging network is so bad.

Federal investment in U.S. charging infrastructure has been frozen altogether by Trump after the Biden administration was able to deliver only a couple hundred of the half-million chargers it promised by 2030. Tens of thousands of planned chargers may never get installed. China already has nearly 20 public chargers for every one in the United States, and Europe has four times as many chargers as the U.S.

Hughes-Cromwick said the auto manufacturers can fix the charger shortage by following the lead of Tesla, which built its own charging network to conform with the cars it makes. That’s the model used in China, where the car companies operate like government-backed start-ups. But that’s expensive. Tesla lost money for 18 years before making a profit. Sustaining such losses is more difficult for publicly traded, legacy automakers, who face pressure from shareholders to grow quarterly profits.

Meanwhile, Trump’s freeze on subsidies is causing companies to abandon plans to build factories making EV components in the U.S. after the administration froze subsidies. Scrapped projects include billion-dollar battery factories in Georgia and Arizona.

Even some fans of the president’s industrial policies are unnerved.

“It is not good that they have taken some of these steps” to undermine EV sales and innovation, said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. “Car companies are going to have to tell this administration, ‘You will be faced with half-built factories here if you don’t stop this war on clean-energy vehicles.’ They will hopefully start to listen. I don’t think this administration wants its legacy to be a landscape where they have vacant plants in places like Tennessee with weeds growing in the parking lot.”

As the industry lobbied against a phaseout of the internal combustion engine, China’s government was seeding dozens of EV companies with tens of billions of dollars.

“These incredibly cheap, high-quality EVs from China are impossible to match if you don’t have the U.S. government helping manufacturers make this transition,” said Ann Carlson, former chief counsel for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “The shortsightedness of the industry in not seeing the trend would be toward electrification has put them in a precarious position. Now, Trump blocking every effort to assist that transition leaves us in a very dicey place.”