When did getting from point A to point B get so complicated? When the government decided which cars Americans should buy. With the economic and scientific premises behind electric vehicle (EV) mandates collapsing, the EV bubble may burst completely. There is one mandate left to burst: California’s Advanced Clean Cars II (ACC II) regulation, which requires all new vehicles to be 100 percent electric by 2035, or else automakers get penalized.
With the federal repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s Endangerment Finding in February, the government’s formal scientific basis for EV mandates is gone. State governments no longer have a rational scientific basis for requiring EV sales.
The concept of an EV mandate was first made formal policy by the Biden administration when it issued its de facto EV mandate in the form of a 2024 executive order, which changed EPA standards with the clear goal of forcing consumers to start buying EVs over gas-powered vehicles. Though the Trump administration has reversed this policy at the federal level, nearly a dozen state governments have followed a coercive plan to extend EV mandates.
Yet, as I noted in RealClearEnergy, the reasoning behind EV mandates is extremely dubious. The federal government recently emphasized that carbon dioxide emissions, like those from gas-powered cars, should not be considered a pollutant at all. Ironically, EVs don’t dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions due to the reliance on conventional hydrocarbons, like coal and natural gas, to power their batteries and charging stations.
In fact, the federal government had never ruled that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions were a pollutant until the 2009 politically-motivated determination known as the Endangerment Finding. In 2003, the EPA rejected a petition for the agency to declare CO2 a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. When the Obama administration’s EPA issued the Endangerment Finding, it made no effort to quantify the supposed harm of CO2 emissions; rejected every request by Americans to consider contrary evidence; and, puzzlingly, never consulted the EPA’s Scientific Advisory Board.
Fortunately, state EV mandates are not going unchallenged. With the help of Congress, President Donald Trump rescinded the California EV mandate in May 2025. California and the other states doubled down, kicking off a legal battle with the Trump administration. In the ping-pong match of legal battles, the Trump administration sued California on March 12, over its violation of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, which directs the federal government to establish uniform fuel economy standards nationwide.
Due to the political inconvenience of admitting that one’s policies are unwise, it may be unreasonable to expect states to reverse course. However, some already are. In addition to Oregon and Vermont, Maryland has already walked back its EV mandates in the past year. Maryland’s governor has decided to delay imposing penalties on automakers who do not meet EV sale quotas and has paused other measures to penalize gas-powered cars.
Leading U.S. automaker executives are also reversing course. GM’s luxury division, Cadillac, has admitted it cannot fulfill its pledge to shift to an all-EV fleet. In December 2025, GM CEO Mary Barra said that Biden-era vehicle regulations, if left in place, would have forced GM to “start shutting down plants.” Ford CEO James Farley, days later, revealed that U.S. automakers are “in a fight for our lives” in the global market, largely due to “aggressive carbon mandates.”
Farley, in particular, wasn’t kidding. Ford has taken tremendous losses in its EV initiatives. The auto giant has lost more than $16 billion on its EV ventures since 2022, and Ford’s financial pain is slated to keep coming for years.
Unfortunately, this situation is not unique to Ford. Other car companies are suffering losses. GM, Stellantis, and Honda have cumulatively sustained a nearly $30 billion loss from jumping into the EV abyss.
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel—and we don’t need to reinvent the engine. There is an opportunity for American EV companies to dominate the market, for example, by leveraging U.S. advances in critical minerals. To require brand new critical mineral supply chains for batteries inevitably creates inefficiencies. For now, though, gas-powered vehicles are the better option, and consumer behavior shows that.
It would be bad enough if Americans were just forced to buy certain kinds of cars and not others. Yet EVs themselves have real—even dangerous—drawbacks. According to a 2024 study from Consumer Reports, EV models had 21 percent more defects than gas-powered vehicles.
Of course, if consumers want to buy EVs, that should be their prerogative. State governments mandating that Americans buy them, though, is the problem. And the impracticality of many EVs, in their current form, is partially why the free market has not spurred a consumer shift.
Take one personal anecdote that I believe many share. I thought EVs were relatively harmless until my own run-in with a rental EV in South Florida. While at my first charging station, my vehicle stopped charging without my knowledge. However, I calculated that, driving at a normal pace, I could get to another charging station many miles away but closer to my destination.
Big mistake. Two hours later, I was stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, trying to enter a highway that was blocked off due to a foreign leader’s visit to Mar-a-Lago. I watched with dread as the projected mileage continued ticking down to less than 20 miles.
After a fairly dramatic escape, I was just five miles from my destination when the EV was flashing a warning signal on the screen. It would not tell me how many miles I had left—it just told me to charge my vehicle immediately. That was not an option. Miraculously, I made it to my destination.
Thank God I was in an urban area because in the rural United States, the sparse charging infrastructure is even more inaccessible.
For these reasons and others, EVs are unlikely to outpace gas-powered vehicles, and that is perfectly fine. In this sense, it is reminiscent of a strikingly similar historical parallel. In the early 1900s, EVs were all the rage and became a major focus of visionaries like Thomas Edison and Ferdinand Porsche. Gas-powered vehicles, though, easily surpassed EVs in popularity within a few years, for the same reason they are more popular now: gasoline fueling is simple, cheap, and widely accessible. EV charging stations are not.
As one of the largest purchases in someone’s life, car ownership is a serious decision. Moreover, America is a car-dependent country. The United States has the second most cars in the world, after China, and ranks seventh in per capita car ownership. Americans need to exercise their choice, and their choice alone, in one of the largest purchases of their life.
EV mandates only burden individuals and companies. Their scientific basis is gone. States that mandate EV sales should re-evaluate immediately. We are at an inflection point of breaking free of the EV shackles and making consumer choice great again.
Sydney Rodman is a visiting fellow with the Independent Women’s Center for Energy and Conservation.
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