At the midpoint of a fiery inaugural address — and later, in a sprawling executive order — President Trump said he would "revoke the electric vehicle mandate," which he says President Biden imposed on the unwilling American people.
"In other words, you'll be able to buy the car of your choice," Trump continued.
Except ... it's well documented that there is no federal EV mandate — and President Biden certainly didn't advance it.
Even as he made comparatively historic gestures toward transforming American transportation — even if the bar is not terribly high — Biden kneecapped that impact by actually increasing domestic oil production compared to Trump's first term. Trump's predecessor did set goals to increase national EV sales to 50 percent by 2030, but those goals weren't binding; he did strengthen fuel economy standards to nudge automakers towards that lofty benchmark, but he also undercut it with comparatively less-aggressive standards for the SUVs and pickups that dominate the U.S. market; in collaboration with Congress, he did extend tax credits for electric vehicles, but only 8 percent of the 15.9 million cars Americans bought in 2024 ran exclusively on batteries, while the remainder still burned President Trump's beloved fossil fuel (aka the "liquid gold under our feet").
If that's an "EV mandate," it's an astonishingly weak one — but Trump has scored a touchdown with this political football. And amidst all this fighting over electric vehicles, many sustainability advocates seem to be missing the broader field on which we're all playing, as well as some wide-open opportunities to avert climate catastrophe.
Here's a truth that bears repeating (and here at Streetsblog, we certainly repeat it a lot): even if Biden had enacted a real "EV mandate" and somehow banished all internal-combustion vehicles from the road, it would still not have been enough to prevent a climate catastrophe. Until we end the car dependency mandate under which Americans have actually lived for the better part of a century, that catastrophe, mathematically, cannot be avoided.
Study after study has shown that cutting emissions in America's leading sector — yes, it's still transportation! — to levels in line with the Paris Climate Accords will require electrifying much of our vehicle fleet and reducing how much U.S. residents drive, which starts with increasing their access to both nearby destinations and shared and active ways of getting around. And it will require confronting the fact that Americans take 87 percent of their trips in personal cars not purely because they want to, but because a century of policy choices has made it impossible, dangerous, or heavily stigmatized to travel any other way.
Even if you aren't compelled by decades of climate science — and the U.S. Department of Transportation's incoming Secretary (and open climate change skeptic) Sean Duffy certainly doesn't appear to be — America's car dependency mandate flies in the face of Trump's self-proclaimed commitment to give Americans more freedoms.
The ability "to buy the car of your choice," after all, is the freedom to spend more than $12,000 a year in fuel, maintenance, financing and more, not to mention the cost of lost housing opportunities, time in traffic (no matter how many new lanes we build), and the painful and expensive decline of your health (even if you don't lose your life in one of the 40,000-plus deadly crashes that occur on U.S. roads every year).
To be frank, even if Trump succeeds in his mission to preserve Americans' ability to buy gas-powered cars, he'll still obligate them to spend a collective $5.9 trillion, compared to what they would save by 2050 if they reduced their driving by just 27 percent.
Of course, it's unlikely that Trump would abandon his commitment to automobility — especially since no president in recent U.S. history truly has. But U.S. residents don't really need the president to end the car dependency mandate, Even it sure would help.
The truth is, many of the policy decisions that have made private vehicle travel our national default are made at the state and local level, and can be unmade at the state and local level. Those policies include ones set by state DOTs that put dollars into highways over transit (but could shift money in the other direction) and set speed limits so high no one in their right mind would dare to walk (but thanks to new federal guidance, could set them lower.)
And cities can help reverse the car dependency mandate, too, by designing safe roads for cycling, or setting local taxes that allow them to provide better bus service. Even hyperlocal groups like neighborhood associations and individuals can play a role, by simply not fighting the permit for a corner store, or dismantling other simple barriers to active mobility that we see all around us.
Time will tell whether Biden's hopes for mass EV adoption were so fragile that they can be unraveled by a single executive order, which directs federal agencies to remove "regulatory barriers to motor vehicle access by ensuring a level regulatory playing field for consumer choice in vehicles," including the immediate pause in key federal funds for EV chargers. If Congress heeds Trump's urging to "consider the elimination of unfair subsidies and other ill-conceived government-imposed market distortions that favor EVs over other technologies and effectively mandate their purchase," and "drill, baby, drill," that will undoubtedly be a massive setback for our climate, too.
The far greater disaster, though, is the one that's been slowly unfurling on U.S. roads for generations, as car dependency has so thoroughly subsumed American transportation culture that many have lost the ability to even see it. And in the process, we've also been blinded to the many opportunities we have to decarbonize our transportation sector and give our fellow U.S. residents a real choice in how they get around.
