American Auto Giants Thrilled To Sell Gas Guzzlers Again After Collapse Of Biden’s EV Mandate

U.S. automakers are celebrating their ability to continue selling gas-powered vehicles after President Donald Trump rolled back electric vehicle (EV) mandates.

Trump signed three new bills into law in June, which terminated Biden-era rules that allowed states like California to impose a national EV mandate. These rollbacks have caused companies like Ford and General Motors to scale back their EV plans and search to leverage demand for their big SUVs and commercial vehicles, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported.

“This is a multibillion-dollar opportunity over the next couple of years,” Ford Motor Chief Executive Jim Farley said last week in a call to analysts.

California and several other states imposed rules that would have banned the sale of new gas-powered vehicles in their respective areas by 2035. Trump’s new rules stripped these states of those mandates and have allowed the auto industry to continue selling gas-powered engines in new vehicles, according to The WSJ.

“It’s a very, very fast speed for the auto industry,” Tyson Jominy, J.D. Power’s senior vice president of data and analytics, told the WSJ. “But it’s faster to be able to revert to an existing technology rather than tool up and prepare for a new technology.”

General Motors switched its plan to do away with combustion engines by 2035 and have instead laid out the benefits of keeping them around, The WSJ reported. General Motors CEO Mary Barra stated that her company can “appreciate the profitability” of selling gas-powered vehicles as a result of Trump’s rollbacks.