President Donald Trump has positioned himself as a defender of gas cars, and a foe of any mandate to phase them out. But his U-turn on federal policy doesn’t spell the end of an electric revolution in Detroit, which has invested decades and hundreds of billions of dollars in developing electric vehicles, batteries, and their supply chains.
An announcement last week by Ford marks the most definitive statement yet by an American automaker that it is committed to the future of electric cars, no matter what happens in Washington.
CEO Jim Farley said the company will invest $5 billion in an all-new modular EV platform and assembly process that will make it easier and cheaper to produce electric models in the United States. The company also announced the first product to be built with this system: a small electric pickup set to debut in 2027 for under $30,000.
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump is ending policies to promote electric cars. But carmakers like Ford are focused more on Chinese competition than on Washington politics. The company’s stunning goal: a small electric pickup priced below $30,000.
The announcement, at a union factory in Louisville, Kentucky, reflected what many in the auto industry say is an increasingly clear reality: Electric transportation – and the technology to produce it more affordably – is barreling ahead, regardless of American politics or culture. And if U.S. automakers don’t want to fall behind, they need to figure out how to strike a delicate balance among shifting political demands in Washington, the evolving tastes of American car buyers, and global competition, especially from China.
“It’s so difficult to impress on people who are not watching the industry that the next step in the automobile will be electric,” says Sam Fiorani, vice president of global vehicle forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania. “If you take your foot off the accelerator of EV development, China is not going to slow down. And once you lose the lead, you become an also-ran very quickly.”
Ford’s announcement demonstrates its dedication to not becoming one of those also-rans by staying in the global competition.
Soon after he took office, Mr. Trump instructed Congress to eliminate the $7,500 purchase rebates for American-made EVs, as well as fuel economy standards for car manufacturers that effectively required EV production in order to comply. The administration has also done away with the Environmental Protection Agency’s mandate to regulate carbon emissions and California’s waiver to set its own air quality standards that are stricter than the rest of the nation. It recently implemented a federal road tax just for EVs that is about twice what an average driver pays in federal gas taxes.
All of this has made the environment for EVs “far more challenging in the U.S. market this year,” says Karl Brauer, executive analyst at iSeeCars.com.
Pioneer of assembly lines, Ford aims to innovate again
To make EVs affordable, Ford envisions a massive overhaul of the production process. Its plans, years in the making, developed out of view. A small, dedicated skunkworks of management engineers, poached from EV and tech firms such as Apple, Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, and Amazon, has been working in Long Beach, California, far from Ford’s Detroit-area headquarters.
“The automotive industry in America is at a crossroads about new technology and about new competition from everywhere,” Mr. Farley told the assembled autoworkers. “We saw this coming for years. We knew that the Chinese would be the major player [in global EV competition.] For too long, legacy automakers played it safe. We needed a radical approach. We need to do it and be sustainable and make money, and we need to do it with American workers.”
Ford called its plan a “Model T moment,” because it aims to bring back a kind of modular production system that will allow it to easily build a variety of body styles on a single production line. Instead of a single car moving down an assembly line with workers adding parts along the way, the line will have three branches, like rivers coming together at the end, with front, middle, and rear sections that can be mixed and matched to meet demand. So a single center cabin could get a sedan, hatchback, SUV, or pickup back end. With each portion built separately, workers will no longer have to reach through doors to install large parts like dashboards, making production much more efficient – and safer.
Despite the anti-EV rhetoric coming out of Washington, 10% more EVs were sold during the first quarter of 2025 – nearly 300,000 vehicles – than during the same time frame in 2024, according to Cox Automotive data. Sales dropped in the second quarter, to 6% below last year, but they were still higher in the first six months of 2025 than they were in 2024. And the biggest drop in sales came from Tesla, which alone accounts for 46% of the U.S. EV market.
At the time, Tesla had shut down its Model Y factory in Texas in preparation to build an updated model with a new assembly process similar to the one Ford announced last week. Many potential Tesla buyers and existing owners also balked at CEO Elon Musk’s actions at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), giving rise to bumper stickers proclaiming, “Bought before I knew Elon was crazy,” or “This is my last Tesla.”
Excluding Tesla, EV sales actually rose 4% in the first half of 2025 compared with last year.
“If this administration had its way, [American automakers] would stop production of anything electrified; they would only build big trucks and SUVs,” says Samuel Abuelsamid, vice president of market research at the Detroit-based consultancy Telemetry. But “People in Japan are never going to buy [Ford] F-150s, because they won’t fit on their tiny roads. Markets like Japan and Korea don’t buy U.S. products because we don’t build anything they can use.”
China drives a changing global marketplace
Ford’s investment shows that Detroit is motivated more by Chinese competition than by Washington politics, analysts say.
“The global EV environment is facing increasing domination from Chinese automakers,” says Mr. Brauer of iSeeCars.com. Chinese automakers have been gobbling up market share with EVs in Europe, where Ford and Stellantis have business worth tens of billions of dollars. EVs account for 49% of car sales in China, where Ford made $660 million last year, while business for both General Motors and Stellantis there has been faltering.
Now, U.S. automakers “are adapting, shifting products around,” says Mr. Abuelsamid. Going forward, legacy automakers will focus more on smaller, more affordable electric cars, such as the new small electric pickup that Ford announced, he says. GM is bringing back the affordable Chevrolet Bolt EV. And Hyundai and Kia have a raft of new smaller models in the wings. Legacy automakers have “realized they put too much emphasis on the high end of the market,” he says, in part trying to emulate Tesla’s success in selling $70,000 to $130,000 EVs.
“We’re committed to electrification,” says Marty Gunsberg, spokesperson for Ford Model e, in a statement to the Monitor. “We appreciate the administration’s work to align regulations with market realities, and we believe electric vehicles are a great customer solution. These are the vehicles that will go toe-to-toe with China. We … think our investments speak for themselves.”
Cheaper batteries are also part of the effort to bring prices down. GM, Ford, and Tesla are transitioning to batteries using the lithium iron phosphate technology from power tools, which costs half as much as earlier EV technology that was akin to what’s used in laptop computers and cellphones.
If there is a change in the EV market at the moment, then, it’s less a pullback from electric cars than a reflection that previous forecasts were too optimistic, says Mr. Fiorani, the analyst in Pennsylvania.
“The problem in both the U.S. and Europe is that regulators pushed [automakers] to produce more [EVs] than the markets could bear,” he says. “The whole industry was under the misperception that this was going to be a relatively quick transition to EVs, and that just wasn’t going to be the case.”
