A few years ago it looked like things would be mostly up and to the right for electric cars in America. Car companies were investing billions. Tax credits were doing their thing. There were bound to be stumbles, sure, but generally the odds looked strong for vastly more Americans to be plugging in by the end of the decade.
Then President Trump came into office for a second time and started breaking things. A new, wide-ranging report from BloombergNEF on the future of the global electric car industry surveys the damage.
“This is the second consecutive year where we have reduced both our near-term and long-term passenger EV adoption outlook,” researchers wrote in the company’s 2026 Electric Vehicle Outlook, published in June. “Full withdrawal of federal regulatory support for electrification in the U.S. is the biggest factor.”
Photo by: InsideEVs
In 2024, BloombergNEF projected that, by 2030, 47.5% of cars sold in the U.S.—nearly half—would be either fully electric or plug-in hybrid. It slashed that forecast in 2025 and again this year. Now it expects that around 17% of U.S. car sales will have a plug by the end of the decade.
