Trump to hurt the US auto industry?

Will cross post in general.

From early January. It looks like Trump and the GOP sre working on the authors predictions.

Detroit’s Death Spiral?
How Trump’s Climate Policy Could Kill the U.S. Auto Industry
BY ALFRED MCCOY

But just last week, I was surfing the EV (electric vehicle) test drives in Edmunds and Kelly Blue Book when a web page popped up with the title “7 Long-Range Electric Cars from China.” I was stunned to read that a car I’d never heard of, the NIO ET7, comes with a standard 649-mile range and complimentary access to “3,000 battery swap stations across China.”
....
European companies were hand-crafting cars for the rich as early as 1890. The Detroit auto industry didn’t get a jump-start until 1908 when Henry Ford mass-produced the Model T for what began as a reasonably affordable $850 and soon had dropped to $345 — unprecedented pricing that ramped that car’s production relentlessly up to an impressive two million units a year. In just 10 years, half of all the cars in America were Model Ts.

Following Ford’s time-tested lead, China’s largest automaker, BYD, is selling its Dolphin hatchback EV for a low-low $15,000, complete with a 13-inch rotating screen, ventilated front seats, and a 260-mile range. Here in the U.S., you have to pay more than twice that price for the Tesla Model 3 EV ($39,000) with lower tech and only 10 more miles of driving range. In case $15K beats your budget, BYD has a plug-in hybrid version with an industry-leading 74-mile range on a single charge for only $11,000 and an upgrade with an unbeatable combined gas-electric range of 1,300 miles. Not surprisingly, EVs surged to 52% of all auto sales in China last year. And with such a strong domestic springboard into the world market, Chinese companies accounted for more than 70% of global EV sales.
....
Not only did President Biden extend the critical $7,500 tax credit for the purchase of an American-made EV, but his 2021 Infrastructure Act helped raise the number of public-charging ports to a reasonable 192,000, with 1,000 more still being added weekly, reducing the range anxiety that troubles half of all American car owners. To cut the cost of the electricity needed to drive those car chargers, his 2022 Inflation Reduction Act allocated $370 billion to accelerate the transition to low-cost green energy. With such support, U.S. EV sales jumped 7% to a record 1.3 million units in 2024.

You can skip the intro if you like.

https://tomdispatch.com/detroits-death-spiral/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=d4ff9c8f3d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_01_26_11_11&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-d4ff9c8f3d-308782401