President Donald Trump said Saturday he has approved new fuel economy standards that “terminate” what he calls former President Joe Biden’s “EV mandate,” teeing up a Monday finalization by the Transportation Department that would cut required fleet efficiency by more than 30 percent through 2031.
“These new Standards will take the waste out of building cars in America. That means LOWER PRICES, saving families thousands on a new, beautiful, and safe car,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy piled on, promising “a major victory for America’s auto workers is coming Monday.”
The $930 Promise
The pitch is simple: cheaper cars. Reuters reports the Transportation Department estimates its proposal would shave $930 off the average new vehicle’s cost — by dropping the fleetwide fuel-economy target to 34.5 miles per gallon by 2031, down from 50.4 mpg under the Biden-era rules.
It is a dramatic reversal of trajectory. Biden’s standards demanded roughly 8% annual efficiency gains for model years 2024 and 2025, 10% for 2026, and 2% a year from 2027 to 2031. The new plan would even retroactively revise down the 2022 standard, then creep upward by just 0.25 to 0.5 percent a year — a near-freeze stretched all the way to 2031.
The $185 Billion Catch
Here is the part the Truth Social post leaves out. The Transportation Department’s own math says the rollback would burn roughly 100 billion extra gallons of fuel through 2050, cost American drivers an additional $185 billion at the pump, and lift carbon dioxide emissions by about 5%. Cheaper on the lot, far pricier on the road.
The timing is awkward, too. American drivers are already grappling with sharply higher fuel prices since the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran began at the end of February. Locking in thirstier cars now means the pain at the pump compounds for decades.
There Was Never an Actual EV Mandate
One point worth keeping straight: no federal law ever required Americans to buy electric cars or banned gasoline ones. Al Jazeera reports the Biden rules simply set a fleetwide average — a grade-point average across every car and light truck an automaker sells — and let manufacturers mix efficient combustion engines, hybrids, and EVs to hit it. The standards nudged the industry toward EVs; Congress separately gutted EV consumer tax incentives last year in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Trump has branded the standards an effective mandate anyway, arguing they forced Americans “into cars they never wanted.” But automakers are not exactly behaving like the EV era is over — General Motors has said it will keep building electric vehicles regardless of the rollback.
Why This Matters
Strip away the politics and this is a bet that Americans will happily choose cheaper, thirstier cars — while the rest of the world moves the other way. Fully electric cars grabbed 30.5% of new-car sales across key European markets in August, Chinese brands have nearly doubled their European share to 11.3%, and back home Tesla just fired up mass production of its electric Semi in Nevada. CAFE rules change what Detroit is required to build; they do not change what batteries and motors are now capable of.
The real collision is at the pump. The administration is selling a $930 discount on the window sticker while its own analysts pencil in $185 billion of extra fuel bills — at a moment when gas prices are already spiking. That is not an EV mandate being terminated. That is the American driver picking up the tab twice.
Meanwhile in Cars & EVs: Geely’s 2.2-megawatt charger article — and Bentley’s first-ever EV Torcal article.
