By José Niño
The electric vehicle (EV) revolution that automakers spent years promoting has crashed into the wall of economic reality. According to the Financial Times, a reversal in EV ambitions has triggered at least $65 billion in losses for the global auto industry over the past year, with executives warning of more pain ahead as they fundamentally reset their strategies.
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The losses are staggering. Stellantis took a $26 billion charge this month to scrap several fully electric models and revive the popular 5.7 liter “Hemi” V8 engine in the United States. The company also decided to bring back diesel engines for several European models. The write-off triggered a share selloff that cut its market value by about $6 billion. Ford recently disclosed a $19.5 billion write-down after canceling its electric F-150 pickup truck. General Motors posted $7.6 billion in EV related losses for 2025, including $6 billion in the fourth quarter alone tied to unused manufacturing capacity.
The New York Post calculated that U.S. and European automakers collectively lost over $114 billion on EVs, translating to roughly $20,887 in losses per EV produced over three years.
Stellantis had previously set a goal that EVs would account for all its European passenger vehicle sales by 2030 and half the total in the United States. Those targets are now abandoned as fantasy. The cancellation of EV credits in the United States and President Donald Trump’s determination to further roll back emissions regulations mean industry executives now expect EVs to account for just 5% of America’s new vehicle market in the coming years, about half the current level.
Bernstein analyst Stephen Reitman explained that Stellantis and other carmakers left consumers behind as they tried to replicate the early success Tesla achieved when it revolutionized the EV market.
“Everyone got caught up in the kind of euphoria of ‘look at the valuations Tesla was getting’ … and they didn’t bring the customers with them,” Reitman said. Their shortcoming was failing to offer vehicles that met drivers’ price and range expectations, while charging infrastructure also remained inadequate.
Wall Street has grown increasingly bearish on the sector. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas warned that 2026 “could be a pretty dreadful year for EVs in this country,” citing the elimination of the $7,500 federal tax credit as a devastating blow to demand. His colleague Andrew Percoco downgraded both Rivian and Lucid, warning that “slowing adoption, loss of the $7,500 tax credit, and persistent consumer concerns—range anxiety, charging infrastructure, residual values, battery tech, affordability—create headwinds that a mass-market vehicle may struggle to overcome in the near-term.”
Consumer resistance is anchored in economics. New EVs averaged approximately $58,000 in transaction price in the final months of 2025, according to Kelley Blue Book, compared to roughly $49,800 for all new vehicles. According to the American Automobile Association, commonly known as AAA, only 16% of U.S. adults said they were likely to buy an EV as their next car, down from 25% in 2022. After the federal tax credit expired on Sept. 30, 2025, fourth quarter EV sales plunged 46% from the third quarter and 36% year over year, falling to the lowest level since late 2022.
Curt Hopkins, CEO of MCQ Markets, told “Wards Auto,” a website dedicated to the latest automotive news, that legacy automakers “got the BEV—battery electric vehicle—market so horribly wrong” because they failed to understand fundamental differences between U.S. and European consumer demand.
He also pointed out that gasoline is taxed far less in the United States, American drivers travel much longer distances, and EV adoption sits at roughly 8% in the U.S. versus 17% in Europe.
Charging infrastructure remains a persistent barrier. The Trump administration suspended the $5 billion NEVI federal charging program in early 2025, and although a federal judge ruled the suspension unlawful in January 2026, the damage to deployment timelines was real.
Industry experts note that deploying chargers at scale faces “thousands of local permitting jurisdictions and hundreds of utility territories patch-worked across the country,” each with different regulations. Meanwhile, grid capacity constraints are growing as data centers and artificial intelligence workloads compete with EV charging for electrical capacity.
Analysts warned that there could be more write-downs for Stellantis ahead as the group aimed to improve its U.S. market share with a renewed focus on hybrid and petrol models. “The prospect of further one-off costs, with unknown cash implications, gives us reason to remain cautious,” Michael Tyndall, senior global automotive analyst at HSBC, wrote in a report this month.
Ford chief Jim Farley told investors in early March that the regulatory environment globally was the “wildcard” as the carmaker refined its strategy and investments. Farley said:
There’s enough choice around the world on electrification for us to cherry-pick customers’ choices around the world and come up with the right strategy, not only in the U.S. but around the world.
The broader picture that emerges is a strong and growing consensus among financial analysts, industry executives, and market observers. EVs are not economically viable in the United States without subsidies at current price points. Automakers massively overestimated the pace of adoption among mainstream American consumers. The all-electric-by- vision is dead for most legacy automakers, replaced by a hybrid-first strategy.
In the end, energy policy should serve the national interest, not the preferences of environmental activists or the regulatory schemes of unelected bureaucrats.
The market has rendered its verdict on electric vehicles, and that verdict is clear. Americans want affordable, reliable vehicles that meet their actual needs, not expensive status symbols that require massive government intervention to survive. It didn’t help matters that even those familiar with doing basic maintenance on a gas-powered vehicle cannot do even the most basic repairs on an EV themselves.
