Trump says he has ‘no choice’ but to back EVs after Musk endorsement

Donald Trump has for months denigrated electric vehicles, arguing their supporters should “rot in hell” and that assisting the nascent industry is “lunacy”. He now appears to have somewhat shifted his view thanks to the support of Elon Musk, the world’s richest person.

“I’m for electric cars, I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly,” Trump, the Republican nominee for US president, told supporters at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, on Saturday.

The transactional nature of this relationship with Musk was made clear by the former president and convicted business fraudster, however. “So I have no choice,” said Trump, who then went on to say that electric vehicles were suitable for a “small slice” of the population and that “you want every type of car imaginable” to be available.

Trump also claimed that $9tn would be needed to build a network of electric car chargers, which is not a figure that has been cited by the industry or White House. Joe Biden’s administration has vowed to build 500,000 chargers, far fewer than the approximately 28m needed , and secured several billion dollars for this, although progress on this buildout has been painfully slow .

Musk, the chief executive of Tesla who has pushed increasingly strident rightwing views via his ownership of Twitter/X , has backed Trump’s return to the White House despite the candidate’s repeated antipathy to electric cars on the campaign trail. Last month Musk denied reports he was planning to donate $45m a month to a Super Pac focused on getting Trump elected; he declined to clarify how much he planned to donate.

Trump has warned that the president’s embrace of electric cars will bring a “bloodbath” to the US automotive industry, falsely claimed that battery-powered cars don’t work in cold weather and that they aren’t able to travel long distances. “You’re not going to be able to sell those cars,” he has warned of Mexico-made EVs in the US market.

A new Trump administration will “immediately terminate Joe Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate”, Trump has said. There is no such mandate, although Biden has overseen a tightening of vehicle pollution rules that should help make EVs more attractive and has signed legislation providing a tax rebate for new EV buyers.

Last year, more than 1 million electric cars were sold in the US for the first time and analysts expect numbers to climb further this year, approaching a tipping point where even a withdrawal of government support for them will not slow the growth in sales.

Several barriers still remain, however, such as the comparatively high cost of electric cars compared with gasoline and diesel models, a lack of chargers and supply chain snags. Environmental advocates, who point out that transportation is the largest source of US greenhouse gas emissions as well as a nexus of deadly air pollution, argue that more needs to be done to shift Americans away from gas-guzzling cars, or out of cars altogether.

“The writing is on the wall: around the world, the future of personal transportation is electric, independent of whatever the United States decides to do,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator and owner of two Chevy Bolts, last week.

“And that’s great. They’re quieter, faster and more fun to drive. They don’t have tailpipe emissions stinking up highways and neighborhoods. Repair and maintenance costs are nearly nonexistent.”