October EV gross sales on course to face-plant: ‘Less than half the rate from September’ after EV tax credit score abolished – ‘A frightening result for EV advocates’ as Individuals lurched again to purchasing conventional fuel guzzlers

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/power-switch/2025/10/28/octobers-ev-sales-are-frightful-00624399

October’s EV sales are frightful

By DAVID FERRIS

This Halloween, the federal government is offering zero treats to electric vehicle buyers. And it’s produced a frightening result for EV advocates: Americans lurched back to buying traditional gas guzzlers.

EV sales are on track to face-plant to slightly less than 6 percent of new car sales in October, the first month after the Biden-era $7,500 tax incentive blew away like the first leaves of fall. That’s less than half the rate from September, according to a report by research firm J.D. Power and data firm GlobalData that made full-month conclusions from earlier sales.

You’d have to go back to 2022 to find EV sales at that level. But analysts consoled that the figures aren’t as bad as they could have been and that they will probably get better.

“We’re going to still keep some momentum,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, an industry analyst at Cox Automotive, on a webinar today about EV sales.

She expects EV sales to settle at 8 or 9 percent of sales next year before they climb again in 2027, as exciting and/or inexpensive new electric models start to arrive from automakers including Slate, Rivian and Ford.

One reason for the October plunge is that September’s EV sales — 12.9 percent — were the best month ever. Buyers were in a “frenzy of the urgency to buy now” as the tax credit breathed its last, Streaty said.

Meanwhile, American auto companies and their investors are celebrating a return to the comfy internal-combustion engine (known in car circles as “ICE”) and its profit margins, aided by a gutting of emissions limits by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans.

The market is rewarding General Motors and Ford with their highest stock prices of the year, after CEOs made an implicit promise to cool their EV ambitions.

“We’re going to build to consumer demand. We’re not going to overbuild,” GM CEO Mary Barra told investors last week, while insisting that “electric vehicles remain our North Star.”

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A poll this month by YouGov, a market research firm, found that 69 percent of Americans prefer gasoline-powered cars. That’s the highest it’s been since YouGov started asking in early 2024.

Meanwhile, preference for EVs has dropped to 11 percent from 16 percent.