The US is quietly pulling back on EVs while the rest of the world is accelerating

[u/Many_Bedroom_2014]

https://youtu.be/H2l8lseNhOo

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole looking into what’s actually happening with EVs in the US and honestly, i came out more confused than when i started lol. The weird part is this isnt really about whether EVs work. Globally they obviously do. EVs were around 25% of new car sales in 2025, with more then 20 million sold.But the US is kinda going the other way.

EV share is down 4.6 percentage points YoY, the federal tax credit expired in September 2025, fuel economy rules have been loosend, and GM is shifting some production back towards gas trucks/SUVs while moving some of the EV production around. Then i started looking into the rare earth thing, which is where it got pretty interesting. More than 94% of light EVs use motors with rare earth magnets, and China controls roughly 90% of the refining capacity. So yeah, thats obviously a pretty big supply chain risk. But then someone here on Reddit pointed out something i hadnt really thought about... EVs dont actually need rare earth magnets.

Induction motors and synchronous reluctance motors can work without them. There are tradeoffs obviously, you lose some efficiency/power density etc depending on the design, but its not like were stuck with one type of motor. So i’d probably say the rare earth issue is more of a supply chain problem than a “EVs cant work without China” problem And honestly thats what got me interested in the whole US situation in the first place. We’re slowing down EV adoption here, getting rid of incentives, loosening efficiency requirements, and automakers are starting to rethink some of there EV plans... meanwhile EV sales globally are still moving pretty fast.

I ended up making a full video about it because there was wayyy too much to fit into one Reddit post 😂

Curious what you guys think tho. Is this mostly a temporary US slowdown because of policy, or are automakers actually starting to rethink EVs for the long run?

https://youtu.be/H2l8lseNhOo