The American EV Industry Is Dazed and Confused

Here’s the good news on electric cars in America: Sales in the second quarter of 2026 rose by 14% compared to the first quarter, which itself was an improvement on the preceding quarter. And here’s the bad: Even those good-looking Q2 sales numbers this year represent a 20% decrease from the same period in 2025.

Welcome to a confused moment in EV history. Electric vehicle sales in this country grew at a decent rate through the early part of the 2020s — right up until they fell off a cliff last fall when the federal tax credit disappeared and cars became $7,500 more expensive overnight. EVs have begun to recover in the intervening months, especially as Americans look for some respite from high gas prices. Yet the lineup of available EVs for them to purchase has been weakened by endless volatility. Car companies struggle to keep up with Chinese competitors abroad and the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on electric vehicles here. Meanwhile, EV makers have shifting visions of what they want electric cars to be.

In the long run, nothing has changed. The automotive industry is headed in one direction: toward a future dominated by battery-powered electric vehicles. But in the short run, even as EVs are setting sales records in dozens of countries and approaching 30% of the global car fleet, it feels like everyone involved in trying to sell EVs to Americans is driving in a different direction.

Just take a quick accounting of the players. At the start of the decade, Ford pinned its hopes on the F-150 Lightning pickup truck and the Mustang Mach-E, but never figured out how not to lose money on them. Last year, the company then blew up plans for its second-generation EV to go back to the drawing board. It stood up a skunkworks team at a far-flung California factory to learn how to slash manufacturing costs and make a mid-size electric truck in the $30,000s, set to emerge from the shadows next year.

Its Detroit rival, GM, looked to be in better shape. It bet its battery-powered fortunes on the Ultium platform that would underpin many vehicles across its lineup. In doing so, it rolled out a more ambitious lineup than Ford: Not just the Chevy Silverado, Blazer, Equinox, and Bolt, but several well-received Cadillac models that breathed some life into that atrophying brand.

In 2024, GM phased out the Ultium name, seemingly to make room for the next-generation architecture to follow. And then things started to get a little rocky. The Chevy Bolt, a hero of the late 2010s era of EVs, returned just in time to be canceled so GM could build more gas-guzzling Buick crossovers. General Motors is now stuck in a wait-and-see on battery power. It may update its existing EVs, particularly the Equinox, but reportedly has no plans to expand its electric offerings until at least 2030 — when, perhaps, some of the dust of the Trump presidency has settled.

GM’s fortunes look rosy next to those of Stellantis, the global giant that owns car brands like Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler, and Ram. Like competitors Ford and GM, Stellantis has had to take on eight-figure losses as it rejiggers its business to try to compete in the electric future. But unlike the Detroit duo, it has no particular success story even to hang its hat upon. Jeep EVs have been a struggle, and the planned Ram EV pickup never even saw the light of day. Now the great electric hope for pickup trucks is the planned Ram extended-range EV, a truck that would carry a gasoline engine simply to act as an onboard generator that recharges the battery.

Among Japan’s legacy automakers, the surprising insurgent is Toyota. The world’s biggest car company has been perhaps the most openly skeptical of electrification, with leadership arguing time and again against the economic feasibility of electric cars. Public statements make it sounds as if the company is being dragged away from the combustion age against its will. And yet, as the other car companies drift into limbo amid the chaotic current market, here is Toyota, slowly building up something rather than shifting its plans every couple of years.

Though its first true EV, the bZ4x, wasn’t up the standard of today’s best EVs, Toyota has stormed into 2026 with an improved version, the bZ, plus a revival of the C-HR small crossover in fully electric form. Toyota is in the midst of electrifying the Highlander SUV and even rolled out a concept car to tease a battery-powered makeover of the iconic Toyota Corolla. While the rest of the industry retreats from EVs to formulate a new plan, Toyota chose this moment to dive in headfirst. The same is true of its frequent design partner, Subaru, which has finally introduced multiple EVs to join the race.

Compare that with the turmoil at rival Honda. Like Subaru, it borrowed technology to accelerate its entry into the U.S. EV race — in Honda’s case, building the Prologue crossover on GM’s Ultium system. The company put several new EVs in the pipeline that would be Hondas from the ground up. Earlier this year, it killed them all, with leadership convinced its efforts just couldn’t compete, especially in non-U.S. markets where it would go up against the dirt-cheap offerings coming out of China.

Then, of course, there’s Tesla. Elon Musk’s brand is suddenly thriving again, thanks in large part to the vacuum created by the rest of the industry. Tesla, for all its bad press in some corners of the internet, still makes up more than half of EV sales in America, and the numbers soared in Q2 in spite of everything that’s been going on with Musk and his company (his focus on everything else that’s not human-driven cars, his political misadventures, and his reliance on just two aging car models, just to name a few issues).

That legacy car companies have stalled and flip-flopped on electrification as the political winds have changed has left the door open for the other EV-only startups. Rivian’s much-ballyhooed R2 arrived this summer and is off to an excellent start on its mission to make that company mainstream. Slate has finally taken the cover off its affordable electric small pickup. Lucid has been dogged by bankruptcy rumors as it tries to cross the startup’s valley of death, but for now, it’s still chugging.

With the car industry so scattered and disparate on its electrification efforts, it’s hard to know quite what to make of things. We’re a long way from the go-go Biden era, when government incentives for EV production gave automakers the confidence to make proclamations about going fully electric. Back then, it felt like we might be on the cusp of seeing an EV version of just about everything. Now it feels like the United States government is fighting another losing war — this one trying to singlehandedly save petroleum power while the rest of the world moves on.

Electric cars came to America slowly, and then fast. After decades of science experiments and sci-fi promises and Who Killed the Electric Car?, EVs gained a foothold remarkably quickly after the rise of Tesla. Millions of Americans now own one. But the leap from early adoption to mass adoption — which was first delayed by factors like high prices and unease with new technology — has been further forestalled by an antagonistic administration and an industry flailing about it keep up with its whims.

Electrification is coming. But this lull isn’t going away anytime soon.