American carmakers and battery companies announced more than $50 billion of electric-vehicle capital projects in each of 2022 and 2023. In 2024 the figure was about $6 billion, in 2025 about $6.5 billion, and this year is on pace for roughly $3 billion.
Mike Colias, who edits Reuters' US autos coverage, said 87% of the investment that did get built went into red states that had voted for President Trump — the same states now absorbing the cancellations.
"I mean, there's no profit margin on the EVs right now for almost every company."
Colias has covered Detroit for years and wrote a book on the electric transition whose title is the argument: Inevitable. Beyond Tesla and BYD, he said, almost nobody has solved the economics.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 42 minutes of audio, 15 minutes of reading.
Here are the 15 numbers that matter.
👤 Guest: Mike Colias, US Autos Editor at Reuters, who edits the wire's Detroit coverage and wrote a book on the electric-vehicle transition titled Inevitable
🎙️ Host: Carmel Crimmins, who presents Reuters Econ World
📰 Published: 16 September 2026 on YouTube and the show's own feed
🔴 YouTube | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | ⏱️ 42 min | ✅ Time saved: 27 min
Key Takeaways
Announced EV capital projects have collapsed from more than $50B a year to a $3B annual pace
Around $20B of announced projects were cancelled in 2025 alone
87% of the investment went into red states, and about 26,000 promised jobs were wiped clean
Colias calls that an undercount, because some cancelled projects never had a job number attached
US EV sales fell more than 40% in the months after the $7,500 tax credit expired
The credit had survived four administrations before it became an industrial policy under Biden
Joe Manchin's condition was that the money employ American workers rather than buy Chinese cells
Auto employment is flat: nearly a million people in August, down 1% since January 2025
Almost nobody makes money on an electric car except Tesla and BYD
Detroit's fattest margins are on the Suburbans and Escalades that fuel-economy rules used to constrain
GM's profits are at record highs partly because it stopped spending on electric vehicles
The AI data-center build-out is absorbing some of the stranded battery capacity, but nowhere near all of it
China is on pace to export seven or eight million cars this year, from almost none eight years ago
Its entry into Canada, Colias said, reads as a dress rehearsal for the United States
1. A Subsidy From 2008
Crimmins opened by noting that the American car market does not much resemble free-market economics, and that even the electric-vehicle tax credit predates the administration that made it famous.
The credit dates to 2008, under George W. Bush. Colias confirmed it has been in place since then, through Obama and through Trump's first term, when it was not in the administration's crosshairs.
The original motivation was environmental and strategic rather than industrial. Most countries subsidize greener cars, he said, usually to reduce emissions and often to reduce dependence on foreign oil.
The amount is $7,500 per vehicle, and by the Biden years it was starting to expire as manufacturers used up the volume caps attached to it.
2. Manchin's Strings
What changed under Biden, on Colias's account, was the reason for the subsidy rather than its size.
By then China had emerged as the dominating force in electric vehicles, and geopolitical tension was high, so renewing the credit became a question of industrial policy rather than emissions.
Joe Manchin set the condition. His version of the West Virginia senator's position: "Look, we're not going to give you this keep giving you this money just so you could turn around and spend it on battery cells from China." The money, Manchin said, had to employ American workers.
So the $7,500 stayed and acquired conditions. Cars had to be built in North America, and the companies had to make the batteries — and eventually the battery materials — in the United States.
The effect was to supercharge a build-out that was already under way. Investment was flowing into electric vehicles before Biden; the conditions turned it into what Colias called a springboard, aimed at keeping manufacturing jobs onshore.
3. The Battery Belt
The conditions forced a physical rebuild rather than a conversion of existing plants.
Battery production cannot be bolted onto an existing factory. "So, for example, you couldn't just convert a transmission plant or, a factory that makes spark plugs and then start making batteries." He described it as a high-tech, finicky process needing huge greenfield sites.
More than twenty battery plants have gone in, concentrated in the South and Midwest, in a corridor that has taken the name the battery belt and runs from North Carolina up through Indiana.
His framing is that this was not an expansion of the car industry but the creation of a new industrial base.
4. $160B in Six Years
Crimmins asked for the size of the transition in dollars.
Across 2019 to 2024, Colias put it at roughly $160 billion, which he said is about double what the auto industry would normally spend over a six-year stretch.
The money went into assembly plants, battery factories and the beginnings of raw-material processing for nickel, lithium and graphite.
He called it a massive onshoring event, and said it continues at a far more muted pace.
5. Tesla Was the Catalyst
Crimmins pushed back on the idea that policy did all the work, pointing to Tesla's market value approaching a trillion dollars and the rise of Chinese manufacturers.
Colias agreed, and put Tesla first. "I think that Tesla initially was probably the biggest catalyst."
The mechanism was the share price. Tesla's stock rose year after year while Ford, General Motors and Volkswagen, in his words, "were getting no love at all from investors."
What followed was capitulation. Starting around 2018 and 2019, one by one, every car company concluded that this was the future, this was where the growth was and this was what investors wanted to see.
6. Why Americans Didn't Buy
The sales response was real but smaller than the plans assumed.
Electric vehicles went from under 2% of US sales to 10% by the end of 2025. Colias called that a huge move in a short period, and immediately noted that 10% is still a small share of the market.
The forecasts missed anyway, and that was true before any Trump policy change. The goals set at the time of the spending boom were not coming to fruition, he said, because "Americans weren't gravitating to EVs and the numbers that the companies expected."
The first reason is price. Like for like against a comparable gasoline car, an electric one costs more — and the credit closes the gap only sometimes.
The second is what American manufacturers chose to build. Unlike Europe, the United States got few small affordable electric cars: "A lot of the car companies went big and luxury to start with their electric vehicle plans." For the average buyer there was not much under $40,000, and Colias said that largely remains true.
The third is charging, and it is broader than range anxiety. Will the charger work, and what does it cost to wire the house — he put that at three or four thousand dollars. "But I think Americans, drive long distances and take road trips," and he thinks more buyers had a hangup about charging than the companies had counted on.
7. Sales Fell Off a Cliff
The credit expired at the end of September 2025, after more than fifteen years.
"So about a year ago, yeah, sales fell off a cliff." Sales fell more than 40% in the months that followed.
They have started to trickle back up on renewed interest, but not to the old levels. "So, money talks, right?"
Crimmins put it in economic terms — that American demand for cars is highly elastic, so the bigger the subsidy the bigger the demand, and the reverse also holds. Colias agreed and said it is not an American phenomenon: European countries put incentives on and take them off, and "there's always a direct and immediate correlation" with the money available.
8. What Trump Actually Did
Crimmins asked Colias to spell out the policy changes for an international audience. The tax credit is the headline, but he listed three more.
Fuel-economy fines were frozen. Carmakers that miss the standards pay fines and buy credits from zero-emission producers such as Tesla; freezing the fines removed the constraint. Those rules had dictated product plans and market strategies for decades, he said, "and it just kind of went away overnight."
The practical effect is permission. "So companies it allows companies to sort of back burner their EV plans and strategies and to lean into their gas engine portfolios."
California lost its ability to set its own environmental standards, a power it had held for decades. The change is tied up in legal proceedings, but it hangs over the biggest electric-vehicle market in the country.
Tariffs hit the inputs. Duties apply to battery materials such as graphite and to the cheaper Chinese cells a manufacturer would use to build an affordable electric car. Combine all the tariffs and levies on those cells, Colias said, and the rate is something like 80%.
Colias noted that investment had already been slowing before any of this, and was careful about what that proves: nobody will ever know what would have happened if the policy had gone the other way and Washington had increased support instead.
What is measurable is the last 18 months: large write-downs of electric-vehicle businesses, cancelled projects, factories slow-walked or abandoned, supplier contracts cancelled. Executives have pointed to the tax credit specifically, he said, and to the other changes as well.
9. Investment Fell to $3B
Crimmins asked how big the retrenchment actually is. Colias's numbers come from Atlas Public Policy, a Washington group that tracks green investment at a granular level.
In 2022 and again in 2023, more than $50 billion of electric-vehicle-related capital projects were announced by carmakers or battery companies.
In 2024 that fell to about $6 billion; in 2025 about $6.5 billion; this year is on pace for about $3 billion — a tiny fraction, Colias said, of what it had been.
Around $20 billion of announced projects were cancelled in 2025.
Reuters' own tally of the Atlas data puts about 26,000 promised jobs as "no longer there or sort of wiped clean," and Colias called that an undercount, because some cancelled projects never carried a job number. Tens of thousands of jobs, he said, went by the boards.
The political geography is the striking part. Across Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana and Michigan, "87% of the investment went into a swath of red states that, had supported had supported Trump in the election" — the same heartland where the president has promised to bring back jobs and investment.
10. Lordstown and the Blame
Crimmins asked what Reuters reporters heard in those communities. The answer was not the one the numbers suggest.
There was no single strain of blame directed at the administration. There was, Colias said, "definite sort of heartbreak" over the lost enthusiasm about revitalizing small towns that had spent years trying to attract a large employer.
Many of these places had already been hollowed out by jobs going overseas, which is why the announcements carried so much hope.
The example is Lordstown, Ohio, which Reuters reporter Kaylee Hall visited. The battery factory there was a major win for the town; workers were out of work from January through the summer because there was no demand for the batteries it makes.
The blame the reporters found was spread widely: state governments that backed the projects, the Biden administration for moving too fast and creating what some described as false demand, and the current administration for changing the rules. Colias said the communities are judicious in assigning who is to blame.
11. Jobs Are Flat
Asked whether employment has risen since the change of administration, Colias gave a number rather than an argument.
"It's roughly flat." Counting people employed at carmakers and suppliers, it is nearly a million as of August — down 1% from January 2025.
That cuts against the political claim. "The numbers don't bear that out, at least in terms of the job the job count right now is just flat."
There is an offsetting trend he expects to show up later. Because of the tariffs, both the Detroit companies and some foreign carmakers are moving production onshore — from Mexico to the United States, for example — which could lift the count as those projects come online.
12. Batteries for Data Centers
Some half-built plants are simply sitting there with no announced plan. One thing is absorbing part of the capacity.
The AI data-center boom has created demand for on-site electricity storage.
Car companies, battery companies and their joint ventures have repurposed plants built for vehicle cells to make energy-storage batteries instead, and they see large growth in it.
Colias was explicit that this does not solve the problem. Reuters has looked at the numbers closely and does not think storage comes anywhere near soaking up the factory space planned for electric vehicles: "It's not a clear one for one. It's not like a flip of a switch, but it is helping to soften the blow."
13. Detroit Likes It
Crimmins asked about the mood in Detroit boardrooms. It is better than the investment numbers imply.
The slowdown and the deregulation have been welcomed, even though the companies lobbied hard to keep the credit. One lobbyist told Colias they started ripping up their plans the night of the election.
The chief executives have not abandoned the destination. They still say the endgame is all-electric — Mary Barra used that term recently — but the policy change has let them lean back into combustion engines.
The clearest example is Stellantis's Ram brand, whose muscle trucks with large V8 engines would not have been possible at these volumes under the old rules, something Colias said the company has essentially admitted.
The financial result is visible in GM. The stock is up sharply and profits are at record highs, in part because the capital spending on electric vehicles has been dialed back and the money is going into buybacks: "This investors have really liked what they've seen."
The margin arithmetic explains the enthusiasm. "I mean, there's no profit margin on the EVs right now for almost every company." The batteries are too expensive, and beyond Tesla and BYD very few companies have solved it — which, he noted, is the original reason for the subsidy.
Meanwhile the most profitable products Detroit makes are big pickups and luxury SUVs, a Chevrolet Suburban or a Cadillac Escalade, and the rules are gone: "And now, without sort of like the fuel economy regulations in place, they're kind of liberated to sell as many of those as they can."
The affordability problem cuts the other way, and the administration points at it. Its answer to criticism is that consumers now have more choice, while the average US car price is flirting with $50,000, which Colias said has frozen a lot of people out of the market.
14. A Sealed Market
Crimmins asked whether this is a battle won and a war lost, given that the ultimate direction is electric — the argument of Colias's own book, whose title is Inevitable.
He called it one of the most interesting storylines in the global car industry: a hermetically sealed American market protected from Chinese competition. Chinese electric vehicles face a 100% tariff and are effectively barred.
Without regulation pushing and without competition pulling, the incentive to innovate is the open question. GM and Ford are overwhelmingly US-focused, and aside from Tesla there is no outside pressure.
The companies' answer is that protection buys time to get cost out of the battery and build an electric car that can compete with the Chinese on cost and technology.
Colias does not find that convincing, on organizational grounds. Given a choice between a business losing billions and one they have been good at for fifty years, "It's a tough thing for an organization to force themselves to do" — a point Crimmins sharpened by noting they are judged every quarter on earnings.
His conclusion is a timing question rather than a disagreement about direction. It feels good right now, he said, to be a US-centric carmaker, with existential questions hanging over the industry about if and when Chinese competition arrives.
The executives say the same thing on the record, citing the Japanese manufacturers who arrived in the 1970s and took Detroit's market share. Ford's Jim Farley, Colias said, is on record saying he has seen this movie before.
China, meanwhile, can wait. Colias reads the Chinese manufacturers as content to watch the United States step off the accelerator, and said Reuters has reported that some of them treat the entry into Canada as a dress rehearsal for an American entry they accept is years away.
The export numbers are why they can afford to wait. "I think the last number I saw was going to be up to seven or eight million cars this year out of China." Six to eight years ago there were almost no exports; now China is the largest car exporter, selling into Southeast Asia, Latin America and increasingly Europe. The United States, he said, is the oasis for anyone who wants to compete without them.
15. The Midterm Question
Since the cancelled projects sit in states that voted Republican, Crimmins asked whether there is political fallout coming.
Colias doubts it moves presidential outcomes. The states are red enough that it probably would not tip the scales, though he allowed it could matter at the margin in the midterms.
The reporting found little Trump-directed animosity, which he tied back to the communities themselves.
The irony he drew out is that the investment landed where the product had no market. Visiting battery plants during the enthusiasm, he would ask workers whether they were interested in buying an electric car, and he said most of them laughed the question off.
He thinks the skepticism was rational. These are rural places without charging infrastructure, where people drive long distances and drive pickups, and while electric pickups exist they do not deliver the towing and hauling utility buyers need. The money, he said, went into some of the least EV-curious places in the country.
Bonus Insights
The show's quiz asked which car is recognized as the first mass-produced fully electric vehicle, offering the Nissan Leaf, the Tesla Roadster and the Chevrolet Volt. The answer is the Leaf, which arrived in 2010 as the first mass-market electric and zero-emission vehicle.
Crimmins added the footnote for enthusiasts: General Motors' EV1, designed and produced in the 1990s, of which only around a thousand units were ever built and which never reached the consumer market.
Used electric vehicles and hybrids are where the demand went. Colias reported strong used-EV sales and a big uptick in hybrids, and said carmakers are scrambling to work out how many hybrids they can fit into their lineups now that the straight jump from combustion to electric looks unlikely.
Europe is the counter-example on gasoline prices. Since the Middle East war began at the end of February, Colias said, Europe has seen a large move to electric cars and the United States has not — because Europe has affordable small cars, Chinese competition and manufacturers who built reasonably priced models, while the average American electric car is probably north of $50,000.
Colias's bottom line is that the policy reversal has been good for Detroit's current earnings and bad for its position in a market it still expects to lose: the companies have record profits, flat employment, a protected home market and, by their own executives' account, a delayed rather than cancelled confrontation with Chinese manufacturers.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
General Motors (Its stock is up and profits are at records after cutting EV capital spending and buying back shares; its 1990s EV1 is the quiz footnote)
Ford (Jim Farley is on record saying he has seen this movie before, referring to the Japanese entry in the 1970s)
Tesla (The catalyst that pushed every incumbent into electric plans, and one of only two companies Colias says makes money on electric cars)
BYD (The other company earning a margin on electric vehicles)
Stellantis (Its Ram muscle trucks with large V8 engines are Colias's example of what the fuel-economy freeze made possible)
Volkswagen (Named with Ford and GM as the incumbents investors ignored while Tesla's stock rose)
Nissan (The Leaf, the answer to the show's quiz, arrived in 2010)
Atlas Public Policy (The Washington group whose granular tracking of green investment is the source of the $50B-to-$3B collapse and the job numbers)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Inevitable – Mike Colias (His book on the shift to electric vehicles; the title is the argument, and he restated it on air)
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