President Trump went on another rambling tangent about electric cars at a Las Vegas rally Wednesday night, telling the crowd he “ended the electric mandate” and mocking EV owners for worrying about range – claiming they have a “disease.”
Out of the entire unhinged rant, Trump did say one accurate thing: the EV take rate in the US is roughly 7%. The problem is that he said it proudly while the rest of the world is rapidly moving to electric transport.
‘These people are crazy’
Speaking at the Red Rock Resort, Trump pivoted from a riff about the “radical left” trying to ban gasoline straight into his usual EV material.
“I ended the electric mandate. I don’t want to talk about it because Elon wasn’t exactly thrilled with me, but I had to do it,” he said. “We love Elon.”
He continued:
I ended [it] because it said that within a very short period of time, like 20-30, everybody had to have an electric car — even though there was no way you could charge it. You ever see the signs? You’re driving along [in] an electric car, they have a disease, you know, it’s a disease… they’re driving and they realize their battery’s getting low, and they start thinking about it when it’s 3/4 full. Okay, it loses a little bit, so ‘where am I going to [go]?’ And you’re driving down the highway and you’ll see a sign — charging station, with an arrow, 89 miles to the right. These people are crazy.
By “disease,” it appears that the US President is referring to range anxiety, a real problem in the early adoption of electric vehicles, but something that has pretty much been eradicated in most markets with extensive charging infrastructure.
He also tossed out a number. “And I like electric cars. You know, we sell 7% of our cars despite all of the taxes and all of the things that we gave away. 7%,” he said, before swinging into a claim that the US has “60% of the world’s oil and gas, including Venezuela.”
There was never a mandate
No federal law has ever required Americans to buy an electric car, by 2030 or any other date. We walked through this back in 2024 the first time he started saying it on the campaign trail.
The policies he’s actually referring to are federal tailpipe emissions standards and California’s clean-car rules. Those pushed automakers to build more EVs, but they never forced a single person to buy one. His administration went after them with executive orders in the first days of his second term.
But Trump is mostly right about his “7%” figure on battery-electric market shares in the US.
However, he said it as if this proves that there’s no demand for electric vehicles.
Electrek’s Take
This is the same script he’s been running since 2024, almost word for word. Range anxiety is largely a thing of the past. Increasingly accurate range prediction, combined with a growing fast-charging infrastructure, is the cure to the “disease” Trump is talking about. It’s already here in most markets.
The “mandate” he brags about ending was never a mandate. And the 7% he holds up as a punchline is a number his administration actively drove down by yanking the tax credit and gutting emissions rules.
The rest of the world has moved on. Norway is virtually all-electric. Most European markets are now reaching past 20% EV market share. China has recently crossed the 50% market.
The US is being left behind because a large part of the population still believes in the lies and misinformation engineered by the fossil fuel industry and spread by politicians, morons, or in some cases, both.
Obviously, Trump is Trump. At his rallies, he is just saying what he believes his fans want to hear. But in this case, the result is the US President bragging that the US is being left behind in the most significant energy revolution in a hundred years.
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