Here’s what the federal rules mean for car companies, the climate, and you.
The Environmental Protection Agency has officially cemented new pollution rules for cars, pickup trucks, vans, and SUVs that the Biden administration called the US’s strongest-ever clean vehicle regulations. The EPA says the new rules will avert 7 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions and provide close to $100 billion in savings per year across the country in the form of fuel costs, lower maintenance needs, and health benefits.
The challenge for the government and carmakers, though, will be actually getting people to buy enough of these cleaner cars to move the needle. And that may be harder than regulators and the industry thought.
Because of that concern — and some feedback from car companies that the technology and demand wouldn’t materialize fast enough — these new standards are notably more lenient than those the EPA proposed almost a year ago. The EPA slowed the pace at which companies would need to lower pollution outputs and offered more options to meet the targets, which kick in for model year 2027 and run through 2032.
The regulations are not specifically designed to promote battery electric vehicles and instead allow carmakers to pursue a variety of options, like more efficient gasoline engines, plug-in hybrids, and hydrogen-powered cars.
“We are providing a little bit more lead time so that these investments can occur, not just in the automobiles themselves, but the infrastructure,” EPA administrator Michael Regan told Vox.
Car buyers will see even more fuel-efficient and electric models in showrooms going forward, but the most gas-guzzling cars and trucks won’t be available for sale much longer. Some of these cleaner cars may have a higher sticker price at first, but the EPA says that the new rules will save drivers money over time and that prices will fall as manufacturers scale up.
That’s a key question: While EVs are more popular than ever, demand has fallen short of what many manufacturers predicted. A Yahoo Finance/Ipsos poll last year found that one in three prospective car buyers said it was likely their next car would be an EV. Still, in 2023, only 7.6 percent of new cars sold were electric, due in part to concerns about price, performance, and spotty charging infrastructure.
Some companies are scaling back their electric offerings, while others are renewing their bets on hybrid-electric cars.
This underscores why decarbonizing transportation is one of the toughest climate challenges. It’s not simply about imposing rules or developing technology; it requires winning over fickle consumers who are worried about many other things in addition to the environment.
The EPA says the new vehicle regulations would protect health, the climate, and wallets
Transportation is the largest source of heat-trapping gases emitted by the US, the majority of which come from road vehicles burning gasoline and diesel. For the US to meet the climate change targets set by the Biden administration — cutting emissions in half by 2030 relative to 2005 levels — it’s essential to curb greenhouse gases from cars and trucks.
These vehicles also spew pollutants that have immediate health harms — nitrogen oxides, soot, volatile organic compounds — so reducing their output will have widespread air quality benefits as well.
The EPA this week also changed the way it compares the fuel economy of electric cars to those powered by gasoline, giving manufacturers much less credit for EVs. Electric cars obviously don’t burn gasoline, but they still have an environmental footprint depending on the emissions of the electricity used to charge them and their overall efficiency. And in order to calculate the average fuel economy for a fleet of vehicles that includes electrics, the EPA has devised a formula to figure out roughly how electrons translate into hydrocarbons.
For instance, the Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck used to get 238 miles per gallon, but under the new formula, it gets 83 mpg. That means Ford will have to sell a lot more electrics or dramatically increase the fuel efficiency of its conventional cars to meet mileage requirements.
Combined, these regulations give manufacturers a strong push to not just build cleaner vehicles, but also promote them to their customers.
Prices for cleaner cars need to drop alongside emissions
The new EPA regulations don’t map out a specific route to their destination, but if carmakers choose the electrification path, the agency estimates that between 30 and 56 percent of new light-duty and 20 to 32 percent of medium-duty vehicles sold from model years 2030 to 2032 would have to be fully electric.
“Sold” is the key word here. It’s not enough for the government to set the standard and for automakers to build the car — someone has to actually buy it. And right now, the industry isn’t making enough of the cars that consumers want or can afford to purchase that line up with the new regulations.
EVs have also broken promises to drivers. Many buyers say models have failed to live up to range estimates, have quality and reliability problems, and cost more to repair than anticipated. Other owners have complained about the availability and reliability of public charging infrastructure. Some car dealers have been reluctant to keep EVs on their lots.
Some of these issues are just growing pains that come with a new technology, but changing consumer perception will be critical to keeping EV growth humming.
That’s created an opening for hybrid cars, which offer many of the same strengths as gasoline and electric vehicles in one package. For companies like Toyota that have a long history building hybrids but have been slower to produce EVs, the final regulations offer them an easier path forward. “They will tell you selling a large number of hybrids is far better than selling a moderate or small number of electric vehicles,” said Alan Baum, principal of Baum and Associates, a market research firm focused on the auto industry. That’s likely true given that close to 80 percent of car trips are less than 10 miles, so several plug-in hybrids that run fully electric, as they can for shorter distances, could displace more greenhouse gas emissions with a lower-range battery capacity than a single car that runs solely on batteries for hundreds of miles.
But it’s also important to remember that the average car in the US has been on the road for 12.5 years. Many vehicles keep rolling for two decades, or even longer. So, shifting gears to cleaner vehicles will have the greatest impact on climate change if it happens at the starting grid rather than the finish line.
Trump’s favorability has ticked up with many Americans and soared with some traditionally Democratic groups.
Something confounding is happening in America: Donald Trump, once the least liked presidential officeholder and reviled by nearly two-thirds of the country by the time he left office, is getting more popular.
For the loyal Vox reader, that statement may be hard to believe. Yes, the twice-impeached, multiply indicted former president is still generally disliked: The latest New York Times/Siena poll places his favorability rating at a “weak” 44 percent. But that’s still higher than his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, who is viewed favorably by just 38 percent of registered voters. As views of Biden have been getting more negative, views of Trump have also been getting more positive.
Across multiple kinds of polling and public opinion surveys, Trump’s favorability appears to have stabilized at a higher place than three years ago. Views of Trump have been modestly improving for most Americans and have actually increased significantly among Black and Latino Americans, younger voters, and working-class people.
Those shifts are apparent if you dig into the numbers a bit. In Gallup’s surveys of US adults, for example, Trump ended 2023 with his highest favorability ratings since the eve of the 2020 election.
That was true for young adults, aged 18 to 34, where Trump’s popularity plummeted as he tried to overturn the 2020 election but has rebounded since. Forty-two percent of young adults saw him favorably in October 2020, but that dropped to 28 percent in January 2021. His favorability bounced back to 42 percent by December 2023.
The same pattern held among nonwhite Americans, 27 percent of whom saw Trump favorably in October 2020. That plunged to 15 percent in January 2021 but had rebounded back to 28 percent by November 2022. The rebound is even more pronounced among Americans making less than $40,000 a year. Thirty-seven percent saw him favorably in October 2020, while 32 percent said that in January 2021. But that number jumped to 48 percent by December 2023.
Similar trends appear in other polls, as the former Democratic pollster Adam Carlson has tracked for specific subgroups and in general when looking at polling aggregates.
“In the overall trends, Trump’s favorable rating is back to baseline,” Lydia Saad, the director of US social research at Gallup, told Vox. “Among young people, it’s back to where it was before January 6. … It also does not look like he has recovered among white adults, whereas he has improved above baseline among all people of color.”
These data points all suggest that something has changed among the electorate and the country in general, and also that something more pronounced might be happening with younger, nonwhite, and working-class Americans. What could it be? Here are three theories to explain and understand what might be happening.
Explanation 1: Trump is benefiting from economic nostalgia
As the pandemic subsided, the economy became the major storyline of the Biden years. It’s consistently the top issue for all voters, but especially for Black, Latino, and working-class Americans. Trump made the booming pre-pandemic economy central to his reelection pitch four years ago, and he is using it as the central argument against Biden.
Inflation, higher interest rates, and mixed views about the post-Covid recovery continue to be Biden and Democrats’ biggest liabilities. In an inverted way, it also may be one of Trump’s biggest assets in rebuilding his popularity.
In the latest New York Times/Siena poll, for example, Black voters feel as bad about the economy as their white counterparts; Latino voters feel even worse. Similarly, younger voters, under the age of 30, feel worse about the economy than older cohorts. Seventy-three percent of white voters would rate the economy as fair or poor, while 74 percent of Black voters and 84 percent of Latinos would say so. Among young adults, 86 percent would say so, 8 points higher than those 30 to 44 years old.
Among these cohorts of Americans, young people and Latino voters also feel strongly that the economy is worse now than it was right before the pandemic. Seventy-one percent of adults under 30 would say so, higher than the 65 percent of 30- to 44-year-olds, 62 percent of 45- to 64-year-olds, and 63 percent of the oldest voters. Seventy-one percent of Latino voters would say so, compared to 56 percent of Black voters and 66 percent of white voters.
There’s plenty of evidence for this discontent. As my colleague Nicole Narea has explained, Americans think the economy is worse under Biden’s presidency than under Trump’s — despite there being plenty to be optimistic about, regardless of individual perceptions. Economic confidence is lower, concerns about the economy are higher, and Americans are racking up credit card debt, even as they also say they are worried about interest rates on debt.
At the same time, many Americans remember the Trump economy in better terms than they view the current economy. A March CBS News/YouGov poll found that 65 percent of registered voters would rate Trump’s economy as “good” while only 38 percent would say the same for Biden’s economy. And in the latest Times/Siena poll, a similar dynamic emerges. Americans across race, age, and gender feel that Trump’s policies, usually talking about his economic policies, were better for them than Biden’s currently are.
Many of the pandemic’s economic effects in both presidential terms were out of each leader’s control, but that doesn’t change many people’s belief that Biden bears more blame than Trump for the state of the economy.
Explanation 2: Trump is recovering from a remarkably low moment
Elections have consequences, and one of them tends to be that the campaign season divides the country nearly in half. Each side views the other negatively, and the presidential winner is left with the task of uniting the nation, usually with help from the outgoing executive.
Famously, Trump did the opposite in 2020. He was already suffering from low ratings throughout his presidency, but the combined effect of the coronavirus pandemic, the summer of protests and unrest, and his attempts to overturn the results of the election all translated into a steep slide in his approval and his favorability ratings by the time he left office.
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