U.S. President Joe Biden answers questions from reporters after driving a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon Xe around the White House driveway following remarks during an event on the South Lawn of the White House on Aug. 5, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Biden delivered remarks on the administration’s efforts to strengthen American leadership on clean cars and trucks.
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President-elect Donald Trump‘s transition team is planning to kill the $7,500 consumer tax credit for electric-vehicle purchases as part of broader tax-reform legislation, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
Ending the tax credit could have grave implications for an already stalling U.S. EV transition. And yet representatives of Tesla — by far the nation’s largest EV seller — have told a Trump-transition committee they support ending the subsidy, said the two sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Elon Musk, one of Trump’s biggest backers and the world’s richest person, said earlier this year that killing the subsidy might slightly hurt Tesla sales but would devastate its U.S. EV competitors, which include legacy automakers such as General Motors.
Repealing the subsidy, which has been a signature measure of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), is being discussed in meetings by an energy-policy transition team led by billionaire oilman Harold Hamm, founder of Continental Resources, and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, the two sources said.
President Joe Biden, with General Motors CEO Mary Barra, looks at a Chevrolet Silverado electric vehicle as he tours the 2022 North American International Auto Show at Huntington Place Convention Center in Detroit, Michigan, on Sept. 14, 2022. Biden is visiting the auto show to highlight electric vehicle manufacturing.
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The group has had several meetings since Trump’s Nov. 5 election victory, including some at his Florida Mar-a-Lago club, where Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has also spent considerable time since the election.
Representatives with the Trump transition and Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group representing nearly all major automakers besides Tesla, also did not immediately respond. The alliance last month in an Oct. 15 letter urged Congress to retain the EV tax credits, calling them “critical to cementing the U.S. as a global leader in the future…
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