(DCNF)—U.S. automakers are celebrating their ability to continue selling gas-powered vehicles after President Donald Trump rolled back electric vehicle (EV) mandates.
Trump signed three new bills into law in June, which terminated Biden-era rules that allowed states like California to impose a national EV mandate. These rollbacks have caused companies like Ford and General Motors to scale back their EV plans and search to leverage demand for their big SUVs and commercial vehicles, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported.
“This is a multibillion-dollar opportunity over the next couple of years,” Ford Motor Chief Executive Jim Farley said last week in a call to analysts.
California and several other states imposed rules that would have banned the sale of new gas-powered vehicles in their respective areas by 2035. Trump’s new rules stripped these states of those mandates and have allowed the auto industry to continue selling gas-powered engines in new vehicles, according to The WSJ.
“It’s a very, very fast speed for the auto industry,” Tyson Jominy, J.D. Power’s senior vice president of data and analytics, told the WSJ. “But it’s faster to be able to revert to an existing technology rather than tool up and prepare for a new technology.”
General Motors switched its plan to do away with combustion engines by 2035 and have instead laid out the benefits of keeping them around, The WSJ reported. General Motors CEO Mary Barra stated that her company can “appreciate the profitability” of selling gas-powered vehicles as a result of Trump’s rollbacks.
Jeep maker Stellantis said on a call with analysts that the auto provisions in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” will make it easier for companies to produce both EVs and gas-powered vehicles.
Ford, General Motors and Stellantis had agreed to pay nearly $10 billion on regulatory credits and fuel-economy rule-violation fines, according to The WSJ. Stellantis has expressed that it will benefit financially by no longer having to pay these fines.
Adam Lee, chairman of Maine-based Lee Auto Malls, added that large SUVs will boost companies’ sales because Americans are fond of them.
“Americans do like buying giant vehicles,” Lee said. “They’re going to see how many more giant SUVs they can pump out, because they sell a lot of them and make a lot of money on them.”
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