The EV revolution will NOT be subsidized

The policy news is genuinely bad and he says so. Subsidies look doomed, and what he calls probably the more important move is the revocation of California’s authority under the Clean Air Act to set its own emissions standards, which would have forced automakers to sell a rising share of zero-emission vehicles on a timeline he says many longtime electric-vehicle believers, himself included, considered aggressive, and which other states had adopted under the same waiver. He grants these are not positive developments for the pace of adoption. The turn is that pace is not direction. His claim is about the technology rather than the policy: if electric drivetrains are simply better, removing the subsidy changes when America gets there rather than whether it does.

The first two supports are about cost and capability. On charging he points to Chinese platforms that have collapsed the gap with a fuel pump, and he is careful: they remain several times slower, but close enough, he argues, that the friction of charging effectively disappears. Range anxiety therefore moves from inside the vehicle to outside it, leaving two hurdles, geopolitical barriers to the technology spreading and the energy infrastructure for fast charging, of which he names the second as harder. On manufacturing he concedes ground before claiming any. Two years earlier he had called US-China tension the biggest remaining risk to electric vehicles globally; he now reports that China has widened its lead at practically every step of the supply chain, with BYD’s possibly insurmountable. His narrower claim is that America can still have good, cheap electric cars by working with Japanese and Korean suppliers instead, and he reads the cancelled American battery projects as a startup problem rather than a national one: cell production is among the most exacting parts of advanced manufacturing, and partnering with incumbents is the model that works.

The third support he does not re-argue; he quotes his own earlier post on autonomy. That passage holds that autonomous vehicles are high-utilization by necessity because their capital cost demands it, which favors a drivetrain with lower maintenance and energy costs, and that their sensors and processors need powering anyway. His present-tense additions are that autonomy has moved faster than that piece described, and that he is convinced the confluence of the two will be a major driver of adoption. The conclusion is calibrated rather than triumphant: no subsidy, a possible drag on the market for a few years, and a transition he thinks cannot be stopped.