From Tilak´s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

On Saturday, President Trump announced that he had approved new vehicle fuel economy standards, and on Monday the Transportation Department made the final rule official. Within hours, the legacy media covered the rollback of Biden’s vehicle mandates with shrill criticisms. The New York Times told readers that the administration was gutting a signature federal effort to speed the shift to electric vehicles. Politico judged the revision “one more nail in the coffin” for Biden-era EV policy. Bloomberg’s headline announced that the US “guts” auto mileage rules, while the Washington Post ran its own story under the banner “Analysts are doubtful”, reporting that “experts” scoffed at the administration’s claim of a $1,300 cut in new-car prices.

The final rule requires a fleetwide average of 34.9 miles per gallon by model year 2031, in place of the roughly 50 mpg demanded by Biden’s standards. To the assembled commentariat, this is climate vandalism, a betrayal of drivers and a gift to Beijing. Every one of these claims is false or badly misleading. And the missing context – what the Biden mandates cost, who paid, and what they actually bought – is the story the legacy press coverage never reveals.

A funeral for a rule already dead

Start with an irony that the NYT buries in its own reporting. The paper conceded that Congress had already scrapped the fines for automakers that miss the mileage targets, leaving Monday’s rollback more symbolic than substantive. That penalty repeal, part of last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill, is what mattered. Politico’s own expert, Joshua Linn of the University of Maryland, explained that without penalties CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) had become little more than a polite request: Detroit is asked nicely to add technology, with no consequence for declining. Neither outlet drew the obvious conclusion. If the standards were toothless, the handwringing over their formal retirement is theatre. If they still bit, they were a mandate – precisely what the Times insists Trump falsely accuses Biden of imposing. The coverage wants it both ways.

As for the Post’s doubtful analysts, Stephanie Brinley of Mobility Global and Jessica Caldwell of Edmunds argue that savings will not reach buyers when the average new vehicle already costs around $50,000, and that any saving would first be absorbed by tariffs. In fact, NHTSA itself cautions that its estimated $1,289 reduction in average vehicle cost by model year 2031 materialises only if manufacturers pass it on. But whether a cost saving shows up at the dealership is irrelevant to what the vehicle efficiency mandates cost in the first place, and who paid.

The hidden tax on every showroom floor

The answer is not hard to find, though it requires reading beyond the Beltway press. The Heritage Foundation’s Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Andrew Weiss showed that Biden-level CAFE targets exceeded what gasoline-powered cars can plausibly achieve, converting fuel economy regulation into a backdoor EV mandate. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Marlo Lewis argues that this ran afoul of the statute’s own limits.

To comply, legacy manufacturers had to raise the EV share of their fleets, selling the extra EVs at a loss, and then recoup the loss by charging more for gasoline models or by buying regulatory credits from Tesla – a compliance tax according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The gasoline-car buyer subsidised the EV buyer, one sticker price at a time.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation and the American Energy Institute quantified this cross-subsidy in 2025. On its estimates, each model-year 2023 EV imposes between $94,121 and $152,695 in hidden 10-year social costs, borne by gasoline-car buyers, taxpayers and electricity ratepayers, while CAFE, EPA greenhouse-gas and state ZEV credits can be worth $46,000 to $115,000 per EV to the manufacturer.

The academic literature points the same way. UC San Diego’s Mark Jacobsen, cited in a January public comment by the American Consumer Institute, finds CAFE three to four times costlier than an equivalent gas tax, with each additional mile per gallon costing consumers $11.2 billion in the first year and $24.1 billion after 10. Cato Institute’s Peter Van Doren puts CAFE’s cost at no less than six times that of a carbon tax, and the Mackinac Center cites Jacobsen’s figure of $222 per ton of CO₂ abated. CEI reckons the reset spares buyers about $900 on the average new car. These studies measure different things, but they converge on one conclusion: the mandate was expensive, and the expense was hidden.

The bill came due in Detroit. Ford took a $19.5 billion write-down in December as it cancelled EV programmes, including the electric F-150 Lightning, and GM followed in January with a $6 billion charge. These are the balance sheets of firms that built what regulators demanded rather than what buyers wanted. The Times frets that the rollback may encourage bigger pickups and SUVs, yet Van Doren’s point is that footprint-based standards already penalise small, cheap cars and subsidise big trucks and SUVs.

CAFE doesn’t set one mileage target for every car. The target for each vehicle depends on its ‘footprint’, which is approximately the area between its four wheels. The larger the footprint, the lower (easier) the mpg target. A small hatchback must hit a demanding number, while a full-size pickup gets a lenient one.

Reuters reports that under the Trump rollback, lifetime fuel costs rise by more than $1,600 per vehicle higher through 2050 than under the Biden rules. The Biden rules added roughly $1,289 efficiency technology costs to a car’s price in exchange for that $1,600 in fuel savings. But if a buyer could recoup $1,600 at the pump for $1,289 of technology, why would a mandate be needed in the first place?

Non sequiturs and the China bogeyman

Critics offer three further objections. The first is that tariffs and dearer fuel – gasoline at $4.48 a gallon since the US-Israeli attacks on Iran began in February – will swamp any regulatory saving. True, and irrelevant. Tariffs and Gulf-driven pump prices exist whether or not CAFE mandates are loosened. Keeping the mandate would not abolish them; it would merely stack another cost on top. To argue that because one burden is heavy, one should insist on carrying a second, is a non sequitur.

A second criticism in the mainstream media coverage is that the rest of the world is ‘racing toward EVs’ and America will be left behind. Dan Becker of the Center for Biological Diversity warns that Detroit is being told it may be competed into oblivion by Chinese EV exports. But the evidence suggests that EV sales are disappointing everywhere outside China.

In March 2024, CNBC published a widely cited article entitled ‘EV euphoria is dead. Automakers are scaling back or delaying their electric vehicle plans’. The outlet’s automotive industry reporter Michael Wayland wrote:

For years, the automotive industry has been in a state of EV euphoria. Automakers trotted out optimistic sales forecasts for electric models and announced ambitious targets for EV growth… Now the hype is dwindling, and companies are again cheering consumer choice. Automakers from Ford Motor and General Motors to Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Jaguar Land Rover and Aston Martin are scaling back or delaying their electric vehicle plans.

NPR reported that EVs have held 5-6% of new US car sales into 2026, and even the second quarter ‘rebound’ left sales down 20.5% on a year earlier. Detroit is not failing for want of a mandate, it is writing off billions on EVs that it cannot sell.

I wrote in these pages last year on the false promise of EVs. The EV story is overwhelmingly a China-focused one. Europe bought 1.6 million more electric cars in in the first half of 2025 relative to the same period last year, or 27% more. North Americans bought only 0.7 million more, or 3%. The ‘rest of the world’ bought 0.6 million more EVs or 36% from a very small base. China alone accounted for 4.4 million new EV units, logging a growth of 33%. To call what is essentially a China-dominated story a global EV success story is a sleight of hand.

News reports in China are opaque and dominated by CCP interests, like so much else of life in that country. There have been reports of vast ‘graveyards’ of unsold EVs in various cities. A Bloomberg article in 2023 reported that “a subsidy-fuelled boom helped build China into an electric-car giant but left weed-infested lots across the nation brimming with unwanted battery-powered cars”.

The third criticism of the Trump CAFE rollback is that this is ceding EV and battery leadership to China. That also rests on a false premise. Chinese dominance is built on coal-fired power and on control of the dirty, energy-intensive global upstream supply chain of mining, refining and processing of rare earths and minerals. Western consumers who believe their EVs are ‘clean’ never see the dirty secrets of EVs. China commissioned 78 gigawatts of new coal power in 2025, the most in a decade, and accounting for four-fifths of all coal capacity brought online worldwide, while developers submitted a record 161 gigawatts of new or reactivated proposals. Celebrating China’s EV penetration while ignoring its coal build-out is like admiring the showroom and ignoring the boiler room out of sight behind.

Tailpipes, power stations and philosopher kings

The final refuge is pollution and climate. The NYT reminds readers that transportation is the country’s largest source of greenhouse gases, and the Sierra Club, which has promised to challenge the rule in court, says families will be handed the bill at the pump and with their health. But cutting tailpipe emissions is not cutting emissions. It relocates them to power stations, mines and smelters, out of sight of the showroom. And on the pollutants that actually damage health, the internal combustion engine has an extraordinary record that the coverage never mentions. The EPA says new cars, SUVs and pickups are roughly 99% cleaner than 1970 models for hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and particulates, and that total emissions of the six principal air pollutants fell 79% between 1970 and 2024 even as vehicle miles travelled rose 195%.

Fuel economy mandates were never about those pollutants. They were about carbon dioxide, which is not a pollutant at all. As the physicist William Happer of the CO₂ Coalition has testified, the real pollutants are fly ash, carbon monoxide, oxides of sulphur and nitrogen, heavy metals and volatile organic compounds, while CO2 and water vapour, the dominant products of combustion, are not among them.

The larger context is the belief that bureaucrats know better than households how to spend money on energy. In Plato’s Republic the philosopher king rules and the plebs obey; if energy efficiency were the bargain its promoters claim, we would not need experts at the IEA, the EPA or McKinsey to tell us so. Households and businesses, and motorists for that matter, do not need to be told how to save money that energy efficiency would bring. One Mercatus study found that much efficiency policy analysis assumes people never make sound choices. Mandated standards are the philosopher king’s favourite tool precisely because, unlike explicit subsidies, they conceal their costs, which land first on manufacturers and reach consumers untraced. If buyers are poorly informed, the remedy is better information, not a mandate.

The Sierra Club will see Trump in court, and the litigation will be dutifully chronicled. But the real news of the week is not that Washington retired a rule it had already defanged. It is that a mandate born of the 1975 oil embargo has been recognised, at last, as an expensive way of making people buy what they were reluctant to buy. In the same fortnight that New York hosted its annual climate circus, the American car buyer got something rarer than another pledge: a little of his own freedom back.

The strangulation of the regulatory state is to be welcomed, and one should never mourn the end of intrusive mandates – for motorists as for others – designed by bureaucrats and know-it-all philosopher kings. As Friedrich von Hayek taught us many years ago, “the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design”.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/10/01/legacy-media-weep-as-trump-axes-bidens-fuel-economy-diktat/

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.