The True History Behind ‘The Plot Against America’

 

HISTORY | MARCH 16, 2020

The True History Behind ‘The Plot Against America’

 

Philip Roth’s classic novel, newly adapted by HBO, envisions a world in which Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 presidential election

 

Meilan Solly

Meilan Solly

Associate Editor, History

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-history-behind-plot-against-america-180974365/

 

The Plot Against America unfolds in a world much like our own. Set in Newark, New Jersey, on the eve of World War II, Philip Roth’s 2004 novel finds its protagonist, a fictionalized version of the 7-year-old author himself, leading a banal existence punctuated by nightly radio news broadcasts, dinners with his all-American Jewish family and neighborhood excursions undertaken to fill the halcyon hours of summer vacation. Then, the writer-narrator recounts, “[T]he Republicans nominated Lindbergh and everything changed.”

 

What follows is an alternate history penned in the same vein as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, a 1962 novel recently adapted for television by Amazon Studios. Like High Castle, The Plot Against America—the subject of a new HBO limited series of the same name—poses the age-old question of “What if?” But while the former depicts a world in which the Axis powers won the war, the latter places its departure from the historical record prior to the conflict’s peak, envisioning a virulently isolationist United States that nevertheless ends up entangled in international affairs.

 

Seamlessly blending truth and imagination, The Plot Against America pits aviator Charles A. Lindbergh against incumbent Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election. Voters’ choice, argues the Spirit of St. Louis pilot and fervent “America Firster” in a trailer for the series, is not between Lindbergh and Roosevelt, but “between Lindbergh and war.”

 

Roth’s account of a celebrity-turned-politician winning the presidency on a platform of fearmongering and “othering” proved more prophetic than he could have predicted.

 

“It’s a story of an American dystopia,” explains “The Plot Against America” showrunner David Simon to Variety’s Will Thorne. “It seems startlingly prescient in that it anticipates a politician who seizes upon a very simple message and is able to activate the worst fears and impulses of a significant number of Americans. He gets them to relinquish not only power, but some of the most essential bulwarks of self-governance.”

 

While the Roth family, renamed the Levins in the HBO show, and many of the characters mentioned in The Plot Against America are based on real people, much of the narrative is entirely contrived. From the true extent of Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic views to the rise of the “America First” movement, here’s what you need to know to separate fact from fiction ahead of the six-part series’ March 16 premiere.

 

As Roth wrote in a 2004 essay for the New York Times, “To alter the historical reality by making Lindbergh America’s 33rd president while keeping everything else as close to factual truth as I could—that was the job as I saw it.”

 

The main conceit of The Plot Against America is a fictional Lindbergh presidency. Set between June 1940 and October 1942, the novel opens with the aviator’s unexpected bid as the Republican Party’s nominee and proceeds to envision how the war would have unfolded if the United States had not only stayed out of the fight, but colluded with the Axis powers and instituted Nazi-inspired restrictions on Jewish Americans’ freedom.

 

Roth’s book features prominent public figures—including Roosevelt, gossip columnist Walter Winchell, non-interventionist Democratic senator Burton K. Wheeler, New York City Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, industrialist and avowed anti-Semite Henry Ford, and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop—in roles ranging from key players to cameo appearances. In line with the author’s goal of adhering to reality whenever possible, sentiments shared by these individuals are actual quotes or plausible fabrications built on the existing historical record.

 

Lindbergh, for example, really did accuse Jews of being “war agitators.” He also cautioned against “the infiltration of inferior blood” and “dilution by foreign races.” He did not, however, declare, as he does in the book, that with the German invasion of the U.S.S.R., “Adolf Hitler has established himself as the world’s greatest safeguard against the spread of communism and its evils.”

 

Of the work’s central characters, most are dramatized versions of real people. Young Philip (played by Azhy Robertson in the HBO series) and his immediate family members borrow their names from Roth’s actual relatives: Herman (Morgan Spector), family patriarch and insurance salesman; his mother, Elizabeth, or “Bess” for short (Zoe Kazan); and older brother, Sandy (Caleb Malis). But while Philip’s cousin Alvin (Anthony Boyle) and aunt Evelyn (Winona Ryder) play major roles in both the book and the show, neither has a direct real-life counterpart. Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro), a conservative rabbi who attracts the Jewish community’s ire for his steadfast support of Lindbergh (Ben Cole), is also fictional.

 

What time period does The Plot Against America cover?

The novel’s alternate timeline is fairly straightforward, particularly toward the end of the novel, when Roth shifts from a first-person narrative to a day-by-day, newsreel-style account. Lindbergh soundly defeats Roosevelt in the November 1940 presidential election and, just weeks after his inauguration, meets Adolf Hitler to sign a so-called “Iceland Understanding” guaranteeing peaceful relations between the U.S. and Germany. A similar “Hawaii Understanding” paves the way for Japan’s unimpeded expansion across Asia.

 

The Jews of America find themselves subjected to increasing anti-Semitism and thinly veiled restrictions on their livelihood. The Office of American Absorption, established to encourage “America’s religious and national minorities to become further incorporated into the larger society,” indoctrinates Jewish teenagers by sending them to the country’s rural heartland for summer “apprenticeships”; an initiative dubbed Homestead 42 similarly relocates urban Jewish families, framing forced relocation as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

 

Some, like Philip’s parents, are convinced the government is attempting to “lull [Jewish Americans] to sleep with the ridiculous dream that everything in America is hunky-dory.” Others, like his aunt Evelyn and older brother, decry these fears as the result of a “persecution complex.” Needless to say, the Roth parents prove correct in their assessment of the situation, and before the end of the book, readers are treated to a dystopian vision of a country plagued by pogroms, fascist totalitarianism and the unmitigated reversal of the very rights Herman Roth previously cited as exemplars of America.

 

But The Plot Against America’s break from history is only temporary. By December 1942, Lindbergh has been vanquished, FDR is back in office, and the U.S.—reeling from a surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—has entered the war on the Allies’ side. Despite this late arrival, the Americans still manage to secure victory in Europe by May 1945.

 

In truth, the “America First” mentality that enables Roth’s version of Lindbergh to win the presidency was fairly widespread prior to Pearl Harbor. At its peak, the America First Committee, founded by a group of isolationist Yale University students in 1940, swelled to 800,000 members recruited from all regions of the country. Lindbergh emerged as the movement’s biggest proponent, but other well-known figures were also involved with the committee: Among others, the list includes Walt Disney, Sinclair Lewis, future president Gerald Ford and future Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart.

 

America Firsters argued against U.S. involvement in the war, presenting themselves as the “pinnacle of American patriotism and American traditions,” says Bradley W. Hart, author of Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States. Members emphasized defense over offense and attempted to paint themselves as patriots “interested only in preventing” the number of “gold star mothers”—those whose children died in service—from growing, according to Hart. Though many members held anti-Semitic sentiments and sympathized with the Nazis, such opinions became an increasing liability as the war in Europe raged on.

 

During the first half of the 20th century, anti-Semitism was fairly widespread across the United States, manifesting at “every level of society and across the country,” writes historian Julian E. Zelizer in the Atlantic. Automotive titan Henry Ford published a propaganda paper blaming “the Jews” for all of society’s ills, while radio personality Father Charles Coughlin regularly spouted anti-Semitic sentiments to his audience of some 30 million weekly listeners. Even institutions like Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Princeton enacted anti-Semitic policies: As Zelizer writes, all four universities imposed quotas on the number of Jewish students admitted.

 

The America First Committee’s efforts culminated in a 1941 speech Lindbergh delivered at a rally in Des Moines, Iowa. The aviator accused three groups—the British, the Roosevelt administration and American Jews—of “agitating for war.” Predicting that the “Jewish groups in this country … will be among the first to feel [war’s] consequences,” he argued that the “greatest danger to this country lies in [Jews’] large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”

 

Critics roundly condemned Lindbergh’s words as anti-Semitic. Writing for the New York Herald Tribune, columnist Dorothy Thompson expressed an opinion shared by many, declaring, “I am absolutely certain that Lindbergh is pro-Nazi.” Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie called the speech “the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national reputation.”

 

The America First Committee officially disbanded three days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

 

Why Charles Lindbergh?

In May 1927, 25-year-old Charles A. Lindbergh skyrocketed to fame after completing the first successful non-stop, solo transatlantic flight. (As Bess tells her husband in a “Plot Against America” trailer, “To most people, there’s never been a bigger hero in their lifetime.”) Dubbed “Lucky Lindy” and the “Lone Eagle,” he became an international celebrity, garnering his influence to promote the field of aviation. In 1929, he married Anne Morrow, daughter of a prominent American financier and diplomat; shortly after, the couple welcomed a baby boy, whose kidnapping and murder three years later sparked a media circus.

 

Overwhelmed by the publicity, the family fled to Europe. While living abroad, Lindbergh, acting at the U.S. military’s request, made multiple trips to Germany to assess the country’s aviation capabilities. He was impressed by what he encountered: As historian Thomas Doherty says, Nazi Germany shared Lindbergh’s admiration of “Spartan physicality” and aviation-centric militarism. In 1938, the American hero attracted intense criticism for accepting—and later declining to return—a medal from Nazi military and political leader Hermann Göring.

 

After moving back to the U.S. in April 1939, Lindbergh became a key figurehead of the America First movement. He spoke at rallies, denouncing the war as a European affair with no relevance to the U.S., and soon shifted from isolationism to outright anti-Semitism. Among his most patently bigoted remarks: Western nations “can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood” and “It seems that anything can be discussed today in America except the Jewish problem.”

 

Radio broadcaster Walter Winchell emerged as one of Lindbergh’s most steadfast critics, updating Lindy’s “Lone Eagle” nickname to the “Lone Ostrich” and arguing that the aviator gave up the country’s goodwill to become the “star ‘Shill’ for the America First Committee.” Roth’s fictionalized Winchell takes a similarly irreverent approach, decrying Lindbergh as “our fascist-loving president” and his supporters as “Lindbergh’s fascists.” But while The Plot Against America’s version of Winchell defies the reviled commander-in-chief by staging his own presidential bid, the real journalist never ran for office.

 

During the 1930s, Lindbergh and his other Plot Against America presidential rival, Franklin D. Roosevelt, were arguably the two most famous men in the country. But while many respected the pilot, few viewed him as a viable political candidate. According to Hart, an August 1939 poll found that just 9 percent of Americans wanted Lindbergh, whose name had been raised as a potential alternative to Roosevelt, to run for the nation’s highest office. Of these individuals, less than three-fourths (72 percent) thought he would actually make a good president.

 

Though Roosevelt personally supported America entering the conflict, he “hedged and waffled on war” while campaigning during the 1940 presidential race, says Susan Dunn, author of 1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler—The Election Amid the Storm. “At the same time that he was speaking against American involvement in war,” adds Dunn, “his administration was preparing for possible war” by instituting a peacetime draft and formulating lists of priorities in the event that war broke out. Like Roosevelt, his real-life Republican opponent, businessman Wendell Willkie, was an interventionist and anti-fascist, though he, too, toned down these views on the campaign trail.

 

There was no love lost between Roosevelt and Lindbergh: The president likened the pilot to the “Copperheads” who had opposed the American Civil War, labeling him a “defeatist and appeaser.” Lindbergh, in turn, called the Roosevelt administration one of three groups “agitating for war” and accused it of practicing “subterfuge” to force the U.S. into “a foreign war.”

 

The president’s distaste for Lindbergh continued well beyond the United States’ 1941 entry into the war. Though the pilot attempted to volunteer for the Army Air Corps, he was blocked from doing so and forced to settle for a consulting position with Henry Ford’s bomber development program. Later in the war, under the auspices of United Aircraft, he was stationed in the Pacific theater, where he participated in around 50 combat missions despite his official status as a civilian.

 

Lindbergh’s reputation never fully recovered from his pre-war politics. Once the aviator accepted a medal from Göring, says Doherty, “the universal affection Americans had for Lindbergh dissipates, and people divide[d] into camps. There are still a lot of Americans that will always love Lindbergh, … but he becomes an increasingly provocative and controversial figure.”

 

Whether the pilot actually came to regret his comments is a point of contention among scholars. Though his wife later claimed as much, he never personally apologized for his comments. Roth, writing in 2004, argued that “he was at heart a white supremacist, and … did not consider Jews, taken as a group, the genetic, moral or cultural equals of Nordic white men like himself and did not consider them desirable American citizens other than in very small numbers.”

 

Though Lindbergh is The Plot Against America’s clearest antagonist, his actual actions, according to Roth, matter less than what “American Jews suspect, rightly or wrongly, that he might be capable of doing”—and, conversely, how supporters interpret his words as permission to indulge their worst instincts.

 

As Roth concludes, “Lindbergh … chose himself as the leading political figure in a novel where I wanted America’s Jews to feel the pressure of a genuine anti-Semitic threat.”

 

Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's associate digital editor, history

The Plot Against America: Official Trailer | HBO

The Plot Against America is an American alternate history drama television miniseries created and written by David Simon and Ed Burns, based on the 2004 novel of the same name by Philip Roth, that premiered on HBO on March 16, 2020.

The Plot Against America imagines "an alternate American history told through the eyes of a working-class Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, as they watch the political rise of Charles Lindbergh, an aviator-hero and xenophobic populist, who becomes president and turns the nation toward fascism."

 

 

No.        Title                       Directed by              Teleplay by         Original air date               U.S. viewers

(millions)

 

1       "Part 1"       Minkie Spiro      Ed Burns & David Simon               March 16, 2020 0.407

June 1940. Herman is riled by the anti-war rhetoric of populist aviator hero Charles Lindbergh with its anti-Semitic overtones, but does not take the possibility of his running for the Presidency seriously. Herman is offered a promotion, but this would require them to live in Union where they would likely be the only Jews in the neighborhood. Disgusted by the patrons at a German-themed bar in Union, he decides to decline the offer. Alvin is fired from his job at a local Esso service station for stealing; he tells Sandy he took the blame for a friend. He moves out of the house after an argument with Herman. Bess's older sister Evelyn, who looks after their mother, is having an affair with a married man in New York; it soon becomes clear that he has no intention of divorcing his wife. Philip's friend Earl, whose mother has a scandalous reputation, is a corrupting influence on him. Evelyn and Bess meet Rabbi Bengelsdorf, who is sympathetic to Lindbergh's anti-war message; Evelyn is charmed. Alvin secretly stays with a friend whose father runs a candy store. At night, he and two friends wait outside the German bar in Union and beat up two drunk patrons on their way home, calling them fascists.

 

2      "Part 2"      Minkie Spiro      David Simon & Ed Burns               March 23, 2020 0.395

October 1940. Sandy eagerly attends a speech by Lindbergh, with Evelyn and Bengelsdorf present. Evelyn and Bengelsdorf later enter into a relationship, and Evelyn introduces him to her mother. Bengelsdorf assures Evelyn he will attempt to sway her family to his side politically. With Herman's assistance, Alvin takes a job as a driver for a wealthy man named Abe Steinheim, but quickly grows to find him crass and corrupt. To aid her family financially, Bess takes a retail job at an upper-class store, though she soon becomes unnerved by Lindbergh-supporting customers. Philip continues to learn delinquent behavior from Earl, including theft and following strangers around the city. Speaking at a Lindbergh rally, Bengelsdorf lavishly endorses Lindbergh, with Evelyn by his side. Disgusted by Bengelsdorf and the direction of the country, Alvin quits his job and enlists in the Canadian Army. Lindbergh later wins the election and becomes President.

 

3      "Part 3"      Minkie Spiro      Ed Burns              March 30, 2020 0.357

May 1941. A few months after Lindbergh's inauguration, anti-Semitic incidents have been rising in the United States. Lindbergh signs a neutrality agreement with Adolf Hitler. He also places Bengelsdorf in charge of a program called "Just Folks," as part of the Office of American Absorption, which temporarily places Jewish boys into rural families to make them "more American"; Evelyn signs up Sandy to participate. Philip begins to have nightmares about Nazis. Meanwhile, Evelyn and Bess's mother's dementia has been worsening. As Bess's concern for her family's safety grows, she places them on a waiting list to potentially emigrate to Canada. The Levins take a trip to Washington, D.C., where they experience anti-Semitism among both citizens and the police. Herman ultimately gives his permission for Sandy to travel to Kentucky as part of Just Folks. Alvin flourishes in Canada's military program, and is recruited by British intelligence to help steal a German radar device. However, he loses his leg in combat.

 

4      "Part 4"    Thomas Schlamme          David Simon & Reena Rexrode   April 6, 2020               0.420

September 1941. Bess and Evelyn's mother passes away. Herman visits Alvin in the hospital and offers his support, but Alvin has grown aloof and disillusioned. Alvin is questioned by the FBI, after which he is discharged and returns to New Jersey. In synagogue, Sandy gives a presentation espousing Just Folks, after being designated a 'Recruitment Officer' by Evelyn. When Evelyn and Bengelsdorf join the Levins for Shabbat, Herman clashes with Bengelsdorf's views and upbringing, including his father fighting for the Confederacy. After Bengelsdorf proposes an expansion of Just Folks, Anne Morrow Lindbergh invites him and Evelyn to a state dinner with German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (as all other Jewish representatives refused). Evelyn also secures an invitation for Sandy, which enrages Herman and Bess, who refuse to let Sandy attend. He responds by calling his parents "ghetto Jews" and "worse than Hitler". Evelyn dances with the German official at the dinner, which appears later on the newsreels. The FBI, meanwhile, has been tracking Alvin after marking him a potential Communist. Earl leaves town to live with his grandmother after his mother is committed to a psychiatric hospital. Seldon's father dies. Philip, overwhelmed by everything happening around him, happily watches a Lindbergh newsreel, much to Herman's exasperation.

 

5     "Part 5"   Thomas Schlamme          Ed Burns              April 13, 2020    0.433

April 1942. The Levins are forcibly signed up, by Evelyn, to participate in Homestead 42, Bengelsdorf's Just Folks expansion that relocates entire Jewish families. Bengelsdorf informs Bess that their participation will convince the FBI to take some heat off of Alvin. Philip expresses curiosity and concern about a Ku Klux Klan presence in Kentucky, and angrily asks Evelyn why his neighbor Seldon Wishnow, and Seldon's widowed mother Selma, weren't relocated instead. Misinterpreting this as a desire to be with his friend, Evelyn signs them up as well. Despite FBI threats, Herman intends to sue the OAA, but learns the legal process will take at least a year; instead, he quits his job to avoid the Homestead 42 obligation. Philip is overwhelmed with guilt when he realizes that he was the cause of Seldon's relocation to Kentucky, where he will almost certainly be unhappy. The FBI resumes tailing Alvin. Evelyn and Bengelsdorf marry in an extravagant ceremony unattended by the Levins. Outspoken radio host Walter Winchell escalates his anti-Lindbergh rhetoric; Bengelsdorf quickly gets him fired. Winchell announces a presidential run and Herman attends his rally, but violent Lindbergh supporters attack the attendees as the police stand aside. When Herman returns home bloodied, Bess threatens to leave him and take the children to Canada if he continues his resistance.

 

6    "Part 6"  Thomas Schlamme          David Simon       April 20, 2020    0.392

September 1942. Violent anti-Semitic incidents escalate and spread throughout the country. Winchell is assassinated in Louisville. At his funeral, New York Mayor Fiorello la Guardia eulogizes him and denounces Lindbergh. In response, Bengelsdorf urges the First Lady to convince Lindbergh to issue a statement, but Lindbergh's speech is short and lacking substance. Billy Murphy, a fellow veteran from the Canadian Army, visits Alvin and introduces him to a British agent who persuades Alvin to join a secretive anti-fascist group that wants to assassinate Lindbergh; Alvin's radar expertise is needed to track Lindbergh's plane, which vanishes soon after. German radio spreads propaganda of a Jewish conspiracy, claims that are taken up by Acting President Wheeler who declares martial law and orders the arrests of prominent Jews including Bengelsdorf. Concerned by reports from Kentucky, Bess attempts to contact Selma but is only able to reach a distraught Seldon, whose mother hasn't returned home. Herman and Sandy drive to Kentucky to pick up Seldon, where they learn Selma has been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. They encounter more Klan members on the way back to New Jersey. A terrified Evelyn asks Bess for sanctuary, but Bess tells her to leave and never return. The First Lady issues a statement calling for civic peace, the release of the Jewish detainees, and urges Congress to replace Wheeler and call an emergency Presidential election. Bengelsdorf returns to his synagogue, finding his congregation all but gone. His claims that Lindbergh's presidency and subsequent disappearance were the result of a German blackmail operation are met with skepticism from his colleagues. Alvin visits the Levins with his fiancee, but gets into a fistfight with Herman over Alvin's apparent indifference to national events. In November, the emergency election is marred by government disenfranchisement of Roosevelt voters, and the series ends without the results being revealed.

The Chicago Daily Times published a bombshell expose on September 9, 1937, exposing the German-American Bund and its secret pro-Nazi military network inside the United States.

 

The Chicago Daily Times published a bombshell expose on September 9, 1937, exposing the German-American Bund and its secret pro-Nazi military network inside the United States.

Key Details of the Denunciation

• The Investigation: The newspaper sent two German-speaking reporters and brothers, John C. Metcalfe and James J. Metcalfe, to infiltrate the Bund from the inside.
• The Headline: The September 9, 1937, front page famously blared, “SECRETS OF NAZI ARMY IN U.S.A. By TIMES men who joined it!”
• The Impact: The series ran throughout September 1937, warning the American public about a growing, regimented network of domestic fascists working against American democracy.
• Modern Recognition: This historic piece of investigative journalism is featured prominently in the documentary Nazi Town, USA, part of the PBS series The American Experience

Nazi Town, USA (2024) | Full Documentary | AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

 

Nazi Town, USA is a compelling historical documentary that originally premiered on January 23, 2024, as part of the 36th season of the acclaimed PBS series American Experience. Directed by Peter Yost, the 53-minute film chronicles the rise and fall of the German American Bund, a domestic pro-Nazi organization that gained significant traction across the United States during the 1930s.

Core History Covered

The documentary tracks how fascist subversion nearly took root in mainstream America before World War II:

• The German American Bund: Led by Fritz Kuhn, this group sought to meld traditional American patriotism and symbols (such as George Washington) with virulent anti-Semitism and Nazi imagery.
• Youth Summer Camps: The Bund operated dozens of indoctrination camps across the country—most notably Camp Siegfried in Yaphank, Long Island, Camp Nordland in New Jersey, and Camp Hindenburg in Wisconsin. In these towns, streets were even named after prominent Nazi figures like Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring.
• The 1939 Madison Square Garden Rally: The movement culminated in a massive "Pro-American Rally" in February 1939, where over 20,000 American Nazi sympathizers packed the arena.
• Klan Collaborations: The documentary highlights how the Bund cross-pollinated with other domestic extremist movements, even holding joint rallies with the Ku Klux Klan.

 

Fossil fuels are doomed – and Trump can’t save them

 

Fossil fuels are doomed – and Trump can’t save them

28 January 2026

Wesley Morgan

https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2026/01/fossil-fuels-are-doomed-and-trump-cant-save-them

 

Yes, climate change is worsening and action is uneven. But the shift away from fossil fuels is beginning.

 

The past three years have been the world’s hottest on record. In 2025, Earth was 1.44°C warmer than the long-term average, perilously close to breaching the Paris Agreement goal of 1.5°C.

 

This warming is fuelling Australia’s current record-breaking heatwave. Other consequences are visible globally, from Iran’s crippling drought to catastrophic wildfires and unprecedented floods in the United States to deadly cyclones hitting southern Asia.

 

We know what to do to tackle the climate crisis: replace fossil fuels with clean energy technologies such as solar, wind, electric vehicles and batteries. We are well on our way. Globally, the power produced by renewables overtook coal last year.

 

Petrostates such as Saudi Arabia and the US have made trillions from oil and gas. Now they are fighting a rearguard action to prolong fossil fuels. The US is pushing European nations to buy its gas, for instance.

 

But most countries have seen the writing on the wall. In November, the COP31 climate talks in Turkey are expected to deliver a global roadmap away from fossil fuels. Dozens of countries will meet in Colombia in April to fast-track the transition. The road ahead is bumpy. But the end of fossil fuels may finally be coming into view.

 

No holding back clean energy

There’s no one trying harder to slow the clean energy transition than US president Donald Trump. During his bid to return to the White House, Trump pressed oil executives for US$1 billion (A$1.4 bn) in campaign finance, promising a windfall in return.

 

In 2025, he increased subsidies for fossil fuel producers, weakened environmental laws, gutted Biden-era support for clean energy and moved to block clean energy projects, even some near completion. The US is now one of the world’s biggest exporters of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and oil.

 

But clean energy growth has proved difficult to kill. Despite Trump’s efforts, domestic solar generation is still expected to grow 46% in the next two years while electricity output from fossil fuel plants falls.

 

Trump is betting fossil fuels are the key to future American power. He made no secret of the fact the US military raid on Venezuela earlier this month was aimed at increasing oil production. He has implored US oil companies to invest billions to revive the country’s battered oil infrastructure. The response was lukewarm. ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said Venezuela was “uninvestable”.

 

Developing Venezuela’s oil reserves assumes there will be demand for decades to come. But the world now faces an oversupply of oil, even as sales of electric vehicles grow strongly in many countries. Last month, battery electric vehicles outsold petrol cars for the first time in Europe.

 

Electrostates rising

While the US doubles down on 20th century fossil fuels, China is betting on an electric 21st century. It is emerging as the first electrostate, dominating production and export of solar, wind, batteries and EVs. China is now the world’s biggest car exporter. Most new Chinese cars are powered by batteries, not oil.

 

China’s manufacturing might has driven down the price of batteries, the main cost of EVs. As EVs get cheaper, emerging economies are finding they can leapfrog fossil fuels and move straight to solar panels and EVs – even if the national power grid is limited or unreliable.

 

Commodity price trends show surging global demand for copper, silver and other metals needed for mass electrification. Worldwide, investment in clean energy technologies first overtook fossil fuel investment ten years ago. In 2025, clean investment was more than double the investment in coal, oil and gas. Clean energy is where the world is headed, whether Trump likes it or not.

 

China, India and Pakistan are rapidly making the shift to renewable power. Developing nations from Nepal to Ethiopia are taking up electric transport to slash the cost of importing fossil fuels.

 

A new roadmap away from fossil fuels

This week, the US formally withdrew from the Paris Agreement. But no other country has followed.

 

For decades, the COP talks have focused on “cutting emissions” without dealing directly with the use of coal, oil and gas. But at the 2023 talks, nearly 200 countries agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels”.

 

At last year’s COP30 talks, host nation Brazil proposed a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. More than 80 countries backed the idea, including Australia, but pushback from Saudi Arabia and Russia kept it out of the final outcomes.

 

In response, Brazil is working to develop a roadmap for phasing out fossil fuels. This – or something similar – may be formally adopted at the next climate talks in November.

 

While COP31 will be held in Turkey, Australian climate minister Chris Bowen will have a key role as “President of Negotiations” and will steer global discussion ahead of the summit.

 

Bowen plans to lobby petrostates to support a managed shift away from fossil fuels, drawing on Australia’s experience as a major exporter of coal and LNG facing its own transition. Korea – Australia’s third largest market for thermal coal – will retire its entire coal fleet by 2040.

 

Government modelling suggests Australia’s coal and gas exports could plummet 50% in value in five years as global demand falls. Independent modelling suggests the decline for coal could happen even faster if countries meet their climate targets. Policymakers must plan to manage this transition.

 

Coalitions of the willing?

Frustrated by slow progress, a coalition of nations is separately discussing how to phase out fossil fuels. The first conference will take place in April in Colombia. Here, delegates will discuss how to wind down fossil fuels while protecting workers and financial systems. Some nations want to negotiate a standalone treaty to manage the phase-out. Conference outcomes will also feed back into the UN climate talks.

 

Pacific island nations aim to be the world’s first 100% renewable region. Ahead of COP31, Australia and island nations will meet to progress this.

 

Progress is happening

In an ideal world, nations would rapidly tackle the existential threat of climate change together. We don’t live in that world. But it may not matter.

 

The shift to clean electric options has its own momentum. The question is whether the shift away from coal, oil and gas will be orderly – or chaotic.The Conversation

 

Wesley Morgan, Research Associate, Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney

 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The American E.V. Has Been Crushed. Will It Take the U.S. Auto Industry With It?

 

The American E.V. Has Been Crushed. Will It Take the U.S. Auto Industry With It?

 

The largest U.S. automakers have backed away from electric vehicles, even as global sales are booming. The decision may make them obsolete.

 

Matthew Shaer

By Matthew Shaer

Matthew Shaer spoke with dozens of auto industry analysts and academics for this article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/magazine/electric-cars-american-evs.html

July 15, 2026

 

The first sign of real trouble arrived two years ago, in the guise of an electric S.U.V. so new it did not yet have an official name. Fast and capacious, sleek and quiet, with plenty of comfortable seating and enough juice to carry a family 350 miles on a single charge, the vehicle was unveiled in May 2023, at a Ford investor event in the Michigan factory town of Dearborn. “It’s beautiful,” Doug Field, the head of Ford’s E.V. unit, promised the audience. “And it’s unlike anything else in the segment so far.” A “personal bullet train,” he called it.

 

He had good reason to be optimistic. Buoyed by billions of dollars in federal investment in charging infrastructure and a generous $7,500 consumer tax credit, the electric vehicle market in the United States had recently hit historic highs, climbing from annual sales of roughly 490,000 in 2021 to more than 800,000 in 2022 — an increase of approximately 60 percent. Many experts believed that the United States was now poised to enter the fruitful second phase of what’s commonly known as an S-curve, in which early interest in an emerging technology gives way to widespread adoption. If they were right — and data from other parts of the globe suggested they were — the rollout of a long-range electric S.U.V. was more than savvy thinking. It was an investment in the future.

 

And yet the project seems to have been cursed from the outset. Unlike many of the earlier Ford E.V.s, the “bullet train” was not merely a retrofitted version of an existing vehicle with an internal combustion engine — ICE, in the industry parlance. It was an entirely new car, requiring a large and complicated battery to match the vehicle’s projected heft. In April 2024, Ford pushed back the sale of the “bullet train” by two years, to “enable Ford to take advantage of emerging battery technology”; that August, it confirmed it was killing it entirely. “These vehicles need to be profitable,” Ford’s chief financial officer, John Lawler, explained in a conference call with reporters. “If they’re not profitable, based on where the customer is and the market is, we will pivot and adjust and make those tough decisions.”

 

At the time, his comments went relatively unnoticed. But it soon became clear that Ford — which went on to retire the Lightning, an electric variant of its best-selling F-150 pickup — was not the only manufacturer to have suddenly developed a case of cold feet. In July 2024, General Motors said it was delaying the introduction of a Buick E.V. S.U.V., and the following September, Volvo dialed back plans for an all-electric lineup of vehicles that would have debuted in the United States. In 2025, Dodge followed suit, axing a battery-powered Charger and its long-anticipated E.V. Ram pickup truck. Two plug-in hybrid Jeeps were sent to the scrap heap in the sky, as were several e-sedans that Honda and Nissan had designed for the U.S. market. Acura pulled the plug on an electric S.U.V. built at a G.M. plant in Tennessee.

 

The cancellations accumulated at such a rapid clip that the industry press often struggled to keep up: Late last year, for example, MotorTrend published an effusive review of the BrightDrop, a cutting-edge electric van from Chevrolet. The cargo hold of the vehicle was “cavernous,” the magazine’s writers noted approvingly, and the pedal feel supple. As for visibility, it was akin to “looking out of a giant terrarium.” The only problem was that the BrightDrop was no longer available, having been discontinued by Chevy two weeks after its press team dropped the thing off at MotorTrend headquarters. (“Well, this is awkward,” the article begins.)

 

And the carnage was far from over: Under the second Trump administration, the E.V. tax credit was eliminated and tailpipe-emission standards were gutted, which more or less instantly drove down sales of new battery-powered vehicles and encouraged the so-called Big Three — Ford, G.M. and Stellantis North America, the maker of the Dodge, Chrysler, Ram and Jeep brands — to refocus their considerable resources on trucks and plus-size S.U.V.s. Assembly lines at E.V. plants went dormant, and the battery plants that had sprung up around the country in the Biden years were unceremoniously closed or repurposed for other tasks, like the manufacture of industrial battery storage units. Thousands of workers lost their jobs. One of them was Doug Field, the brain behind Ford’s three-row “bullet train,” who departed the company this spring as part of an internal restructuring.

 

In purely financial terms, the combined cost of this industry about-face remains nothing short of staggering: This year, Stellantis alone was forced to write down $26 billion in E.V.-related losses. (Ford reported a slightly less ghastly $19 billion loss.) But somehow, it’s the long-term repercussions that look worse. “The way I’d put it,” the auto journalist Martin Padgett told me recently, “is that we pulled a U-turn while the rest of the world was pushing forward.”

 

According to the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based policy group, one of every four vehicles sold globally in 2025 was battery-powered. Analysts with Bloomberg have predicted that in the next decade, that number will more than double, putting gas-powered cars — for the first time ever — in the minority of overall new vehicle sales. Overseas, Asian and European manufacturers have spent years preparing for this eventuality, dumping billions into the development of battery technology. With predictable results: China now makes 75 percent of all E.V.s sold anywhere on earth. (The United States makes around 5 percent.) Many of those vehicles are produced by BYD, a Chinese company that recently became the largest manufacturer of battery-powered cars in the world.

 

“Already, the technological gap is getting dangerously wide,” says Stephen Ezell, a senior economist with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, or I.T.I.F., a Washington-based nonprofit. “Today, China can get a new E.V. from blueprint to launch about 33 percent faster than a U.S. company, give or take. But that will accelerate, right? The speed of innovation, the speed of the production cycles at these foreign companies, is just going to get faster and faster. And at some point, the gap will get pretty close to fully impossible for American automakers to close.”

 

For Detroit, the timing could not be worse. Since the 1960s, the U.S. auto industry’s once-dominant stake in the domestic car business has been slowly chewed up by foreign manufacturers, sinking from a near monopoly of 92 percent in 1965 to 46 percent in 2015. As of 2024, Ezell estimates, only a third of new cars purchased in the United States were built by the Big Three. The E.V. revolution was seen by its proponents as a way to reverse that trend. It was an opportunity for Detroit to rediscover its capacity for ingenuity and to re-establish credibility in an industry it helped to create.

 

Instead, whipsawed back and forth by shifting political headwinds and afflicted by all manner of self-enforced error, it appears to be in the process of sealing its own doom — at the precise moment interest in E.V.s is surging in the United States. In April, the analytics firm JD Power conducted a survey showing that 26 percent of prospective buyers in the United States were “very likely” to consider an E.V. for their next car. And that was before the chaos in the Strait of Hormuz helped push the price of unleaded gasoline to a four-year high.

 

“We’ve reached a genuinely existential moment,” Ezell told me. In a best-case scenario, Detroit manages to meet it by crafting a viable, long-term E.V. strategy while also servicing the still dependably lucrative existing market for ICE trucks. In the worst, it retreats onto what the economist Susan Helper calls a “shrinking island of ICE,” churning out outlandishly large trucks and not much else. At which point, the obsolescence of the mighty U.S. automobile industry — a sector once inextricably associated with American know-how and economic might — would be all but guaranteed. As Ford’s chief executive, Jim Farley, recently acknowledged in a statement that could apply to any member of the Big Three, “If we don’t put our chips on the right number and the right color, Ford could maybe not exist.”

 

“Is Detroit resigned to its fate? Has it accepted the role of subordinate in the world of cars?” Somewhat remarkably, these lines were not published this year but nearly half a century ago, in 1983, in the last chapter of a book called “The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry.” Its author was the legendary journalist Brock Yates; the eerily resonant topic was the threat posed by a new breed of fuel-efficient Asian sedan — in this case, the Honda Accord, which would go on to become one of the most popular vehicles ever sold in the United States.

 

To Yates, there was little question that the Accord was deserving of its popularity. The vehicle was a “masterpiece,” he wrote, “the ne plus ultra of small cars.” But he was far more interested in the Big Three’s reaction to its release, which he characterized as alternately cocky and flat-footed. Trapped in their corner offices, coasting on the fumes of earlier successes, many executives had hoped that Americans would eventually go back to their preference for heavy gas guzzlers. By the time they realized their error, Yates argued, Detroit had found itself in a position analogous to today: lapped by outsiders, left flailing in the wake of technological advances and cultural currents that it should have anticipated — forced to play catch-up.

 

“I remember it as basically all the stages of grief,” says Helper, who wrote her 1987 doctoral dissertation at Harvard on the rise of the Japanese auto industry. Denial — how could the collective experience of Detroit come up short against an overseas rival? Then anger. Why would anyone in their right mind prefer a small car to a full-size one? Then bargaining, in the form of a few ill-considered sedans designed to compete with the Accord and subsequently rejected by consumers for being too pricey, too ugly and far too slow. Sales of imports, meanwhile, were rising every year, as Honda and another Japanese powerhouse, Toyota, established a bigger foothold in the U.S. market.

 

To the Big Three — and to the American public — this was unacceptable. Detroit had long been the defining force in American industry, contributing billions of dollars to the domestic economy and regularly making up close to 5 percent of the annual G.D.P. “When you think about it, it was the original American start-up,” Ezell says. “I mean, look at what it unleashed in our society: The Interstate highway system, the rise of the suburbs and so on. That’s the coming-of-age story of our entire country.” It was a machine that had remade cities and towns, lifted millions of Americans into the middle class and fueled an array of downstream industries, from steelwork to the manufacture of radial tires and antennas. It would have to be preserved, and the U.S. government would have to help.

 

In the early 1980s, under pressure from Detroit, President Ronald Reagan negotiated a “voluntary” quota that restricted the number of Japanese imports that could be sold in the United States; he also gave Toyota and Honda permission to build a few factories in America, providing they were staffed by local workers. In addition to stemming the loss of American jobs, these moves were designed to buy time for the domestic auto industry — to allow executives to study (and ideally, to ape) how the Japanese were able to produce their vehicles so efficiently.

 

But even with the assist from the White House, Detroit was never able to recover anything like its previous market clout. In the United States, unlike Asia, manufacturers had to contend with a layered corporate bureaucracy that hindered innovation. More than that, they had to contend with their own history. In a paper on the convulsions of the era, Helper noted that “problems of perception — or of the failure to recognize that the world is changing — flow from the fact that senior managers tend to become overly reliant on the mental models and beliefs that undergirded the firm’s success in the first place.” A well-grooved track can transform, with enough traffic, into a rut.

 

Through the 1990s, sales figures continued to slide, as more foreign automakers targeted U.S. consumers — Nissan, BMW, a Korean newcomer called Kia, all apparently more in tune with what Americans wanted than the American companies themselves.

 

What recovery there was for Detroit came in fits and starts. The Dodge Neon, introduced in 1994, was a smart and cheap clone of the top-selling Honda Civic subcompact and a certified hit, generating millions in revenue. (“The Japanese, then, had created a new American auto industry,” the authors Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White quipped in “Comeback: The Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry.” “In the end, Detroit decided to join in.”) And an investment in the growing market in pickups, along with a focus on “shared platform” vehicles — cars and trucks that used the same underlying architecture, thus reducing production costs — helped the Big Three hit record profits in 2000. Still, despite the stockpiles of cash it was accumulating, Detroit entered the new millennium in a defensive crouch, low on innovation and lower still on daring.

 

For every Ford Focus — a compact car that sold well both domestically and overseas, through a partnership with the Japanese company Mazda — there was an embarrassing stumble, like the Dodge Avenger, a cartoonishly proportioned, strangely underpowered pseudo-muscle car introduced in the European market in 2007 with predictable results. Rather than choosing to refine their export strategy or encouraging their engineers to think more creatively, the Big Three responded to these setbacks, as they would in 2024, by pouring more capital into trucks and S.U.V.s. “Basically, the paragons of the American vehicle — the sort of products that manage to persist even in the midst of financial messes and industry catastrophes,” says Martin Padgett, the auto reporter. “It was blinkered thinking, of course. It was an attempt to maximize profits.”

 

The downsides of the approach became abundantly clear in the mid-2000s, when a global energy crisis drove up the price of gas. To many American consumers, all those heavy trucks were no longer so appealing — not if they were going to cost a day’s pay to fill up. Sales of new S.U.V.s and pickups slid precipitously. And there was little diversification to offset the losses: Of the small handful of sedans and subcompacts that Detroit was still making, many had been plagued with wiring and engine issues, requiring sweeping, expensive recalls to rectify. (Today, the Big Three have all but fully ceded the category to foreign manufacturers.) The rest were blandly designed, their cabins lined with cheap and coarse plastics. “What we were seeing, I’d argue, was the ‘enshittification’ of American vehicles,” Padgett told me, referring to a term coined by the technologist Cory Doctorow to describe a purposeful, profit-minded degradation in product quality. “We were being told to expect and accept less.”

 

Still, it took the financial crisis of 2008, and the ensuing global recession, to truly push Detroit to the brink. Americans stopped spending; reasonable auto loans were close to impossible to find. In a single year, sales of new cars in the United States fell by an astonishing 40 percent. Facing the very real prospect of bankruptcy, the Big Three chief executives traveled to Washington to plead for federal assistance. (They opted to fly private, a tragicomic detail that did not go unignored by journalists or lawmakers.) Not everyone was in a listening mood. As the presidential hopeful Mitt Romney wrote in a now-famous editorial in The Times, there were plenty of good reasons to turn the executives away. Assenting to a bailout, argued Romney, the Michigan-born son of a former auto industry exec, was practically a guarantee that “automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses.”

 

To Romney, the solution was obvious: Allow the Big Three to go broke and push them to rebuild more wisely. “The federal government,” Romney wrote, “should invest substantially more in basic research — on new energy sources, fuel-economy technology, materials science and the like — that will ultimately benefit the automotive industry.”

 

But Romney wasn’t in Congress. He didn’t get a vote. And in late 2008, after months of pitched debate on Capitol Hill, President George W. Bush authorized the use of Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to bail out the automakers. G.M. and Chrysler were forced into a structured bankruptcy, and Washington allocated $17.4 billion to keep them afloat. (Ford was in better shape, having mortgaged its assets ahead of the financial crisis.) An estimated 1.5 million jobs were preserved; sales gradually rebounded as automakers were pushed to embrace more fuel-efficient options. “The auto industry has proved that any comeback is possible,” President Barack Obama, who tied ongoing federal support for the Big Three to a commitment to fuel efficiency, said in 2012. “And by the way, so has Motor City.” Unfortunately, the comeback proved short-lived.

 

In February 2008, several months before the Big Three chief executives threw themselves on the mercy of the federal government, a Silicon Valley start-up called Tesla unveiled its inaugural E.V., which it named the Roadster. Effectively a Lotus Elise sports coupe with an electric motor in place of the original four-cylinder engine, the car was far from the first E.V. to be built in America: As early as the late 19th century, inventors had been experimenting with battery-powered people carriers. But it was, as the car site Edmunds noted, “the first car to prove that electric power and high performance need not be mutually exclusive.”

 

The Roadster had a range of 220 miles and traveled from a standstill to 60 m.p.h. in about six seconds. The handling was supple, the torque neck-jerking. (Quite literally: Many of the early articles on the car likened the driving experience to being strapped into the cockpit of a fighter jet.) More important, it had curb appeal. If the Toyota Prius resembled a hyphen on wheels, the Roadster was Ferrari-pretty, with swooping curves, an aggressive stance and a removable targa top. You could picture yourself piloting it through the undulating switchbacks of a slot canyon.

 

No matter, as Elon Musk later admitted, that the car “didn’t really work.” (As with many first-generation E.V.s, the software was cantankerous, the reliability abysmal.) Nor that the price tag — $150,000 in today’s dollars — was out of reach for most consumers. The Roadster was a statement piece: an advertisement for the E.V. industry writ large. And in subsequent years, Tesla used what it learned in making the Roadster to develop the considerably more affordable Model S — a sedan, as the cognoscenti at Top Gear magazine had it, that “almost single-handedly forced mainstream manufacturers to embrace electricity.”

 

In 2012, Tesla sold fewer than 3,000 Model S sedans. In 2013, aided by a drumbeat of positive press — including the top prize in MotorTrend’s Car of the Year awards, a first for an E.V. — it sold more than 22,000. Other early E.V.s, like the Chevrolet Volt and the Nissan Leaf, proved more popular still, to the extent that G.M. had to revise its production capacity to keep up with demand. And the fuel-efficient Toyota Prius — a hybrid that paired an ICE powertrain with an electric motor — surpassed 200,000 in U.S. sales for the second year in the row.

 

Encouraged by the consumer response, the Obama administration proposed creating a $2 billion Energy Security Trust to fund the development of non-ICE vehicles. “With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil,” said Obama, who predicted that by 2015, the United States would “become the first country to have a million electric vehicles on the road.”

 

During his second term in office, production and sales of E.V.s did indeed climb steadily, flattening temporarily when fuel prices stabilized and reaching a respectable 1 percent of the total U.S. new car market in 2016. But it wasn’t until 2018 that the millionth E.V. was finally sold in the United States — by which point the dynamics of the global market had been all but set. Even with the temporary boost engendered by the Biden administration’s $7,500 tax credit, American E.V. adoption, according to Pew, has repeatedly lagged behind the international average of 25 percent of new car sales — to say nothing of the 53 percent recorded by China, or the 68 percent in Nepal. Last year, 97 percent of all vehicles sold by dealers in Norway were electric. The United States has stalled out at 10 percent.

 

The most straightforward explanation for the discrepancy can be found in an innovative paper published in 2024 in Green Energy and Intelligent Transportation, a peer-reviewed journal. Titled “Barriers and Motivators to the Adoption of Electric Vehicles: A Global Review,” the meta-analysis illustrated what compels new-car buyers to go electric — and the fears, including “range anxiety,” that kept them away. Tellingly, regardless of region and nationality, consumers were far more likely to buy an E.V. if reliable incentive programs were in place. Hence the rates of adoption in a place like Norway, which has long offered E.V. subsidies — and the comparably pitiful numbers in the United States, which adopted its own federal incentive program only to retract it three years later, leaving both consumers and manufacturers in the lurch.

 

Executives are “essentially being asked to maneuver a giant warship in a space that changes every four years, if not every four days, in terms of tariffs,” says Helper, the economist. For an industry that thinks in specific increments of time, that’s a recipe for disaster. “Most legacy automakers put a business case together up to four years ahead of launch, based on how many cars they expect to sell and the price of goods and labor,” says Adam Bernard, a former G.M. strategist and the founder of AutoPerspectives, a Michigan-based consultancy. “You’re anticipating what everything will cost and where the vehicle will be assembled. The price of steel. The price of computer chips. You’re making a bet, but it’s an educated bet. You have to be able to gauge where things are headed to get it right.”

 

And you have to do it in an environment almost comically disadvantaged to widespread E.V. adoption. The United States comprises roughly four million square miles of forest, desert and farmland, strung together by 4.1 million miles of paved road and an uncountable number of winding dirt lanes, making the construction of a national charging network considerably more difficult than it would be in a smaller country.

 

“If you think the longest distance you’re going to drive on a regular basis is 50 miles,” Helper says, “you might not worry as much about that. But if you’re regularly commuting sizable distances, like a lot of Americans, your anxiety about battery life is going to be heightened.” Especially when the alternative — an ICE vehicle — can run on fuel that is often not only more readily available than a charging station but also deeply discounted courtesy of a variety of indirect governmental subsidies.

 

In general, Helper told me, “I think that sometimes people overlook what we’re up against here. If you’re an automaker, you’re basically starting out with one hand tied behind your back.”

 

This year, a group of researchers combed through new E.V. registrations in the United States and discovered that from 2012 to 2023, close to half of them had been logged in the 10 most Democratic counties in the country, while a third were made by buyers in ultraliberal enclaves like California’s Bay Area and Cambridge, Mass. “Here’s where my pessimism comes from,” says Nate Jensen, a University of Texas professor who studies the auto industry. “We had a rush of early adopters, right? They lived in cities. They were tech savvy. But now you’re asking: Well, OK, how do you get to the more marginal consumer, without any incentives? How do I persuade a person with range anxiety, or who’s worried about paying an electrician to rewire their house for the right charger?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

To a large degree, the answer may reside with cost: In 2026, many E.V.s sold in the United States are considerably pricier than the typical ICE car. But the more investment Detroit makes in battery technology, and the more it experiments with purpose-built E.V.s, rather than modified ICE cars, the cheaper those vehicles will become. If some sort of price parity can be achieved, as it has been in Asia and Europe — and if prices at the pump keep yo-yoing — the hesitancy of many holdouts is likely to erode.

 

“I talk to a lot of car dealers, a lot of automakers in the U.S.,” says Scott Case, the chief executive of Recurrent, an E.V. analytics company. “And I think all of them would agree with the statement that we’re headed toward a fully electric future.” Good E.V.s, he pointed out, are superior products to ICE cars in nearly every way: They accelerate faster; they’re quieter; maintenance costs are lower. “The debate isn’t about that,” he went on. “The debate is about the rate at which we’ll get there. The whole globe is aimed in one direction.” Which to Case demonstrates that market receptivity is less of a lasting problem than the quality of the cars themselves.

 

Next time you’re driving on the highway, take a tally of the E.V.s hurtling past you. Many will be built by Tesla. A few by Rivian, a California-based start up. But a surprising number will most likely carry the badge of Hyundai, a Korean automaker that last year sold twice as many E.V.s in the United States as Ford, thanks in large part to several reasonably priced offerings, like the $35,000 Ioniq 5 compact.

 

“It’s funny to me, because if you look at U.S. sales right now, the single hottest category in E.V.s is the three-row, full-size electric S.U.V.,” Case said, laughing, when I brought up the three-row “bullet train” unveiled by Doug Field at the Ford investor event in 2023. “The Kia EV9 is totally crushing it. Toyota and Subaru are both rushing out new three-row competitors. And the most desirable cars in the used E.V. market are the Tesla Model X and the three-row Model Y,” he said.

 

“Look, I don’t envy of the job of the planners for these manufacturers,” he continued. “But it just feels to me like the Big Three have been so overreactive to the government swings and overreactive to small demand shifts — when, really, if they had just picked a path and stuck with it, and hadn’t jammed the rudder to one side, they would have been a whole lot better off.”

 

Predicting the downfall (or resurgence) of the Big Three is practically a national sport. There should be a semiannual award devoted to it. In addition to Brock Yates’s “The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry” (1983) and Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White’s “Comeback” (1994), there is Micheline Maynard’s “The End of Detroit: How the Big Three Lost Their Grip on the American Car Market” (2003), Kenneth Whyte’s “The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise” (2021), as well as “Wrecked: How the American Automobile Industry Destroyed Its Capacity to Compete” (2019), by the sociologists Joshua Murray and Michael Schwartz. Throw in “American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company” — the reporter Bryce G. Hoffman’s 2012 chronicle of the company’s efforts to recover from the bailouts — and the apparently endless stream of academic papers on the topic, and you’ve got enough reading material to last you years.

 

What kind of books will be written about the current crisis? And what will they be called? If history and the current industry headwinds are any indication, the answer is probably something along the lines of “Should Have Seen It Coming: How the United States Lost the Last of Its Automobile Industry to Asia.” As Stephen Ezell, the I.T.I.F. economist, noted in a trio of white papers published this year, manufacturers in Korea, Japan and China now dominate large parts of the global car business.

 

For the time being, China is being held back from the U.S. market courtesy of a 100 percent tariff on its E.V.s. But Mexico imposes no such tax on the Chinese, and new data indicates that around 15 percent of new cars sold in that country are made by the likes of BYD and Geely, another Beijing-based automotive powerhouse. (“If you see a new car on the road here now, it’s likely to be Chinese,” a Mexican analyst recently told The Financial Times. “We clearly haven’t reached the peak.”) This spring, 2,900 Chinese E.V.s landed at a port in Canada, where the government has lowered the tariff on the imports to 6.1 percent. In the next five years, the country could import as many as 70,000 more.

 

It may be true, as Musk once warned, that if “trade barriers” were not established against Chinese E.V.s, BYD and Geely would “pretty much demolish most other companies in the world.” But our neighbors seem less concerned, and it’s a short drive from Mexico to the United States, as evidenced by the flood of social media footage of influencers carting their sleek new BYD sedans over the border. Even if more restrictive measures, like a proposed bill in Congress that would fully ban Chinese imports in the United States, were to pass to the president’s desk for signing, China would still be able to exercise free rein in the rest of the globe. (In June, Polestar, an E.V. company owned by Geely, was informed by American regulators that it could no longer sell new cars in the United States.)

 

And as companies like BYD build more vehicles, refining battery life and efficacy, they would steadily improve on an economy of scale. “They’ll be able to innovate more rapidly and keep costs down,” Ezell told me. “Then there’d be us, over here in Fortress America,” warding off the Chinese but not other Asian manufacturers. “You also need to think about the side effects of protecting yourself from China,” says Jensen, the University of Texas professor. “Yeah, you preserve a bit of your market for now, but what happens to the products we make? Are you going to want to go out, in 10 years, and buy a new Ford or G.M. truck that has been completely shielded from real competition? Maybe not.”

 

The “fortress” approach would leave the American auto industry isolated in more ways than one. Left with masses of trucks and S.U.V.s unappealing to the rest of the world, and reliant on domestic sales of gas-powered vehicles, Detroit would inevitably be forced to shrink further. And this time around, Washington might not come riding to the rescue. “I don’t know exactly who is going to be part of Detroit 10 years from now,” Case says. “But I don’t think it’s going to be the same as the companies that are here now.”

 

It’s not necessarily too late to abandon hope: In the wake of the cancellation of the “bullet train” and the F-150 Lightning, Ford has put its weight behind a line of smaller, more affordable E.V.s that it hopes will prove more palatable to American buyers. (The first of those cars, a light pickup, will retail for around $30,000 and debut next year.) And in late June, Slate Auto, a start-up backed in part by Jeff Bezos, began taking preorders for its own bargain e-truck; prices start at less than $25,000. For that amount, says Slate’s chief executive, Peter Faricy, consumers will “get the most beautiful, simplified, E.V. pickup that’s ever been built. And it’s a game changer.”

 

But the vehicles would have to be phenomenally successful to have a truly transformative effect on a market that is no longer goosed by the federal tax credit — or supported in any meaningful way by the Trump administration. Even Tesla, which saw its European sales skyrocket in the early months of this year, has watched its U.S. presence dwindle. (The backlash to Musk’s politics didn’t help.)

 

To Helper, a coherent national strategy is needed — and fast. “Coming from a trailing position,” she and several colleagues note in a new paper, “America’s Retreat in E.V.s: Economic Security, Prosperity and the Industrial Future,” “we must establish a forward-looking agenda that invests in American innovation,” starting with battery research, private-public partnerships and joint ventures with Asian corporations.

 

In short, the United States will require the same type of incentive and investment programs that have paved the way for E.V. growth in other parts of the world.

 

“The precedent that comes to mind for me is semiconductor chips,” Ezell told me. From 1990 to 2020, he pointed out, China’s share of the global market increased substantially, compelling the U.S. government to pass the CHIPS Act — a 2022 package of incentives for manufacturers that allowed the industry to rebound. “We saved ourselves,” Ezell went on. “And I think something like that is the only thing that saves Detroit — Congress wakes up and realizes we’re about to lose this industry.”

 

Matthew Shaer is a contributing writer for the magazine based in Atlanta. He often writes about technology, politics and the American criminal justice system.