By Steven Symes 
With the federal tax incentive for EVs ending September 30, the share of the auto market they occupy will shrink dramatically. While some media outlets have been celebrating the struggles of Tesla lately, the real story is that electric cars in general have fallen out of favor.
Guy in Batman pajamas busts a car burglar.
According to iSeeCars, the 7 to 8 percent of new car market share EVs carved out at the peak of their adoption is about to crumble. The automotive marketplace says it predicts market share will fall to about 4 percent and won’t recover until at least 2028.
We wonder if it won’t be even longer.
People just don’t really want EVs like they did three years ago. There are all kinds of theories about why that is, but we think it’s a combination of factors, not just the ending of federal incentives for consumers and automakers. But those going away have been instrumental in the decline of electric cars.
As Karl Brauer, executive analyst for iSeeCars, has rightly noted, EV sales were contracting even when the federal tax incentives were in place. In other words, supporters of electrification would be wise to not just pin the blame on President Trump.
Others have tried saying the decline of electric cars is the fault of Elon Musk. While he’s been the face of the movement for well over a decade, every mass market automaker at this point has at least one EV, if not multiple.
Now that everyone’s jumped on the bandwagon, those electric models will be competing with each other over a dwindling segment of the overall vehicle market. That means the explosion of EV options will quickly turn into a bloodbath of model line cancellations.
Sure, there’s been a run on EVs before the end of September, but Brauer predicts a “substantial drop” in sales starting in Q4 2025. That’s why many automakers have already begun pulling back on production and cancelling or pushing back new EV model launches.
Brauer, like many others, believes that in the meantime hybrids and plug-in hybrids will only grow in popularity.
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