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

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.)