THE GREAT EV RESET

SALES OF ELECTRIC VEHICLES WILL LIKELY FALL FOR A WHILE. BUT DON'T BELIEVE THE GRIM PROGNOSIS—EVS ARE HERE TO STAY.

- BY JOHN VOELCKER

GLOOM AND DOOM ABOUT EVS and their prospects is pervasive these days in business media, especially in reports coming out of Detroit.

It's the polar opposite of car brands' soaring plans of just a few years ago, as executives proclaimed they would migrate largely or entirely to battery-electric vehicles by some deadline within 10 or 15 years.

Tech enthusiasm routinely peaks and then crashes; ask anyone who lived through the dotcom bust of 2000. But globally, EVs are getting more affordable and continue to improve, with longer range and faster charging.

You might not know it from the coverage, but EV sales hit a new record in the third quarter of 2025, taking about 12 percent of the U.S. market. That's at least partly because the $7500 federal-government purchase incentive ended on September 30, and analyst Loren McDonald of Chargeonomics estimated that as many as 125,000 EV sales were pulled into the third quarter from future quarters.

That said, North America has clearly seen EV retrenchments, especially from the Detroit Three automakers. Electric-vehicle plans, products, and predictions have been delayed or walked back, and some models have been canceled outright [see “Unplugged,” page 64].

Still, it is widely acknowledged that the world's vehicle pool will continue to be electrified—but at widely varying paces in different places, among different vehicle types, and for different uses. Battery-electric urban delivery vans, for example, can cost far less to fuel and require just a fraction of the maintenance of their diesel counterparts, and fleet managers have noticed. Just ask the United States Postal Service [see “Mail-Order Ride,” page 15].

LESSONS LEARNED

Before predicting what will happen in the future, let's look at where we are now and what we have learned from 15 years of EVs. Here are takeaways on some key topics: