President Donald Trump told the press this week that he plans to direct the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to return to the 2020 standard for automobile emissions, according to The Detroit News. Trump came to this decision after a conversation with Stellantis chairman John Elkman, in which they talked about “some of the problems they have with the environment, which we’re going to clean up.”
“We’re going to go back, probably, to a 2020 standard,” Trump told reporters as he signed an unrelated executive order. Existing pollution regulations don’t “mean a damn bit of difference for the environment” but “make it impossible for people to build cars,” the president added.
Going back to 2020, the last full year of Trump’s first term, would return the EPA’s emissions standards to a limit of 204 grams of pollutants per mile for cars and 284 grams per mile for light trucks. The Biden administration set much more aggressive emissions standards of 170 grams per mile for model year 2027 and 85 grams per mile for 2032.
Trump on Monday defended the 2020 level as still “a strong standard,” adding: “We’re going to be bringing it back to a standard that is a very good environmental standard, but it makes it possible to build a car.”
This is part of Trump’s agenda to eliminate what he frequently cites as an “EV mandate.” Although there’s no explicit federal mandate to produce electric vehicles, regulations on emissions and fuel economy from agencies like the EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) are almost impossible for automakers to satisfy without marketing EVs, especially under the Biden administration’s proposals.
The proposed relaxing of federal emissions standards aligns with an industry-wide slowdown in EV development. EV market share in the U.S. recently hit 10 percent, with Chevy being the nation’s fastest-growing EV brand, but demand for electric vehicles still lags behind what many industry analysts anticipated in recent years.
