Biden Administration Imposes Strictest-Ever Vehicle-Emissions Standards in Bid to Phase Out Gas Cars

The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it will impose the strictest vehicle-emissions regulations ever enacted as part of an effort to push the American car industry toward electric vehicles.

The emissions standards, which will cover light-duty vehicles — cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks — are set to apply to models produced from “2027 through 2032 and beyond,” the Environmental Protection Agency said in a statement.

The new rules set targets for the number of electric models produced in the United States as a percentage of all light-duty vehicles created each year. For instance, in 2030, hitting the EPA’s new targets would require somewhere between 31 percent and 44 percent of new cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks to be fully electric, with the exact percentage depending on the amount of emissions from other vehicles.

Though the regulations announced Wednesday are the strictest in the country’s history, they are a step back from the EPA’s April 2023 proposal, at least in terms of the rollout speed. While the target in 2032 is still for carbon emissions to be cut in half from the total produced by cars that went on sale in 2026, the shift will be more gradual than the changes the administration proposed last year and the targets in the earlier years easier to meet.

Another difference is the inclusion of hybrid vehicles. The April 2023 proposal called for two-thirds of cars sold in 2032 to be electric, but the new regulations amend that number to 56 percent of cars sold being electric and another 13 percent hybrid.

A key factor in the differences between last spring’s proposal and the regulations announced Wednesday is the slight declining interest in electric vehicles in the U.S. While electric-vehicle sales have grown over the past few years, the rate at which Americans purchase the cars has declined, and some car manufacturers, like Ford Motor Company, have shifted their focus to popular hybrids.

Amid the slowdown in electric-vehicle sales in late 2023, a group of car dealers wrote a letter to President Biden urging him to amend the EPA’s proposal, citing customer concerns about charger accessibility, price, and the ability of an electric car to handle long trips as reasons for the decrease in Americans’ desire to switch from gas-powered or hybrid cars.