Gas-Guzzler Revival Risks Dead-End Future for US Automakers

Detroit under Donald Trump has rediscovered its love of the big, roaring engine.

By gutting climate regulations, the president has freed U.S. automakers to sell as many gas-burning trucks and SUVs as they can. Muscle cars powered by rumbling V-8s and Hemi engines are back, with beasts like the Dodge Charger and Ford’s Mustang Dark Horse laying down rubber at this year’s Detroit Auto Show. Electric vehicles, pushed by years of federal policy, are now purely optional.

The sudden switch promises a new era of fat profits for the companies. They’ve always made their best margins on large vehicles with monster engines. Ford Motor Co.’s top executive even hailed the change as a “multibillion-dollar opportunity.”

Long term, it risks sending American automakers off a cliff. EVs are still backed by government regulations and incentives across much of the world. And they’re finding buyers, particularly the high-tech, low-cost cars now pouring out of China. If US automakers turn their backs on electrics, their sales outside the US will shrivel. They’re already falling behind on the technology, relying on a 100% US tariff on Chinese EVs to keep surging rivals like BYD Co. at bay.

“If they just go back to Hemi Land and not do anything, it would be disastrous in a few years — a horrific disaster,” said Mark Wakefield, head of the global automotive practice at consultant AlixPartners. While the American automakers “mostly understand the challenge in front of them, they don’t have full plans” to confront it, he said.

Auto executives pledge they’ll use the windfall from Trump’s regulatory reprieve to invest in an electrified future. Ford Executive Chair Bill Ford, great-grandson of the company’s founder, pointed to a line of affordable electric vehicles the automaker plans for 2027, including a $30,000 pickup. The company also is expanding its offerings of gas-electric hybrid models.

Related: EV Collision Claims Rise in US And Canada as Sales Of New Models Decrease

“We certainly are not turning our back on the rest of the world,” Ford said in an interview at the Detroit show. “We are investing.”

But the company used the same show to highlight its new take on the Mustang muscle car — a version called the Dark Horse SC with horsepower exceeding 500 and a price expected to top $90,000. “Now is a great time for the V-8 engine,” said Ryan Shaughnessy, the Mustang’s brand manager. “We’ve done extensive customer research in multiple cities, looking at a variety of powertrains, and the V-8 is always the No. 1 choice.”

It isn’t just customers. US automakers have long been run by “car guy” enthusiasts who live for the bone-shaking rumble of a big engine. For them, quiet and smooth EVs — even the absurdly quick ones — can’t satisfy that craving. They’re convinced many American car buyers share the same enthusiasm for what Shaughnessy described as “the sound and roar of the V-8.”

Wall Street couldn’t be happier with the new direction. After General Motors Co.’s earnings blew away expectations in January, more than a dozen analysts boosted their price targets, with Piper Sandler’s Alexander Potter writing that GM “has too much earnings power to ignore.” Ford’s fortunes are also on the rise, as it’s predicting operating profits could grow by as much as 47% this year to $10 billion. Ford’s stock has risen nearly 50% over the last 12 months.

Under the previous environmental rules, automakers effectively had to sell zero-emission vehicles in growing numbers to offset their gas-guzzlers. When they fell short, they had to buy regulatory credits from EV companies such as Tesla Inc. or face penalties. GM spent $3.5 billion on credits from 2022 to the middle of 2025.

Related: EV Collision Claims Rebound as Expiring U.S. Government Tax Incentives Drive Record Sales

Now, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst Ryan Brinkman, GM and Ford each have “billion dollar tailwinds” from Trump zeroing out those penalties in his One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed last summer.

“We’re seeing our profitability improve,” said Ford Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley. “I’m really looking forward to this year.”

California, which for years set its own air-pollution requirements for cars, even decided to ban sales of new vehicles with internal combustion engines by 2035, with a number of other states moving to follow suit. Congress blocked that ban last year, and the Trump administration has proposed substantially weaker fuel economy standards that would require an average of 34.5 miles per gallon by 2031, down from about 50 mpg under the Biden administration’s policy.

“It’s about what the future production stream and portfolio was going to have to look like, because you were going to have to produce fewer ICE vehicles and more EVs,” GM Chief Financial Officer Paul Jacobson said after a February speech at the Federal Reserve Automotive Insights Symposium. “It’s not really about this year, the next year’s earnings, the next two years. It’s about the next five.”

Outside the EV heartland of California, plug-in cars and trucks have struggled to win over American buyers, hampered by their high cost and inadvertent role in the country’s fierce culture war. Ford took $19.5 billion in charges on its money-losing electric car business in December and announced plans to convert an EV plant under construction in Tennessee to make gas-fueled pickups instead.

GM did an about-face on a factory in Michigan that had been slated to produce EVs, choosing to build the Chevrolet Silverado truck there. The company also canceled a $300 million investment in a plant near Buffalo, New York, that would have made drive units for electric vehicles, opting instead to spend almost $900 million to make more of its sixth-generation V-8 engines. GM has written off $7.6 billion from its EV investments, while Jeep maker Stellantis NV announced more than €22 billion ($26 billion) in charges.

The hangover from all that new horsepower could leave US automakers lagging their Chinese rivals who already build the world’s most advanced — and lowest-priced — electric cars. Indeed, there’s much talk in Detroit about the competitive tsunami that will be unleashed on American automakers once Chinese car companies find a way to break through trade barriers now protecting the US market. Farley even calls it an “existential threat.”

Focus too much on V-8s, and Detroit risks becoming a technology island, making products the rest of the world doesn’t want. Wakefield at AlixPartners compared it to Brazil, which in the 1970s bet on ethanol as the fuel of the future only to doom its automakers in the process.

“They’re going to build as many V-8 engines and big trucks as they can get out the factory doors,” said Sam Fiorani, vice president of vehicle forecasting for consultant Auto Forecast Solutions. “And as the rest of the world develops modern drivetrains, newer batteries and better electric vehicles, GM and Ford in particular are going to find themselves falling even further behind.”

Ford’s Farley last month spoke with administration officials about letting Chinese companies build cars in the US through joint ventures in which American automakers would hold a controlling stake as a way to provide some protection to the domestic businesses, according to people familiar with the discussions. But the idea received a cold reception from the officials, who felt it would face opposition in Washington. GM has told the Trump administration that the company opposes Chinese entry into the market, one of the people said.

Canada recently dropped its own 100% tariffs on Chinese cars and will allow 49,000 of the vehicles into its market each year. Chinese automakers like BYD have loaded their cars with advanced technology while lowering prices by 15% over the last three years. America’s fleet of new car offerings has seen average prices top $50,000, up nearly 30% since 2019.

American auto executives insist they haven’t abandoned an electric future.

GM, the country’s No. 2 seller of EVs behind Tesla, continues to develop battery-powered vehicles, and CEO Mary Barra said the automaker would begin offering a “handful” of hybrids soon. Ford and Stellantis have plans to launch extended-range electric vehicles, or EREVs, a new kind of plug-in hybrid with an internal combustion engine that recharges the battery as the vehicle drives down the road.

through hybrids, they eventually will end up owning pure-electric vehicles. “You do wonder what a customer will think when they realize that in three months the engine has never started, but they still have to go get the oil changed on it,” said Doug Field, Ford’s chief EV, digital and design officer.

For now, though, Detroit’s automakers are leaning into the lucre that comes from selling millions of fossil-fuel vehicles in a rare moment of loosened regulation.

“They’d be crazy not to do what’s the most profitable thing to do,” Wakefield said. “It would also be crazy not to start investing some of that money into what they really need to do to win in the future.”

Top photo: A Chevrolet Suburban High Country SUV at the Detroit Auto Show on Jan. 14. Bloomberg.