Thousands of people are expected to converge in downtown L.A. as this year’s Los Angeles Auto Show wraps up on Sunday. The event at the Los Angeles Convention Center is one of the oldest and largest auto exhibitions in the nation and features hundreds of new vehicles and concept cars, including the latest in EVs.

EVs always feature prominently at the L.A. Auto Show, and this year there were again new ones available for purchase in addition to those that carmakers are still planning. The show has long leaned on California’s reputation as a climate leader to launch the latest in electric technology. This year it comes at an important moment. The Trump administration has ended rebates that lowered the price of EVs, aiding the oil industry. It’s unclear what effect that will have on sales.

Electrifying vehicles is one of the main ways governments, including California’s, address climate change. The state has committed to 100% decarbonization by 2045 and has prioritized the transition away from smog- and pollution-forming combustion engines.

Among the EVs exhibited this year are the 2026 version of the Nissan Leaf, which now offers an estimated 303 miles of range on a charge, and the Chevy Bolt, which offers an estimated 255 miles of range. The Bolt is returning due to “popular demand,” after being discontinued in 2023, company officials said. The starting retail price for both cars is around $29,000.

The auto show also saw new models debut, including the 2026 Jeep Recon — a Wrangler-style EV advertised by the company as “the only fully electric Trail Rated SUV” — that offers 230 miles of range starting at $65,000. The range for the new Hyundai Ioniq 6 N has not yet been announced but is expected to land around 257 miles when the car comes to market early next year.

Luxury EVs on display include the $77,000 Rivian RIS and the $80,000 Lucid Gravity, with estimated ranges up to 410 and 450 miles, respectively. (Rivian also displayed its upcoming R2 — a smaller SUV with a promised price of $45,000 that is expected to offer more than 300 miles of range.)

In addition to canceling rebates on new and used EVs, the Trump administration has moved to block California’s landmark ban on the sale of gas-powered cars, prompting a lawsuit from the state in return.

The administration’s actions pushed many consumers to snap up EVs before the federal incentives expired, with California reporting a record number of zero-emission vehicle sales in the third quarter of 2025 — just shy of 126,000, or about 29% of new car sales.

However, the headwinds coming out of Washington, D.C., also appear to be giving some automakers pause. Brands such as Acura, Ford and GM in recent months have announced plans to discontinue some electric models and scrap plans for new ones. The climate reporting website Heatmap noted that there was an absence of enthusiasm for EVs at press events surrounding this year’s L.A. Auto Show, and that “fanfare over the electric future was decidedly tamped down.”

In October, the first full month after the repeal of the federal tax credit, EVs accounted for just 5.2% of new vehicle retail sales in the U.S., according to consumer insights company J.D. Power. The number represented a notable tumble from the all-time high of 12.9% in September.

The forecast for November is mostly the same, with EVs expected to represent about 6% of national car sales.

Still, many in the industry believe the lull will amount to little more than a bump in the road.

“The strong will survive, so the ones who make really good EVs that are priced right, you’ll see them bounce back,” said Ed Loh, head of editorial with Motor Trends, in an interview with Fox Business at the L.A. Auto Show.

The show also comes as California continues to ramp up its EV charging network. The state in September surpassed 200,000 fully public and shared EV charging ports — an increase of about 20,000 since March, according to the California Energy Commission. There are now more charging ports than gas pumps.

Gov. Gavin Newsom also reaffirmed the state’s commitment to electric vehicles with a June executive order on reducing vehicle emissions and funding for clean manufacturers, among other items.

What’s more, the global picture for EV remains bright. The International Energy Agency reported 17 million electric car sales worldwide in 2024, a roughly 25% increase over the year prior.

Sales in 2025 are expected to exceed 20 million, or more than a quarter of cars sold worldwide.

By Molly Bedford, Gabriel Blanco, Laura Salaberry, Rebecca Lieberman, Veronica Majerol and Ashwin Seshagiri

November 28, 2025

California is among the world’s largest economies, but the engines that drive it haven’t been firing on all cylinders.

The state has been buffeted by a litany of layoffs this year from Hollywood to Silicon Valley — and beyond. Economists cite several explanations, including contraction in the entertainment industry, displacements caused by artificial intelligence and overall uncertainty in the national economy.

This year, thousands of workers at Amazon, Intel, Salesforce, Meta, Paramount, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co. have lost their jobs. Even Apple just announced a rare round of cuts.

Seemingly no corner of entertainment and tech has been immune from the cost-cutting that has put workers on edge.

“People are hunkering down because they think a storm is coming,” UC Berkeley labor economist Jesse Rothstein said.

Through October there were 158,734 layoffs announced in California, compared with 136,661 for the same period last year. That was the most of any state, lagging behind only Washington, D.C., which has been hit hard by federal downsizing, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.

Nationwide, the layoffs have topped 1 million so far for the year, the most since the pandemic, according to Challenger.

As in the late 1990s, there’s a disruptive technology at play again — artificial intelligence, which is fueling a Silicon Valley investment boom reminiscent of the build-up to the last tech bust.

AI has been cited in more than 48,000 of the U.S. job cuts this year, with about 31,000 of those taking place in October alone, Challenger said.

“AI is replacing some of the entry-level jobs in tech. And yes, AI is actually replacing some jobs in Hollywood,” said economist Chris Thornberg, founding partner at Beacon Economics in Los Angeles.

Other factors are at work too. Intel Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan emailed employees after the company lost $821 million in the first quarter that becoming more efficient was key to a turnaround. “I’m a big believer in the philosophy that the best leaders get the most done with the fewest people,” he wrote.

The layoffs have challenged the notion that engineering jobs are a safe and sure path to success, perhaps in a way not since the first tech bust.

The mood is glum as well in Hollywood, where a succession of challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic, the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes in 2023 and runaway production to other locales has taken a toll — and that was before the current wave of consolidations that is threatening more job losses, with Warner Bros. the latest studio on the block.

The downsizing has contributed to California having the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 5.5% in August, with the exception of Washington, D.C. — though the state’s large farm economy with its agricultural workforce is a big contributor to its persistently high rate, Thornberg said.

The rate is unchanged from July but up from 5.3% a year earlier. (More recent figures have been delayed by the government shutdown.)

The job insecurity is reflected in the percentage of workers quitting their jobs, which fell to 1.9% in August, a 10-year low.

Yet for all the doom and gloom, there isn’t any consensus that the local, state or national economies are heading into a recession, even with President Trump’s erratic tariff and immigration policies that have whipsawed industries and created economic uncertainty for businesses.

Part of the reason is that job creation has held up, with the most recent report last week showing the economy added 119,000 nonfarm jobs in September, exceeding forecasts, even as the unemployment rate edged up a tenth of a point to 4.4%.

Another significant reason, of course, is the river of money flowing into AI. Last year, private investment in AI totaled about $109 billion in the U.S., with China and the U.K. under $10 billion, according to the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

By one estimate, Silicon Valley tech giants will invest more than $400 billion this year in AI data centers. Amazon, which recently announced plans to cut 14,000 corporate jobs, said this week that it would invest up to $50 billion to expand its AI and supercomputing services for the U.S. government.

Moody’s Analytics estimates AI spending this year has so far added more than half a point to GDP and is helping keep the U.S. out of a recession.

Now, the bigger fear is that the spending is feeding a gigantic stock market bubble that has benefited higher-income consumers — while middle-class and lower-income workers worry more about keeping a job and a roof over their heads.

The volatile market was calmed last week only when AI chipmaker Nvidia reported strong earnings.

The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index fell to 51.0 this month, down from 53.6 in October, with a number above 50 indicating a positive sentiment. Survey economists point to persistent inflation and the loss of income.

To put the statistic into perspective, the index is lower than at the height of the Great Recession in 2008, and reflects what is called a K-shaped economy, with higher earners spending and lower earners not.

The effect has been so profound it’s not just reflected in the growth of luxury sales but in who’s spending at America’s two great consumer bellwethers — McDonald’s and Walmart.

Prices have risen so high at the country’s largest burger chain that sales to low-income customers have fallen while higher-income consumers are spending more. Walmart noted the same dynamic in its own earnings report last week.

Raul Anaya, co-head of business banking for Bank of America and president of its Greater Los Angeles operations, said that while layoffs by large companies are drawing attention, the bank’s recent survey of small and medium-sized business owners shows they are cautiously optimistic about the economy.

The survey, conducted in September, found that 74% think their revenue will increase in the next 12 months, though they would like to see a stabilization of tariff policies and a reduction in inflation and interest rates. Only 1% expected to lay off employees, while 43% said they expected to hire more workers.

“That’s fairly consistent with what I’m hearing from CEOs that I’ve been spending time with either over lunch or dinners that I regularly host throughout the last several months,” he said. He noted the Los Angeles region in particular is benefiting from the growth of aerospace and defense.

“There are those companies that are serving some of these growing industries that continue to build a greater presence in Southern California or L.A. They’re part of the supply chain ecosystem of these broader industry concentrations,” he said.

In another positive sign, venture capital investments in the region more than doubled to $5.8 billion in the second quarter, compared with a year earlier. Costa Mesa-based defense tech company Anduril received the most funding, raising a $2.5-billion funding round, according to research firm CB Insights.

That kind of money has spurred a hiring spree among scores of aerospace and defense tech companies, many of which were started by former employees of SpaceX, which has large operations in Hawthorne.

A report this year by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. found the county’s aerospace and defense industries added 11,000 jobs between 2022 and 2024, with an average wage of $141,110.

And while high, the county’s unemployment rate of 5.7% in August is lower than a year earlier, when it was 6.1%.

Vast, a Long Beach company building a space station, started in 2021 with just a few dozen employees. A few months ago the figure was close to 1,000 and they were working in a recently expanded 189,000-square-foot headquarters complex — to cite just one example.

“There’s a lot of mixed readings out there. If you look at one set of indicators, you’ll see one economy. You look at the other set, you’ll see a different economy,” Thornberg said. “This is the strangest economy I have seen in 25 years I have been in this business.”