Business
With an executive order, Trump casts doubt on the future of EVs in California
Shel Singh has gone all-in on electric vehicles in recent years. The 36-year-old business owner currently drives an electric Porsche. Before that, it was a Tesla.
But with President Trump working aggressively to reverse policies enacted by former President Biden intended to bolster the EV market and phase out gas-powered vehicles, he’s starting to question the wisdom of his choices.
Faced with what he expects to be declining demand for EVs and fewer resources to build a network of charging stations under Trump, Singh, who lives near Sylmar in northern Los Angeles County, said he’s not optimistic about his chances for re-selling his Porsche in the future.
He is not alone. Electric vehicle owners, sellers and manufacturers are awash in uncertainty after Trump signed an executive order Monday that took aim at several EV-friendly initiatives. With the stroke of a pen, the President froze funding allocated for charging infrastructure and abandoned Biden’s ambitious goal that EVs make up half of new cars sold in the U.S. by 2030.
Trump also signaled in the order that he would eliminate a popular $7,500 tax credit available to eligible buyers of electric vehicles and revoke California’s authority to set its own regulations on gas-powered cars. Both of those moves come with legal hurdles, said Bryant Walker Smith, an associate law professor at the University of South Carolina.
“The executive order is clearly evidence of a change in tone from the last administration,” Smith said. “But there are legal constraints that in theory should limit some of the short-term implications.”
Although Trump has said he wants to do away with what he calls Biden’s “EV mandate,” there is no federal rule requiring the purchase of EVs. Last December, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency signed off on a California clean air rule that would ban the sale of new gasoline vehicles in the state by 2035. If it survives Trump’s challenges, the Advanced Clean Cars II rule would require 35% of new vehicles sold in the state to be all-electric by 2026, a goal that dealerships have said is unrealistic.
More than a dozen states have followed California’s lead in adopting clean air standards that are stricter than federal law. Trump is seeking to eliminate these standards and the EV incentive programs that come with them.
If Trump is successful in killing the tax credit, EV sales will take a hit, experts agreed. The credit goes a long way in making a new or used EV more affordable and desirable, said Karl Brauer, an executive analyst at iSeeCars.com.
“We’re going to see an undeniable drop in electric vehicle sales when the $7,500 credit goes away,” he said. “It’s not as easy to pin down how drastic that drop will be.”
When he bought his Tesla 3, Singh, who owns an online electronics company, said he was told by the salesperson that he would receive the credit, but later discovered his income was too high for him to be eligible. His frustration led to him trading out his Tesla for the Porsche.
Preparing for a drop in interest driven by the new administration, some manufacturers have already begun shifting away from sales strategies dominated by electric vehicles, including Porsche, which hinted last October that it would stray from its electric-only strategy.
Major manufacturers that produce electric and gasoline-powered vehicles have a better chance of adapting if EV sales fall significantly, Brauer said, including Volkswagen, Ford and General Motors. Companies like Rivian and Lucid, which make only EVs and sell directly to consumers, are in a more precarious position.
Days before Trump took office, Rivian finalized a $6.6-billion loan agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy to fund a manufacturing facility in Georgia. Rivian’s stock has dropped more than 9% over the past month.
Dan Ives, a Wedbush Securities industry analyst, said his company predicts demand for EVs will fall between 15% and 20% over the next three to four years if the tax credit is revoked. As a result, he said, the EV market will shrink.
“There’s going to be consolidation,” Ives said. “There’s less incentives for car manufacturers to head down that road when the government is going the opposite way.”
While the elimination of the tax credit would hurt most sellers of EVs, Tesla is a likely exception, Ives said. Because of the company’s size and market dominance, Tesla could actually benefit from decreased competition from manufacturers who relied on the credit to increase sales.
Across California, dealerships vary in their reliance on EV sales. Robb Hernandez, president of Camino Real Chevrolet in Monterey Park, said roughly 50 to 60 of the 150 to 200 new cars they sell per month are electric.
“EV sales have been strong for us the last four to six months with new launches,” Hernandez said, which include the Blazer EV and Silverado EV. “Because of the incentives and lease programs and everything else out there, we’ve been able to do pretty well moving them.”
With Trump targeting those incentives, Hernandez said he’s not sure how things will play out.
“We’re in a holding pattern,” he said. “We don’t really know what kind of short- or long-term effects this is going to have on the market.”
Brian Maas, president of the California New Car Dealers Assn., said an average of 13% of sales across the 1,400 dealerships his organization represents are electric, but that number can vary significantly based on location and manufacturer.
Jessie Dosanjh, who owns 18 dealerships in the Bay Area, said electric vehicles make up around 15% of sales in aggregate. That’s a far cry from the 35% the state wants to see by 2026, he said.
Orange County resident Tina Thurm received the $7,500 tax credit when she purchased her Tesla Model S in 2020, but said she likely would have bought the car anyway. “That wasn’t instrumental in my decision to purchase,” she said of the credit. “It was the test drive that pushed me over.”
Thurm, who owns two gas-powered vehicles along with her Tesla, said Trump is protecting Americans’ right to choose what kind of car they drive.
“Nothing should be mandated,” said Thurm, who owns a jewelry business and is now semi-retired at 70 years old. “I certainly don’t want the government to tell me what I must purchase.”
Other SoCal residents are discouraged by Trump’s actions and what they signify for the EV market.
“Not getting another EV after my Tesla lease ends,” one Californian wrote on social media this week. “This country is moving backwards and isn’t ready for full EV adoption. It’s a shame because I really love my Tesla.”
Early in April, Ruben Hallali got an unusual alert on his phone: The evening temperature at Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport had jumped about 6 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds.
Mr. Hallali, the chief executive of the weather risk company Sereno, had set up notifications for extreme weather swings. Then, nine days later, it happened again.
“It was an isolated jump, at one single station, early in the evening,” said Mr. Hallali, who added that he noticed another strange coincidence about the spikes: The timing was just right for somebody to reap a windfall on the betting site Polymarket.
He wasn’t the only one who sensed a problem. Météo-France, the country’s national meteorological service, filed a complaint last week with the police and local prosecutors, saying it had evidence that a weather sensor at Charles de Gaulle, the country’s largest airport, may have been tampered with.
The temperature swings, experts said, coincided with a period of unusual activity on Polymarket, one of the leading online prediction markets, which allow users to wager on the outcome of virtually anything.
One increasingly popular area is weather betting, where speculators can make real-time wagers on temperature readings, rainfall totals, the number of Atlantic hurricanes in a year and much more — with payouts in the thousands of dollars and higher.
As the stakes rise, so has the temptation to tamper with the instruments used to generate weather readings in hopes of engineering a lucrative outcome. Experts warn that this could have dangerous ripple effects, like degrading the information that underpins safe air travel.
Temperature data is used in a host of calculations at airports, helping determine correct takeoff distance, climb rate and whether crews need to apply frost treatment to planes. It’s crucial to airport safety, Mr. Hallali said.
“The Charles de Gaulle incident is not an isolated curiosity,” Mr. Hallali said. “It is what happens when financial incentives meet fragile data infrastructure.”
On April 6, the temperature reading at Charles de Gaulle jumped from 64 degrees Fahrenheit to 70 degrees at 7 p.m., before slowly falling over the next hour, according to data from Météo-France.
On April 15, the recorded temperature climbed even more sharply, from 61 degrees at 9 p.m. to 72 at 9:30 p.m., then dropping back to 61 a half-hour later.
In both instances, the spikes set the high temperature for the day, the metric on which some Polymarket wagers rest.
Laurent Becler, a spokesman for Météo-France, said the service contacted the police after noticing the discrepancies in temperature data. He declined to comment further on the case, saying it was under investigation.
Mr. Hallali said that after the first instance, experts and commenters on the French weather forum Infoclimat began to search answers. Theories were floated, including user error. But after the second spike, commenters zeroed in on the unusual Polymarket wagers, which totaled nearly $1.4 million over the two days, according to the company’s data.
The sums bet on April 6 and 15 were hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than on typical days this month.
It is not the first time that strange bets on prediction markets have raised accusations of insider trading.
On Thursday, a U.S. Army special forces soldier who helped capture President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in January was charged with using classified information to bet on outcomes related to Venezuela, making more than $400,000 on Polymarket. Late last year, another trader on the site made roughly $300,000 betting on last-minute pardons from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. before he left office.
Polymarket did not immediately respond to a request for comment. While the site used to tie some bets to temperature readings at Charles de Gaulle, this week, after Météo-France filed its complaint, the platform began using temperatures taken at another airport near the city, Paris-Le Bourget, according to recent bets on the site.
Representatives for Charles de Gaulle airport declined to comment beyond saying that the case was under investigation. The airport police also declined to comment. The Bobigny Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is handling the case, declined to answer questions about the investigation but said that no complaint had been filed against Polymarket.
As to how the instruments could have been tampered with, a number of theories have been offered online, including by use of a hair dryer or a lighter. Mr. Hallali said that the precision of the spike on April 15 suggested the use of a calibrated portable heating device, although he declined to speculate about what kind.
“Markets are expanding into every domain where an outcome can be observed, measured, and settled,” he said. “As these markets multiply, so does the surface area for manipulation.”
As the war in Iran strangles the flow of oil around the globe, California’s jet fuel reservoirs are running low.
The state — which refines much of its own fuel in El Segundo and elsewhere but still relies on crude oil imports — has seen its jet fuel stock decline by more than 25% from last year’s peak to a level not seen since 2023, according to data from the California Energy Commission.
The supply is shrinking as a global shortage is already affecting travelers’ summer plans with canceled flights and higher fares. It could even affect plans for people coming to Los Angeles for the 2026 World Cup, which starts in June, said Mike Duignan, a hospitality expert and professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.
“People don’t know exactly how this is going to escalate,” he said. “There’s a huge black cloud over the sea for the World Cup and the travel slump that we’re seeing is all linked to this oil shortage.”
As fuel supplies shrink, flight prices are rising. Airlines are adding baggage surcharges to cover fuel costs. Several routes leaving from smaller California hubs, including Sacramento and Burbank, have already been canceled.
Air Canada has suspended flights for this summer, cutting routes from JFK to Toronto and Montreal.
“Jet fuel prices have doubled since the start of the Iran conflict, affecting some lower profitability routes and flights which now are no longer economically feasible,” the airline said in a statement last week.
Europe had just more than a month’s supply of jet fuel left last week, the International Energy Agency said. In an effort to cut costs, the German airline Lufthansa slashed 20,000 flights from its summer schedule this week.
Without a fresh oil supply flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, the situation is unlikely to improve, experts said. The oil reserves countries and companies have in storage are helping fill shortfalls, but the squeezed supply chain could still wreak economic havoc.
“When there’s a shortage somewhere, everything is affected,” said Alan Fyall, an associate dean of the University of Central Florida Rosen College of Hospitality Management. “Airlines are being cautious, and I would say that is a very wise strategy at the moment.”
California’s jet fuel stock reached its lowest levels in two and a half years at 2.6 million barrels last week, down from a peak of more than 3.5 million barrels last year.
The California Energy Commission, which tracks fuel inventory, said the state’s current jet fuel stock is sill sufficient.
“Current production and inventory levels of jet fuel are within historical ranges,” a spokesperson said. “Although supply is tight, no structural deficit has emerged yet. The present tightness reflects short‑term global market stress. As long as refinery operations remain stable, California is positioned to meet regional jet fuel needs.”
Europe has been affected more directly because it relies on the Middle East for the vast majority of its crude oil and many refined products, experts said. California gets crude oil from the Middle East but also from Canada, Argentina and Guyana.
The state has the capacity to refine around 200,000 barrels of jet fuel per day, most of it from refineries in El Segundo and Richmond.
The amount of crude oil originating in the state has been declining since the early 2000s, as state regulations and drilling costs have led to more imports.
California has become particularly vulnerable to supply-chain shocks like the war in Iran, says Chevron, one of the companies that provides jet fuel in the state.
“The conflict in the Mideast Gulf has exposed the danger of California’s decision to offshore energy production,” said Ross Allen, a Chevron spokesperson. “Taxes, red tape and burdensome regulations cost the state nearly 18% of its refinery capacity in just the past year, and we urge policymakers to protect the remaining manufacturing capacity.”
In 2025, 61% of crude oil supply to California’s refineries came from foreign sources, according to the California Energy Commission. Around 23% came from inside the state, down from 35% five years ago.
The state’s refining capacity has also been declining, said Jesus David, senior vice president of Energy at IIR Energy. The West Coast region’s refining capacity has decreased from 2.9 million to 2.3 million barrels a day since 2019, he said.
“California’s had issues prior to the war,” David said. “Nothing new has been built over the past 30 years, and California has closed a lot of capacity.”
The result is higher prices for both gasoline and jet fuel in the state. Jet fuel at LAX costs close to $15 per gallon this week, compared with almost $10 at Denver International Airport and $11 at Newark International Airport.
Gasoline prices have also been hit hard by the global conflict. Average gas prices in California are close to $6 a gallon, around $2 higher than the national average.
The West Coast is a “fuel island” because it’s not connected by pipelines to the rest of the country, United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby said in an interview last month. That means oil and refined products have to be brought in by ships.
“Fuel price is more susceptible to supply weakness on the West Coast than anywhere else in the country,” Kirby said.
Some airlines might not survive the turmoil if oil prices don’t level out soon, he said. Spirit Airlines, a budget carrier based in Florida, is reportedly facing imminent liquidation if it isn’t bailed out by the Trump administration.
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
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