Narayan Subramanian,
The year is 2030 and about half of all cars sold in the world are electric. Thanks to new battery and charging technologies, electric vehicles (EVs) are cheaper than anticipated and the fear of range-anxiety is immaterial. Barring a few competitors in South Korea and Europe, this market belongs entirely to China.
Such a scenario is increasingly a base case. Already in 2025, the majority of Chinese EVs are cheaper than their fossil equivalents and are flooding the world with low-cost exports, including in emerging markets from Ethiopia to Brazil. Alongside producing over 60 percent of the world’s EVs and 80 percent of its batteries, Chinese companies have unveiled new breakthroughs that will solidify their dominance in automobile markets: EVs that charge in five minutes, batteries that don’t require any costly critical minerals, and a luxury EV that can drive for 14 hours on a single charge.
These are tectonic shifts in one of the most politically and economically vital manufacturing sectors across developed nations.
Notably, the United States is missing from the picture—but ongoing negotiations among Republican lawmakers on the heels of the House reconciliation bill passed last month will decide whether this becomes reality. There has been much attention paid on the energy front to the bill’s changes in tax incentives for clean electricity projects. Equally consequential, but receiving far less attention, are the provisions that would disrupt the emerging industrial base for electric vehicles, batteries, and critical minerals.
Narayan Subramanian is an adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia Climate School and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He previously served as the director for energy transition at the White House National Security Council and as an advisor to the secretary of energy in the Biden administration.
Milo McBride is a fellow in the Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was previously an analyst at Eurasia Group and adjunct professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering.
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