The Future Looks Dim for Big Oil in the Motor Vehicle Industry
Because 40% of Big Oil’s American sales are to the Big 3 auto companies, its beleaguered executives won’t go down to defeat by EVs without a last-ditch stand, even as carmakers like Ford desert and other factors.
Just as American consumers closed out the horse-and-buggy era at the start of the 1900s with the arrival of gas-run vehicles, carriage makers saw the handwriting on the wall and gradually moved capital, labor, and creative efforts elsewhere. Big Oil’s executives today certainly recognize that the gas-run vehicle era is fast ending once EV prices drop below $30,000 for working-class consumers.
A sign of these possibilities is that China’s BeteTek company is producing a BD-DB small $860 run-about model, for example, with a 53-mile range. The only EV that comes close is the 2026 Nissan Leaf (303 range) at $29,990. But at least it’s an indicator of affordable EVs in the near future for the American general public.
Consider what’s at stake in Big Oil’s view with its 40 percent projected loss of 9.1 million barrels of oil powering today’s motor vehicles. Of course, the industry will use any means to counter the EV interloper in that marketing niche. It certainly couldn’t survive on the 10 percent sold to the plastics industry. Their remaining major sales categories include foreign exports, heating homes and building, the military, utilities, medical goods, and agricultural products and equipment.
Yet environmentalists became Enemy No. 1 to such sales, especially after it was revealed that executives in the oil and gas and automotive industries, such as Exxon Mobil, GM, and Ford, had known since the 1960s about vehicles’ significant carbon dioxide emissions. It’s now recognized as the chief contributor to global air pollution and to the disastrous impacts of global warming on the weather. Nevertheless, environmentalists insist that they prioritize profits over people’s lives.
This highly secret decision by Big Oil and major carmakers was made quickly, as they realized their industries faced cataclysmic ruin if cars were converted from gasoline to other energy sources. Thus began their mutual, costly, long-time public propaganda campaign against the idea that fossil fuels cause climate change and Earth’s eventual death.
Their industries were temporarily protected from such adverse findings until the late 1960s, when environmentalist presidents were in power, namely Richard Nixon (Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Environmental Protection Agency, Endangered Species Act) and Jimmy Carter (solar energy, Alaska’s wilderness protection, and wildlife refuges).
For decades, large political donations were made to influence presidents and Congress in exchange for their protection. In the last election, according to Common Dreams’ staffer Brett Wilkins, the desperate “fossil-fuel industry interests spent nearly $450 million during the 2024 election cycle in support of Trump and other greedy Republican candidates and initiatives.” Indeed, the President called a meeting at Mar-a-Lago of their executives to demand $1 billion for his 2024 presidential campaign expenses for post-election needs.
In his first term at the White House, it paid off. The public suddenly heard climate change was a “hoax” and that Trump would end any federal effort toward its existence, even banning the words “climate change” and “green” at his Department of Energy. In the second term, among other anti-environmental measures against solar and wind, he allowed the October 1 deadline to expire for Biden’s $7,500 discount for EV cars.
In 2021, Biden secured bipartisan passage of a law allocating $4.4 billion to states for 1,600 EV charging stations every 50 miles on the nation’s highways. Hardly had construction started than Trump “paused” the program for seven months, sufficient time for contractors to withdraw. Lawsuits forced him to resume the program, on which only 2 percent has been spent to date.
But Big Oil couldn’t buy or sway President Joe Biden once he became aware of fossil fuels’ dire physical implications for the world. Nor could heavy pressure from the auto industry. Serving between Trump’s two terms, he put out extraordinary concern for the environment, particularly a major push for EVs: that $7,500 tax credit, tightening pollution standards for vehicles, a ban on new gas-run cars after 2035, and pausing approvals of liquefied natural gas export facilities.
Despite these monumental power plays against the rise of EVs, Big Oil executives were running scared. They knew the clock was ticking for losing 40 percent of their sales to EVs. They were also well aware that the motor industry (especially Ford) would desert them and switch to another (and renewable) energy source. Like battery-powered electricity used in China’s fast-growing car industry, and heavy competition around the globe. Recently, BYD surpassed Tesla in global sales, becoming the world’s top EV producer in 2025, selling 2.26 million vehicles versus 1.64 million vehicles.
True, China has been communist for 77 years, so most of its cars have been made for the general public, just as Henry Ford’s popular $260 Model T (15 million sold 1908-1927) and Germany’s Volkswagen after WWII. Russian technical aid and vehicles created the start of China’s automotive industry. Its creators adroitly set up joint ventures in 1983 to swap ideas and skills with eight foreign carmakers (American Motors, Volkswagen, Peugeot, Suzuki, etc.) and their factories and sales in China.
These companies learned from each other. Chinese engineers, technical specialists, and designers took it from there. Experimenting with battery-powered EV vehicles began in 2001. Then, China’s government in 2009 began to subsidize and give tax breaks to a multitude of carmakers to build affordable electric buses, taxis, and cars. Up to 2023, subsidies amounted to $29 billion. Secondarily, it help halt gas and coal emissions then choking urban areas.
By last August, some 6.9 million EVs were on China’s city streets and country roads. They served by a nationwide network of 3.9 million charging stations, the largest number in the world. What is unique is that most stations are paired with convenience stores open 24/7, and underwritten by the government and the stores. While waiting for a 15-40 minute charge, most drivers and passengers visit the stores for beverages, snacks, and impulse-buying of other items.
Because America’s car companies such as GM and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) seem perpetually focused on high-end customers, such a profitable partnership probably never occurred to them. If it did, they discarded it as too bothersome. But because charging is essential, most EV drivers’ common fear is of being stranded. They need those frequent charging stations. It’s the same as the early 1900s “horseless carriages” up to 2007 when cautious drivers carried a gas can. Ford EVs today come with a towing information service — and a free home charging unit.
Big Oil and the Big 3 carmakers currently are suffering from hits great and small.
One factor is a two-year slump in industrywide automotive sales, plain to any Sunday car-lot shoppers. They’ve heard about the major producers’ retooling factories to EVs. That they’re willing to wait for a new or used EV may partially explain why major vehicle companies have large backlogs of unsold gas-run cars.
Carmakers’ usual remedy to clear those inventories are incentives: “higher cash discounts and more zero-percent financing deals.” Rarely do they lower the “manufacturer’s suggested retail price” (MSRPs). These days it’s obviously not working.
Yet another adverse factor is the recent lawsuit filed by the state of Michigan charging four of Big Oil companies —BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and its trade association—with conspiring “to forestall meaningful competition from renewable energy and maintain their dominance in the energy market.”
In other words, impeding a transition to clean power and transportation (EVs).
Another factor is emphasizing production of the high-end gas-guzzler instead of an affordable, easy-to-park EV run-about such as that $860 Chinese BD-DB.
Now, legendary carmaker Henry Ford believed that volume-selling to the masses yielded greater profits than those high-priced prestige cars for the rich (“Every time I reduce the price of the car by one dollar I get one thousand new buyers”). It’s been a winning and profitable sales philosophy then and now, but which most carmaker CEOs and board members deliberately refuse to follow.
About Ford’s constant leading the pack in sales, he also said: “There’s no use trying to pass a Ford because there’s always another one just ahead.” Ford has always refused to be cowed by Big Oil, major carmakers, or pressure by presidents and lawmakers.
And so when American carmakers learned European and Chinese competitors were retooling for EVs—far cheaper to make, easier to sell—they began doing the same by costly retooling and heavy complaints about layoffs. GM spent $15 billion in 2021, for example.
Whether Big Oil called in its investment in Trump’s compliance may never be known, but he soon began his vendetta against EVs. He certainly indicated the polluting, gas-run vehicles would always be an American staple. GM was prepared evidently to spend another $6 billion on re-re-tooling.
Only Ford balked at the prospect of yet another prohibitively expensive retooling to return to the dead past. It already had six EVs in America’s showrooms: the F-150 Lightning van, Mach-E Mustang, Bronco, Explorer, Maverick, and Expedition. And it just announced 2027 plans to build “the world’s cheapest EV motors ($30,000) on its truck platform.”
Meantime, Ford officials have been standing up against Trump’s bullying on behalf of Big Oil. In mid-December it issued its declaration of independence for the future:
“By 2030, Ford expects approximately 50% of its global volume will be hybrids, extended-range EVs and fully electric vehicles, up from 17% in 2025. Ford will concentrate its North American electric vehicle development on its new, low-cost, flexible Universal EV Platform. This next-generation architecture is engineered to underpin a high-volume family of smaller, highly efficient and affordable electric vehicles designed to be accessible to millions of customers.”
Such regular effrontery seems to have called for Trump to drop in recently at Ford’s Detroit factory for a little disciplinary chat with its officials—followed by a plant tour. Trump wound up facing cat-calls and jeers, exchanging middle-finger gestures and curses from an assembly line worker (“[he] has stood up to Trump more than any of our elected officials.”). Suspended instantly without pay, the spunky worker was sent $800,000 two days later from 30,000 via the “GoFundMe” online donation platform. In view of the thousands of layoffs from the conversion of vehicles from gas to electricity, Trump was lucky to have escaped this floor-wide response of massive middle fingers and far stronger language.
Henry Ford would have been proud —and delighted.
- Image credit: Elite EXTRA.
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