Backward American Capitalism (and Trump) Are Getting Electrical Vehicles All Wrong
The dirty fossil fuel industry keeping gas-powered vehicles on the road are like the horse-and-buggy companies of 1902, which laughed at Henry Ford’s Model T for a while before being put out of business by it.
A BYD Birdsong L luxury EV sedan. “Wang Chuanfu, the CEO of BYD, the largest EV company in the world, is the Henry Ford of the 21st century, not an American,” writes Cole.
(Photo: BYD/promotional)
The dirty fossil fuel industry keeping gas-powered vehicles on the road are like the horse-and-buggy companies of 1902, which laughed at Henry Ford’s Model T for a while before being put out of business by it.
A BYD Birdsong L luxury EV sedan. “Wang Chuanfu, the CEO of BYD, the largest EV company in the world, is the Henry Ford of the 21st century, not an American,” writes Cole.
(Photo: BYD/promotional)
Juan Cole
Dec 26, 2025
Dec 26, 2025
Informed Comment
Euan Gregor at the Ember energy think tank makes a novel argument: The adoption of electric vehicles has spread in a major way to the Global South and is no longer only a Chinese, European and American phenomenon. By EVs Ember means both hybrid and pure battery electric cars.
But it certainly is a Chinese phenomenon, since in that country nearly half of new car sales were electric this year. That is an incredible statistic.
‘An Abject Failure’: Economists Trash Trump’s Disastrous Job Creation Record in Year-End Reviews
Globally, Yale Climate Connections says, 25% of new car sales were electric of some sort. Road transportation, this site says, accounts for 12% of global carbon emissions.
When we say that people in the Global South are buying EVs hand over fist, alas, we aren’t saying that they are buying Chevy Bolts or Nissan Leafs or Teslas. They are mostly buying BYDs, Geelys, BWMs and other Chinese makes, which are 65% the price of a Tesla. Since automobile transportation will be electrified over the next 30 years, the country that makes all those EVs will become the industrial powerhouse of the 21st Century. Most of the growth in Chinese EV exports, Ember says, has come in countries outside the relatively wealthy 38 nations that belong to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Developmentnon (OECD).
Backward American capitalism has been captured by dirty petroleum interests and is like the horse-and-buggy companies of 1902, which laughed at Henry Ford’s Model T for a while before being put out of business by it. (They started by saying that automobiles were impractical because they would scare the horses).
The petroleum industry and the dirty oil countries are aware that China and Europe are electrifying transport, but they had pinned their hopes on a continued demand for internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEV) in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Ember is saying that that hope is a pipe dream (pun intended). Exhibit A: Ethiopia has banned the importation of gasoline cars.
Wang Chuanfu, the CEO of BYD, the largest EV company in the world, is the Henry Ford of the 21st century, not an American. America is a sinking ship under the anti-science, anti-technology, anti-greeen Trump administration, which is more likely to kill off the population with preventable diseases by halting vaccinations than to dominate the world economically.
Ember says, “39 countries have reached an EV sales share larger than 10% in 2025, a third of which are outside Europe.” In 2019, all countries with substantial EV sales had been in Europe.
In particular, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has emerged in 2025 as a major adopter of EVs. Nearly 40% of new vehicle registrations in Vietnam were electric, more than in the European Union and more than the UK, and the electric vehicle industry could generate 6.5 million jobs there over the next 30 years. In Singapore 43% of new car sales were electric in the first nine months of this year. More than 20% of new cars bought in Thailand were electric this year, again more than in the EU or Britain. In Indonesia, about 18% of new vehicle registrations were electric this year, an increase of 49% over 2024. In Malaysia, EV sales were up 74%, and in the Philippines they increased a whopping 656%. Because they started from a low base, however, these two countries are still seeing only 5-6% of new car sales as electric.
India, Mexico and Brazil, two of them BRICS countries, are also emerging as significant EV markets. In Brazil EVs made up 9-10% of new passenger car sales. Since Brazil has an exceptionally clean grid, EVs are almost carbon-free there. In Mexico 8-9% of new vehicle registrations were electric. I visited Mexico twice this year, and noticed the BYD dealerships. In India, about 5% of new passenger car sales were electric this year, a big increase over the past. Five percent doesn’t sound like much, but Indians buy about 4.5 million new cars every year, so that was 225,000 EVs this year. In Turkiye 17% of new car sales are EVs, most of them battery electric. That country makes its own EV, the Togg, but also has attracted Chinese investment for a BYD manufacturing plant.
© 2023 Juan Cole
Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His newest book, "Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires" was published in 2020. He is also the author of "The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East" (2015) and "Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East" (2008). He has appeared widely on television, radio, and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles.
Full Bio >
Euan Gregor at the Ember energy think tank makes a novel argument: The adoption of electric vehicles has spread in a major way to the Global South and is no longer only a Chinese, European and American phenomenon. By EVs Ember means both hybrid and pure battery electric cars.
But it certainly is a Chinese phenomenon, since in that country nearly half of new car sales were electric this year. That is an incredible statistic.
‘An Abject Failure’: Economists Trash Trump’s Disastrous Job Creation Record in Year-End Reviews
Globally, Yale Climate Connections says, 25% of new car sales were electric of some sort. Road transportation, this site says, accounts for 12% of global carbon emissions.
When we say that people in the Global South are buying EVs hand over fist, alas, we aren’t saying that they are buying Chevy Bolts or Nissan Leafs or Teslas. They are mostly buying BYDs, Geelys, BWMs and other Chinese makes, which are 65% the price of a Tesla. Since automobile transportation will be electrified over the next 30 years, the country that makes all those EVs will become the industrial powerhouse of the 21st Century. Most of the growth in Chinese EV exports, Ember says, has come in countries outside the relatively wealthy 38 nations that belong to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Developmentnon (OECD).
Backward American capitalism has been captured by dirty petroleum interests and is like the horse-and-buggy companies of 1902, which laughed at Henry Ford’s Model T for a while before being put out of business by it. (They started by saying that automobiles were impractical because they would scare the horses).
The petroleum industry and the dirty oil countries are aware that China and Europe are electrifying transport, but they had pinned their hopes on a continued demand for internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEV) in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Ember is saying that that hope is a pipe dream (pun intended). Exhibit A: Ethiopia has banned the importation of gasoline cars.
Wang Chuanfu, the CEO of BYD, the largest EV company in the world, is the Henry Ford of the 21st century, not an American. America is a sinking ship under the anti-science, anti-technology, anti-greeen Trump administration, which is more likely to kill off the population with preventable diseases by halting vaccinations than to dominate the world economically.
Ember says, “39 countries have reached an EV sales share larger than 10% in 2025, a third of which are outside Europe.” In 2019, all countries with substantial EV sales had been in Europe.
In particular, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has emerged in 2025 as a major adopter of EVs. Nearly 40% of new vehicle registrations in Vietnam were electric, more than in the European Union and more than the UK, and the electric vehicle industry could generate 6.5 million jobs there over the next 30 years. In Singapore 43% of new car sales were electric in the first nine months of this year. More than 20% of new cars bought in Thailand were electric this year, again more than in the EU or Britain. In Indonesia, about 18% of new vehicle registrations were electric this year, an increase of 49% over 2024. In Malaysia, EV sales were up 74%, and in the Philippines they increased a whopping 656%. Because they started from a low base, however, these two countries are still seeing only 5-6% of new car sales as electric.
India, Mexico and Brazil, two of them BRICS countries, are also emerging as significant EV markets. In Brazil EVs made up 9-10% of new passenger car sales. Since Brazil has an exceptionally clean grid, EVs are almost carbon-free there. In Mexico 8-9% of new vehicle registrations were electric. I visited Mexico twice this year, and noticed the BYD dealerships. In India, about 5% of new passenger car sales were electric this year, a big increase over the past. Five percent doesn’t sound like much, but Indians buy about 4.5 million new cars every year, so that was 225,000 EVs this year. In Turkiye 17% of new car sales are EVs, most of them battery electric. That country makes its own EV, the Togg, but also has attracted Chinese investment for a BYD manufacturing plant.
© 2023 Juan Cole
Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His newest book, "Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires" was published in 2020. He is also the author of "The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East" (2015) and "Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East" (2008). He has appeared widely on television, radio, and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles.
Full Bio >
Trump admin fudged the numbers to make faltering economy look better: economists
Adam Lynch
“A major problem concerns housing costs, which account for about one-third of the data inputs for the (Consumer Price Index),” Hiltzik reports. “Because the BLS was unable to collect rental data for October, it implied that the monthly change in rents was 0 percent in October — further skewing the reported CPI lower. Experts say it will take at least six months to use newly collected data to provide a reliable estimate of housing inflation.”
The delay in sampling, Swonk said, means some seasonal price phenomena, such as airfares, also went unreported. The originally scheduled sampling would have incorporated a pre-Thanksgiving run-up in fares, but by the time the data were collected fares had returned to a non-holiday level.
On top of this, Hiltzik says economists are warning “that some economic factors haven't yet fully played out.”
“That includes Trump's tariffs, which in their execution have been lower than they appeared on the surface, and higher healthcare premiums, which have been forecast or announced but won't actually become effective until 2026.”
Read the full report at this Kansas City Star link.
Adam Lynch
December 26, 2025
ALTERNET
Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik writes that President Donald Trump and his helpers are cheering prematurely over some good economic numbers that came out this month.
On Dec. 18, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that inflation had fallen to an annual rate of 2.7 percent in November, down from 3 percent in September. Then, on Tuesday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that real gross domestic product had gone up by a surprising 4.3 percent annual rate in the third quarter of 2025.
“Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration and its Republican acolytes seized on the figures to boast about Trump's economic policies,” Hiltzik writes in the Tribune National. “White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett proclaimed the inflation figure to be ‘an absolute blockbuster report,’ and described the GDP figure as ‘a great Christmas present for the American people.’
After being hounded by bad numbers for most of Trump’s first year, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) happily jumped aboard, announcing "America is winning again" after the GDP report. He even called it "the direct result” of congressional Republicans’ and President Trump’s policies.
“Um, not so fast,” said Hiltzik, pointing out that the 43-day government shutdown from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12 was the most important cause of gaps in the collected data for the consumer price index calculation.
“You've got to take it with a grain of salt," said Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG US, of the inflation report. "It's confusing and it doesn't quite square with prices that we've observed."
Swonk said Trump’s steep cutbacks at the BLS had already reduced the staff assigned to sampling prices by 25 percent. That prompted the agency to substitute "imputed" numbers in lieu of hard data.
"Those cases can show up as zeros in the percent change of the release," Swonk wrote, which lowers the bottom-line figure. In fact, a sampling scheduled for mid-October had to be canceled, so figures dating from August were used instead. This conceals any price increases in subsequent months.
Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik writes that President Donald Trump and his helpers are cheering prematurely over some good economic numbers that came out this month.
On Dec. 18, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that inflation had fallen to an annual rate of 2.7 percent in November, down from 3 percent in September. Then, on Tuesday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that real gross domestic product had gone up by a surprising 4.3 percent annual rate in the third quarter of 2025.
“Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration and its Republican acolytes seized on the figures to boast about Trump's economic policies,” Hiltzik writes in the Tribune National. “White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett proclaimed the inflation figure to be ‘an absolute blockbuster report,’ and described the GDP figure as ‘a great Christmas present for the American people.’
After being hounded by bad numbers for most of Trump’s first year, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) happily jumped aboard, announcing "America is winning again" after the GDP report. He even called it "the direct result” of congressional Republicans’ and President Trump’s policies.
“Um, not so fast,” said Hiltzik, pointing out that the 43-day government shutdown from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12 was the most important cause of gaps in the collected data for the consumer price index calculation.
“You've got to take it with a grain of salt," said Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG US, of the inflation report. "It's confusing and it doesn't quite square with prices that we've observed."
Swonk said Trump’s steep cutbacks at the BLS had already reduced the staff assigned to sampling prices by 25 percent. That prompted the agency to substitute "imputed" numbers in lieu of hard data.
"Those cases can show up as zeros in the percent change of the release," Swonk wrote, which lowers the bottom-line figure. In fact, a sampling scheduled for mid-October had to be canceled, so figures dating from August were used instead. This conceals any price increases in subsequent months.
“A major problem concerns housing costs, which account for about one-third of the data inputs for the (Consumer Price Index),” Hiltzik reports. “Because the BLS was unable to collect rental data for October, it implied that the monthly change in rents was 0 percent in October — further skewing the reported CPI lower. Experts say it will take at least six months to use newly collected data to provide a reliable estimate of housing inflation.”
The delay in sampling, Swonk said, means some seasonal price phenomena, such as airfares, also went unreported. The originally scheduled sampling would have incorporated a pre-Thanksgiving run-up in fares, but by the time the data were collected fares had returned to a non-holiday level.
On top of this, Hiltzik says economists are warning “that some economic factors haven't yet fully played out.”
“That includes Trump's tariffs, which in their execution have been lower than they appeared on the surface, and higher healthcare premiums, which have been forecast or announced but won't actually become effective until 2026.”
Read the full report at this Kansas City Star link.
U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he arrives to deliver remarks on the U.S. economy and affordability at the Mount Airy Casino Resort in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, U.S. December 9, 2025. REUTERS Jonathan Ernst
December 25, 2025
ALTERNET
Politicians and President Donald Trump sell the vision of a manufacturing renaissance, but the Washington Post Editorial Board argues their vision of “massive factories employing thousands of people” are not possible in real-life America.
“Some places have had manufacturing renaissances,” reports the Post, citing its coverage of Bridgeport, Connecticut, with an old manufacturing city allegedly sputtering “back to life,” according to the headline.
Once the home of Remington and divisions of General Electric, which filed for bankruptcy in 1991, the area is now serving vocational education programs that are helping workers without college degrees cultivate welding and technician skills, which almost guarantee careers.
It was a “feel-good story politicians want to hear,” writes the Post, though the paper observed that the hard truth of re-emerging factory jobs “barely registered” in the overall data on Bridgeport’s economy. Manufacturing employment in the Bridgeport-Stamford-Danbury metropolitan statistical area saw only “a small bump” and remains near 30-year lows, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“Real manufacturing output in the Bridgeport metro area has been rising but is also quite low compared to before the Great Recession, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis,” the Post reports. “The turnaround in the past few years is that manufacturing is no longer a drag on Bridgeport’s GDP growth, as it was during most years since the Great Recession. It flipped positive in 2021” — But is has remained “barely above zero” since then.
The problem, according the Post, is that the new jobs “are relatively few in number,” however high in compensation.
“These newer, successful manufacturing companies in Bridgeport don’t have assembly lines with workers performing repetitive tasks. They have high-skilled workers meeting exacting specifications for a relatively small number of picky customers,” said the Post. “That’s what most American manufacturing firms look like today. Ninety-eight percent of U.S. manufacturing firms employ fewer than 500 people, and 93 percent employ fewer than 100, according to 2022 data.”
The “manufacturing” jobs actually employ more robots than anything, per the Post's editorial. Automation makes them extremely productive, and more productive workers are paid more, but it still means fewer people work in manufacturing than in the past.
“Pro-manufacturing politicians face a choice,” says the Post. “They can applaud the success of places like Bridgeport while conceding that manufacturing isn’t a jobs juggernaut. Or they can continue to yearn for the mass-production plants of yesteryear, which aren’t coming back. Even if they did, they would yield worse, lower-paying jobs than the high-tech manufacturing plants of today.”
Read the Post's editorial at this link.
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