Recurrent Sees Gas Car Tipping Point In The Near Future, Despite New Tariffs

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Recurrent Auto is an organization that promotes the transition to electric transportation. Its major investors include AAA Washington, CarMax, and Goodyear Ventures, all of which share Recurrent’s vision of making electric vehicle ownership more transparent and accessible. On its website, it says, “That independence matters. It means Recurrent can serve drivers and the industry with data-backed insights without bias or hidden agendas.”

Recently, Recurrent CEO Scott Case said in a blog post, “Gas cars are disappearing, and this data shows it’s happening before most people realize, There will be fewer gas powered cars on the road in California next year than this year, and every year after that. In Colorado and Washington State, that tipping point occurs in 2026.”

“It turns out that when a state approaches 30 percent new EV sales, that’s the tipping point for the number of gas cars on the road falling. It’s a little counterintuitive that it’s not 50 percent when that happens — almost like one of those tricky logic problems on the SATs. The catch is that a certain percentage of all cars on the road exit operation each year. This can be due to accidents or being aged out of the purchase pool.”

The Recurrent Vision Vs Reality

At CleanTechnica, we are all in on the EV revolution. Our pages are filled with stories about electric vehicles, not just in North America, Europe, and China, but in Australia, Africa, South America, the Philippines, and even Nepal. But despite our firm embrace of all things electric (We even like electrified high speed rail. Oh the horror!), we have to be pragmatic as well.

A quick glance around shows a world in which the oil, methane, and coal industries wield outsize influence over governments everywhere. The failed US administration was largely bought and paid for by fossil fuel interest. In exchange for their financial contributions to the last campaign, they have been richly rewarded with new policies that roll back limits on atmospheric pollution from thermal generating plants which burn either methane or coal.

Auto emissions standards have been weakened so manufacturers are now free to build cars and trucks that spew more fine particulates, oxides of nitrogen, and carbon dioxide in their wake. Fracking companies no longer have to worry about turning our aquifers into toxic waste because America has an energy emergency, which has given the fossil fuel companies a license to run roughshod over any and all environmental restrictions.

Today, the EV revolution has a new obstacle in the path to a clean transportation future. Jack Ewing, automotive correspondent for the New York Times, reported that the Commerce Department, now headed by Howard Lutnick, has ruled that China is “dumping” battery grade graphite on the United States. As a result of that finding, the graphite will now face a 92.5% tariff starting today. The ruling by the Commerce Department is preliminary, so if it turns out that it is rescinded as some point in the future — something that is always possible with the TACO president — the money collected will be refunded — maybe.

“The decision will hurt many automakers like Ford, and suppliers like Panasonic and LG Energy Solution, that have been setting up battery factories in the United States. The tariffs are likely to raise prices for electric cars at the same time that the federal government is eliminating tax credits of up to $7,500 for people who buy or lease the vehicles,” Ewing wrote.

Many other items needed to make electric cars — like the copper needed to make electric motors and the aluminum used to make lightweight body parts — are also facing increased tariffs. If you think Big Oil isn’t using its lobbying muscle to put any road blocks in the path of the EV revolution it can, you aren’t paying attention. The new tariffs on graphite could raise the price of a new electric car by about a thousand dollars, but when you add that to the other tariffs and the repeal of the federal tax credit on September 30, 2025, the vision Recurrent laid out seems more like hope than reality.

Tesla is one of the companies that will be hurt by the new tariff on graphite. It sent a letter to the Commerce Department in February saying it had agreed to buy graphite from US suppliers, but “they have not yet shown the technical ability to produce commercial quantities” of battery-grade graphite “at the quality and purity required by Tesla and other battery cell manufacturers.”

The anode material producers group applauded Thursday’s decision. “Dumping is a malicious trade practice used by China to undercut competition and wield geopolitical influence,” the organization said in a statement.

Readers may note that the prior administration had put policies in place to encourage companies to build stuff in America. This administration is taking all those incentives away. The cruel irony is that the US was an early leader in battery technology but seemed quite content to let others develop it. Now the chickens have come home to roost and America finds itself left to wonder what happened to its original lead in the field.

New York Times columnist David Brooks, who used to be a staunch Republican but has distanced himself from the MAGA wing of the party, wrote an essay on July 17 with this title: “Trump is winning the race to the bottom.” It’s an interesting read, but here is the part that pertains to this discussion:

Populists are anti-intellectual. President Trump isn’t pumping research money into the universities; he’s draining it out. The administration is not tripling the National Science Foundation’s budget; it’s trying to gut it. The administration is trying to cut all federal basic research funding by a third, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A survey by the journal Nature of 1,600 scientists in the United States found that three-quarters of them have considered leaving the country.

The response to the Sputnik threat was to go outward and compete. Trump’s response to the Chinese threat generally is to build walls, to erect trade barriers and to turn inward. A normal country would be strengthening friendships with all nations not named China, but the United States is burning bridges in all directions. A normal country would be trying to restore America’s shipbuilding industry by making it the best in the world. We’re trying to save it through protectionism. The thinking seems to be: We can protect our mediocre industries by walling ourselves off from the world. That’s a recipe for national decline.

The problem is not just Trump. China has been displaying intellectual and innovative vitality for decades and the United States has scarcely mobilized. This country sometimes feels exhausted, gridlocked, as if it has lost its faith in itself and contact with its future.

China graduates more engineers every quarter than the entire number of engineers in the US. This is not a strategy for winning, it is a strategy for becoming irrelevant on the world stage. Another story in the New York Times today describes how the leaders of Germany, France, and the UK are planning a new political order that does not include the US.

The alleged president likes to spout off about how anyone who doesn’t agree with him is a sucker, but in fact, it is America that is the sucker for putting this aging buffoon in power. The costs of that error will be enormous and weigh the country down for decades to come. In fact, America may never recover from this self-inflicted wound.