Is The US Going To End DEAD LAST In Vehicle Electrification?

The useful part

0 Comments Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all of the high-quality, original content we publish week after week despite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles. I just read Paul Fosse's article on the rapid rise of Chinese cars and electrification in Brazil, where the share of pure electric vehicles (BEVs) has almost caught up with the BEV share in the United States.

How it works

• Then we've got Juan Diego Celemín Mojica's recent report on the ridiculously fast vehicle electrification in the country of Uruguay.
• Europe, formerly ahead of China, has fallen far behind the red giant, but it is still several times better than the US, sitting at 26% BEV share in July.
• Okay, the other economic and automotive powerhouses of the world are far ahead of us — nothing new and no one is going to argue that.
• Some markets are already changing fast, and we have to assume this trend will soon spread to other markets in South America, Asia, Africa, etc.
• One issue with the US is there's extreme protectionism against Chinese companies, and against other companies as well.

What to take from it

Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. It doesn't seem like there's any real chance of that changing anytime soon. In the meantime, policy changes and automaker apathy or animosity toward EVs have led to a withdrawal in the EV market and EV projects getting canned.

Example or evidence

• African countries are realizing it makes much more sense to cut their dependence on oil and support their local economies.
• Which country in the world is blocking EV growth and trying to tamper down EV momentum more than the US?
• Even Russia is reportedly catching on and adopting competitive Chinese EV models.
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Details worth keeping

Is The US Going To End DEAD LAST In Vehicle Electrification?. (The US, for comparison, was at 5.9% in the first half of 2026.) This is a story we've been covering for years now, so nothing here is going to be a shock surprise to anyone, but as I was getting to the end of Paul's story, I started thinking that the US could actually end up dead last in vehicle electrification. China, of course, is far, far ahead of us by now.

Related coverage

• Insideevs: U.S. regulators are trying to slow down the transition to EVs. But Europe and China aren't going to wait up for us.
• Cleantechnica: For a handful of years, legacy automakers were pumping out press releases on electric cars consistently and frequently.
• Autospies: LOSING POWER. Ford EV Sales Take A MAJOR Nosedive!
• Cleantechnica: We all know that one of Donald Trump's favorite things to do is complain about China and put tariffs — or threaten to put tariffs — on Chinese produced goods.