The EPA's Vehicle Standards: Just the Facts
The agency’s proposal will drive up costs for drivers, make our air more unhealthy, and reduce consumer choice, and put polluters over people.
Highway 36 just outside of Boulder, Colorado
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed repealing the landmark endangerment finding, the determination that climate change harms health and is a danger to the public welfare.
The transportation sector is the largest source of climate-harming pollution, yet the Trump administration’s EPA has proposed eliminating all climate-related vehicle standards since 2012—a move that would drive the U.S. auto industry into the past and, by the EPA’s own admission, cause drivers to pay more at the pump.
EPA vehicle standards have been cutting pollution and providing significant net societal benefits since 1975. The Biden administration’s vehicle standards—adopted just last year—would have reduced climate pollution by more than 7 billion metric tons by 2055 (more than the total annual greenhouse gas emissions of the entire United States) and provided $2.1 trillion dollars of net societal benefits.
But now, with the Trump administration’s proposal, that is all at risk of being lost.
What’s at risk
Before diving into what the Trump administration's EPA is proposing, here’s what is at risk of being eliminated.
Historically, the agency's car and truck emissions standards focused on reducing lead, particulate matter, smog, climate pollution, and other pollution from vehicles. As to climate, the metric has been grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) per mile. The EPA set an average stringency across an automaker’s total vehicle fleet, and the average got incrementally lower every year. This was aligned with decades’ worth of standards that the EPA has implemented. These annual reductions translate directly to improved air quality and human health.
And the fact is that the EPA’s standards have worked, despite what some automakers and the oil industry may claim. With the rules in place, automakers showed they can cut pollution while still innovating, providing the vehicles that Americans want to buy, and moving the United States into the future—a future with cleaner air, less extreme weather, healthier communities, and lower costs.
A dirtier, more expensive future
The Trump administration's EPA is trying to use the repeal of the endangerment finding to eliminate all greenhouse gas (GHG) standards for vehicles, claiming that removing these regulations will save “trillions of dollars.”
However, the draft rulemaking documents clearly show that the opposite is true: Eliminating greenhouse gas emissions standards would increase costs—including gasoline prices.
Even when completely ignoring all health and climate benefits from these standards, Trump’s own EPA still finds that the repeal will have a net cost to Americans: $350 billion.
An analysis from the Energy Information Administration also shows that eliminating these regulations as part of the broader attack on climate and clean energy from the Trump administration would increase gasoline prices for consumers—while maintaining the Biden regulations would ultimately reduce prices.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration regulations that are at risk would have saved drivers up to $6,000 over the lifetime of their vehicles.
Politics over the law: EVs in the crosshairs
The EPA’s Draft Regulatory Impact Analysis has one focus—ranting about electric vehicles (EVs).
But it ignores the facts and reality of what the GHG regulations did (or didn’t do). Every previous EPA regulation provided flexibility for automakers to meet the standards. For example, automakers could comply by producing more EVs, hybrid or plug-in hybrid vehicles, or cleaner internal combustion engine vehicles. It will be up to automakers to decide the best way forward—just as they have done for decades.
But the Trump administration's EPA does not recognize that federal standards are technology neutral, and while automakers could meet the standards through EVs, they could also meet the standards through the increasing popularity of hybrid vehicles.
Instead, the Trump administration's EPA’s analysis focuses just on electric vehicles, even while ignoring that EV sales continue to grow in the United States, albeit at a slower pace than previous years. Indeed, automakers are still growing their zero-emission vehicle offerings, with 149 electric models now available for sale in the United States.
Vehicle emission standards are the bare minimum
The United States over the past four years was building toward becoming a leader in clean, zero-emission transportation—a transition that the rest of the world is moving toward. The United States brought in billions of dollars of investments, domestic manufacturing, and jobs, all while improving health and reducing costs to Americans.
In just the first eight months of 2025, the Trump administration is now attempting to not only revert all of that progress but to allow automakers to emit as much GHG pollution as they’d like.
Requiring automakers to do better is not “over-regulation”—it’s needed to provide market certainty, improve health, and protect our climate. And it’s not a binary choice of regulation versus innovation. Instead, both can and should work together, as they’ve historically done.
What comes next
The EPA has one job—and that’s to protect the environment. This proposal to not only eliminate clean vehicles standards but to also rescind the endangerment finding is egregious and chooses polluters over people.
Luckily, there is an opportunity to make your voice heard: There are public hearings on August 19 and 20, 2025, and a public comment period ending on September 22, 2025.
This expert blog was originally published February 26, 2024, and has been updated with new information and links.
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