Trump's running mate J.D. Vance wants tax rebates for gas cars instead of EVs

A proposed "Drive American Act" would give $7,500 incentives to fossil fuel-powered cars and trucks

By Bradley Brownell / Jalopnik4 min readUpdated August 6, 2024

Ohio Senator J.D. Vance introduced a bill during the 1st session of the 118th Congress that would, if passed, cost American taxpayers billions of dollars, run in the face of climate change, and would sell all of us out to the oil and gas industry. Vance, once a critic of Trump’s firebrand “America’s Hitler” image, has cozied up to him in dramatic fashion, reinventing himself from a Never Trumper to MAGA with direct help from Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk. A big part of that reinvention was a shift to climate denialism and Trump-style populism, both of which are on full view in his proposed Drive American Act.

As recently as 2020 Vance was seen praising solar energy and begged for a “clean energy future” to cure the “climate problem in our society.” When it became clear to him that he’d need Donald Trump’s endorsement to win the Ohio senate race, he began a dramatic shift his positions on climate denialism and fossil fuels. This bill proved to Trump that Vance would kiss the ring in exchange for power, killing the old Vance to grow a new one in his image.

The Drive American Act seeks to gut the Biden administration’s electric vehicle tax rebate program, with the first half of the bill undoing the program altogether. In the latter half of the bill, Vance proposes that American taxpayers follow him into a ridiculously circular logic that would instead place up to a $7,500 rebate on all new gasoline- and diesel-powered cars, trucks, and SUVs. Vehicles with larger payloads and more seats would be eligible for more of the incentive. In order to take advantage of this, you’d need to live in a household making less than $300,000, and the vehicle could not exceed $80,00o. Both “limits” are well north of average.

Americans are buying more electric vehicles than ever before, expected to exceed ten percent of all new cars sold in the country this year. That is, in part, due to the successful incentive program which promotes American-made and union-made vehicles and components over all others. Vance’s bill would instead push Americans into bigger and more expensive gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks. In order to achieve the full $7,500 credit under the Drive American Act, your new purchase would have to be able to haul a big load and lots of people.

As the bill is written, each American-assembled vehicle sold powered by gas or diesel would automatically qualify for a $2,500 price reduction. There is an additional incentive of $500 “for every 250 pounds of payload capacity in excess of 1,000 pounds,” meaning a vehicle with a payload of 2,500 pounds would qualify for an extra $3,000 rebate. The final incentive structure would give an extra $1,000 for each additional seat in vehicles with seating capacity more than 4. A seven-seat vehicle would qualify for a $3,000 bonus. Both bonus incentives are capped at a collective $5,000, meaning you could have a truck with 3,500 pounds of payload capacity hit the full $7,500, or a seven-seat SUV with at least 2,000 pounds of payload capacity.

There are approximately 11 million new vehicles produced in the United States every year, and about 1.6 million of those are destined for export. With an average transaction price on new cars in the U.S. now running at around $47,000 we can assume that at least 80 percent of cars sold are under the $80,000 threshold. In May EVs and plug-in hybrids made up around seven percent of total U.S. new car sales. For the purposes of this exercise, we’ll estimate that 6,993,600 American-made gas and diesel vehicles are eligible for at least the base $2,500 amount.

There’s almost no vehicles on the road which would not qualify for at least some amount of extra seat incentive or payload incentive. Even small sedans like the Alabama-built Hyundai Elantra would get $3,500 back for having five seats. Let’s assume the average incentive would be $5,000, for argument’s sake.

If each of those 6,993,600 new cars made in America and sold to Americans qualified for an average $5,000 incentive, it would add a massive $34,968,000,000 to the national budget.

And to what end? What does J.D. Vance’s America get from pushing new gas and diesel car sales? During his 2022 campaign J.D. Vance was one of the top recipients of oil and gas contributions, getting a nearly $300,000 cash injection in exchange for buying a mouthpiece.

Now if anyone could figure out Elon Musk’s motivations for personally pushing climate denialist and electric car opponent Vance ever closer to second-in-line for the presidency, and committing $45 million per month to the cause, the story might get even more interesting.

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