A Republican senator is trying to kill the federal EV tax credit, again
This time it's Senator John A. Barrasso from Wyoming who's leading the charge.
The federal electric vehicle tax credit has been a cornerstone of the car industry's plan to push EV adoption, and now it looks like a Republican senator from Wyoming wants to get rid of it, according to Electrek.
Senator John A. Barrasso introduced his bill on Saturday, called "A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to terminate the credit for new qualified plug-in electric drive motor vehicles and to provide for a Federal Highway user fee on alternative fuel vehicles." It seeks not only to revoke the EV tax credit but to tax those vehicles more with a highway use fee, since electric vehicles do not pay into the gas tax, which helps keep our infrastructure from... well, falling apart further, hopefully.
This isn't the first time that the EV tax credit has come under fire, with the GOP making moves to kill it as part of the tax bill the party submitted in 2017. That got shot down, but it's possible that this standalone bill may have better luck getting passed by the Republican-led Senate.
The full text of the bill is not yet available on Congress' website, so it's hard to say what exactly is included in it. One thing that's been made clear is that much of Barrasso's campaign funding comes from the oil and gas industry, so we can guess that it might use some unfriendly language toward alternative fuel vehicles.
What remains to be seen is what effect the phase-out of Tesla's tax credit eligibility will have on its sales now that it's crossed the 200,000 delivery threshold, as that will possibly serve as a bellwether for the future of the EV industry as a whole if this bill passes into law.
