Donald Trump has diagnosed millions of electric-car drivers with a new illness: worrying about where to charge. At a rally in Las Vegas on Wednesday, the US President claimed that EV owners suffer from a “disease” that apparently begins when their battery is still three-quarters full.
Speaking at the Red Rock Resort, Trump said he had abolished an “electric vehicle mandate” that would have forced everyone to own an EV by 2030, even though there was supposedly “no way” to charge one.
He then offered an example from the Trump school of transport geography: a roadside sign pointing to a charging station 89 miles away. “These people are crazy,” he concluded.
Range anxiety versus range
There are genuine reasons why some Americans hesitate to switch to an EV. Public chargers do not always work, rural coverage remains patchy, and charging still takes longer than filling a petrol tank. Trump’s 89-mile detour, however, remains an unverified rally anecdote rather than a representative picture of the US charging network.
By June, the United States had passed 250,000 public charging ports, including almost 74,000 DC fast-charging connectors. The federal highway charging program Trump regularly ridicules was designed to place fast chargers no more than 50 miles apart and within one mile of an Interstate exit. That is almost the exact opposite of sending drivers 89 miles into the desert.
The battery arithmetic is not particularly kind to Trump either. The median official range of a new US electric car had already reached 283 miles in model year 2024. At three-quarters full, Trump’s supposedly panic-stricken driver would still have about 212 miles left.
That would be enough to reach his mythical charger, return to the highway, and still have more than 30 miles remaining. The longest-range EV certified by the EPA has managed 520 miles.
No compulsory EV by 2030
Trump’s claim that Americans would have been forced into electric cars by 2030 is also false. Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order set a target for zero-emission vehicles to represent 50% of new passenger-car and light-truck sales by 2030.
The target was not legally binding, applied only to new sales, and included plug-in hybrids and hydrogen vehicles alongside battery-electric cars. Existing petrol cars could continue to be driven and resold, while combustion models would still have remained available to new-car buyers. The “mandate” was therefore a policy target recast by Trump as compulsory national electrification.
He was closer to the truth when he said EVs account for around 7% of US car sales. According to Cox Automotive, Americans bought 247,226 new battery cars in the second quarter of 2026. That represented 5.8% of the market, so Trump’s figure was generous but in the right postcode.
Sales rose by 14.7% compared with the first quarter but remained 20.5% below the same period in 2025. That fall followed the withdrawal of the federal clean-vehicle tax credit, which had been worth up to $7,500 and disappeared for cars acquired after September 30, 2025.
Trump is therefore pointing to a low market share that his own government helped make lower. First, remove an incentive, then present weaker sales as evidence that buyers never wanted the product.
Europe moves the other way
Across the Atlantic, the picture is very different. Battery-electric cars captured 20.7% of the EU market during the first half of 2026, up from 15.6% a year earlier.
Their European market share was more than three and a half times the latest US figure. EU buyers registered 1.22 million battery cars in six months, while plug-in hybrids added another 9.8%. Almost one in three new cars sold in the EU came with a charging cable.
Petrol and diesel together accounted for only 29.7% of EU registrations, down from 37.8% a year earlier. Europe is not abandoning the combustion engine overnight, but it is clearly moving in the opposite direction from Trump’s America.
The EU is using emissions rules and national incentives to accelerate the transition. Washington removed its consumer credit and now cites the resulting slowdown as evidence that the technology was unwanted. Trump’s 7% is therefore less a verdict on electric cars than a progress report on his own policy.
A thousand years of gasoline
Las Vegas also received another Trump energy classic. “We have a thousand years of gasoline,” he told the audience, before claiming that the United States possesses 60% of the world’s oil and gas, including Venezuela.
The US is indeed the world’s largest crude-oil producer, averaging a record 13.6 million barrels per day in 2025. Venezuela has the world’s largest proven crude reserves, estimated at around 303 billion barrels.
It is, however, a separate sovereign country. Venezuelan oil does not become American merely because Trump includes it in the same sentence. There is also no recognized reserves calculation showing that the US has a thousand-year supply of gasoline.
Fifteen-minute EVs and electric tanks
The new remarks fit a long-running pattern. Trump previously claimed that electric cars could travel for only 15 minutes before needing a charge.
He also warned that EV policies would destroy 40% of US automotive jobs, apparently transforming a Ford executive’s statement that an EV requires around 40% less assembly labor into a prediction that 40% of all automotive employment would disappear. Fact-checkers found no evidence for that conclusion.
Trump repeatedly alleged that the Biden administration spent $9 billion to build eight charging stations. In reality, Congress allocated $7.5 billion for charging programs running over several years. The rollout was undeniably slow, but the entire budget had not been spent on the first handful of completed sites.
He has also warned that fully electric battle tanks could run out of power in war zones, although the US Army had no program to replace its tanks with battery-electric versions.
Then there was the famous electric-boat dilemma, in which Trump imagined a passenger choosing between electrocution from a sinking boat’s battery and jumping into shark-infested water. Neither battery-electric tanks nor electrically powered shark bait featured in the policies he was attacking.
The Tesla he never drove
Trump’s relationship with EVs becomes more cordial when the car is made by a political ally. In March 2025, he converted the White House driveway into a temporary Tesla showroom and selected an Ultra Red Model S while Elon Musk sat beside him.
Musk did not give the car to Trump. Trump said he would pay the full price himself, reportedly around $80,000, and described the Model S as a great product.
He sat behind the wheel but did not drive it. Presidents generally do not drive on public roads due to Secret Service security requirements, so the car was reportedly intended for White House staff.
When Trump and Musk’s political bromance collapsed in June 2025, the Model S became an inconvenient four-wheeled souvenir. The White House said Trump was considering selling or giving it away. It later disappeared from its regular parking place, but no sale or donation has been publicly confirmed.
The Tesla, therefore, appears to have achieved what many Trump policies could not: a quiet exit without an executive order. The President’s closest encounter with range anxiety may ultimately have been wondering how far he needed to move his Tesla after the friendship ran out of charge.
