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Tthe Trump administration’s elimination of tax credits; for electric vehicle purchases had their projected impact in the final quarter of 2025, causing a 36% drop for the segment after a surge in the third quarter, as Americans scrambled to grab the $7,500 incentive before it disappeared. As a result, full-year electric vehicle sales fell 2 percent to 1.275 million from a record 1.3 million in 2024, according to Cox Automotive.
The outlook for battery vehicles in the US this year isn’t much better, with London-based forecaster Benchmark Minerals Intelligence expecting a further 29% decline. But this weakness is not the story worldwide. In fact, global EV sales could rise nearly 16% this year to 23.9 million units, with China growing around 20% and Europe growing 14%.
Against the domestic recession, General Motors and Ford have announced huge changes in strategy and are making big cuts as a result: Ford took a $19.5 billion charge last year and canceled its F-150 Lightning electric pickup. GM has so far said it is taking at least $7.6 billion in charges to scale back its battery and EV production plans, a major reversal from steady investment in recent years.
GM’s turnaround is particularly surprising after it quietly became the second-largest EV seller in the U.S. last year, delivering nearly 170,000 models through its Chevrolet, Cadillac and GMC brands, a company record and 48% year-over-year growth. Only Tesla, which is down 7% in the US in 2025, sold more. And as that brand becomes increasingly toxic in California, the top EV buyer in the US, due to CEO Elon Musk’s hardline political and social views, there’s certainly an opportunity for GM, with affordable models like the Equinox EV and the refreshed Bolt hatchback, to gain more market share.
The $27 billion in cuts by Ford and GM, aimed at increased sales of large, gas-powered SUVs and pickups, may make short-term economic sense, but they seem short-sighted and out of step with where the world is headed. China is already the leading maker and buyer of electric vehicles – consumer sales were 10 times those in the US – and is finding more opportunities in both developing and advanced markets that want its affordable products. Even Canada, which has until now followed the US lead in knocking out Chinese EVs with 100% tariffs, is changing that policy. It plans to import up to 49,000 models in exchange for lower tariffs on its agricultural exports, drawing criticism from the Trump administration.
Rather than curtailing their EV operations so precipitously, both Ford and GM would be wise to focus on affordable, mass-market models that promise high volume, building on the success of the Mustang Mach-E and GM’s electric Equinox — and looking beyond the U.S. Both companies are filled with smart engineers, many of whom helped produce and build batteries. Despite the company’s cuts, GM CEO Mary Barra said electric cars remain the future, despite volatile conditions in the U.S.
“When we have more affordable EVs…I think people will choose EVs,” he told reporters last week. “We’re going to be realistic about it.”
One could argue that with the Equinox EV, priced at $33,600, and the Bolt, starting at $29,000, models well below an average new vehicle price of nearly $50,000, GM has fulfilled Barra’s affordability requirement. Her “pragmatism” may have more to do with making sure the company doesn’t piss off a management that just plain hates electric cars.
The big read
Brightline hires ex-Eurostar boss to raise Bullet train costs
Brightline, the private passenger railway created by billionaire investor Wes Edens, has tapped Nicolas Petrovic, formerly head of high-speed Eurostar, as its new CEO, taking over from Mike Reininger, who will now focus on building the company’s Las Vegas to Southern California train.
Petrovic, who most recently led Etihad Rail Mobility, the high-speed system in the United Arab Emirates, will focus on growing Brightline’s service and passengers in Florida, which operates between Orlando and Miami. Reininger is moving to CEO of Brightline West, tasked with building and operating the $21 billion, 218-mile bullet train by 2029.
“The knowledge Nicolas brings from around the world will strengthen our company as it continues to grow and expand, while Mike refocuses his attention on delivering unprecedented infrastructure growth,” Edens said in a statement. The company also named Mauricio Anderson as its new chief financial officer.
Becoming a 21st-century US railroad baron has been a goal of Eden’s, a co-founder of Fortress Investment Group and co-owner of sports teams including the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks and European soccer teams such as the Premier League’s Aston Villa. But bringing modern 200 MPH+ rail travel across the United States is taking longer and costing more than he originally anticipated. Ridership on Brightline’s Florida trains, which operate well below 150 miles per hour, is growing, 13 percent through November 2025 to 2.8 million people, but its ambitions are much bigger. Similarly, revenue from the line was $193.4 million through November, up 14% from a year earlier. Development will continue in 2026 with the addition of new railcars from Siemens, another of Petrovic’s former employers, and a possible extension of the line to Tampa in the coming years.
Read more here
Hot topic
Star Tribune via Getty Images
Christophe Beck, CEO of Ecolab, for solving the water problem in the data center
Along with energy needs, the other issue with data centers is the increasing consumption of water, a finite resource, for cooling. How is this solved?
Stepping back for a second, water is at the heart of artificial intelligence, and it’s at the heart of many other things. It is at the heart of life. It is at the heart of development. It is at the heart of our future. It has been true for millions of years. All the water we have is on the planet. There is nothing else that comes from space.
People have always found a way to make it work, and I think that will be the way forward. The main issue we have is that people have, for too long, used water in linear ways. You take it, use it, throw it away and hope for the best.
That’s not how nature does it. As we know it, it’s a circular system that goes to the cloud, rains, comes back and all that, which is more complicated. But this is the only way to move from the finite to the infinite, because when you are circular, you have no problem.
When we think of artificial intelligence, I think of the three dimensions and [Ecolab] it tries to deal with all three. You need water to produce energy. It’s the number one place where water goes in the US. When I think of these three dimensions, you say, well, water is the core of what’s going on here. At the same time, artificial intelligence is growing exponentially, love it or hate it. It was 27% of the market last year for energy use – 10x more than in 2023. So AI was growing 10x in 12 to 24 months. We’re kind of trying to catch a tiger by the tail.
So for Ecolab, you work with companies to create closed systems that use the same amount of water over and over again?
Yes. The way we look at it is, how do we use water in a circular way? This is what we do to produce energy, like in a nuclear power plant. Try to reuse water as often as possible. In a data center, it used to be air-cooled, like an AC in a large room, cooling computers. It has moved a bit in the last couple of years towards liquid cooling.
The way we solve this is not to not use water. It is ultimately the use and reuse of water in a closed loop.
Ecolab provides a range of services for industrial companies. Are data centers now the fastest growing part of your business?
No doubt. And it became the fastest growing in the last three years, with the whole OpenAI launch game we’ve all been through. Three years ago, for us, data centers were computer centers that banks had, that cities had, that universities had. And for us, being the largest water and cooling company in the world, we thought of these sites as air conditioning projects. They were normal seasons – pretty flat, pretty boring. Then, suddenly, everything changed when AI really, really took off with the arrival of OpenAI.
So we’ve reorganized into these three new dimensions: cooling, power generation, and AI chip production, because these are three different technologies.
It helps us as a company to grow because our solutions are circular solutions: reuse water as much as you can. It ultimately helps you operate in places that have very limited amounts of water and limited amounts of energy, too.
What else are we reading?
At least 22 GW of renewable energy aborted or in limbo under Trump’s “blockade” (Canary Media)
There is nothing left of the US Climate Change Corps? (Milling)
Data from many international organizations show “unprecedented global warming” (Inside Climate News)
In green Californiavery little plastic is recycled (Los Angeles Times)
The House votes on a bill codifying Trump’s executive order which exempts water conservation regulations (Associated Press)
Economists’ climate models can predict catastrophic or moderate damagebut not which of these futures comes (The Atlantic)
