In a Truth Social post, the president dismissed an entire product category: "I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted." [1] The year he called these cars unwanted, Americans bought them at a record pace, and the rest of the world bought one for every four new cars sold.
What buyers actually did
In the third quarter of 2025, U.S. drivers bought 438,487 electric vehicles, an all-time quarterly record, up 29.6 percent from a year earlier. [2] EVs reached 10.5 percent of all vehicles sold, also a record share. [2] Globally the picture is larger still: more than 20 million electric cars sold in 2025, a quarter of all new cars on Earth. [4] "Nobody wanted" is a strange description of a record.
Data
| Q3 2024 | 8.6% |
|---|---|
| Q3 2025 (record) | 10.5% |
The honest part
There is a real wrinkle, and it is worth stating plainly. The $7,500 federal EV tax credit ended on October 1, 2025, and fourth-quarter sales dropped about 36 percent from a year earlier as the incentive disappeared. [3] That is a genuine policy-driven dip. What it is not is a collapse of demand. Even with that drop, full-year 2025 U.S. EV sales fell only about 2 percent from 2024, making it the second-best year on record. [3] A subsidy being pulled and softening sales for a quarter is a different thing from a product nobody wanted.
The trend, and the word 'mandate'
The longer arc is growth, not retreat. The International Energy Agency counts more than 20 million EVs sold worldwide in 2025 and projects roughly 23 million in 2026. [4] On the other half of the claim, there was never a federal rule requiring anyone to buy an electric car. Emissions standards and tax credits encouraged EVs; no mandate forced a single purchase, so there was no mandate to take away.
THE BOTTOM LINE
- "Electric Cars that nobody else wanted": Mostly False [1]
- Record 438,487 U.S. EVs sold in Q3 2025, a record 10.5 percent share [2]
- Even after the federal credit ended, 2025 was the second-best year on record; a quarter of new cars sold worldwide were electric [3][4]
Demand for electric cars is rising, not vanishing, and the only real dip traces to a subsidy the administration itself ended, not to drivers rejecting the cars. Record sales and "nobody wanted them" cannot both be true, and the sales numbers are the ones with receipts.
