The market for electric vehicles in this country is at a turning point.

EVs just had their best quarter of sales on record, as Americans rushed to buy them before federal tax credits expired at the end of September. There are now more EVs on the road than ever before: over 6.5 million.

Now that the Trump administration and Congress have stripped away both the federal tax credits and most of the regulations that incentivized building more electric cars, carmakers are scaling back EV production in the U.S. and concentrating on vehicles with internal combustion engines.

Still, the American market for EVs likely won’t go away, according to experts who watch the industry, thanks in part to the thousands of new EV owners.

Chris Bendel of Colchester, Vermont, is one of them. He just bought a new 2025 Chevy Equinox EV. Like a lot of brand-new cars, it comes with plenty of features: He can start it up remotely, there’s an array of screens on the dashboard, and it’s got seat warmers with three different temperature levels.

“You can kind of just do whatever feels comfortable,” Bendel said, sitting inside the Chevy in his driveway.

It’s a big upgrade from his last car, a 2014 Mazda CX-5, which he brought to his mechanic in late September. It turned out to be one of those visits to the repair shop.

“The guy was like, ‘You got a lot of rust ... I would say, sell it now, trade it in, make it someone else's problem,’” Bendel said.

This happened just a few days before the $7,500 federal tax credit for new EVs expired. Bendel had been planning to make his next car an EV, so he decided to jump. After the tax credit and a bundle of other discounts, he said he paid about $20,000 for the Equinox. He figures he’ll save money in the long run.

“Because I have solar panels, because I charge at home, because I don't drive as much, I'm not spending any money on gas,” Bendel said.

Amy Farnham of Exeter, New Hampshire, bought an EV before the end of the tax credit too. She had assumed her next car would be a hybrid because they have better range than pure electrics. 

“I have kids that play hockey, so that's a lot of driving around New England,” she said.

But when she started to see the ranges on some of the newer models, “I changed my mind,” she said. “Why not go fully EV?”

She bought a used 2023 Nissan Ariya. It can go over 300 miles on a single charge.

Farnham, Bendel and thousands of other buyers are the reason why EV sales surged in the third quarter and are expected to decline in the short term. 

“People moved their purchases forward in time,” said Elaine Buckberg, a senior fellow at Harvard's Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. She’s also the former chief economist at General Motors.

With that pull forward of demand, and the Trump administration’s rollback of vehicle regulations, carmakers have cooled on EVs. 

“They're explicitly delaying when they're going to bring out new models, or in some cases, pulling back models,” Buckberg said. “They're just not moving as ambitiously into the market as they had been planning to six months ago.”

Many auto companies plan to sell more gas cars for now. Which, for most companies, are more profitable than EVs.

“They're looking at this landscape where they're facing multibillion dollar tariff hits, so they really need to think about their profitability,” Buckberg said.

And yet, most auto industry leaders still say that the future of cars is electric, Buckberg said, for a few reasons.

First, big automotive markets in other parts of the world have been transitioning to EVs faster than the U.S, especially China. And most auto companies are global.

“The global market will continue to go EV and automakers won't want to be making new internal combustion engine cars just for the US,” Buckberg said.

Second, those emissions regulations in the U.S might not be gone forever.

“The car companies, they know that it will come back,” said Gil Tal, director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at University of California, Davis. 

Emissions regulations have swung back and forth depending on which party controls the White House. So for car companies, “I think that in the long run, they know that they need to find a balance,” Tal said. “They cannot just go back to zero in any way.”

They’ll also have to meet at least some consumer demand for EVs. Most (but not all) EV owners stay EV owners, Tal said.

So many of those drivers who just bought one before the tax credits ended will likely want another EV in a few years. Though Chris Bendel, the new Chevy Equinox owner, is on a longer timeline. He hopes his new car will last him 20 years. 

“I'm going to try and take good care of this and, like, drive it into the ground,” he said. “Then in 20 years, who knows what we're going to be driving? Super EVs.”

Probably with even better seat warmers.