Think of it as a set of cables that connect all the electrical parts in a car, like lights and engines. It keeps everything organized so mechanics can find what they need quickly.
When a car factory needs special machines that only other countries make, they have to ship those machines across the ocean. This can be expensive and slow, so it’s a big issue for U.S. car makers.
The parts that let cars do smart things—like navigation or self-driving features—are made from chips. If there aren't enough chips, car makers can’t finish cars on time.
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Welcome to Daily Drive for Monday, December 29, 2025, I'm Kellan Walker in Las Vegas.
We're continuing our series of conversations looking back at the biggest stories in the
auto industry throughout the past year.
Today, we kick off a comprehensive discussion about the state of automotive technology and
innovation in 2025.
I'm joined by members of our Automotive News tech and innovation team.
Molly Boygon covers vehicle software, connected technology and more, and host of the Automotive
News Shift podcast.
John Irwin covers tariffs and supply chain.
Lonnie Eiliff covers Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, and other automakers from Silicon Valley.
And Richard Truett covers engineering and JLR.
Here's the first part of our conversation.
2025 was a year where policy shifts collided with technological reality.
Let's start broad.
Molly, what was your biggest tech story of 2025?
The biggest tech story of 2025, from my perspective, was the administration's pullback of federal
support for electric vehicles.
And that took many shapes from the elimination of EV tax credits to the revision of CAFE,
to the revoking of the California waiver, and the automakers sort of responding to that
and pulling back on their EV plans.
One thing that you might not see if you're outside of Detroit, Molly, and everyone else
is how it disrupted the local economy here in Detroit.
Companies have been laying off, people, suppliers have been pulling back.
The rest of the country hasn't caught the cold that Detroit has.
We're in a full blown recession here, maybe even worse.
And I think it's policy driven.
Yeah.
You know, I think when we're talking about the policy changes, it's just so dramatic
when we think about the last decades, actually, with CAFE, with the slow, steady push over
time that has driven a lot of vehicle technology, fuel injection, turbocharged engines, emissions
controls, et cetera.
And I think Molly's right that reversal is just kind of shock.
We're kind of going back to gasoline cars for a while, and there's kind of a hold on
that technology because of these policies.
And I would also choose that as the top one.
I'm with everyone.
I, you know, covering suppliers for automotive news, just over the past year, you get news
all the time about whether it's a small supplier, tier two company you've never heard of laying
off a handful of people or, you know, thousands of layoffs at larger suppliers.
I mean, a lot of companies, not every company, but a lot of suppliers, you know, given, you
know, the massive changes in federal policy are sort of just sitting back saying, OK,
we have to hunker down and preserve our profit margins, whether that means cutting jobs or
cutting back on R&D.
I mean, there's a big pullback in spending on R&D and on hiring right now throughout
the supply chain.
And a lot of that is driven by, you know, changes in federal policy, whether it's the pullback
in electrification support or whether it's trade and tariffs, as we'll get into later.
I mean, it's this year has sort of been a year of kind of hunkering down for companies.
And there's been all sorts of ramifications throughout the supply chain in the economy.
In one sense, it's the worst thing that could happen to Detroit because when you consider
a technology investment is hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars, and there are
years forward in planning.
And when the policy changes from one administration to the next, it makes it very difficult for
automakers to rein in prices.
And we've been covering the affordability issue, and it just messes up everything.
Molly, you cover the regulatory earthquake this year.
How has the industry responded from the shift away from EVs?
There were so many things that happened this year related to EVs.
I just am thinking about it.
It's sort of mind blowing.
So we had the Congress voting to revoke California's waivers that enable it to
write its own stricter vehicle emissions policies.
We had the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which ended the electric vehicle tax credits in September.
We had a pull forward effect from the end of those tax credits.
So consumers rushing to purchase EVs in September and then a significant decline in October.
And you have the most recently, the Trump administration rolling back fuel efficiency standards.
So it's just been a really clear message from the administration that the days of federal support
for the electric vehicle transition are over.
And the thing that's been most interesting to me is how the automakers have really changed their tune.
I mean, you had in 2019, 2020, basically a panic from the industry about Tesla's increasing dominance
and acknowledgement that the industry had to make the electric vehicle transition in order to stay relevant.
And then as the sort of optimism and excitement around the transition waned,
you have Jim Farley appearing at the White House in December,
saying that reducing the emission standards is a return to common sense.
So for me, it's just been a really like a 180 in terms of the automakers position on electric vehicles
that I think has gotten lost in the shuffle.
People assume that this was a government imposed set of decisions
when in fact, if you look at the way that the automakers originally responded,
they really wanted the support that's since been pulled back.
And it's really stark here in Silicon Valley to see the difference,
to hear about what's happening in Detroit and the automakers that are arguing to go back,
to have more support for gasoline cars.
I understand like their economic rationale, right?
They need to make money. They've invested in a lot of platforms.
They've paid for that stuff and paying for EVs or self-driving or other technology.
But here in Silicon Valley, when you talk to people at Rivian or Lucid or Tesla,
they are in a different planet. They are on a different planet.
They are developing software defined platforms.
They are investing in battery technology.
They are looking at more efficient motors.
They are developing self-driving cars.
And if you look at Tesla's latest full self-driving that they are giving customers,
people are saying they drive 100 miles, 200 miles more without a single intervention.
And the car will even park for them.
And so, and Rivian is going that route now.
They're a little bit behind Tesla.
But that's their new thing is that everybody's going to have to have self-driving cars.
And when you compare it to, you know, listening to the traditional automakers,
it's like they are preserving what they have,
but it doesn't sound like they're investing in the future like they used to be.
Before the legacy automakers were saying, we're investing in the future.
We're building electric vehicles.
You know, General Motors had a cruise division which had a functioning robot taxi.
And it feels like they're all just kind of pulling back.
And I think, you know, that could be dangerous for them in, you know, five years, 10 years.
Lana, you didn't say this in so many words and I'm wondering if Molly would agree.
Do you think that these policy changes are going to make the domestic automakers less competitive in the long term,
and especially on a global scale?
I certainly do.
I mean, it's just you look at the Chinese on the global stage.
You have a steady march of Chinese vehicles into Europe.
We have some protections that are meant to prevent the sale of Chinese vehicles here in the United States.
But when you look at global market share, these are, you know, for fair or unfair,
sub $30,000 electric vehicles with amazing technology.
People are becoming increasingly brand agnostic.
They're increasingly looking for value.
And I just, I do think that when you look at the global trend,
it's really hard to make a case for the domestic auto industry retrenching on internal combustion engines,
which are increasingly becoming not only a small share of the global market,
but a smaller share of the domestic market.
So I wonder, Lana, how you feel about that too.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And what's what's amazing about it is, I mean, if we built those Chinese cars here in the United States,
realistically, they would be more expensive.
They would be, they would cost maybe what our cars cost.
But that would, you know, still be helpful for affordability, right?
Because one thing that's really interesting about this moment that people are retrenching on EVs and software technology is,
it's like the wrong time to do it with AI, with supercomputers, with battery technology,
with all these breakthroughs and the Chinese have shown this.
This is actually really a good moment for the electric vehicle transition.
EVs are very good. They're very efficient.
They charge super fast on highways.
And, you know, some of the technology that's in China and even some of the technology to here with Lucid,
now with BMW, those cars charge very, very fast.
It's going to be maybe not quite a gasoline like experience, but close.
And so it's a strange moment for retrenchment.
I'll note on the supply chain as it relates to this pullback with EVs.
I mean, I just think back a couple of years, you know, maybe in 2022,
you'd go on any major supplier earnings call.
And, you know, the main thing that they want to give away to,
they're trying to tell their investors and trying to tell Wall Street is that,
you know, we're investing for the future.
They're kind of following the automakers, right?
Obviously, they're investing heavily into electrification.
Not every supplier.
Other suppliers are a little more conservative,
but you see a lot of suppliers that were, you know, touting massive investments and saying,
they're going to get a big return on those investments.
And just a couple of years later, certainly over the past year or so, you know,
now what they're trying to demonstrate to Wall Street is their ability to,
like I said earlier, just kind of hunker down.
And, oh, we made these cuts.
We're cutting back on R&D.
You know, we're pulling back on this investment.
We're trying to, you know, do what we can to recoup what we invested in,
you know, this EV platform that's not going to, you know,
pan out the way that we were thinking,
given our customers pulling back on electrification.
So, again, it's sort of contributed to this moment in the supply chain where,
you know, companies are just sort of, you know, sitting there and cutting back
and just cutting and cutting as opposed to investing.
And, you know, we'll see long-term, you know, how that impacts their competitiveness globally.
A lot of cases we're talking about global suppliers with, you know,
large presences in China already, but, you know, we'll see how, you know,
kind of how they're impacted globally of their competitiveness.
You know, as we're talking about how automakers are also where they'll be standing
in the next few years.
Cal, can we address the big elephant in the room?
Politics, which is, you know, a very dangerous thing because no matter what you say,
you're going to get somebody angry.
But it just seems to me like the current administration is more intent on reversing
what the previous administration did than thinking through how to handle this
in a more measured way.
For instance, instead of completely getting rid of those EV incentives,
couldn't they have been rolled back $1,000 a year, $500 a year, a little bit?
Because we've already seen in Europe some countries have gotten rid of their EV incentives
like Sweden and sales did not suffer.
But it wasn't like they were there one day and gone the next.
It was a more measured approach.
And we seem to want to take a sledgehammer to whatever the previous administration wanted to do.
And I'm not sure that that's the best way forward.
Even within the policy proposals for the reducing of the EV tax credits,
the original plan was to reduce the tax credit in December.
And then it was, oh, 180 days after passage and ultimately it became September.
So you even had the auto industry players who typically sort of side with more conservative industry moves
saying, actually, we were sort of hoping for a bit of a longer runway here.
And the other thing is to the politicization of EVs that Richard's talking about,
I was absolutely stunned that the tax that the administration chose to eliminate the California waiver
was through the Congressional Review Act, which was this.
They had many ways of sort of pulling back the EPA waivers.
And the way that they chose basically opens up additional executive actions to congressional review.
It was sort of like a really procedurally nerdy thing to know about this decision that they made.
But it has serious implications for the long-term viability of all these executive actions
that the Trump administration has taken, which told me this is a priority.
And the Republican Congress and the president were willing to basically take this sort of scorched earth approach
to get rid of it by any means necessary and as quickly as possible.
Molly, with automakers pulling back on EVs and Chinese brands capturing the global market share,
are Western automakers seeding the future to China?
I would say that looking at the global market share picture, they do run that risk.
However, I think that a couple of things are also lost in the larger conversation about China,
which is that China is not 10,000 feet tall.
They have had their own issues.
So you look at the Chinese government talking about basically a price war that is gutting the domestic industry.
They have too many automakers.
They have honestly a similar problem to the United States where the prediction is that there's going to be significant consolidation.
You have also had in China's development of some of these advanced technologies high-profile safety issues.
The government has basically reversed its position and become increasingly conservative on regulating OTA updates that govern autonomy.
So I do think it's going to be interesting to see what happens with the Chinese market because right now I would say,
and maybe even a few months ago, they were kind of at a peak in terms of operating at peak efficiency
and technology advancements and the sort of hype around the Chinese vehicle market.
However, I do think that there are some of these really important structural questions about basically a race to the bottom on price,
an oversaturation of the market, and a shrinking sort of addressable market there in China and eventually in Europe as well.
Now, Lonnie, you cover EVs day to day.
How permanent is the sales slump in the EV world?
And is this just a blimp or a fundamental reset?
Well, it's interesting because I've seen some of the more recent numbers on EVs and Tesla's making a comeback,
Rivian's making a comeback, Lucid's making a comeback.
So some of the pure EV players still have some pretty strong sales.
Now, they also have some strong incentives.
So we shouldn't look too much into it.
But I think the problem is that if you don't have enough good vehicles out there and different price ranges,
kind of a variety for buyers, then you can get into like a vicious cycle, right?
Where people aren't investing in EVs and people aren't buying EVs and people aren't investing in EVs and people aren't buying EVs.
And so I think that's real danger.
I hope that there will be kind of a period now where a lot of automakers are pausing.
They've pulled back some vehicles.
They've cut back some investments.
But they say that they are going to build new and better platforms.
They're kind of going to use this time when they have the support for their gasoline vehicle platforms
and their hybrid platforms to invest in the next generation of EVs technology.
So I'm hopeful that in two, three, four years, we'll have a more diversified EV market.
And that transition will continue after this kind of period of a pause.
Lonnie, is the R2 going to save Rivian?
Is it going to get them to make some money?
Well, yeah, I tell you, Rivian hopes so.
I mean, when you talk to them, it's just R2, R2, R2.
You know, they've lost many, many billions of dollars over the last four years on their first vehicle platform.
And the investment from Volkswagen, right?
Which was, you know, almost $6 billion.
But when you have debt losses of a billion dollars a quarter, $6 billion is not that much money.
And so they really need the R2 to be a hit.
I've seen it, the more recent versions when I went to Rivian's Palo Alto to adventure with Volkswagen.
It looks really good. It's a good size.
But, you know, it's still going to be probably for most people a $60,000 vehicle and not a $35,000 vehicle.
And so I am a little hesitant to make any predictions.
Coming up more on the ups and downs of automotive tech and innovation in 2025, including the disruption caused by the next period chip crisis.
That's next on Daily Drive.
The chaos that is tariffs and suppliers.
John, you've been tracking tariffs and supply chain all year. Give us the damage report.
Well, at the end of the day, you can look at automaker earnings reports and see, you know, the billions of dollars that, you know, they're paying and new tariffs that weren't there before this year.
I mean, I was talking with an executive at a major tier one supplier somewhat recently and kind of looking back at this year, you know, looking back maybe to January.
And, you know, he was saying essentially that, you know, where tariffs are at right now at that point for the industry would have been somewhat unthinkable.
But at the same time, they've come down a bit since, you know, maybe the peak of kind of, you know, before we got into destacking and exemptions for USMCA compliant goods and some of the deals that have been reached to lower auto tariffs to 15% from some nations.
They've come down to a point where, you know, the industries are sort of like, okay, at least we know now that we have at least a little bit of, I don't want to call it stability, but a little bit more of an insight into where, you know, tariffs might level off.
I mean, there's been, I think this year, a lot of the issue that a lot of companies have had, in addition to just the costs have been kind of the uncertainty.
You know, he's here about a tariff being implemented and then a couple of the, I'm thinking back to March when, you know, tariffs were initially implemented on Canadian and Mexican goods, you know, 25%.
It wasn't until a couple of days later after the president signed that executive order that we got the clarification that, okay, USMCA goods are going to be exempted.
And then obviously we have all sorts of deals that have been reached that, you know, lower tariffs to, you know, from 25% and automotive imports to 15%.
We've seen, on the other hand, steel and aluminum tariffs raised from 25% up to 50%, in most cases at least.
There's been just a lot of uncertainty, which, you know, kind of getting back to one of my points earlier, sort of just kind of left a lot of the supply chain in a state of paralysis.
You know, just kind of hunkering down, focusing on the here and now, maybe at the expense of investing in the future.
We'll see kind of where a lot of companies land.
At the same time, though, I do want to point out, you know, the industry has demonstrated, I think to a large degree, you know, maybe more resilience than even a lot of people in the industry were expecting, you know, back in February, March, April.
I mean, you go back and read some of the predictions that, you know, executives are making publicly, in some cases, about, you know, if tariffs were to be implemented, you know, we could see the auto industry, you know, pretty quickly, you know, shut down, or more or less,
you see a lot of production cuts immediately.
And while there have been some ramifications, you know, we've, and we'll get into some of those.
I think there's been a good amount of resilience.
I think a lot of that stems from, again, these USMCA exemptions, at least in North America, we've seen, you know, there's still a lot of confusion about a lot of the details there.
And we'll get into that.
But a lot of the executives I've talked to have said, you know, as long as we have those in place, you know, we can make this work in the short term, at least there are a lot of long term questions about how to invest, especially since billions of dollars are being, you know, essentially being paid by the
automakers, you know, for these tariffs.
But yeah, it's been a year unlike any other, I think, for pretty much anyone in the supply chain.
And it's going to be interesting to see kind of where things go in 2026.
There's a lot that's still outstanding.
I agree with you, Don.
I have been surprised by, yeah, there were these sort of doom and gloom projections that came out earlier in the year and the automakers willingness to kind of just eat the tariffs.
And that's been explained to me as basically perfect storm of the reduction in some of the emissions standards and the basically like the elimination of the NHTSA cafe fine.
So there's and the elimination of the market for EV credits between automakers.
So there, you know, some of those costs have been offset, but it is really interesting to me.
And it also suggests that there's sort of more flexibility built into the profit margin than anticipated, which is crazy given the cost of vehicles at this point and the cost of technology and all the other things.
But for me, you know, the EV credit piece and the elimination of the fines piece kind of only explains half of it.
It's also the automakers willingness to kind of just absorb this pain because of the power of the administration and the very sort of erratic way that the administration has imposed these policies.
And I'm sure they're watching other industries where they can see if they say or do something to basically tick off the administration that that can have like even greater potential costs than something like the tariffs, which is a significant cost impact as well.
You know, I think there could be some long term costs as well.
I think there may be things that are coming down the road that are hard to predict because if you look at the, you know, the auto industry, the North American auto industry, it was pretty carefully crafted around Mexico, the United States and Canada.
I actually was able to cover the original NAFTA talks when I worked in Mexico.
And then I followed the ones with the revision with Trump very carefully.
And, you know, they were trying to find a balance of bringing more jobs to the US, but also having a low cost supplier base to get your costs down right and then kind of putting all those pieces together.
And I know that at least part of the industry in Mexico and part of the industry in Canada feels kind of betrayed that they've broken that system that was built over decades.
And so I think that there could be some, you know, long term effects of that if, you know, suppliers in Mexico start going out of business, you know, where are we going to get some of those things?
How much are they going to cost?
So I do agree that like in the short term, it seems like the adjustments that the Trump administration has made have put us on a more sustainable trajectory in the short term.
But it will be interesting to see obviously what happens with the USMCA revision.
There's even further layer to the imposition of the tariffs that I've been paying attention to, which is the Section 232 investigation into tariffs on robotics and industrials manufacturing.
So even as the companies are trying to return manufacturing to the United States, the robotics and industrial manufacturing equipment is made abroad.
So it just keeps on going down all the way down to raw materials, which obviously there's been a lot of spotlight on rare earths.
But it is just, I mean, we, John knows probably better than anyone about the complexity of the automotive supply chain.
And now we're into the complexity of the manufacturing supply chain.
It just kind of never ends.
I think this whole tariff saga has really demonstrated just how much, how global the supply chain truly is.
I mean, there are certain parts, for instance, that aren't made in the US and just probably never will be.
I mean, thinking about something like a wire harness, it's so labor intensive.
And we've talked to supplier executives who have said, there's just no way that they would ever bring that job to the US because not only the cost, but there's also just the idea of, are we going to find workers for jobs like that?
I mean, that's a larger issue in and of itself.
I mean, for bringing back a lot of manufacturing to the US, that's, you know, obviously a goal worth pursuing, but at the same time, we're already right now suppliers have been talking about how they can't find enough, you know, highly skilled workers to fill current roles.
You know, that's something that I think has to be addressed long term.
That's sort of a long term issue.
And then, yeah, on top of that, you know, manufacturing equipment, as you alluded to Molly, I mean, there's a lot of expertise that's been built up, whether it's in Germany, Japan, China, there is some here in the US too, but when you're talking about specific robotics, specific equipment,
a lot of times there's a lot of specialty built up in kind of one locale and building that up in the US.
If it's possible, it's not something that can happen overnight and it's something that, you know, in the meantime, you know, if you're going to be building a new plant in the US, you're going to have to still import, you know, a lot of this equipment and it's going to cost, you know, if, you know,
the tariffs on robotics go through, you know, whatever it ends up being another 25% or wherever we end up.
So, yeah, there's just a lot of, again, long term, so a lot of long term uncertainty, even as the industry sort of settled in in the short term to a degree, and it's sort of learned to live with the tariffs, more or less, there's a lot of long term uncertainty about how exactly they can invest and where what the supply chain ends up looking like.
And I don't think there are any easy answers.
I would just add that a lot of innovation still does happen in the US and Silicon Valley and elsewhere, just that the actually assembly and building of the things take place in low cost labor markets and it makes you wonder, do the unions in America have a role to play to help
us become more competitive globally? No one seems to really talk about that too much here or elsewhere, but if it's, you know, companies are always going to take the path of least resistance when it comes to labor.
I will say, I thought I assumed that that was true until the LG Hyundai immigration raid earlier this fall, where you had, it is a highly skilled trade functionally that for which South Korea is dominant.
And that's not so much a function of low labor costs as much as it is a function of higher education investment, research investment, government funding for that type of battery plant construction.
So I think that the picture is becoming a little bit more complicated, even in China where the labor costs are significantly low, that country has steadily built a meaningful sort of like white collar expertise in renewable energy too.
If I wanted to touch on something I have here in my notes while we're on it, the next serious situation because we haven't brought that up yet. Now, John, that situation was wild, Chinese Dutch chip makers stand off that threat and the shutdown European auto production.
It was a whole thing. We all were there. What did that expose about supply chain vulnerabilities?
And again, it's another reminder too, I guess, for the auto industry and any industry that the geopolitics and supply chains are just increasingly intertwined. It's not something that's always been the case to a degree, but it's more so than ever right now.
I mean, just given obviously all the trade policy and tariff imposition, et cetera, but I mean, a lot of this is just about, we're seeing just political disputes play out with massive ramifications for supply chains.
I think that they don't like it. If it were up to them, politics wouldn't have anything to do with supply chain management, but that's just sort of the case right now. And I think if anything, that was another pretty stark reminder that that's the case.
And then again, yeah, just the vulnerability of the semiconductor supply chain, it's still varied as with a lot of raw materials that the industry relies on. There's still a lot of reliance on whether it's China or just specific markets.
If there's ever, I mean, tensions between China and Taiwan, I mean, that long term that could be pretty massive ramifications for the auto industry as it relates to chip supply long term. So there's just a lot to keep an eye on.
And I think that the next period situation, even though the industry was able to get out of it without the massive shutdowns, it appears we'll see how things progress. But as of now, it looks like able to get out of it without the worst case scenarios playing out.
But it's just another reminder that this sort of thing is going to keep rearing its head. And the industry has to be really nimble and build in backup plans as much as possible. They have to find multiple suppliers when possible and not be so reliant on one company or one region of the world.
A lot of cases, it's easier said than done, though. So yeah, I think that's sort of where things stand as of now.
We'll continue this conversation on tomorrow's show with a focus on tariffs, Tesla and the coolest tech we saw throughout 2025.
So Tesla's really got kind of a two feet situation. It's got one foot in the car industry where it has to make cars and sell cars and make money. And then it has one foot in artificial intelligence, robots, robotics.
That's Daily Drive for today. I'm Kellan Walker. Thanks to Automotive News executive producer Jake Nier for his help on today's podcast. You can get the latest news on tech and innovation, trade policy and everything happening in the auto industry at AutoNews.com.
We'd love to hear from you. Let us know what you think of the show and the topics we cover today. Send us an email at DailyDrive at AutoNews.com or leave us a voicemail at 313-444-2774.
And if you enjoy the podcast, remember to like, leave a review and subscribe so you never miss an episode.
About this episode
A deep dive into the automotive technology landscape of 2025 reveals significant disruptions caused by policy shifts, particularly the reduction of federal support for electric vehicles. Experts discuss the implications of these changes, including layoffs in Detroit and a pullback on EV investments from traditional automakers. The episode features insights on how this shift contrasts with the innovative strides being made by companies like Tesla and Rivian in Silicon Valley. The conversation also touches on the ongoing challenges posed by tariffs and the semiconductor supply chain, highlighting the industry's need for adaptability in a rapidly changing environment.
Daily Drive’s year-end series shifts focus to automotive technology in 2025. The Automotive News Tech and Innovation team examines the year’s biggest tech stories, from advances in vehicle software and connected technology to the disruption caused by the Nexperia chip crisis.
