Table of Contents
⚡ This Week’s Big Charge
💡 5 Predictions For 2026
Happy New Year and welcome to 2026! I don’t know anyone who isn’t happy to put 2025 in our collective rearview mirror.
That’s especially true in the automotive industry and the broader e-mobility space: last year brought nearly unprecedented chaos, ups and downs to the electric vehicle market, and policy whiplash across the entire sector.
But 2025 also showed us that despite many setbacks, EVs aren’t going anywhere—and autonomous vehicles really aren’t going anywhere. And I expect those two trends to converge this year in ways that will define how we get around for decades to come.
Now’s as good a time as any to look ahead at what we can expect in 2026. I actually don’t like making predictions; I’m a reporter, first and foremost, and that means I don’t like being wrong.
But as I get ready to head to CES (drop me a line if you’ll be there too!) I wanted to run down five major trends that are on my radar, and where I expect them to go in 2026 and beyond.
💰 1. Affordability Will Define The Automotive Conversation In 2026
The now-dead EV tax credit and $7,500 leasing loophole weren’t just a boon to electric sales. They helped juice sales numbers for the entire American auto industry; for much of 2025 and the preceding years, the best and cheapest way to get into a new car was to go electric.
Now, all of that is gone, and it coincides with the average new car retailing for around $50,000. Affordability is about to be an industrywide problem, no matter what “fuel” the cars run on.
We’re still waiting on the final tally for new car sales in Q4, but it’s expected to be rough. Even with the usual end-of-year clearout events, Cox Automotive predicts that sales will be down more than 5% year-over-year. Blame tariffs, or wider economic uncertainty, or the K-shaped economy (where wealthy buyers have the most power), or just people not wanting to finance a car for a decade. Whatever the cause, people may be holding off on new car purchases until prices cool off.
Will they? As I wrote for The Atlantic recently, there’s no easy way out of this problem—it’s not like carmakers are in a rush to generate fewer profits. And we’re as car-dependent a society as we’ve ever been. It’s hard to see a way out of this mess. But any automaker without an answer will be in trouble.