This story appeared on BigPivots.com on June 4, 2025.
Colorado has been advancing rapidly toward its goals of having 940,000 EVs on the road. The budget bill passed by the House would put sales into a slower lane.
Car buyers took the bait when Colorado dangled tax credits of $5,000 on top of federal tax credits of up to $7,500 for electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. Sales took off. EVs alone constituted 24.7% .of all new car sales in the final months of 2025.
Even in early 2025, when Colorado’s tax incentives ramped down to $3,500, EVs were still responsible for about 21.1% of all sales.
What if federal tax credits go away as proposed in the budget reconciliation bill now before the U.S. Senate?
Repeat, (Rapid Energy Policy Evaluation and Analysis Toolkit), a project housed within the University of Princeton, predicts 40% fewer sales nationally by 2024. Sales will still increase, just not as fast.
Travis Madsen, who oversees the transportation program for the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, an advocacy group, said EV sales will continue to grow in Colorado. EVs save people money in lesser fuel and maintenance costs over the lifetime of a car.
Research by the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project found that drivers in Colorado and other Southwestern states can save on the order of $10,000 over 200,000 miles by choosing an electric sedan. For battery-electric pickups, the savings can exceed $30,000.
The front-end costs can be discouraging, though.
“We will have to develop new tools to help people understand that they can save money,” said Madsen. “We will still be making progress. It just won’t be as fast.”
Will Toor, who directs the Colorado Energy Office, described the bill’s effects more broadly if the Senate were to go along with what the House passed.
“They would be, I think, ceding the future of auto manufacturing to China and essentially knee-capping American auto manufacturers from their ability to compete into the future,” he said.
“We’d started to see a bit of manufacturing renaissance in this county for clean energy supported by the Inflation Reduction Act. If this moves forward, I think it will be really negative for that clean energy manufacturing across the nation.”
The net effect of the sweeping 1,000-page bill would be to “drive up the cost of electricity, drive up the cost of vehicles and essentially drive up the costs of all the things that Coloradans depend on in their daily lives,” he added.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a frequent visitor to Colorado over the years, made the same point several days later. In a column, “Trump’s Gilded Gut Instinct,” he wrote this:
“As I have been arguing since Trump came to office, his ridiculous right-wing woke obsession with destroying the U.S. electric vehicle industry that President Joe Biden was trying to build up undermines U.S. efforts to compete with China in electric batteries. Batteries are the new oil; they will power the new industrial ecosystem of A.I.-infused self-driving cars, robots, drones and clean tech.”
Friedman then introduced the thoughts of an economist, Noah Smith, who observed the consequences of the new budget bill in light of last weekend’s attack of Russian’s airplanes by Ukrainian drones. The essay is extended but entirely germane to U.S. defense but also EV adoption in Colorado.
Smith’s posting on Tuesday included this:
“Electric vehicles are crucial for battery manufacturing capacity, because in peacetime, they’re the main source of demand for batteries. Pump up the EV industry, and you pump up the battery industry too — just as the chart above shows Biden doing. Kill the EV industry and you kill the battery industry too, just as Republicans now want to do. Harming the solar industry will also harm the battery industry, because some types of batteries are used to store solar energy for when the sun isn’t shining.”
As for Colorado’s goal of having 940,000 EVs on its roads by 2030, it remains on track to get there. The incentives have jump-started sales. Another component was to ensure sufficient charging infrastructure exists.
This has several components.
To assuage worries about running out of fuel without a way to quickly charge when traveling, Colorado set out to get high-speed charging stations around the state. Some of this has been done with federal aid.
Gaps remain in Colorado, though. Most every wide spot in the road has a gas station. Fast charging EV stations are not so omnipresent. Colorado has worked to provide that reliability.
Colorado now has a more than 1,100 fast-charging and 4,400 level-two ports, including these at the headquarters of Tri-State Generation and Transmission in Westminster.
Colorado has been helped by but has not been solely dependent upon federal aid to seed the charging stations needed to make drivers comfortable when considering purchase of an EV. The state has investment programs, and utilities have invested, too.
“Unlike many other states, we haven’t been dependent just on federal investment,” said Toor.
The federal government has cut off funds for continued fast-charging through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Fund. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser joined with California and other states in a lawsuit that seeks to force the Trump administration to thaw those funds.
“They are important, and we’ve been relying on them and we need to get access to them,” said Toor. “But there’s a lot of EV charging that’s been deployed and will continue to be deployed in the state.”
EV adoption in Colorado also depends upon having ample fast-charging stations in other states, too, said Toor. Coloradans don’t always stay in Colorado, so they want assurances of being able to charge when driving across the vast expanses of Wyoming and Montana, too.
Another difference is that you can fill up a car with gas before you finish washing your windows. With an EV it can take 10 or 20 minutes. Best to find a charger coupled with a coffee shop and plan your trips accordingly. You can get charged up with caffeine while your car gets charged with electricity.
In May, after the Legislature convened, Toor, who directs the Colorado Energy Office, set out from the Front Range in his Chevy Blazer EV for a backpacking trip in Canyonlands National Park. It worked well, he reported. The car has a listed range of 285 miles. He reports that in temperate weather, he can get 330 miles. “And I’m sort of the opposite of a lead-footed driver,” he explained.
The first stop was a fast-charging station coupled with a coffee shop in Fruita. In Utah, at Monticello, they had a similar pre-scheduled stop.
“We stopped a few times in nice places,” said Toor. “The only problem was I drank too much coffee. Couldn’t sleep that night.”
Allen Best publishes the e-journal Big Pivots, which chronicles the energy transition in Colorado and beyond.