Major US automakers publicly backed the Environmental Protection Agency's proposal to delay enforcement of Biden-era vehicle pollution rules by two years at a public hearing on Wednesday, while calling on the agency to move quickly to rewrite the underlying standards rather than simply pushing deadlines back. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation — a trade group representing General Motors, Ford, Stellantis, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Hyundai — told EPA officials that the delay was necessary and called for what its representative described as "a reasonable, workable path forward" and "realistic and durable long-term standards." The EPA estimates that postponing enforcement of the Biden rules by two years would save automakers approximately $1.7 billion.
In prepared testimony delivered to the EPA, Alliance Senior Director and Executive Adviser Michael Hartrick argued that the market conditions assumed when the Biden administration finalised the rules in April 2024 had failed to materialise. He pointed to three specific factors driving the gap between the rules' assumptions and current reality: slower-than-projected consumer adoption of electric vehicles, the expiry of federal tax credits for EV purchases, and China's continued dominance in battery production — all of which he said had made meeting the original compliance deadlines impractical. "This fundamental disconnect between outdated policy assumptions and market reality has already stranded billions of dollars in investments," Hartrick said. "The decline in EV sales has already stranded billions of dollars in investments."
What the Biden Rules Required — and What a Delay Would Change
The regulations at the centre of the dispute were finalised by Biden's EPA in April 2024. They cover what regulators call criteria pollutants — six specific air pollutants: ozone, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and lead — and set compliance targets running from the 2027 through the 2032 model years. The rules require a 50 percent reduction in criteria pollutants from light-duty passenger vehicles and a 58 percent reduction from medium-duty commercial vehicles by 2032. The EPA's own modelling found that reaching those targets would require a significant shift toward electric vehicles in the new-car fleet, with projections under the Biden-era rules suggesting between 35 and 56 percent of new vehicles sold between 2030 and 2032 would need to be electric.
The proposed delay would push enforcement of those standards back two years — from the 2027 model year to the 2029 model year — while the EPA works to rewrite the rules to better reflect what the agency described in its May proposal as "evolving market conditions, regulatory requirements, and feasibility challenges, while maintaining strong environmental protections." The automaker alliance's message at the hearing was clear: a temporary reprieve is welcome, but what the industry needs is a permanent reset of the standards, not a series of rolling deferrals. What no automaker wants, several industry observers noted, is to spend the next several years operating under the uncertainty of a two-year delay only to face equally stringent targets on the other side.
Environmental Groups: The Delay Will Cost Lives
Environmental organisations sharply criticised the proposed postponement. Rishab Jagetia, a fellow with the Environmental Defense Fund, told the hearing directly that postponing the standards would increase public health risks and generate billions of dollars in additional health-related costs for American families and public health systems. "Vehicle standards save lives," Jagetia said. "Delaying them means more people will suffer from serious heart and lung diseases and die prematurely from air pollution that we have the technology and the regulatory framework to prevent." The EDF and allied groups argue that the six criteria pollutants targeted by the Biden rules are among the most well-documented causes of preventable illness in American communities, disproportionately concentrated in lower-income areas near highways and freight corridors.
The Sierra Club issued a separate statement calling the delay a gift to the auto industry at the public's expense, noting that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin had in March already moved to reconsider the agency's broader greenhouse gas rules for vehicles — rules that would have required fleet-average tailpipe emissions to drop by nearly 50 percent by 2032 compared with 2027 projected levels. Together, the criteria pollutant delay and the greenhouse gas rule rollback represent the most significant rollback of US vehicle emissions policy in a generation. Under the Biden-era standards, EPA had previously projected the rules would prevent tens of thousands of premature deaths annually by 2032.
A Wider Pattern of Regulatory Rollback
The hearing came against a backdrop of sustained deregulatory activity at the federal level affecting the auto sector. The Transportation Department under the Trump administration has dialled back fuel economy standards — moving from a Biden-era target of 50.4 miles per gallon average by 2031 to 34.5 mpg, a reduction of roughly 16 mpg that reversed years of tightening standards. Zeldin told reporters in March that automakers had told the EPA the existing emissions requirements were "causing adverse impacts" and that heeding their concerns would have a "positive impact on the auto industry, on auto jobs and bringing down the cost of vehicles and increasing consumer choice." The criteria pollutant delay sits within this broader policy shift and reflects an industry that spent part of the Biden years investing in EV capability, then watched demand fall short of projections, and is now pressing for regulatory relief on multiple fronts simultaneously.
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation's consistent position — both in September 2025 comments to the EPA and in Wednesday's hearing testimony — is that the criteria pollutant rules as currently written are "unachievable without significant increases in EV market share" and that without relief, manufacturers face hundreds of dollars of additional cost per internal combustion engine vehicle. What the industry is seeking is not freedom from environmental standards, its representatives have been careful to say, but a regulatory framework that is achievable with the technology and market conditions that actually exist rather than those that policy architects projected would exist. Whether the EPA's permanent rewrite, whenever it arrives, will satisfy both the industry and public health advocates remains very much an open question.
