At the Detroit Auto Show in January, the American auto industry’s shift away from electric vehicles was on full display. Rather than displaying EVs front and center, as was the case in 2025, automakers emphasized hybrids and updated gas models.
A month later, war broke out in Iran and energy prices soared. As the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz continues to reduce access to oil and gas in much of the world, some nations are looking to boost energy infrastructure by turning to green technologies, including EVs, as noted in a recent Foreign Affairs piece by Benjamin Bradlow, assistant professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Sociology.
Bradlow, who is studying how the global rise of EVs is remaking auto manufacturing in the Global South for an upcoming book, explains how the global appetite for EVs is evolving under these competing dynamics.
In the United States, electric vehicle adoption has slowed as federal subsidies have expired and public charging infrastructure remains inconsistent. Is the rest of the world following suit?
Benjamin Bradlow: The U.S. is one of the few places where you're seeing a slowdown in the adoption of battery EVs and various hybrid options. The rest of the world has largely been very open to the leading manufacturers of EVs, which are Chinese firms. In the U.S., you cannot get the most advanced technology, which in many instances also happens to be the cheapest. It's one thing if consumers just can't get the best or cheapest product, but the real problem is the U.S. is basically falling behind technologically.
I don't think many Americans understand that it's countries like Brazil that are seeing the most Chinese investment in auto manufacturing. Brazil is developing a manufacturing base that is increasingly oriented toward the technological frontier, at least in the auto sector, and the U.S. auto sector is increasingly distant from that frontier.
How influential are U.S. automakers globally in terms of adoption of EVs or what happens in the industry?
BB: The glib answer is that U.S. automakers are just not important, but that's not entirely true. A very illustrative case that I've been researching in Brazil is that Ford had a very large manufacturing facility in the northeastern state of Bahia, which they left a few years ago, and that site has now been taken over by BYD, which is a Chinese firm and the largest EV manufacturer in the world.
But that does not mean that that U.S. automakers are irrelevant. The other country where I've been doing research is South Africa, where you have firms that are much more ambivalent about producing EVs. [U.S. automakers] are making an offer to some auto manufacturing countries like South Africa that they could, in effect, be the last countries standing for internal combustion engine technology. It's difficult to transition to EV manufacturing technologies, so that offer can be attractive in certain instances.
To what extent is building out EV charging infrastructure an obstacle for wide-scale adoption?
BB: Certainly the rollout of EV charging infrastructure does affect the pace at which EVs are adopted. But almost everywhere, it seems as though EV charging infrastructure is being rolled out at scales that go beyond what is typically predicted.
In South Africa, BYD has made major investments, not in manufacturing, but they've announced in the past year a huge rollout of dealerships, imports from China, and a build-out of charging infrastructure. Key Chinese firms — BYD, Chery, and Great Wall Motors are quite important across the globe, but particularly in the Global South — are rolling out their own charging infrastructure. They're not waiting for governments or other private actors. The firms that really want to build their export markets know that they have to do this, and so I'm not convinced that this is a major impediment in the medium term.
What is the effect of the Iran war on all this?
BB: You wouldn't expect to see a structural shift in the data just yet, but we can look to historical experience. The Arab oil crises of the ’70s had major effects on many countries’ energy infrastructures that still play out today — and that are shaping auto sectors, in particular.
After those crises, across the globe, you saw new kinds of fuel standards emerge. Most notable in my research was the development of sugar cane-derived ethanol fuel in Brazil, which was explicitly a response to the dependencies that were exposed by the Arab oil crises. That ethanol technology is critical to the kinds of hybrid vehicles that are being developed by many different Chinese and Western automakers in Brazil right now.
Right now, you are seeing huge month-on-month rises in EV purchases across Southeast Asia, the region most reliant on oil coming from the Strait of Hormuz. But you're seeing a lot of growth in EV purchases almost everywhere in the world since this war started and gas prices have shot through the roof.
How long can the U.S.’s preference for gas vehicles last, if EVs are being adopted globally and if all this great car technology exists in other markets?
BB: The U.S. has what we might think of as a petrostate model, increasingly so over the last couple decades. If the Trump administration policies in terms of reliance on fossil fuels were extended into the medium term and if you keep the more advanced technology out — which the U.S. has been doing through prohibitive tariffs on Chinese vehicles — it's not inconceivable that EVs would remain a minority technology in the auto sector in the U.S., notwithstanding the fact that it is becoming very popular in most of the rest of the world.
I'm wary of a kind of technological determinism, given the energy infrastructure that exists in the U.S., which is very oriented towards fossil fuels. That being said, there is growth in some renewable technologies, particularly solar, which means that market forces could enable a shift toward a renewable future, but on a much slower timeline than much of the rest of the world.
What are you learning as you research your upcoming book, “The Climate Hinge: Green Industrial Transitions in the Global South”?
BB: There is a lot of variation in terms of how countries are able to build green technology manufacturing sectors in cars. A lot of what shapes the possibility for building green technology manufacturing sectors and key industries like cars is energy infrastructure.
Brazil has one of the cleanest energy grids in the world, and what I'm finding is that has shaped the kinds of political alliances that have been supporting the growth of EV manufacturing in the country. South Africa has one of the dirtiest grids in the world, and I'm finding that that has shaped a lot of the incumbent pressures that have prevented the emergence of EV manufacturing, notwithstanding that South Africa has been historically the largest auto manufacturer in Africa.
