Republican state lawmakers want a temporary pause on Virginia’s 32 cent per gallon gas tax to help offset rising prices at the pump resulting from President Donald Trump’s ill-defined and unpopular war in Iran.

They remained cool to, and to some extent critical of, electric vehicles as a means of liberating Virginia motorists from rising gasoline prices and the broader choke point on global oil supplies, as Iran continues to shut down the Strait of Hormuz.

“We need immediate relief since oil prices have spiked due to this Strait [of Hormuz] being blocked,” said Del. Scott Wyatt (R-Mechanicsville), who appeared last week at a press call on Zoom with Del. Terry Kilgore, the state House minority leader from southwest Virginia, and other GOP colleagues.

“We’ll continue to work on the long-term need for additional infrastructure, to fund those charging stations,” Wyatt said.

As a result of the war in Iran, average gasoline prices in Virginia have now surged past $4 a gallon, according to AAA, up from $2.93 a month ago. The war in Iran began Feb. 28.

Wyatt and the other Republicans are now asking to pause the state’s gas tax for 90 days. The relief could come through separate legislation, which lawmakers could pass when they reconvene in Richmond on April 22, or in the budget bill, which could be sent from the legislature to Gov. Abigail Spanberger for signature on April 23.

If gas stations stopped levying the gasoline tax, the state would lose about $125 million a month in revenue for road maintenance and more, Republicans said, proposing that the state’s surplus could make up the difference.

But Democrats in Virginia, who now control both houses of the legislature and the governor’s office, have thus far indicated no interest in suspending the gas tax.

“Let’s be 100 percent clear about why gas prices are skyrocketing: It’s because President Trump unilaterally launched a war with no thought to the direct impact on families in Virginia and across the country,” Spanberger, who took office in January, said in a statement. “Right now, Virginians are feeling the brunt of the President’s actions at the pump and grocery store. As gas and diesel prices soar, I am working to create long-term solutions to address rising costs in energy, housing, and healthcare.”

Beyond suspending the gas tax, the affordability debate over skyrocketing pump prices centers on the transition to electric vehicles, which the Republicans have criticized as too costly and lacking in charging infrastructure. Democrats, meanwhile, have tried to speed up the transition, but have left some options awaiting funding or enabling legislation.

Virginia’s Transition

In 2021, Virginia Democrats passed a law to tie the state to California’s escalating tailpipe emission standards, which would fully ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars in 2035. Former Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced in 2024 that Virginia would no longer follow California’s rules and instead follow the federal ones for model years 2027 through 2032, which are less aggressive than California’s.

The Trump administration is moving to end California’s waiver to the Clean Air Act that allows the state to have stricter tailpipe emissions standards. The administration is also seeking to reverse the Biden-era federal tailpipe rules, which were intended to spur adoption of electric vehicles.

With those actions pending, Democrats in Virginia have as yet taken no action to challenge Youngkin’s decision to have Virginia follow the federal rules. Jay Jones, the state’s newly elected Democratic attorney general, did not respond to a request for comment. Jones is challenging the EPA’s actions to weaken the federal tailpipe rules.

At their press event, the GOP lawmakers echoed Youngkin’s earlier call to let consumers choose what kind of car they want to buy, without endorsements of tax breaks or other incentives encouraging them to go electric.

Del. Michael Webert (R-Warrenton) said the average Virginian driving a 2014 Chevy Malibu can’t afford a new Tesla. Kilgore, the House minority leader, critiqued charging times for electric cars, but added “I’m all for whatever the consumer wants to buy.”

The EV Transition

Democrats in Virginia set up an electric vehicle purchasing program in 2021, offering Virginians a $2,500 rebate. But it went unfunded in anticipation of incentives in the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, which Trump ended in September.

Democrats have not shared any plans to fund the state rebate program as part of ongoing budget negotiations. Neither Spanberger nor House Speaker Don Scott (D-Portsmouth) chose to address how an electric vehicle transition could help with affordability in statements issued in response to the Republicans’ gas tax suspension request.

On the Senate side, Majority Leader Scott Surovell (D-Fairfax) told Inside Climate News by text message that the transition would help prevent the pain of international conflict, without mentioning the state’s lack of funding for the rebate program.

“Transportation is the largest carbon producing segment of the American economy and the sooner we can revert to electrical vehicles the less exposed we are to foreign policy quagmires like this,” Surrovell said.

Deploying Charging Stations

As for charging stations, Virginia is moving along with its plans for charging networks developed through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program. But built in America requirements will likely stifle any actual rollout of the chargers since the manufacturing industry for those components, set to take off under the Biden administration, has been halted by Trump.

On the state level, the Democratic legislature last year passed a bill to cover some costs to build rural electric vehicle charging stations, but Youngkin vetoed it. This year, with a much larger Democratic majority in the House, the bill died in the House Appropriations Committee, which killed several other bills amid budget woes that leaders blamed on the Trump administration.

Spanberger this week did sign a bill that would direct the State Corporation Commission, which regulates Virginia’s utilities, to determine what distance would be appropriate for a utility-owned charging station to be from a charger at a gas station. The bill aims to limit competition between the two. In planning documents, Dominion Energy, Virginia’s largest electricity utility, assumed last year that about 822,500 electric vehicles could be in its service territory by 2038.

Mike O’Conner, president and CEO of the Virginia Petroleum & Convenience Marketers Association, which represents gas stations, said there are over 5,700 locations in Virginia selling gas. The rates of adopting electric vehicles show how relevant those stations are.

“Stopping” the war in Iran, O’Conner said, would help ease gas prices, and putting chargers at gas stations could help ease electric vehicle drivers who have “range anxiety” over how long a battery charge may last. Kelly Blue Book, a widely respected car appraisal outlet, said fast chargers can put an electric vehicle at 80 percent capacity in about 30 minutes. The range of an electric vehicle can be anywhere from as low as 125 miles up to more than 400.

O’Conner said money the state received from a settlement with Volkswagen put chargers at strip malls, but not enough at his members’ locations.

“They weren’t put in, as other states have done, at convenience stores, travel centers, travel stops, where people could stop, recharge their phone, recharge their battery, (have) their lunch,” O’Conner said, noting that Virginia made the decision to install stand-alone chargers at smaller sites.

Alleyn Harned is the executive director of Virginia Clean Cities, a fuel-agnostic organization working to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. He said there are more than 5,300 EV charging ports at 1,800 different locations throughout Virginia.

And charging an electric vehicle is cheaper than paying for gas, Harned added. Filling up a gas car averaging 30 miles per gallon at $3.98 per gallon, less than the latest average Virginia rate, would cost about $143.28 after filling up three times in a month, compared to $58.98 to charge at home, according to Kelly Blue Book.

This story is funded by readers like you.

Our nonprofit newsroom provides award-winning climate coverage free of charge and advertising. We rely on donations from readers like you to keep going. Please donate now to support our work.

Donate Now

If the gas tax is suspended, Harned said, so should a highway use fee the hybrids and electric vehicles pay because they don’t use gas but still use roads. The fee ranges from from $6.86 for a 25-mile-per-gallon vehicle to about $132 for an electric vehicle, according to the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. Since its creation in 2020 through June 30, 2025, the fee has generated over $324 million in revenue.

And home chargers, Harned said, also offer opportunities to use electricity generated in Virginia instead of gasoline made in out-of-state refineries.

“This kind of price shock will happen continually until we have wider adoption of options in Virginia for fuels that we can make locally that are not instantly globally traded,” said Harned. “The legislative session had a lot of talk about electric vehicles. I think there can be some acknowledgement [that] those priorities are front and center.”

The Status of the Transition

There were about 7.8 million cars registered in Virginia in 2024, according to the latest available data from the U.S. Department of Energy. As of June 30, 2025, The Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles said 123,672 registrations were electric and 265,680 were plug-in hybrids and traditional hybrids.

Kelly Blue Book reported in September that the lowest price for a new electric vehicle in August was $29,280. Amid the state and policy changes on purchasing new electric vehicles, sales in Virginia, according to information from the Virginia Automobile Dealers Association, fell from about 27,000 in 2023 to about 25,300 last year.

The sale of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, which can drive about 25-40 miles on a single charge, rose from about 4,500 to 6,217 over the same time period. Sales of traditional hybrids, which use a combination of a gas engine and a battery to increase a car’s miles per gallon, went from about 62,700 to 86,543.

Across all gas, electric and hybrid vehicles, sales in Virginia are slowing, based on sales that were about 5.4 percent lower in January than a year ago. Specifically, sales of Tesla, and electric vehicles and hybrids, over the same time period dropped by about 2 percent and 8 percent, respectively. Gas car sales grew from about 74 percent of sales to 82 percent of sales.