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The imminent closure of Duke University’s herbarium sparked an outcry in the natural sciences community. But the loss to climate science could be even worse.
Kathleen Pryer did not watch March Madness this year.
That isn’t unusual in and of itself — Pryer describes herself as “not a basketball person,” though that might still raise a few eyebrows this time of year at Duke University, her place of employment. But the professor of biology has been a bit distracted lately. For the past few months, she’s been on defense, fending off a loss of her own: the pending closure of the school’s herbarium.
A herbarium (or plural, herbaria) is a collection of preserved plants, typically dried and mounted on sheets of rigid paper. The oldest existing collection in the world, the Gherardo Cibo herbarium in Rome, dates back to the mid 1500s; many U.S. collections are well over a century old. Browsing digitized herbaria online, one can easily get sucked in by their unintended whimsy; though the preserved plants are scientific specimens, traditionally collected by botanists to be used in the study of taxonomy during Western biology’s golden age of naming things, the pages remind me more of the pale, beautiful botanical illustrations in my childhood copy of Thumbelina.
Duke’s herbarium turns 103 this year and contains 825,000 specimens, making it one of the largest collections in the country. But back in mid-February, Susan Alberts, Duke’s dean of natural sciences, sent an email to Pryer, who curates the herbarium, and four other associated faculty members to inform them that “it’s in the best interests of both Duke and the herbarium to find a new home or homes for these collections.”
Though there had long been rumblings about the future of Duke’s herbarium — calls for “strategic plans,” hand-wringing about funds, worry about hiring new staff — the news came as both a shock and a slap in the face to the faculty, chief among them Pryer. “It’s some kind of little stinky plot,” she told me, adding, “I didn’t just roll over when it happened. I reached out to absolutely everybody I could think of.”
The news of Duke’s herbarium closure ricocheted through the tight-knit natural sciences community. Mason Heberling, an associate curator in the Section of Botany at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, told me it should be a “wake-up call” for other researchers. The Duke herbarium is prestigious and hardly a “languishing collection,” he explained; researchers and faculty can easily slip into taking their herbaria for granted. “I’ve realized now that a huge part of my job as a curator will need to be explaining why these collections are important,” he said.
Swiftly, botanists and curators came to Duke’s defense. Opinion pieces and quotes decrying Duke’s decision appeared in the pages of The New York Times and Science. A petition went up on Change.org urging the school to reconsider its decision. Online fora burbled with discontent. “This may be the single worst thing to ever happen to Southeastern botany,” one post on Reddit read, with 64 additional comments piling on the administration for being “profit-obsessed business assholes.” “They could probably fund the entire thing with the salary of one head [basketball] coach,” grumbled another commenter.
The criticism of Duke’s decision is rooted in both a romantic nostalgia about herbaria — the same way you might feel fondly about hand-painted globes or cabinets of curiosities — and a very modern sense of scientific urgency. Researchers have only recently started leveraging the collections as invaluable pieces of data in the greater picture of climate change. “Herbaria are, in many ways, one of our best places to understand nature across space, time, and species,” Charles Davis, the curator of vascular plants at the nation’s largest private herbaria, at Harvard University, told me. “These collections are snapshots of events and occurrences in space and time that you just can’t easily replicate anywhere else. In fact, I would argue it’s impossible.”
Think of it this way: Worldwide, there are about 3,600 herbaria located in 193 different countries that collectively hold about 400 million specimens. Botanists estimate as much as half of the planet’s undiscovered flora could be found in herbaria backlogs. Barbara Thiers, the editor of the Index Herbariorum, a digital guide to the world’s collections, told me that when she was the director of the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium, “we had a huge room filled with unidentified species; I think there were 35,000 or 40,000 specimens in there.” That wasn’t for lack of effort — Thiers said that for many of the plant groups, there simply aren’t any working experts or published literature for curators to consult.
Because the climate is changing so fast, many plants in herbaria will go extinct before they’re formally discovered and named, a process known as a “dark extinction.” “It’s a very sobering feeling to touch the leaves of a tree that doesn’t exist anymore,” Erin Zimmerman, an evolutionary biologist and author of the forthcoming book Unrooted: Botany, Motherhood, and the Fight to Save an Old Science, told me, recalling coming across such a specimen in an herbarium while doing her own research. She likened herbaria to a library, but in her description I also heard echoes of a church: “The specimens are sometimes very old; you have to be very gentle with them, which just adds to the sense of holding something precious,” she went on.
Dwindling biodiversity is only the most obvious way herbaria are critical to 21st-century science. “Phenology, whether it’s when plants flower or when birds migrate, is one of the most important signals of climate change response,” Davis, the Harvard curator, said. Still, our long-term datasets aren’t very robust; research on how plants are changing with warming climates typically dates back only 25 to 30 years, tends to concentrate on the U.S. and Western Europe, and centers on easily observable phenomena, like the leafing out of woody trees. Researchers can turn to herbaria for centuries-old records of where certain plants grew and when they flowered, helping to bridge gaps in our understanding.
Heberling, of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, tracks environmental changes in his research, but he didn’t start using herbaria until well after he’d obtained his Ph.D. Only then did he realize “herbarium specimens are incredible archives of the past,” he told me.
“You can look at the tiny pores, the stomata, on the leaves” of a plant in a herbarium and “see how that has changed over time with increased carbon dioxide,” Heberling said. Scientists have even used this method to create CO2 records.
Admittedly, climate science is still a relatively cutting-edge use case for the herbarium; according to Davis’ research, “global change biology” remains one of the least popular ways to leverage herbaria, well behind “taxonomic monographs” and “species distributions” that still dominate the field. Still, “there are things that, five to 10 years ago, I’d never even imagined we’d be doing today with herbarium specimens,” he told me.
As a result, Duke’s herbarium closure has made some question the university’s commitment to climate research — something that Alberts, the school’s natural sciences dean, emphatically refuted when I raised the question with her. She told me that a rough search revealed that only 23 of the 2,000 papers published by Duke researchers over the past few decades on climate change contained the word “herbarium” anywhere in them. “With my knowledge about all of the climate change research that’s been going on at Duke, the herbarium is not really central to whether or not Duke studies climate change,” she said.
For her part, Pryer has bristled at the administration’s insinuations that the herbarium is of limited use to students and faculty on campus. “You don’t measure a collection by who uses it,” she told me. “As I’ve been naughty enough to say, it’s not a toilet. People outside — the global community — uses it. That’s how you measure its value; things like 90 refereed publications a year [across all disciplines] cite the Duke collections.” Pryer can quickly tick off the climate projects that have come through the herbarium’s halls, including her recent supervision of a local high schooler’s research paper that found the pink lady’s slipper is flowering in the area 17 days earlier than it used to.
Duke is “not an appropriate home for a herbarium that is this large and valuable” for a number of reasons, according to Alberts, ranging from the need to hire new faculty to manage it (Pryer and several of her colleagues are approaching retirement) to the collection’s current building needing renovations. “I have had people email me saying, ‘I know you have enough money, I know you have the facilities.’ I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, you should tell me who you’re talking to, because we don’t,’” Alberts said. She added that she plans to be personally involved in finding the right home for Duke’s herbarium over the next several years.
After all, it’s not like the potential untapped climate records in the Duke collection are being destroyed (though both Pryer and Davis told me they’ve had deans wonder aloud if they could be, since many herbaria are now digitized). The goal is only to move the collection somewhere where it might be better utilized.
Thiers, though, said this is exactly what makes the natural science community so alarmed. As the collection is split up, ideally, the Index Herbariorum would record where Duke’s specimens get sent so scientists can still find them. But when new collections absorb the materials, curators will weed out duplicates, sending unneeded pages elsewhere — at which point specimens can fall between the cracks. “Before you know it, individual specimens will be lost,” Thiers said. “I can almost guarantee that as these secondary moves happen, people will not keep up with the database records.”
There is also a worst-case scenario everyone seemed nervous to mention: that Duke’s collection, in whole or in part, will end up in storage somewhere. Herbarium specimens are extremely susceptible to insect damage and must be kept in expensive, climate-controlled cabinets and rooms. “If they’re putting boxes in a storage storeroom someplace, they’ll be worthless in no time,” Thiers warned. The unidentified plants and uncollected climate data — all of it could be lost. And the cruelest part? Scientists wouldn’t even know what they are losing; it’s a dark extinction of a dark extinction.
When I spoke with Alberts, she said there were no updates on the administration’s plans for the herbarium. She expressed sympathy, though, for the faculty who oppose the administration’s decision. The herbarium “is their life’s work, and it’s important that they have a voice in this process,” she said.
Pryer is determined to keep fighting, even if this isn’t exactly how she’d pictured spending her golden years at Duke. “It’s having an impact on my research and on my health,” she told me. “It’s been pretty unrelenting. I’m anxious for something to resolve.”
She looked tired. There was a faculty meeting later in the day, and she hoped she’d be able to get more clarity about the administration’s decision then. “I don’t want this to go on forever,” she said. “But I also don’t want there to be a decision that makes Duke look insane.”
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Businesses were already bracing for a crash. Then came another 50% tariff on Chinese goods.
When I wrote Heatmap’s guide to driving less last year, I didn’t anticipate that a good motivation for doing so would be that every car in America was about to get a lot more expensive.
Then again, no one saw the breadth and depth of the Trump administration’s tariffs coming. “We would characterize this slate of tariffs as ‘worse than the worst case scenario,’” one group of veteran securities analysts wrote in a note to investors last week, a sentiment echoed across Wall Street and reflected in four days of stock market turmoil so far.
But if the economic downturn has renewed your interest in purchasing a bike or e-bike, you’ll want to act fast — and it may already be too late. Because Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs stack on top of his other tariffs and duties, the U.S. bicycle trade association PeopleForBikes calculated that beginning on April 9, the day the newest tariffs come into effect, the duty on e-bikes from China would be 79%, up from nothing at all under President Biden. The tariff on most non-electric bikes from China, meanwhile, would spike to 90%, up from 11% on January 1 of this year. Then on Tuesday, the White House announced that it would add another 50% tariff on China on top of that whole tariff stack, starting Wednesday, in retaliation for Beijing’s counter-tariffs.
Prior to the latest announcement, Jay Townley, a founding partner of the cycling industry consulting firm Human Powered Solutions, had told me that if the Trump administration actually followed through on a retaliatory 50% tariff on top of those duties, then “we’re out of business because nobody can afford to bring in a bicycle product at 100% or more in tariffs.”
It’s difficult to overstate how existential the tariffs are for the bicycle industry. Imports account for 97% of the bikes purchased in the United States, of which 87% come from China, making it “one of the most import-dependent and China-dependent industries in the U.S.,” according to a 2021 analysis by the Coalition for a Prosperous America, which advocates for trade-protectionist policies.
Many U.S. cycling brands have grumbled for years about America’s relatively generous de minimis exemption, a policy of waiving duties on items valued at less than $800. The loophole — which is what enables shoppers to buy dirt-cheap clothes from brands like Temu, Shein, and Alibaba — has also allowed for uncertified helmets and non-compliant e-bikes and e-bike batteries to flood the U.S. market. These batteries, which are often falsely marketed as meeting international safety standards, have been responsible for deadly e-bike fires in places like New York City. “A going retail for a good lithium-ion replacement battery for an e-bike is $800 to $1,000,” Townley said. “You look online, and you’ll see batteries at $350, $400, that come direct to you from China under the de minimis exemption.”
Cyclingnews reported recently that Robert Margevicius, the executive vice president of the American bicycle giant Specialized, had filed a complaint with the Trump administration over losing “billions in collectable tariffs” through the loophole. A spokesperson for Specialized defended Margevicius’ comment by calling it an “industry-wide position that is aligned with PeopleForBikes.” (Specialized did not respond to a request for clarification from Heatmap, though a spokesperson told Cyclingnews that de minimis imports permit “unsafe products and intellectual property violation.” PeopleForBikes’ general and policy counsel Matt Moore told me in an email that “we have supported reforming the way the U.S. treats low-value de minimis imports for several years.”)
Trump indeed axed China’s de minimis exemption as part of his April 2 tariffs — a small win for the U.S. bicycle brands. But any protection afforded by duties on cheap imported bikes and e-bikes will be erased by the damage from high tariffs imposed on China and other Asian countries. Fewer than 500,000 bicycles in a 10 million-unit market are even assembled in the United States, and essentially none is entirely manufactured here. “We do not know how to make a bike,” Townley told me flatly. Though a number of major U.S. brands employ engineers to design their bikes, when it comes to home-shoring manufacturing, “all of that knowledge resides in Taiwan, China, Vietnam. It isn’t here.”
In recent years, Chinese factories had become “very proficient at shipping goods from third-party countries” in order to avoid European anti-dumping duties, as well as leftover tariffs from Trump’s first term, Rick Vosper, an industry veteran and columnist at Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, told me. “Many Chinese companies built bicycle assembly plants in Vietnam specifically so the sourcing sticker would not say ‘made in China,’” he added. Of course, those bikes and component parts are now also subject to Trump’s tariffs, which are as high as 57% for Vietnam, 60% for Cambodia, and 43% for Taiwan for most bikes. (A potential added tariff on countries that import oil from Venezuela could bump them even higher.)
The tariffs could not come at a worse time for the industry. 2019 marked one of the slowest years for the U.S. specialty retail bike business in two decades, so when COVID hit — and suddenly everyone wanted a bicycle as a way of exercising and getting around — there was “no inventory to be had, but a huge influx of customers,” Vosper told me. In response, “major players put in huge increases in their orders.”
But by 2023, the COVID-induced demand had evaporated, leaving suppliers with hundreds of millions of dollars in inventory that they couldn’t move. Even by discounting wholesale prices below their own cost to make the product and offering buy-one-get-one deals, dealers couldn’t get the bikes off their hands. “All the people who wanted to buy a bike during COVID have bought a bike and are not ready to buy another one anytime soon,” Vosper said.
Going into 2025, many retailers were still dealing with the COVID-induced bicycle glut; Mike Blok, the founder of Brooklyn Carbon Bike Company in New York City, told me he could think of three or four tristate-area shops off the top of his head that have closed in recent months because they were sitting on inventory.
Blok, however, was cautiously optimistic about his own position. While he stressed that he isn’t a fan of the tariffs, he also largely sells pre-owned bikes. On the low end of the market, the tariffs will likely raise prices no more than about $15 or $20, which might not make much of a difference to consumer behavior. But for something like a higher-end carbon fiber bike, which can run $2,700 or higher and is almost entirely produced in Taiwan, the tariffs could mean an increase of hundreds of dollars for customers. “I think what that will mean for me is that more folks will be open to the pre-owned option,” Blok said, although he also anticipates his input costs for repairs and tuning will go up.
But there’s a bigger, and perhaps even more obvious, problem for bike retailers beyond their products becoming more expensive. “What I sell is not a staple good; people don’t need a bike,” Blok reminded me. “So as folks’ discretionary income diminishes because other things become more expensive, they’ll have less to spend on discretionary items.”
Townley, the industry consultant, confirmed that many major cycling brands had already seen the writing on the wall before Trump announced his tariffs and begun to pivot to re-sale. Bicycling Magazine, a hobbyist publication, is even promoting “buying used” as one of its “tips to help you save” under Trump’s tariffs. Savvy retailers might be able to pivot and rely on their service, customer loyalty, and re-sale businesses to stay afloat during the hard days ahead; Moore of PeopleForBikes also noted that “repair services may increase” as people look to fix what they already have.
And if you don’t have a bike or e-bike but were thinking about getting one as a way to lighten your car dependency, decarbonize your life, or just because they’re cool, “there are still good values to be found,” Moore went on. “Now is a great time to avoid a likely increase in prices.” Townley anticipated that depending on inventory, we’re likely 30 to 40 days away from seeing prices go up.
In the meantime, cycling organizations are scrambling to keep their members abreast of the coming changes. “PeopleForBikes is encouraging our members to contact their elected representatives about the very real impacts these tariffs will have on their companies and our industry,” Moore told me. The National Bicycle Dealers Association, a nonprofit supporting specialty bicycle retailers, has teamed up with the D.C.-based League of American Bicyclists, a ridership organization, to explore lobbying lawmakers for the first time in decades in the hopes that some might oppose the tariffs or explore carve-outs for the industry.
But Townley, whose firm Human Powered Solutions is assisting in NBDA’s effort, shared a grim conversation he had at a recent trade show in Las Vegas, where a new board member at a cycling organization had asked him “what can we do” about Trump’s tariffs.
“I said, ‘You’re out of time,” Townley recalled. “There isn’t much that can be done. All we can do is react.”
Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.
Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.
But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.
Trump administration officials — including the president himself — have touted cheaper oil to suggest that the economic response to the tariffs hasn’t been all bad. On Sunday, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told NBC, “Oil prices went down almost 15% in two days, which impacts working Americans much more than the stock market does.”
Trump picked up this line on Truth Social Monday morning. “Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION,” he wrote. He then spent the day posting quotes from Fox Business commentators echoing that idea, first Maria Bartiromo (“Rates are plummeting, oil prices are plummeting, deregulation is happening. President Trump is not going to bend”) then Charles Payne (“What we’re not talking about is, oil was $76, now it’s $65. Gasoline prices are going to plummet”).
But according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, pointing to falling oil prices as a stimulus is just another example of the “4D chess” theory, under which some market participants attribute motives to Trump’s trade policy beyond his stated goal of reducing trade deficits to as near zero (or surplus!) as possible.
Instead, oil markets are primarily “responding to the recession risk that comes from the tariff and the trade war,” Dutta told me. “That is the main story.” In short, oil markets see less global trade and less global production, and therefore falling demand for oil. The effect on household consumption, he said, was a “second order effect.”
It is true that falling oil prices will help “stabilize consumption,” Dutta told me (although they could also devastate America’s own oil industry). “It helps. It’ll provide some lift to real income growth for consumers, because they’re not spending as much on gasoline.” But “to fully offset the trade war effects, you basically need to get oil down to zero.”
That’s confirmed by some simple and extremely back of the envelope math. In 2023, households on average consumed about 700 gallons of gasoline per year, based on Energy Information Administration calculations that the average gasoline price in 2023 was $3.52, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics put average household gasoline expenditures at about $2,450.
Let’s generously assume that due to the tariffs and Trump’s regulatory and diplomatic efforts, gas prices drop from the $3.26 they were at on Monday, according to AAA, to $2.60, the average price in 2019. (GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haanwrote Monday that the tariffs combined with OPEC+ production hikes could lead gas prices “to fall below $3 per gallon.”)
Let’s also assume that this drop in gas prices does not cause people to drive more or buy less fuel-efficient vehicles. In that case, those same 700 gallons cost the average American $1,820, which would generate annual savings of $630 on average per household. If we went to the lowest price since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about $3 per gallon, total consumption of 700 gallons would cost a household about $2,100, saving $350 per household per year.
That being said, $1,820 is a pretty low level for annual gasoline consumption. In 2021, as the economy was recovering from the Covid recession and before gas prices popped, annual gasoline expenditures only got as low as $1,948; in 2020 — when oil prices dropped to literally negative dollars per barrel and gas prices got down to $1.85 a gallon — annual expenditures were just over $1,500.
In any case, if you remember the opening paragraphs of this story, even the most generous estimated savings would go nowhere near surmounting the overall rise in prices forecast by the Yale Budget Lab. $630 is less than $3,800! (JPMorgan has forecast a more mild increase in prices of 1% to 1.5%, but agrees that prices will likely rise and purchasing power will decline.)
But maybe look at it this way: You might be able to drive a little more than you expected to, even as your costs elsewhere are going up. Just please be careful! You don’t want to get into a bad accident and have to replace your car: New car prices are expected to rise by several thousand dollars due to Trump’s tariffs.
With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.
More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.
That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.
Yet lots of those cars are still around. I see a few prowling my workplace parking garage or roaming the streets of Los Angeles. With the faded performance of their old batteries, these long-running EVs aren’t good for much but short-distance city driving. Ignore the outdated battery pack for a second, though, and what surrounds that unit is a perfectly serviceable EV.
That’s exactly what a new brand of EV restorers see. Last week, car site The Autopiancovered DIYers who are scooping up cheap old Leafs, some costing as little as $3,000, and swapping in affordable Chinese-made 62 kilowatt-hour battery units in place of the original 24 kilowatt-hour units to instantly boost the car’s range to about 250 miles. One restorer bought a new battery on the Chinese site Alibaba for $6,000 ($4,500, plus $1,500 to ship that beast across the sea).
The possibility of the (relatively) simple battery swap is a longtime EV owner’s daydream. In the earlier days of the electrification race, many manufacturers and drivers saw simple and quick battery exchange as the solution for EV road-tripping. Instead of waiting half an hour for a battery to recharge, you’d swap your depleted unit for a fully charged one and be on your way. Even Tesla tested this approach last decade before settling for good on the Supercharger network of fast-charging stations.
There are still companies experimenting with battery swaps, but this technology lost. Other EV startups and legacy car companies that followed Nissan and Tesla into making production EVs embraced the rechargeable lithium-ion battery that is meant to be refilled at a fast-charging station and is not designed to be easily removed from the vehicle. Buy an electric vehicle and you’re buying a big battery with a long warranty but no clear plan for replacement. The companies imagine their EVs as something like a smartphone: It’s far from impossible to replace the battery and give the car a new life, but most people won’t bother and will simply move on to a new car when they can’t take the limitations of their old one anymore.
I think about this impasse a lot. My 2019 Tesla Model 3 began its life with a nominal 240 miles of range. Now that the vehicle has nearly six years and 70,000 miles on it, its maximum range is down to just 200, while its functional range at highway speed is much less than that. I don’t want to sink money into another vehicle, which means living with an EV’s range that diminishes as the years go by.
But what if, one day, I replaced its battery? Even if it costs thousands of dollars to achieve, a big range boost via a new battery would make an older EV feel new again, and at a cost that’s still far less than financing a whole new car. The thought is even more compelling in the age of Trump-imposed tariffs that will raise already-expensive new vehicles to a place that’s simply out of reach for many people (though new battery units will be heavily tariffed, too).
This is no simple weekend task. Car enthusiasts have been swapping parts and modifying gas-burning vehicles since the dawn of the automotive age, but modern EVs aren’t exactly made with the garage mechanic in mind. Because so few EVs are on the road, there is a dearth of qualified mechanics and not a huge population of people with the savvy to conduct major surgery on an electric car without electrocuting themselves. A battery-replacing owner would need to acquire not only the correct pack but also potentially adapters and other equipment necessary to make the new battery play nice with the older car. Some Nissan Leaf modifiers are finding their replacement packs aren’t exactly the same size, shape or weight, The Autopian says, meaning they need things like spacers to make the battery sit in just the right place.
A new battery isn’t a fix-all either. The motors and other electrical components wear down and will need to be replaced eventually, too. A man in Norway who drove his Tesla more than a million miles has replaced at least four battery packs and 14 motors, turning his EV into a sort of car of Theseus.
Crucially, though, EVs are much simpler, mechanically, than combustion-powered cars, what with the latter’s belts and spark plugs and thousands of moving parts. The car that surrounds a depleted battery pack might be in perfectly good shape to keep on running for thousands of miles to come if the owner were to install a new unit, one that could potentially give the EV more driving range than it had when it was new.
The battery swap is still the domain of serious top-tier DIYers, and not for the mildly interested or faint of heart. But it is a sign of things to come. A market for very affordable used Teslas is booming as owners ditch their cars at any cost to distance themselves from Elon Musk. Old Leafs, Chevy Bolts and other EVs from the 2010s can be had for cheap. The generation of early vehicles that came with an unacceptably low 100 to 150 miles of range would look a lot more enticing if you imagine today’s battery packs swapped into them. The possibility of a like-new old EV will look more and more promising, especially as millions of Americans realize they can no longer afford a new car.