You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
The answer depends on where it’s going and what it’s replacing.
President Biden’s decision to pause approving liquified natural gas export terminals until it can better study their climate effects — functionally delaying or even outright preventing their construction — got real political, real fast. Almost immediately, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin called for a hearing on the president’s decision-making.
“If the Administration has the facts to prove that additional LNG export capacity would hurt Americans, they must make that information public and clear,” he said in a statement last week. “But if this pause is just another political ploy to pander to keep-it-in-the-ground climate activists at the expense of American workers, businesses and our allies in need, I will do everything in my power to end this pause immediately.”
While Senator Manchin is not exactly the administration’s biggest fan lately, he’s also asking some pretty interesting questions. One of the animating ideas of the past few months in climate politics has been the argument that LNG (and maybe even pipeline gas) are in fact far worse for the global climate even than coal, which has long been assumed to be the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fossil fuel around. That view is based on research by Cornell University scientist Robert Howarth and has been expounded by climate advocates and elected officials alike.
But that research has not yet passed through peer review. Even if it had, Howarth’s past research has gotten criticism from other climate scientists for using some idiosyncratic assumptions that yield more dramatic results.
Make no mistake, meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement and holding global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels requires winding down our use of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. If we meet those goals, the natural gas export terminals delayed by the Biden administration’s decision will likely go dormant well before the end of their expected lifespans. But it’s not the case that in all possible worlds, continuing or even expanding natural gas production and exports would actually be worse for the climate.
The basic physics of coal emissions versus LNG emissions are just part of the equation. When it’s burned, natural gas releases carbon dioxide, the primary source of human-caused climate change, albeit less carbon dioxide than coal. But natural gas is itself mostly methane, CH4, which traps far more heat than CO2 when it leaks from wells, pipelines, and production facilities. (LNG is also much more energy-intensive to extract, produce, and store than regular natural gas, since it has to be cooled to -260 degrees Fahrenheit, sailed across the ocean and then “regasified” and shipped via pipeline on the other side.) While CH4 is more potent than CO2 from a warming perspective, it also breaks down much more quickly in the atmosphere, which means the warming effect doesn’t last as long.
How to think about LNG’s effect on overall emissions, then, largely depends on how much you think each of these factors matters. “Only if we assume high methane leakage rates and a 20-year global warming potential is natural gas worse than coal, and such assumptions are likely unrealistic,” wrote Carnegie Mellon energy systems researcher Paulina Jaramillo in an essay titled, aptly, “Navigating the LNG Dilemma.”
Absolute emissions aren’t even what we should be asking about, Arvind Ravikumar, a professor at the University of Texas and a leading scholar on natural gas and energy policy, told me. “The climate impact of U.S. LNG depends on what it replaces in countries — whether those alternatives have more or less emissions than U.S. LNG.”
When the United States stepped in to replace much of the gas the European Union would otherwise buy from Russia with LNG, Ravikumar explained, it likely reduced overall emissions because of lower methane emissions from the U.S. gas industry. Before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia supplied about 155 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Europe; by 2022, that was down to around 80 billion cubic meters. That’s a lot of energy to replace. In that time, the U.S. more than doubled its LNG exports to Europe, which has guaranteed demand of at least 50 billion cubic meters from the U.S. through 2030.
Had the U.S. not ramped up its LNG exports, boosters argue, these countries might not have had a viable alternative and might have turned to coal, instead. But that won’t be the case in every single possible future scenario. “There’s no right answer,” Ravikumar told me. “It depends on who buys, what time frame, which country, and how are they using LNG.”
There’s at least one clear case study of the coal-to-gas switch working to lower emissions: the United States itself.
In 2007, the U.S. was consuming just over 1 billion tons of coal for electricity; by 2016 that had declined to 679 million, and by 2022 to just under 500 million — in other words, by more than half. In that same time, natural gas use for electricity grew from 7 trillion cubic feet in 2007 to 10 trillion cubic feet in 2016 to 12 trillion cubic feet in 2022.
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have dropped more than 15% since 2007 to even below their 1992 levels, according to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Rhodium Group. The drop in emissions has been going on since 2010, which the EPA attributes, in part, to "the growing use of natural gas and renewables to generate electricity in place of more carbon-intensive fuels.”
As climatologist Zeke Hausfather put it in an earlier commentary on an earlier Howarth paper, “While it isn’t responsible for the majority of emissions reductions, natural gas replacing coal is the largest single driver.”
Much of the conceptual infrastructure on which climate policy operates relies on estimating what the world will be like in the future — not just figuring out the effects of different levels of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, but also figuring out different likely pathways for the evolution of those emissions over time.
This works in both directions — asking how specific projects either reduce or lower emissions, and asking about what an energy system would look like in a world where emissions have been reduced enough to avoid certain levels of temperature increases. And that’s really where the rubber meets the road.
In a scenario where the world hits its Paris Agreement goals, there would not be the coal-to-gas switching envisioned by LNG advocates precisely because there would be very little coal still being used to generate electricity. The fear, then, is that LNG terminals would either become stranded assets, capital investments that wind up becoming liabilities; or that, once they’re in operation, the companies behind them would use their political and economic leverage — not to mention just the power of inertia — to keep enough natural gas in the global energy system to be profitable.
“Either you’re building and planning to shut it down early,” Hausfather told me, “or you’re building something that’s going to be inconsistent with the world we’re aiming to have under our climate targets.”
In a Paris-compliant world, almost 90% of the world’s coal reserves and over half of the natural gas and oil reserves will stay in the ground, according to researchers from University College London. They estimate that in order to meet the Paris targets, gas production would “see rapid decline” from 2020 to 2050 and would be eliminated as a fuel for electricity generation by 2040, with accompanying “low utilization rates of infrastructure, and limited prospect for future additional liquefaction capacity” for exports.
In other words, in a world that comes in under 1.5 degrees of warming, the emissions reductions from coal-to-gas switching peter out after 2035; with 2 degrees of warming it’s around 2040 to 2045 — in any case, beyond the planned life of the export terminals that the Biden administration’s decision affects.
But how much LNG export capacity the United States builds up in the next decade is only a tiny part of the overall emissions picture now, in 2035, or in 2050. “This is the issue with regulating at a project level in general,” energy consultant Sean Smillie told me. “The decision of any given project in the scheme of global emissions is small. For me, that points to the fact that we’re trying to regulate climate change — which is a systemic issue — at the project level, and that’s a very hard thing to do.”
The biggest question is just how energy systems overseas evolve — and what role LNG exports play in that determination. The European Union is about to decide whether to reduce its net collective emissions 90% from 1990 levels by 2040, on their way to zero by 2050, which would signal a sharp reduction in demand coming from that part of the world. Meanwhile, for U.S. LNG export projects currently in the permitting pipeline, Asian countries are contracted to receive a much bigger share, according to a Public Citizen analysis. Bloombergreports that those buyers have started looking elsewhere — including to Russia.
But what if we don’t hit our Paris Agreement targets, as the United Nations and Bill Gates agree we’re increasingly unlikely to do? What if developing countries prioritize cheap, available energy (like India’s growing coal production) over climate goals? In that case, Ravikumar argues, then LNG export capacity turns from a potential “stranded asset” into an insurance policy.
“The way to think about LNG in the longer term is the insurance against a 3 [degrees of warming] world,” Ravikumar told me. If we fail at taking quick action to change our systems from carbon-polluting to zero-carbon energy, we might still be doing some coal-to-gas switching by 2050.
“It’s hard to say for certain that we will or not need the LNG export terminals by 2050 and 2060,” Elan Sykes, an energy policy analyst at the Progressive Policy Institute and an opponent of the Biden administration’s decision, told me. “Absent aggressive foreign policy measures [like] a Green Marshall Plan for worldwide clean energy, it’s hard to imagine a world where LNG doesn’t provide” some value, whether from continuing to help reduce emissions or simply maintaining a reliable supply of energy, he said.
Modelers are good at figuring out what the energy mix of a 1.5, 2, or 3-degree world would look like. They’re less good at predicting how that energy mix will evolve over time in the world we actually live in — and it’s in that world that the Biden administration will have to decide whether more LNG exports will serve the public interest.
The job isn’t just to make decisions for an ideal world. As Hausfather told me, it’s “aiming at the best versus mitigating the worst.”
With reporting by Emily Pontecorvo.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
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.