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The state has made itself into a model of relief policy for manufactured homeowners.
There’s a brook that runs along the Mountain Home Park in Brattleboro, Vermont, providing the sort of pleasant babbling sound people play at night to help them fall asleep. On a typical morning, the water moves quickly and is shallow enough that you can see the rocks under the surface.
But when a storm comes through, long-time resident Angela Johnson warns, this steady stream can turn treacherous.
“We watch it every day when it’s raining — it doesn’t matter if it’s a heavy storm, the brook rises quite quickly,” Johnson told me. “It has and it will continue to break out of its space and cause flooding.”
That’s what happened four years ago, when an ice jam caused the brook to burst, flooding into the houses in the low-lying surrounding area. Or during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, which destroyed 29 homes in the greater Tri-Park Housing Cooperative, of which Mountain Home is a member. The rushing water lifted some structures right off their foundations, damaged roadways, and left a trail of debris, photos, and furniture among the wreckage in its wake.
Manufactured homes (which the state of Vermont uses interchangeably with mobile homes, though that term that refers only to models made before 1976) were disproportionately impacted during Irene, making up 7% of the state’s housing stock but 15% of housing damaged during the storm. Across the U.S., one of seven manufactured homes is in a neighborhood with high flood risk, according to a Headwaters Economics analysis, a figure that is only expected to rise due to climate change.
Vermont has recognized this risk, making changes at the state, local, and community levels that have earned it national recognition as a model for mitigating flood risk in these particularly vulnerable neighborhoods. To better understand what some of these strategies looked like, I went to Vermont earlier this year and met with residents, officials, and researchers who shared their experiences working or living — or both — in manufactured home parks.
Or rather, I tried to. On my first attempt to visit, I made it about 45 minutes into my four-hour drive before I had to turn around due to flooding, an irony that was certainly not lost on me. When I finally made it up to Tri-Park the next day, there was still water pooled in front of homes and alongside the road, hinting at the areas that might be particularly vulnerable to the next storm.
Mountain Home Brook.Colleen Hagerty
Weeks later, Vermont was in the headlines for flooding once again. An unnamed storm drenched the state in July, causing “catastrophic” impacts and earning quick comparisons to Tropical Storm Irene. More than 2,900 homes were damaged across the state, hundreds of them significantly, including dozens of manufactured homes. “Flooding had outsized impact on 4 Vermont mobile home communities,” announced the headline from one local news organization, which placed the loss at more than 60 manufactured homes.
So, did any of the changes implemented after Irene make a difference? It’s a tricky question, said Kelly Hamshaw, a researcher with the University of Vermont. She’s been visiting and interviewing residents in manufactured housing communities since 2011 and is currently working to identify needs in areas impacted by this summer’s storm.
For starters, the flooding footprints of the two storms were different, meaning those hardest-hit by one were not necessarily as impacted by the other. The flooded areas are still in the early stages of recovery, so it’s difficult to step back and make clear comparisons. Other less visible interventions, though, have certainly paid off, she told me.
Take accessing aid — researchers say the specific needs of manufactured homeowners are often overlooked in laws dealing with flood damage. Typically, owners of manufactured homes buy the structure they live in but not the land beneath it, which they rent from a distinct owner or corporation. Since most government assistance is aimed at either single-family homeowners or renters, Headwaters Economics research found that manufactured homeowners are “more likely to face barriers in accessing federal and state assistance, more likely to experience long-term recovery problems, and more likely to be permanently displaced.”
In the aftermath of Irene, for instance, most damaged manufactured homes had to be condemned to receive a full payout from the Federal Emergency Management Agency; those payouts often amounted to less than the value of the homes and left their owners without anywhere to live. Other types of homes did not require condemnation for their owners to receive that full payout.
This was a discrepancy the state recognized more readily this time, though it still has required additional interventions to address. In response to this summer’s storm, Vermont has rolled out new programs specifically aimed at damaged manufactured home removal and funding for those who received insufficient payouts from FEMA. A state legislative task force is also working to better understand the economics and issues related to manufactured housing in hopes of addressing policy gaps.
Because it’s not just a challenge accessing aid. Other types of homeowners also have more options when they’re ready to start moving on.
Stephanie Smith, hazard mitigation officer for Vermont Emergency Management, said buyouts were a key tool when it came to single-family homes after Irene. In those cases, the typical model was to pay 75% of the value of a property, an amount that was often significantly higher than the maximum FEMA payout, and gave the homeowner funds towards purchasing a new property. But this approach wasn’t feasible for manufactured homeowners, Smith told me. While many single-family homes appreciate in value over time, Smith said the value of a manufactured home often diminishes over time due to age and wear. And unlike single-family homes, in which the entire property goes into the valuation, manufactured home owners typically own just the structure they live in, paying rent on the actual land beneath it to a landlord.
So, based on just the value of that building, the payout these homeowners would receive would not be “anywhere near enough” to cover purchasing a new structure and paying lot rent, according to Smith.
Aging infrastructure is an issue in Tri-Park, from older homes to public offerings like the bridges and sewage systems, all of which can make the community more vulnerable to flooding. To address these compounding challenges, Tri-Park, where Johnson lives, developed a multimillion-dollar master plan with the input of government officials, residents, board members, and developers. It calls for funding infrastructure upgrades, including fixing up sewers and bridges over the brook, and proposes a new approach to buyouts. Instead of paying the 25 residents living in floodplains a percentage for their homes, Tri-Park will offer them new, eco-friendly manufactured homes located at a higher elevation within the same community.
The plan has multiple public and private supporters, including Smith’s department, which is providing the park with $2 million to purchase those new homes through the state’s Flood Resilient Communities Fund. At this point, both the plans and the funds to make this idea a reality are largely in place.
What’s still missing: Fewer than half of the minimum 25 households necessary to move forward have agreed to move. Residents have been hearing about the plan as a hypothetical for years while the board worked with partners and looked for capital. But board members and residents alike acknowledge there is a lot of skepticism around the plan’s promises. One challenge is that the new lots are expected to be smaller, and residents might not be able to have the same sort of layouts or amenities they currently enjoy.
To address these concerns, the Tri-Park board — which is open for residents to join — has hosted resident meetings and is offering a chance to tour models of the new types of homes they will be building. Which brings up another resiliency strategy more than a dozen parks have adopted since Irene: becoming resident-owned. Vermont law requires landowners of manufactured home parks to give notice to all lessees if they intend to sell the property, giving residents first dibs on purchasing the land. To do so, homeowners often opt to work with a nonprofit or establish a resident-owned cooperative, in which the residents become shareholders. Tri-Park is the largest of the 67 nonprofit or resident-owned manufactured home parks in the state, giving its residents an opportunity to have a voice in these larger park decisions.
Help from Cooperative Development Institute and Resident-Owned Communities has been a key part of this movement, local officials said. Julia Curry, who works for CDI in Vermont, says the biggest benefit in switching to a resident-owned model is security, as things like lot rent cannot be changed without resident input.
“Now the residents themselves — the members of the co-op — are setting their annual budgets,” Curry explained.
Aside from ensuring prices remain reasonable, that can also allow for prioritizing and accounting for risks like flooding. Last Christmas, a winter storm sent Sandy Jarvis’s Christmas into chaos. A mixture of high winds, rain, and snow over Northwestern Vermont caused the St. George Community Cooperative, where Jarvis has lived for nearly a decade, to lose power. Like Mountain Home, even an average storm causes large puddles to form in the low-lying neighborhood. But the Christmas flood sprang from another source — frozen pipes that cracked and leaked, draining the community’s well system.
For Jarvis, this was a warning sign. Since then, she’s been working to establish an emergency plan in the community and budget for a generator that could keep the water supply running during power outages. When the heavy rains came through this summer, she said, they were mostly spared, though they did lose power again and dealt with some flooding.
“Most mobile home communities in the state are old, and there's a lot of aging infrastructure,” Jarvis told me. Reflecting on their luck compared to other communities in the state, she later added, “We came out of it fairly well.”
Bill Dunton, another resident of the St. George development, has lived there nearly 25 years, through the transition to a cooperative; he’s witnessed flooding and the aftermath. Making changes can be difficult, he acknowledges, particularly in a neighborhood that has “118 families — and 118 different attitudes.” Still, Dunton believes the co-op model is ultimately supportive for residents, as it eliminates the fear of losing their homes or getting priced out with no notice, something Hamshaw from the University of Vermont said is not unusual in the state’s “bonkers” housing market, even after disasters.
Concerns over lot rent, which manufactured housing residents can still be charged after being displaced, and accessing aid are among the issues Hamshaw has heard since the summer storm. With the ground now frosting over at night as winter weather settles in, Hamshaw worries about the residents still in the thick of post-disaster bureaucracy. She’s currently interviewing displaced residents, many of whom are couch surfing or living in campers as they await aid. Even once they receive funds, she stressed that the housing market is significantly different now than it was after Irene, with everything from rent to repairs costing more, let alone new housing units.
That’s why Dunton, sitting inside his warm home as a light drizzle fell outside, said he hopes the state can come to see communities like St. George the way he does: as one of the last vestiges of actually affordable housing. And that, he believes, is well worth investing in for the long haul.
Support for this story was provided by The Neal Peirce Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting journalism on ways to make cities and their larger regions work better for all people.
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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.