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They’re often people of color, young, and from the Northeast.
We are living in the Age of the Big Yikes.
Climate change is widely accepted as both real and happening now. Many Americans hear news about global warming at least once a week and though projections aren’t as dire as they once were, they’re still extremely not great. Half of Americans have been “personally affected” by climate change, and of those, 54% say they have experienced a “reduced quality of life due to weather extremes,” a recent survey of 1,000 U.S. adults by Heatmap and Benenson Strategy Group found. Overall, two-thirds of Americans (65%) worry about what climate change will mean for them personally — a common anxiety that the Los Angeles Times has deemed “a normal response to an abnormal situation.”
A smaller but still substantial subset of Americans — around 15% — further self-identifies as having mental health problems stemming from the effects of climate change, including “anxiety and stress” about current and future events, PTSD, depression, substance abuse, and loneliness and isolation, the Heatmap Climate Poll shows. The distress, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, isn’t strongly determined by education level, income, or even ideology: A full quarter of those who say they have mental health problems due to climate change are Republicans (25%, compared to 31% of Democrats and 34% of independents).
The effects of climate change on mental health have historically been studied with a focus on young people, and it’s true that younger adults in Heatmap’s survey were also the ones more likely to describe mental health problems from climate effects. But what else can we learn about those who suffer mental and emotional ramifications from our changing world?
Unsurprisingly, and consistent with prior research, young adults are overwhelmingly the ones most anxious about climate change. Nearly half of 18-to-34-year-olds who’ve experienced climate change firsthand described having mental health problems as a result — a response that was much smaller in the 65+ population (10%). However, of that small number of people in the 65+ population who have reported suffering mental health problems due to climate change, there was a universal (100%) experience of having “anxiety and stress over future effects of climate change,” Heatmap found. Ninety percent also had anxiety and stress over the current effects.
Among young people who self-reported having mental health issues around climate change, “stress and anxiety” about current (69%) and future (66%) climate events was the most often cited mental health impact. Over half also cited depression (53%) and loneliness and isolation (46%).
Despite the “unbearable whiteness” of the conversation around climate anxiety, Heatmap’s polling was consistent with earlier surveys that found people of color are more likely to be alarmed about global warming than white people. White Americans were actually the least likely to report having experienced climate change-related mental health problems, at 28%, compared to African-Americans and Hispanics (36% each) and Asian American and Pacific Islanders (33%). Though white Americans reported the highest instances of depression (60% compared to 36% among all people of color), minority groups lead self-reports of anxiety and stress over the present (71% to white Americans’ 64%); anxiety and stress over the future (65% to white Americans’ 61%); and loneliness and isolation (45% to white Americans’ 35%).
That result isn’t as surprising when you look at who has been personally affected by climate change: just 44% of white people say they have been, compared to more than half of African-Americans (55%), one in six Hispanics (60%), and three-quarters of Asian American and Pacific Islanders (75%). Of the people who said climate change caused them mental health problems, the lowest rate (28%) was among white Americans.
Heatmap also asked all the respondents if climate change makes them worried about their children’s future. Though this question included answers from non-parents and people planning never to have children (and thus could be skewed by the fact that white respondents were also the least likely to have children under 18 living at home), 78% of people of color voiced general concerns about the future of their children due to climate change compared to 64% of white Americans.
Particularly of note was that nearly all (94%) of Asian American and Pacific Islanders described themselves as worrying about their children’s future due to climate change, despite having roughly the same number of children living at home as white Americans (34% to white American's 31%). There were also high levels of concern among Hispanics, at 81%, and African-Americans, at 70%, though those respondents were somewhat more likely to be parents or guardians than white Americans.
Mothers were significantly more likely to suffer from the mental health effects of climate change (49%) compared to dads (33%).
Fathers, on the other hand — and hilariously — were likely to say they've experienced climate-related property damage (51% to moms’ 39%).
It might seem intuitive that people living under the wildfire-orange skies of California or on the eroding coastlines of Florida would be the most concerned about climate change, but that certainly isn’t the rule. The Northeastern United States is technically among the “safest” places in the country with regards to meteorological upheavals — just 11% of respondents in the region described themselves as having been “very affected” by climate change. Nevertheless, of the people self-reporting mental health problems related to climate, 40% were in the Northeast compared to 22% in the West.
This is especially notable because while people in the Northeast might have a reputation for being more high strung than other parts of the U.S., the region actually features the lowest levels of general anxiety, behind the Midwest, South, and West, according to
a pre-pandemic U.S. Census Bureau study. (The Northeast surpassed the Midwest by fall 2020, though that could potentially be attributed to the region being hard-hit by COVID-19).
The higher rate of self-reported mental health problems could be political: the Northeast is the most liberal region in the U.S., and residents are perhaps more inclined to trust scientific warnings about climate change and/or read news about the severity of the crisis, resulting in higher levels of concern.
It’s revealing to look at specifically what kinds of mental health problems Northeasterners describe, too. Most (82%) who were experiencing mental health problems specified having anxiety and stress from current climate change effects — a rate almost 10 points higher than the next-most-anxious region, the South.
“Depression” was the most commonly cited mental health impact in the West (66%) and Midwest (69%), the
Heatmap poll found. Suburbanites also specifically experienced “anxiety and stress” from current climate change in high numbers, at 74% compared to rural Americans’ 66% and urbanites’ 58%.
Climate-linked mental health problems more broadly occur at the highest rates in rural communities, which are also uniquely vulnerable to weather-related impacts. Among those who said they have mental health problems stemming from climate change, 36% lived in rural locations, compared to 29% in the suburbs and 27% in urban environments.
Anxiety only scratches the surface of the mental health issues that result from climate change, Heatmap also found.
Nearly a third of Americans (30%) who reported experiencing climate change said it resulted in mental health problems. While 63% of that group further specified that meant suffering from anxiety and stress, 49% also reported depression, 22% reported post-traumatic stress disorder, and 18% reported taking to coping mechanisms like substance abuse.
The fourth National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report by the U.S. Global Change Research Program published in 2018,
warns that these responses are normal and will continue to result from climate disasters going forward. People who experience a flood or the risk of flood, for example, “report higher levels of depression and anxiety, and these impacts can persist several years after the event.” Droughts commonly result in “increased use of alcohol and tobacco.” High temperatures can “lead to an increase in aggressive behaviors, including homicide.” Children displaced by climate-related disasters experience a “heavy burden” on their mental health. Separately, a 2018 study published in Nature predicted up to 40,000 additional suicides in the United States and Mexico by 2050 due to higher temperatures.
“Climate anxiety” (sometimes interchangeably called “eco-anxiety”) is not technically classified as a medical condition by the all-powerful DSM-5, the diagnostic manual used by mental health professionals in the United States — which makes sense, because “the last thing we want is to pathologize this moral emotion, which stems from an accurate understanding of the severity of our planetary health crisis,” Britt Wray writes in her 2022 book Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. Many in the medical community agree; as one psychotherapist and researcher told the BBC on the subject in 2019, “I’d kind of wonder why somebody wasn’t feeling anxious.”
Within reason, a certain amount of climate anxiety can be a good thing. (It will perhaps be productive to track climate “worry” in the coming years to see if, or as, it changes as guarded climate optimism grows in popularity). But experiencing climate change can also produce mental health problems that, like physical health problems, need to be anticipated and treated as weather-related crises increase, intensify, and expand. That is particularly true as it pertains to underserved communities, whose mental health struggles already frequently go unrecognized or untreated.
The overriding takeaway, though, is that it is wrong to look at climate change as only a danger to property and physical safety, the two human impacts that dominate headlines. Even if just 15% of Americans who experience climate change personally end up with self-described mental health problems as a result, that would potentially mean almost 18 million Americans will be suffering from the mental effects of climate change by 2050.
As Gary Belkin, the former deputy health commissioner for New York City and founder of the Billion Minds Institute, wrote for Psychiatric News in 2021, “We are all psychologically unprepared to face the accelerating existential crisis of climate and ecological change that will further deepen other destructive fault lines in our society ... We must sound that alarm and put our own house in order.”
The Heatmap Climate Poll of 1,000 American adults was conducted via online panels by Benenson Strategy Group from Feb. 15 to 20, 2023. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.02 percentage points. You can read more about the topline results here.
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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.