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:
New data provided exclusively to Heatmap shows just how complicated it is to get money where it needs to go.
By the numbers, a new federal program designed to give low-income communities access to renewable energy looks like a smashing success. According to data provided exclusively to Heatmap, in its first year, the Low-Income Communities Bonus Credit Program steered nearly 50,000 solar projects to low-income communities and tribal lands, which are together expected to produce more than $270 million in annual energy savings.
But those topline numbers don’t say anything about who will actually see the savings, or how much the projects will benefit households that have historically been left behind. In reality, the majority of the projects — about 98% — were allocated funding simply for being located in low-income communities, with no hard requirement to deliver energy or financial savings to low-income residents.
A closer look at the data reveals a more complicated success story. While the program did make some clear strides in bridging the solar inequality gap, other factors — including the language in the law that created it — are also holding it back.
The Low-Income Communities Bonus Credit Program came out of the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022. Though the goal is to increase solar access for low-income households, it’s not actually a tax credit for low income households. It’s for small wind and solar developers — and beginning in 2025, developers of other types of clean energy — whose projects meet certain criteria.
The law caps the total amount of energy the program can support at 1.8 gigawatts per year, and developers have to apply and get their project approved in order to claim funds. To be eligible, a project must produce less than 5 megawatts of power and fall under one of four categories: It must be located in a low-income community, be built on Indian land, be part of an affordable housing development, or distribute at least half its power (and guaranteed bill savings) to low-income households. The first two categories qualify for a 10% credit; the second two, which stipulate that at least some financial benefits go to low-income residents, qualify for 20%. In both cases, the credit can be stacked on top of the baseline 30% tax credit for clean energy projects that meet labor standards, meaning it could slash the cost of building a small solar or wind farm in half.
Each of these provisions has the potential to address at least some of the barriers disadvantaged communities face in accessing clean energy. Low-income homeowners may not have the money for a down payment for rooftop solar or the credit to find financing, for instance. But by giving developers a tax credit for projects located in low-income communities, solar leasing programs, in which homeowners lease panels from a third party in exchange for energy bill savings, now have an incentive to expand into these neighborhoods, and potentially offer lower lease rates. The program helped fund nearly 48,000 residential solar projects in the first year.
Tribal lands, meanwhile, account for more than 5% of solar generation potential in the U.S., but are still a largely untapped resource, for reasons including lack of representation in utility regulatory processes, complex land ownership structures, and limited tribal staff capacity. The program gives outside developers additional incentive to work through the challenges, and it also earmarks funds for tribe-owned development. Crucially, the IRA also opened the door for tribes, as well as other tax-exempt entities, to utilize clean energy incentives and receive a direct payment equal to the tax credits. The program supported 96 solar projects on tribal lands in the first year.
The third category attempts to overcome the famous “split incentive” problem for low-income renters whose landlords have little reason to spend money on a solar project that primarily benefits tenants. The program helped finance 805 solar projects on low-income residential buildings, where the developers are required to distribute at least 50% of the energy savings equitably among tenants.
Lastly, while renters in some states can subscribe to community solar projects, which offer utility bill credits in exchange for a small subscription fee, the subscriptions can be scooped up by wealthier customers if there’s no low-income requirement. The program sponsored 319 community solar projects where at least half the capacity had to go to low-income residents and offer at least 20% off their bills.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo declared the program a success. “These investments are already lowering costs, protecting families from energy price spikes, and creating new opportunities in our clean energy future,” he said.
Despite overwhelming demand during the four-month application period, however, the program ended up with capacity to spare. Although applications totaled more than 7 gigawatts, ultimately, the Department approved just over 49,000 projects equal to about 1.4 gigawatts, or roughly enough to power 200,000 average households. All of it was solar.
The gap between applications and awarded projects has to do with the program’s design. The Treasury divided the 1.8 gigawatt cap between the four categories, setting maximum amounts that could be awarded for each one. Within the four categories, the awards were further divided, with half set aside for applicants that met additional ownership or geographic criteria, such as tribal-owned companies, tax-exempt entities, or projects sited in areas with especially high energy costs relative to incomes.
For example, 200 megawatts were earmarked for Indian lands, with half reserved for applicants meeting those additional criteria, but only 40 megawatts were awarded. The fourth category, meanwhile, which was designed to encourage community solar development, was oversubscribed.
Since tax data is confidential, the Treasury Department could not share much detail about these projects, including where, exactly, they were, who developed them, or who will benefit from them. A map overview shows a concentration of awards across the sunbelt, with Illinois, New York, Maine, Massachusetts, and Puerto Rico also seeing a lot of uptake.
IRS, RAAS, Statistics of Income, August 2024
I reached out to more than a dozen nonprofits, tribal organizations, and other groups who advocate for or develop clean energy projects benefiting low-income communities to find examples of what the program was actually funding. The first person I was connected with was Richard Best, the director of capital projects and planning for Seattle Public Schools, who got a 10% tax credit for solar arrays on two new schools under construction in low-income neighborhoods. While the school system already planned to put solar on these schools, Best said the tax credits helped offset increased construction costs due to supply chain interruptions, preventing them from having to make compromises on design elements like classroom size.
“It's not insignificant,” he told me. “The solar array at Rainier Beach High School is in excess of a million dollars — just the rooftop solar array. That's $400,000 [in tax credits]. So these are significant dollars that we're receiving, and we're very appreciative.”
Jody Lincoln, an affordable housing development officer for the nonprofit ACTION-Housing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, got a 10% tax credit to add solar to a former YMCA that the group recently converted to a 74-unit apartment building. The single room occupancy rental units serve men who are coming out of homelessness or incarceration. Lincoln told me the building operates “in the gray,” and that any cost saving measures they can make, including the energy savings from the solar array, enable it to continue to operate as affordable housing. When I asked if they could have built the solar project without access to the IRA’s tax credits, she didn’t hesitate: “No.”
These two examples show the program has potential to deliver benefits to low-income communities, even in cases where the energy savings aren’t going directly to low-income residents.
I also spoke with Alexandra Wyatt, the managing policy director and counsel at the nonprofit solar company Grid Alternatives. She told me Grid partnered with for-profit solar developers, such as the national solar company SunRun, who were approved for the tax credit bonus for rooftop solar lease projects on low-income single-family homes. In these cases, Grid helped pull together other sources of funding like state incentives for projects in disadvantaged communities to pre-pay the leases so that the homeowners could more fully benefit from the energy bill savings.
It’s unlikely that all of the nearly 48,000 residential rooftop solar projects in low-income communities that were approved for the credit in the first year had such virtuous outcomes. It’s also possible that projects installed on wealthier homeowners’ roofs in gentrifying neighborhoods were subsidized. In an email to me, a Treasury spokesperson said the Department recognizes that “simply being in a low-income community does not mean low-income households are being served,” and that it was required by statute to include this category. It was still the agency’s decision, however, to allocate such a large portion of the awards, 700 megawatts, to this category — a decision that some public comments on the program disagreed with.
Wyatt applauded the Treasury and the Department of Energy, which oversees the application process, for doing “an admirable job on a tight timeframe with a challenging program design handed to them by Congress.” She’s especially frustrated by the 1.8 gigawatt cap, which none of the other renewable energy tax credits have, and which changes it into a competitive grant that’s more burdensome both for developers and for the agencies. It adds an element of uncertainty to project finance, she said, since developers have to wait to see if their application for the credit was approved.
Wendolyn Holland, the senior advisor for policy, tax and government relations at the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy told me there was tons of interest among indigenous communities and tribal clean energy developers in taking advantage of the IRA programs, but it wasn’t really happening. Holland cited challenges for tribes reaching the stage of “commercial readiness” required to apply for federal funding. Tribal developers have also said they are limited by the lack of transmission on tribal lands. When I asked the Treasury about the paltry number of projects on Indian Lands, a spokesperson said it was not for lack of trying. The Department and other federal agencies have conducted webinars and other forms of outreach, they said, through which they’ve heard that many tribes are struggling to access capital for energy projects, and that development on Indian lands has “unique challenges due to the history of allotment of Indian lands and status of some land as federal trust land.”
Holland is optimistic that things will change — in December, Biden issued an executive order committing to making it easier for tribes to access federal funding. The Alliance also recently petitioned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to address barriers for tribal energy development in its new rules that are supposed to get more transmission built.
The unallocated capacity from 2023 was carried over to the next year’s round of funding, so it wasn’t lost. But a dashboard tracking the second year of the program looks like it's following a similar pattern. While the community solar-oriented category, which was increased to allow for 900 megawatts, is nearly filled up, the tribal Lands category, which kept its 200 megawatt cap, has received applications to develop less than a sixth of that.
Wyatt said that so far, she does think the bonus credit has been successful in spurring good projects that might not otherwise have happened. Still, it will probably take a few years before it will be possible to assess how well it’s working. The good news is, as long as it doesn’t get repealed, the program could run for up to eight more years, leaving plenty of time to improve things. It’s already set to change in one key way. Beginning in 2025, it becomes tech-neutral, meaning that developers of small hydroelectric, geothermal heating or power, or nuclear projects, will be able to apply. (When asked why no wind projects were approved to date, a spokesperson for the Treasury said taxpayer privacy rules meant it couldn’t comment on applications, but they added that wind projects tend to be larger than 5 megawatts and take longer to develop.)
One thing is for sure, despite the heavy administrative burden of screening tens of thousands of applications, the agencies involved are clearly committed to implementing the program.
“I’m definitely pleased that they managed to get the program up and running as quickly as they did,” Wyatt told me. “I mean, it's kind of lightning speed for the IRS.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
In a press conference about the newly recast program’s first loan guarantee, Energy Secretary Chris Wright teased his project finance philosophy.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Thursday announced a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for American Electric Power to replace 5,000 miles of transmission lines with more advanced wires that can carry more electricity. He also hinted at his vision for how the Trump administration could recast the role of the department's Loan Programs Office in the years to come.
The LPO actually announced that it had finalized an agreement, conditionally made in January under the Biden administration, to back AEP’s plan. The loan guarantee will enable AEP to secure lower-cost financing for the project, for an eventual estimated saving to energy consumers of $275 million over the lifetime of the loan.
“These are the kind of projects where we’re going to partner with businesses to make our energy system more efficient, more reliable, ultimately lower cost,” Wright said on a call with reporters.
And yet in the past few months, the department has also canceled loan guarantees and grants for other transmission projects that were expected to provide those same benefits — including the Grain Belt Express, an 800-mile line set to bring low-cost wind power from Kansas to the Chicago metropolitan area in Illinois.
“We don’t care about authorship,” Wright told reporters, acknowledging that the AEP loan was conditionally approved by the Biden administration. “Not all of them were nonsense. The ones that are in the interest of the American taxpayers, in the interest of the American ratepayers, and there’s a helpful role for government capital — we’re happy to support those.”
When asked specifically why AEP’s proposal met his criteria while the Grain Belt Express didn’t, Wright first made an argument about cost. “I have nothing against the Grain Belt Express,” he said. “I suspect it’ll still be developed. But it’s far more expensive on a per mile basis since it’s a brand new transmission line.”
His subsequent comments, however, hinted at a more significant shift in approach. He went on to argue that the project came with an unacceptable amount of risk since the developers didn’t have buyers yet for the power coming down the line. It was trying to “close on arbitrage,” he said, by buying up cheap wind power that was stranded in Kansas and bringing it to a larger market. “It’s a more commercial enterprise,” he said. “That’s done with private entrepreneurs and private capital.”
It’s important to note that the Grain Belt Express loan guarantee would have been issued under an innovation-focused program within the Loan Programs Office that was specifically geared toward higher risk projects that banks won’t otherwise touch. The AEP project is part of a different program focused on more mature technologies, with a goal of reducing the cost of major utility infrastructure upgrades to ratepayers.
When I floated Wright’s comments by Jigar Shah, the former head of the Loan Programs Office under the Biden administration, he was flummoxed. “It’s nonsensical,” he said. To Shah, taking Wright’s risk aversion to its logical conclusion would mean, for instance, that the office should not fund any nuclear energy projects. “If this becomes a new standard, that means nuclear is dead in the United States,” he said.
AEP is the first developer to secure a loan guarantee under the Energy Dominance Financing Program, Congress’ new name a Biden-era program within LPO that offered loan guarantees to utilities to “retool, repower, repurpose, or replace energy infrastructure.” Initially called the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Financing Program and created by the Inflation Reduction Act, it focused on projects with climate benefits, like making efficiency upgrades to power plants or installing renewables on the site of a former coal plant.
In the Biden administration’s view, AEP’s project would “contribute to emissions reductions by supporting existing and new clean generation by expanding transmission capacity in the regions in which they operate.”
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act rebranded the program and removed any requirements that projects reduce emissions. On Thursday’s call, Wright seemed to imply that it wasn’t just the Biden-era loan program that had been renamed. “The Loan Program Office is being rechristened the Energy Dominant Financing — it is the rechristening of the same department,” he said in response to a question about the office’s remaining loan authority. The Department of Energy did not respond to my request for clarification.
None of that means that the potential emissions benefits from AEP’s project won’t materialize. Limited transmission capacity is one of the biggest obstacles for bringing new wind and solar power online, and reconductoring could also reduce line losses, making the overall grid more efficient.
The transmission project — which includes plans to rebuild some power lines and reconductor others — will ultimately increase capacity by more than 100%, a spokesperson for AEP told me. The first phase will involve upgrades to about 100 miles of wires across Ohio and Oklahoma, while future phases will tackle lines in Indiana, Michigan, and West Virginia, with the intent of meeting growing demand from data centers and manufacturing development, according to a press release.
When reporters asked Wright about the other conditional loan guarantees the Biden administration had issued under the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program that are still pending, the secretary stressed that he was looking for applicants that had identified a clear set of projects they would implement. “Many were done in a hurry, without really even having the projects that the loans would be associated with identified. You can end up with a grab bag of projects without a lot of say for where the money went,” he said.
Wright accused the Biden administration of failing to ask applicants to detail the impact the projects would have on taxpayers and ratepayers — a key question his colleagues are now asking.
Shah disagreed with that portrayal. The whole point of the program was to reduce interest rates for utilities and require them to pass on the benefit to ratepayers. All of the projects awarded conditional commitments met that bar, he said.
He warned that if the Trump administration didn’t honor the remaining conditional commitments to utilities under the program — all 10 of them — it risked losing the trust of any new companies it attempts to make similar deals with.
“Most of the nuclear projects that they’re looking to chase are not going to get closed until 2028. And so what signal are they sending? That projects that get approved in the last year of an administration are not going to be honored in the next administration?”
On a new loan guarantee, a Nord Stream 2 revival, and AI-aided oil recovery
Current conditions: As Tropical Storm Lorenzo looks likely to dissipate over water by Friday, AccuWeather has slashed the season’s forecast to six hurricanes from nine • Severe thunderstorms near Little Rock, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee, are likely too spotty to relieve long-standing drought in the Mississippi River Basin • The Netrokona district of northeastern Bangladesh is scorching in temperatures nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
A rendering of the future Cascade Advanced Energy Facility. Amazon
A year after Amazon invested in the small modular reactor developer X-energy, the tech giant has unveiled its plans to build a nearly gigawatt-sized plant in southeastern Washington, where it will install the nuclear company’s next-generation technology for the first time. The Cascade Advanced Energy Facility is set to begin construction “by the end of this decade,” with hopes of generating power from up to a dozen of X-energy’s 80-megawatt high-temperature gas-cooled reactors sometime “in the 2030s.” Amazon plans to build the plant in three phases, with four reactors at each stage, eventually reaching 960 megawatts in capacity. Located in Richland, Washington, along the Columbia River, the facility will nearly double the output of the Pacific Northwest’s only nuclear plant, the nearby Energy Northwest’s Columbia Generating Station.
In a sign of what Heatmap’s Katie Brigham called “the nuclear dealmaking boom” back in August, rival microreactor developer Oklo suggested at a recent public meeting in Tennessee that it may propose building some of its reactors near the Oak Ridge site of its debut nuclear waste recycling project, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported Monday. On Tuesday, meanwhile, the U.S. Army announced its new Janus program, which aims to supply bases by 2028 with microreactors like the ones Oklo aims to build, which generate 20 megawatts of electricity or less. The reactors would be owned and operated by private companies. “What resilience means to us is that we have power, no matter what, 24-7,” Jeff Waksman, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army, told The Wall Street Journal.
The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office has largely revoked deals made under the previous administration since President Donald Trump returned to office. But on Thursday morning, the agency’s in-house lender announced a $1.6 billion loan guarantee to a subsidiary of utility giant American Electric Power to upgrade and rebuild about 5,000 miles of transmission lines across Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. “This loan guarantee will not only help modernize the grid and expand transmission capacity but will help position the United States to win the AI race and grow our manufacturing base,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press release.
The move came a day after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s effort to fire thousands of federal workers amid the ongoing government shutdown. At a hearing Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, a Clinton appointee based in California, granted labor unions’ request for a temporary restraining order to halt the dismissals. The hearing took place at the same time White House budget director Russ Vought appeared on the late conservative commentator Charlie Kirk’s podcast to preview his plans to lay off as many as 10,000 federal workers as the shutdown continued. The hearing will pause the job cuts for the roughly 4,000 workers who received notice so far. Illson said during the hearing that she granted the temporary restraining order because administration officials had “taken advantage of the lapse in government spending, government functioning, to assume that all bets are off, that the laws don’t apply to them anymore, and that they can impose the structures that they like on the government situation that they don’t like,” News From The States reported. “Things are being done before they’re thought through — very much ready, fire, aim.” Nearly 200 employees at the Department of Energy began receiving notices last week, as I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter.
The underwater explosion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline connecting Germany to Russia’s gas supply remains one of the world’s biggest geopolitical whodunnits, and Berlin’s fellow European Union members seem keen to keep it that way. In just the past two days, Poland and Italy blocked extradition requests to send suspected saboteurs to Germany for trial. But the Germans aren’t just looking to figure out who’s responsible for destroying the megaproject. The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy is considering restarting the certification process for the pipeline, the daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reported Wednesday. The previous German government had ruled out a restart of the pipeline in March after news broke that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s business allies were angling to restore the project. In June, the new government under conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz began examining legal avenues to block any future plans to reactivate the pipeline, the Financial Times reported at the time. But under current law, the economic ministry said this week a restart “cannot be ruled out in the medium term.”
Ohio passed a new law to fast-track energy projects on former coal mines and brownfields, Canary Media reported Wednesday. Called House Bill 15, the legislation took effect in August and lets the state’s Department of Development designate the former industrial sites as “priority investment areas” at the request of local governments. Roughly a third of Ohio’s 88 counties ban wind, solar, or both, but the language in the bill makes clear that “it was meant to be technology-neutral,” Rebecca Mellino, a climate and energy policy associate at The Nature Conservancy, told Canary’s Kathiann M. Kowalski.
A transition from coal could yield significant health benefits, as The New York Times reported on Tuesday. A recent study found that, when a coal-processing facility near Pittsburgh shut down, the number of emergency room visits for respiratory issues in the surrounding area dropped by about 20% in the month following the closure.
The world’s annual consumption of oil isn’t expected to peak until the mid-2030s, and by 2050 it will reach a cumulative 1 trillion barrels, according to the consultancy Wood Mackenzie’s forecast. But production that’s either already onstream or ready for development is expected to gradually decline to 650 billion barrels per year by the mid century. What will make up the difference? “Traditional exploration will play its part but can’t get anywhere near bridging a gap of this scale,” Wood Mackenzie analysts wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. “Even the 21st century’s biggest new play, Guyana, with 15 billion barrels of oil, barely makes a dent.” To identify potential new resources, Wood Mackenzie rolled out a new AI-powered benchmark called Analogues, which “uses a machine learning method known as clustering to identify each field’s closest matches across 60 different attributes spanning rock properties, fluid characteristics, and commercial factors.” The AI tool could increase the share of recoverable conventional oil reserves by nearly 42%.
A chart showing how the AI "analogues" could bolster oil drilling. Wood Mackenzie
Fusion energy is rapidly accelerating in the U.S., and the Department of Energy is poised to release a national plan for speeding up the deployment of the technology. In the meantime, states can prepare by beefing up regulatory capacity, speeding up permitting, clearing interconnection queues, and creating special tax credits. That’s according to a new roadmap from the Clean Air Task Force. “As fusion energy moves closer to commercial reality, states have a window of opportunity to prepare,” Jack Moore, a fusion policy consultant at CATF, wrote in a blog post. “Proactive policy design today can help states position themselves to create an effective environment for fusion energy deployment tomorrow.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated accurately reflect oil demand by 2050.
This thing is a certified clunker.
Americans certainly got the message about the end of the EV tax credit. With the $7,500 benefit set to disappear at the end of September, electric vehicle sales surged to record numbers in the third quarter of 2025 as buyers raced to beat the deadline.
The rising tide lifted just about all EVs — but not the struggling Tesla Cybertruck. According to new numbers from Kelley Blue Book, Tesla sold just 5,385 Cybertrucks from July to September, less than half as many as it delivered during the same period in 2024. The company is now expected to sell around 20,000 of the metal EVs this calendar year. That’s down from around 50,000 last year, and less than 10% of the 250,000 total Elon Musk once predicted as the truck’s annual sales figure.
Cybertruck was well on its way to flop status before these sales numbers. With its purposefully jarring aesthetic, the EV for edgelords was never going to be as popular as Musk proclaimed, and that was before his relationship to Donald Trump and online provocations pushed many more people away from the Tesla brand. Cost didn’t help, either. Tesla once said it would sell a $40,000 basic version of Cybertruck, a price point that might have enticed some buyers beyond the Musk fanboys who became early adopters, but the cheapest one you can actually buy today is around $60,000.
Still, the vehicle’s third-quarter performance is particularly damning in comparison to nationwide EV sales, where the tax credit’s demise ignited a fire sale. Americans bought more than 430,000 EVs during the quarter, an increase of about 40% from the second quarter of 2025 and about 30% from the third quarter of last year. Popular vehicles including the Chevy Equinox EV, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Ford Mustang Mach-E, and Honda Prologue surged to sales of more than 20,000 during the quarter. Electric trucks including the Rivian R1T, Ford F-150 Lightning, and GMC Hummer EV saw sales increases despite having high prices that rival the Cybertruck’s.
Tesla itself, despite months of bad press, did well, too. The brand’s share of the overall EV market continues to wane, reaching a new low of 41%. But the surge temporarily stabilized its tumbling sales, with plenty of people snatching up Model 3s and Model Ys while the getting was good. Those two vehicles remained the two best-selling EVs in America, with Tesla selling more than 114,000 Model Ys and more than 53,000 Model 3s.
Yet the good times did nothing to spur driver interest in Cybertruck. In fact, public enthusiasm for the vehicle might be even lower than it seems, because it turns out that one of the top customers for Musk’s electric tank is Musk himself. Electrek reports that his other companies, such as SpaceX and xAI, have been accumulating Cybertrucks as their company cars. Tesla is replacing some of its own fleet with Cybertrucks, as well.
The move makes sense for Musk. Because of weak overall demand, Cybertrucks are sitting idle on lots; selling them to his businesses at least puts them to work. The scheme also might improve the appearance of Tesla’s sales numbers, Electrek speculates. By locking in some of these sales with a downpayment before the end of September, Tesla can deliver Cybertrucks to Musk’s other business in the weeks to come and still get the tax credit on them. The approach could boost sales numbers for a fourth quarter that’s likely to be difficult with the disappearance of the federal incentive.
Now that Cybertruck has become Elon’s Edsel, Tesla’s hopes for an EV sales revival lie largely with the new “Standard” versions of its two best-sellers. These trim levels strip away some of the amenities from the Models 3 and Y to bring their starting prices down to $37,000 and $40,000, respectively. It’s far from clear that this will succeed. Anyone shopping for an EV solely on price could wait for the upcoming new versions of the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Bolt, which are expected to come in at $30,000 or less. The Equinox’s $35,000 starting price, five-grand less than even the budget Model Y crossover, has spurred its recent success.
Still, with 320-plus miles of estimated range and at least some of Tesla’s best features, the budget versions could be compelling cars at those prices. At the very least, they’ll speak to more drivers than the Cybertruck does.