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Vermont’s natural gas company is selling heat pumps and rebranding itself a “thermal service provider.”
On a recent Friday morning, I sat down to watch a webinar about a natural gas utility and unexpectedly found myself glued to the screen.
The video featured Morgan Hood, the new product development manager at a small utility once called Vermont Gas Systems, now known simply as VGS, that serves about 55,000 customers in its titular state. For 80 minutes Hood described how the company was working to reinvent itself as a “thermal solutions provider.” As part of that mission, it had recently started selling and leasing electric heat pump water and space heaters to its customers to help them reduce their gas use.
As a reporter who has covered natural gas utilities’ expansion plans and the industry’s all-out war on electrification, I was stunned. The programs alone were unusual, but what surprised me more was the way Hood talked about them.
“If we want to continue to serve our customers, which we do, significant changes are necessary,” she said, describing a “dramatic shift” in public sentiment toward natural gas in Vermont. “We know we're not going to be expanding our customer base with natural gas customers in the future.”
It’s hard to overstate how different Hood’s tone and message were from that of the average gas utility executive, who tends to highlight their product’s popularity and make a case for its role in a low-carbon future. Consider the remarks of Kim Greene, the CEO of the much larger Southern Company Gas, at a conference I attended in November. “Natural gas is foundational to America's clean energy future," she told an audience of state regulators. Without ever once acknowledging that natural gas contributes to climate change, she went on to describe it as a “magical molecule” that was important to the company’s decarbonization strategy.
When I later probed climate advocates in Vermont about VGS, I learned that many dismiss the company’s image change as greenwashing, or are at least skeptical of its plans. They pointed to a highly contested $165 million pipeline the company recently built, and a controversial plan to replace the fuel in its pipelines with biogas and hydrogen.
But my initial impressions also weren’t unfounded. The company does in fact seem to be unique in the way it has actively started leaning into the shift that science, policy, and economics are all driving toward — a transition to all-electric buildings.
“VGS is among the most progressive gas utilities in the country, there's no question about that,” Ben Walsh, the climate and energy program director at the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, and a longtime critic of VGS, told me.
The company still has a lot to figure out. Hood was remarkably transparent in acknowledging that the new products VGS is offering aren’t nearly as profitable as selling natural gas. But its recent past and its uncertain future make it a revealing case study of the challenges gas companies face in trying to stay viable as they try to decarbonize.
The webinar, titled “A Gas Utility Goes Electric,” was organized by a Portland, Oregon-based advocacy group called Electrify Now. Its co-founder Brian Stewart told me he initially had some reservations about featuring a gas utility in their event series, but he and his partners were impressed with the company’s interest in engaging with an electrification group. They hoped the talk might reveal a model that other utilities could follow — particularly Northwest Natural, their local gas utility in Oregon.
“They're doing the exact opposite of what VGS is at least attempting to do,” Stewart said. “Northwest Natural is still denying the idea that electrification is even better from an emissions standpoint.”
In fact, Northwest Natural is not just denying it — it’s reportedly putting millions of dollars into opposing electrification. In February, the Oregon city of Eugene passed an ordinance banning gas hookups in new residential buildings. Northwest Natural responded by spending more than $900,000 to get a measure to overturn the gas ban on the city’s November ballot, according to campaign finance records reviewed by The Washington Post. And it’s just getting started. The Post obtained audio indicating that the gas industry plans to spend $4 million on the Eugene referendum.
The strategy has been widely adopted by the gas industry. Last year, a utility in Southern California, SoCalGas, was fined $10 million for spending ratepayer funds to fight stronger building efficiency standards that would have reduced natural gas demand. New York Focusreported last week that National Fuel, a gas utility in Western New York, is spending hundreds of thousands of ratepayer dollars to lobby against a statewide push to reduce natural gas use.
VGS, on the other hand, first signaled it was reading the writing on the wall for natural gas in 2019, when it announced a new strategy to eliminate its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
That was around the time state leaders were contemplating a new climate law called the Global Warming Solutions Act, which passed the following year. VGS hired a new CEO, Neale Lunderville, who reorganized the company, creating new positions focused on decarbonization, including Hood’s role. Richard Donnelly, who spent a decade working for a nonprofit utility dedicated to energy efficiency joined VGS as its Director of Energy Innovation.
“The creation of that job was a clear signal to me that they were investing in the right things,” Donnelly told me.
VGS rolled out its first electrification program in early 2022, offering customers the option to lease or buy heat pump water heaters. The company was in a fairly unique position to do this, as it already had a sales and leasing program for gas equipment and an in-house team trained to install heating equipment.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, VGS launched an electric space heating program, offering central heat pumps that utilize the same ductwork as a homeowner’s existing furnace. For now, the company is installing these as dual fuel systems, meaning recipients keep their gas furnaces as a back-up source of heat. While heat pumps designed for cold climates don’t require this, they do lose efficiency in the coldest temperatures. Customers can decide when they want the system to switch over to gas, and the company developed a calculator that shows them how much carbon they can save, and what the anticipated costs will be, depending on where they set the switchover point.
The space heating systems are only available to a portion of the company’s customers — about 40% — because most have boilers and radiators with no ductwork. Hood said they hope to offer electric options for those homes in the future.
Dylan Giambatista, director of public affairs for VGS, told me the program is already taking off. Two weeks after it launched, they had well over 100 inquiries, he said. The water heaters, on the other hand, have had a pretty slow start. Only about 6% — or 48 total — of the water heaters the company has installed since January 2022 were heat pumps. “I don't think that folks are yet aware of that technology,” he said. “We expect heat pump water heater use will increase over time as incentives and consumer awareness increase,” he added in an email later.
Electrification isn’t the company’s only strategy to meet Vermont’s emissions goals.
It’s trying to reduce customers’ total energy usage through weatherization and other home efficiency improvements.
It’s also investing in alternative fuels, like renewable natural gas and hydrogen, to pump through its pipelines to any remaining gas customers. Nearly two-thirds of the gas that VGS sells is delivered to commercial and industrial customers, not all of whom may be able to fully electrify their operations. But local climate advocates have a lot of concerns about that aspect of the plan. Renewable natural gas, which typically comes from decomposing waste or dairy manure, is a lot more expensive than fossil gas. There’s also research indicating that it doesn’t necessarily have the climate benefits that proponents claim.
While Walsh, of the Public Interest Research Group, acknowledged how unique VGS’ electrification programs were, he said it's way too early to give the company the benefit of the doubt.
“There are some strategies that a gas utility could implement, that on the surface look good, but ultimately don't serve Vermont,” he said. “I think it's incumbent on all of us that are focused on cutting carbon pollution and cutting energy costs for Vermonters to watchdog their efforts very closely as they unfold.”
Others discount VGS’ heat pump programs because the company also continues to market and sell gas equipment and hook up new gas customers. Annette Smith, who runs a group called Vermonters for a Clean Environment sent me a screenshot of a VGS Facebook ad from May 8 offering people $500 to switch to natural gas.
Jim Dumont, a lawyer who has represented opponents of VGS in regulatory cases and lawsuits for years, said the first thing the company has to do to win public trust is come clean. “They have to tell the public that burning gas to heat your homes is helping push us over the climate cliff,” he told me. “They can sell heat pumps, but it's a competing message.”
VGS doesn’t deny that natural gas contributes to climate change. Lunderville, the CEO, told Vermont officials in a 2021 letter that the company recognizes “that its principal product today — fossil gas — has significant climate impacts.”
But the message stings with irony to Dumont, who has spent the last decade fighting a 41-mile gas pipeline the company built prior to its come-to-Jesus moment. Back in 2013, when VGS was first seeking approval for the pipeline from regulators, it argued that the project would cut energy costs and carbon emissions in the state. Most Vermonters did, and still do, heat their homes with fuel oil, propane, or wood — and gas can be a cleaner and often cheaper option. But opponents argued that cold climate heat pumps that were coming on to the market would be more affordable and effective.
Cold climate heat pumps were still pretty new at the time, and certainly weren’t being adopted in Vermont yet. The idea was sidelined, and while the scale of the pipeline was ultimately reduced, its cost ballooned from $86 million to $165 million. And now that it's completed, VGS is marketing heat pumps.
To Dumont, that’s not only ironic, it’s worrisome. The way gas utilities like VGS pay for big pipeline projects is to recover the costs over decades through customer bills. But if VGS helps people go electric, the residual costs of the pipeline are going to fall on fewer and fewer customers. As VGS leans into electrification, it could also be barreling toward a scenario referred to as the utility death spiral: the cost of gas will increase, driving more people to get off it.
“Is the public going to be asked to bail out the company, or will the company be responsible for its own bad judgment and will its sole shareholder have to swallow the loss?” Dumont asked. “If there are no consequences for making a bad investment, then effectively it's not a regulated utility, it's effectively a taxpayer-funded business.”
This is a problem that all gas utilities are facing or will likely face, whether or not they embrace a transition to electric buildings. Mike Henchen, a principle in the carbon-free buildings program at RMI, a national nonprofit, said this was “the elephant in the room” around the country.
“How to deal with all the customers hooked up to this fossil fuel system looms large on the horizon,” he said. “There's not going to be an easy way to tackle that.”
I reached out to Énergir, the Canadian company that owns VGS, to find out whether it had any concerns about VGS’ financial future. “Énergir has always believed in the complementarity of different energy solutions and in accelerating electrification where it makes sense,” Éric Lachance, president and CEO of Énergir said by email, adding that “Énergir strongly supports VGS’s approach.”
Though heat pumps aren’t as profitable as natural gas, the company does see opportunities for growth. It can sell and lease the water heaters to residents outside its existing customer base. It’s also exploring the potential to build and manage geothermal heating networks, where entire neighborhoods could be heated by underground pipes carrying nothing but water.
“The market opportunity is huge,” said Donnelly, the Director of Energy Innovation. For now, the company is primarily limited by staffing, and is being careful not to create more demand than it can fulfill. He estimated VGS was looking at “hundreds of installs over the next couple of years and growing that part of our business quite rapidly, hopefully, within the next five years.”
VGS also sees potential for these programs to become more profitable thanks to a law passed by the state legislature earlier this month called the Affordable Heat Act that directs the state’s utility regulators to design a clean heat standard. The company could eventually earn credits for its electrification programs and sell them to other fuel providers in the state that need to comply with the standard.
As policy and technology continue to evolve, it makes sense that VGS doesn’t know exactly what the future holds. But faced with similar uncertainty, most gas utilities have responded by putting their heads in the sand or fighting tooth and nail against change.
What makes VGS remarkable is that it’s at least trying to find its place in a post-gas world.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article understated the length of a VGS pipeline. It is 41 miles, not 27 miles. The article has been corrected. We regret the error.
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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.