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Yes, charging when power is cheap will save you money — but not everyone has that luxury.
Rob talks with the U.S. auto giant”s VP of batteries and sustainability, Kurt Kelty.
The global vehicle market is splitting into two — with just a few exception.
Plus more on nuclear, EVs, China, and more, recorded live at our Heatmap House event at New York Climate Week.
Representative Mike Levin, It’s Electric, Rivian, and more showed up for the mobility session at Heatmap House.
On the surface, the climate case for electric vehicles is simple: Battery-powered cars can eliminate our need to burn dirty gasoline and diesel, and as more renewables come onto the grid, they’ll only run more and more cleanly. But the benefits that can be gained from electrifying the vehicle fleet run far deeper, a case that a variety of speakers made at Heatmap House on Wednesday as part of New York Climate Week.
Andrew Peterman, director of advanced energy solutions at the EV maker Rivian, explained how electric vehicles are becoming a multi-tiered grid solution. Rivian itself is cooperating with drivers and utilities to create automatic smart charging so that EVs can charge when energy is abundant and inexpensive, saving the user money — in some cases as much as $1,000 per year — and easing strain on the grid. Doing so helps to keep electricity prices down, which is good for the country and for the bottom line of an electric vehicle maker.
“Our ability to sell and give people value out of an electric vehicle can only be enabled if we transform the grid to be able to be affordable, reliable, and cleaner for everyone,” Peterman told Heatmap deputy editor Jillian Goodman. “We need to use our role in the energy system to enable customers to get more value out of the grid. So everything we do is about grid transformation to enable electric vehicles to have an even stronger and stronger value proposition. When we bring down electricity costs, that brings down the total cost of ownership for our vehicle owners.”
Of course, energy can go in the other direction, too. Now that millions of EVs are on the road, the multitude of kilowatt-hours stored in EV batteries can be a grid asset. That goes for vehicle-to-grid integration, where EVs can discharge energy to help balance the grid when they’re not driving. But it’s an especially compelling proposition when those batteries get older and are no longer optimal for powering vehicles. Rivian is working with partners such as Redwood Materials to recycle old EV batteries and to repurpose some as grid storage. The same is true at Waymo, whose fleet of autonomous, only-electric rideshare vehicles have racked up hundreds of thousands of miles in some cases.
“Our fleets are sometimes outlasting our batteries where they still work, but they’re just not optimal for the ride-hailing fleet,” Waymo head of environment and sustainability Adam Lenz told Nico Lauricella, Heatmap’s CEO and editor in chief. “So we’re taking those batteries out, refreshing them, and then there’s still a lot of life left on this battery. We’re working with a partner that’s based out of L.A. County where we provide service and they’re deploying those batteries to support front of the meter grid storage.” (Waymo is also a sponsor of Heatmap House.)
It’s clear that the rideshare economy will be dominated by electric vehicles, and Lenz argued that this fact helps extend the climate benefits of electrification and autonomy to people who don’t want to drive or have been priced out by the upfront costs of an EV. The promise that self-driving cars will ultimately be much safer compared to those driven by fallible humans makes it safer to walk or bike, the most sustainable transportation methods. Waymo recently introduced a partnership with Visa to give San Francisco Bay Area riders a $2.85 Waymo account credit (the price of a bus ride in S.F.) when they combine a rideshare trip with a train or bus linkup to create a mulit-modal journey — a roundabout way to create “free” buses.
Across the country, EV charging could help give New York City not only cleaner skies but also improved grid management. The city’s Green Ride Initiative is meant to have New York’s taxi and rideshare trips be majority-electric by 2030, yet NYC has been a charging desert compared to other dense cities like London. Tiya Gordon, co-founder and COO of charging company it’s electric, came to Heatmap House to discuss her company’s recent win of a contract to install 700 new street chargers in New York, which has only 88 today.
It’s not just how many chargers are going in, she said, but where — the majority will go into neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens where rideshare drivers live and park their cars overnight. Albert Gore, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, added: “It makes a lot of sense also when you think about the impact to the grid. If you are directing a lot of that charging at night, particularly for these high mileage use cases, that actually puts downward pressure on electricity rates. EVs are a very, very flexible load.”
It became remarkable by being pretty normal.
Quick: What’s the most successful EV in America that’s not a Tesla? At various points over the years, vehicles such as the Toyota Bz, Chevy Bolt, and Chevy Equinox EV have claimed the title. But the most popular non-Tesla in the first half of 2026 was the Hyundai Ioniq 5 — a car that looks essentially the same as it did at its debut in 2021. It also just finished first in Edmunds’ testing of the top electric SUVs, a smidge ahead of the Tesla Model Y and the much-lauded Rivian R2.
In a market as volatile as electric cars, it’s odd for a standout vehicle to be one that hasn’t changed much in half a decade. But Ioniq 5’s sales have been slowly ticking up over the past several years because of some smart choices that allowed Hyundai to navigate the chaos of the EV transition in the U.S. Ioniq 5 has always just been there, in plain sight. So this week, I finally drove it on a California road trip — the Los Angeles to San Francisco journey I use to test many electric vehicles — to see what it does so right.
First, that look. The Ioniq 5 hasn’t changed its appearance much since 2021 because it remains so distinctive. Angular details on the doors and Ioniq’s signature pixelated taillights feel futuristic, but the overall shape is familiar. It scans more like a hatchback from the old days than an SUV, but scaled up to the high riding height Americans love in their crossovers.
The shape also makes Ioniq 5 more practical. What’s underneath the quirky exterior is essentially a five-seat crossover, the most popular vehicle type in the U.S., with a decently spacious cargo area underneath the rear liftgate. Compare that to its stablemate, the Ioniq 6. That lovely car has been discontinued in the U.S. in part because its low-riding sedan shape and small trunk didn’t appeal enough to Americans. Ioniq 5 is also just the right size, not a battleship like the gorgeous but enormous three-row Ioniq 9 I drove last summer.
Inside its EVs, Hyundai has struck an admirable balance between old and new. The central touchscreen isn’t up to the size or sophistication of what’s in a Tesla or Rivian. It does, however, incorporate EV route planning into its built-in navigation, and the driver can scan through nearby compatible chargers. The interface can be frustrating to use — it’s more of a drop-down list of stations, not the map in a Tesla that lets you tap into a Supercharger station to get its real-time information. But Hyundai gets points for trying, since I’ve criticized the likes of Toyota and Subaru for omitting the feature.
Compared to offerings by the EV-only carmakers, Ioniq 5 does, at times, feel like an EV built by a company that doesn’t specialize in electric cars. But while that leads to some annoyances and missing features, it’s not always a bad thing. For example, Ioniq 5 retains plenty of physical buttons to please the analog crowd. A row of physical buttons can put the touchscreen into map, media, or other modes. It’s a helpful touch, allowing you to change what you’re seeing on the display without the need to tap the screen. Climate control runs through a smaller touchscreen located below, and while it may not use physical buttons, it is a simple and straightforward menu that never changes.
Range delivers what you need. Longer-range versions can top 300 miles on their official Environmental Protection Agency rating, while all-wheel drive versions score in the high 200s. Our tester in the high-end “Limited” trim is rated at just 269, but that was enough to get well over 200 real-world miles while driving 75 miles per hour down the interstate. The real key here — and what made Ioniq stand out in Edmunds’ testing — is Hyundai’s 800-volt electrical architecture that allows it to charge much faster than most U.S. EVs, adding 100 miles of range in as little as eight minutes. Remember: Once you reach a good amount of range, charging speed is perhaps more important since it gets you back on the road fast.
Efficiency-wise, ours eked out a respectable 2.5 to 2.7 miles per kilowatt despite enduring some headwinds and 100-degree temperatures thanks to California’s insufferable El Niño summer. On the more temperate trip home from San Francisco, it scored more than 3 miles per kilowatt, pushing its range well above 200 real highway miles. At slower speeds and in better conditions, Ioniq 5 is efficient enough to make your electricity dollar go pretty far.
The price is right, too. A few years ago, Ioniq 5s started in the $40,000s. Since then, however, Hyundai has aggressively slashed prices and offered cheap leases to make up for the loss of the $7,500 tax credit for EV purchases last year and to keep this car competitive in the market. Today you can get the entry-level Ioniq 5 with 245 miles of range for $35,000, while a stepped-up version that can achieve 318 miles in rear-wheel drive configuration starts at $37,500. (Plus, Hyundai has sold more than 175,000 of these in the U.S. and Canada, so you could probably score a good deal on a used one, especially given the accelerated depreciation of EVs.)
Though it has been around for a long time in EV terms, Ioniq 5 looks to be Hyundai’s signature EV for America for years to come. As noted, the Ioniq 6 sedan is going away in the U.S. Hyundai has revealed a compact and affordable Ioniq 3 that might sell in big numbers in the U.K. and Europe, but it isn’t coming to America, a size-first country where small $30,000 EVs like the new Chevy Bolt just can’t gain a foothold. The other EV that will remain in the American lineup is the three-row Ioniq 9. It’s a lovely car for big families, but with a starting price just under $60,000, it prices out many buyers.
Happily for Hyundai, Ioniq 5 still sits right in the sweet spot of what we do want.
