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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.
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.
The startup and the city announced the contract on Tuesday.
The City of New York announced on Tuesday that it will partner with curbside charging startup it’s electric to expand the city’s PlugNYC electric vehicle charging network from 88 curbside charge points today to around 700 by 2030.
“To put in perspective how important this is,” Tiya Gordon, it’s electric’s co-founder and COO, told me. “London and New York City have similar populations. But London has around 27,000 curbside EV chargers while New York City has just 88 so this is a major opportunity for expansion.”
The $60.2 million contract, which covers both installation and five years of operation, is part of New York’s Green Rides Initiative, which aims to replace all rideshare vehicles on the city’s streets with either zero-emission or wheelchair-accessible alternatives by 2030. The program began in 2021 with a pilot in partnership with electric utility Con Edison and EV charging startup FLO. Phase one of the new agreement will involve replacing those chargers with it’s electric models by early 2027, followed by a second phase that will involve installing 600 additional chargers across the city’s five boroughs — the largest municipal curbside charging buildout in the country to date.
The new charging stations will have four chargers apiece for a total of nearly 150 new stations, are just the first step towards addressing this explosion in demand. Each station will come equipped with Level 2 chargers, which can charge a vehicle to 100% of its battery level within seven hours. The city says it will encourage off-peak or overnight charging through “pricing [focused] on affordability while encouraging reasonable turnover,” such as the pilot program’s time-differentiated pricing structure. Where feasible, the stations will feature docking connections to charge e-bikes.
As of February, approximately 13% of New York City’s rideshare vehicles were electric, but that number is growing as both Uber and Lyft’s aim to electrify their entire U.S. fleets by 2030. According to Gordon, commuting to rapid charging stations throughout the city and waiting for a station to become available while on shift costs drivers 30% of their income. Rapid chargers exacerbate the problem; they slow down significantly once the charge reaches 80% to prevent the EV battery from overheating, forcing drivers to either wait for significantly longer or make more frequent stops to charge.
“They’re losing a lot of their income in driving to the limited number of public fast charging stations in New York City — because there’s just two in Brooklyn, two in Manhattan, and a few at the airports,” Gordon said. “Access to curbside charging solves the majority of their problems as they can charge off-shift with a Level 2 charger on the curbside overnight.”
To enable drivers to charge while not on shift, the city will select locations where a greater concentration of rideshare drivers live, especially in outer boroughs far away from the suburban driveways or paid parking garages that typically house charging stations. Incorporating input from drivers, the Department of Transportation has already selected 10 neighborhoods across the city, including Stapleton in Staten Island and Unionport in the Bronx.
it’s electric itself is headquartered in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and manufactures its sleek, futuristic charging stations in Long Island City, Queens. Gordon first conceived of the company while walking through Brooklyn during the Covid-19 pandemic with her co-founder, Nathan King, commiserating over the struggle to find an affordable, convenient place to charge an EV. As the company grew, Gordon and King chose to keep manufacturing local not only to avoid tariff or supply chain complications, but also to deliver jobs in New York City across the entire value chain of an electric charging station — manufacturing, installation, operations, and maintenance. The company contracts with manufacturer Boyce Technologies, which also supplies the Help Point kiosks in the city’s subway system.
it’s electric’s design eliminates a bottleneck that often delays the construction of EV charging stations: the utility interconnection and permitting process. Instead of tapping into the grid, its chargers taps into the electricity supply in nearby buildings via a shallow conduit just below the sidewalk, leveraging spare electrical capacity. The charging stations meter and pay for their own electricity use, and in exchange for the building’s surplus power, it’s electric shares its revenue with building owners. While the first tranche of charging stations the company launches in New York City will be traditional utility-connected chargers, the NYC Department of Transportation confirmed to me that it may use the capacity-sharing design in future expansions.
Though it’s electric has installed these capacity-sharing chargers in major U.S. cities including Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Detroit, and Washington D.C., the New York City project represents a major step up in scale — the 700 chargers it will deliver for New York City comprise almost half of the 2,000 chargers in its current pipeline. To support these projects and hire additional staff, the company also announced on Tuesday that it has raised a new bridge round of seed funding led by Halogen Ventures, bringing its total funding to $15 million.
Gordon thinks the expansion of EV charging in New York City is significant not just for her company, but for the EV industry on the whole. “It signals to the world that the U.S. is not backing down from electrification and is still moving forward in meaningful ways,” she told me. Next, Gordon is eyeing the global market. “The technology that we have really differentiates us because we can power our chargers from a variety of sources — the utility connection, an adjacent building, or even wooden utility poles overhead. The next announcements from it’s electric will center around our expansion from NYC to other countries.”
