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New designs are giving consumers exactly what they want — striking looks and killer range. Electric vehicles will never be the same.
Cutting-edge aerodynamics tend to only be appreciated in hindsight.
The first American car to truly be designed aerodynamically was the iconic 1934 Chrysler Airflow. At a time when everything else on the road was huge and imposing, the Chrysler Airflow introduced streamlining to the automotive industry and featured a radical Art Deco shape that was developed in a wind tunnel. It was much more efficient and stable at high speeds than its contemporaries, and its groundbreaking unibody construction provided fantastic ride quality.
It was an absolute flop.
Via Stellantis
Yet the Airflow’s aerodynamic design changed the face of the industry. Toyota’s first production car was inspired by the Airflow, and Peugeot found big success with its streamliner 202 and 402 models.
Since then, there have been many other aero-focused cars that push the boundaries of engineering, and quite a few of them have been flops. The UFO-like General Motors EV1 of the 1990s was a lease-only experimental electric vehicle with a record-breaking 0.19 drag coefficient. Almost its entire production run was bought back and crushed. Then there was the limited-run 2013 Volkswagen XL1, a diesel-powered hybrid with carbon-fiber construction and butterfly-wing doors that returned 260 MPG. Only 250 were ever made. Maybe the most successful modern example of aero-first design is the Toyota Prius, which is hugely popular, seriously efficient, and has an exterior that people love to hate.
Modern electric cars might just change things though.
The category is still in its relative infancy. Most automakers are focusing on large, heavy EV crossovers and trucks, whether powered by batteries or combustion engines, because those are the most popular segments. But they are also seriously inefficient. To get the kind of range that customers want, most of these new EVs have enormous battery packs. The GMC Hummer EV’s 210-kWh pack is double the size of the ones found in most other EVs and weighs 3,000 pounds. Yet the boxy Hummer still only has a range of around 300 miles.
But EVs like the Hummer might quickly end up an evolutionary curiosity. There’s growing concerned about the dangers these heavy but lightning-fast EVs pose to pedestrians and smaller cars, and some countries are already pushing consumers towards lighter and smaller options through tax rates and incentives. Yet even as charging infrastructure improves and solid-state battery tech emerges, consumers are still expected to prioritize range and efficiency. The result will be a sea change in EV styling, and we’re already starting to see the tides shift.
Finally, aerodynamic designs are going mainstream.
The Lucid Air, Porsche Taycan, and Tesla Model S are all super slippery sedans, but good aero isn’t limited to high-end EVs. The new Hyundai Ioniq 6 has an incredible drag coefficient of 0.21, giving the Long Range RWD trim a range of 361 miles from a 77.4-kWh battery pack. Its starting price of $46,615 is a couple of grand below the average price of a new car. Hyundai prominently features the Ioniq 6’s streamlined design in its advertising, positioning aerodynamics and efficiency not only as economical but cool and desirable. Volkswagen’s upcoming ID 7 will essentially take the Passat’s place in the lineup, featuring a sleek sedan body and a range of well over 300 miles.
Via Hyundai
This is not to say SUVs won’t still remain incredibly popular, and engineers are finding interesting ways to improve their aerodynamics too. The gorgeous Polestar 3 has an aero blade at the front of the hood that improves airflow and reduces pressures, and a floating rear wing that increases downforce and stability.
Via Polestar
The closest modern equivalent to the Airflow is arguably the Mercedes-Benz EQS, the first of Mercedes’ electric EQ sub-brand to go on sale in the U.S. The EQS’ lozenge-shaped body and cab-forward proportions give it a drag coefficient of 0.20, enough to make it the most aerodynamic series-production car when it launched. (The Lucid Air has since beat it with a 0.197 coefficient.) Like the Airflow, many customers and vocal online commenters are put off by the EQS’ styling, especially traditional Mercedes buyers. Mercedes appears undeterred, using the blobby styling throughout its EQ lineup, with an SUV version of the EQS and a midsize EQE sedan already on sale. Despite the success of the EQ models, Mercedes is still probably leaving money on the table by doubling down on the controversial aesthetic.
Via Mercedes-Benz
Until then, there is one recent production car that has pushed the boundaries of what’s currently possible: The Lightyear 0, an expensive Dutch sedan that briefly entered production in 2022. The nearly $300,000 Lightyear 0 was touted as the first truly solar-powered car, with 782 solar cells on the body that add over 40 miles of range per day during the summer, and its drag coefficient of 0.175 makes it the most aerodynamic production car ever. But back in January, Lightyear’s owners went bankrupt and production of the 0 was stopped for good after just a handful were made. The company says it’s focusing now on launching a much cheaper, still solar-powered EV called the Lightyear 2, which will wrap the 0’s know-how in a more accessible package.
Via Lightyear
Chrysler is bringing back the name Airflow for its first legit production electric car, which will be going on sale in 2024. Sadly, the new Airflow is a crossover that, while handsome, captures none of the same groundbreaking spirit as the original. Yet while Chrysler might still be playing it safe 100 years later, the Airflow’s influence lives on in the world’s most exciting new cars. Aerodynamics are once again having a moment.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.