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Even with Trump in the White House, we’ll still have electric vehicles.

It would be easy to feel down about the state of electric vehicles with an avowed EV foe set to reenter the White House. Yes, the election’s fallout will no doubt reshape the car market in the years to come. But in the short term, there’s good news in the form of the new slate of EVs already in the pipeline. For those looking to ditch their fossil fuel-burner for an electric model, there’s plenty to be excited about in 2025.
Having long since displaced the minivan and the sedan as America’s family car, the crossover is the most important piece of the electric car market, and the biggest seller. Next year, we’ll welcome a slew of new models.
Hyundai’s Ioniq EVs have been a hit, with the hatchback/crossover hybrid Ioniq 5 selling impressive numbers (more than 30,000 in the first three quarters of 2024) and the quirky Ioniq 6 sedan earning rave reviews. The Korean brand will be filling out more Ioniq numbers in the years to come, and 2025’s major arrival in terms of size and importance is the three-row Ioniq 9 SUV. The sharp-looking big boy joins the EV9 by Hyundai’s partner brand, Kia, in offering a more affordable EV for those who need to move six or seven people at a time.

Audi was a pioneer offerer of EVs in America: The original Audi e-Tron came to the U.S. in 2019, when Tesla was just starting to sell the Model 3 and many legacy brands had yet to enter the electric market. That model’s 204-mile range looks puny and outdated by today’s standards, however. Next year, Audi is slated to roll out a much-anticipated update to the lineup with the Q6 e-tron (and its A6 e-tron sedan counterpart) delivering a respectable 350 miles of battery power.

The EV startups are expanding their lineups, too. No, we won’t see the new, more affordable Rivians until at least 2026. Lucid, however, plans to inflate the successful Air sedan up to the size of a three-row SUV when it introduces the Gravity, which it claims will deliver 440 miles of range. The story is similar at Polestar, where the upcoming Polestar 3 SUV looks like an expanded version of the Polestar 2 sedan that’s been on sale for several years now.
Remember Chrysler? The erstwhile member of Detroit’s Big Three had withered to a brand that, in the U.S., sells only minivans and the obsolete 300 sedan. Stellantis (parent company of Chrysler, Ram, Jeep, and others) has pinned its hopes for an American revival on electrification, which includes an EV Chrysler crossover planned for 2025. It looks to be called the Airflow and will target the Ford Mustang Mach-E as its competitor.

The same is true of another decaying American giant. Cadillac, fresh off some success with the Lyriq EV (20,000-plus sold through Q3 2024), is pushing out a slate of electric vehicles in the hopes of reminding buyers of its former glory. The smaller Optiq, three-row Vistiq, and extravagant Escalade iq are soon to join the brand’s EV lineup, the latter bringing the icon of early 2000s wealth-bragging into the electric age.

For those who swear by the go-anywhere potential of the true 4x4, battery power is a tough sell — there aren’t too many plugs in the backcountry. Yet as EV driving ranges get longer and EVs get more capable, the icons of off-roading are coming around.
Jeep, which has introduced plug-in hybrid models of some of its best-selling SUVs, is at last taking the all-electric plunge. No, you won’t be able to buy an EV Jeep Wrangler, which is still years away. (Stellantis is being cautious with its icon.) But we are on the cusp of having the Jeep Recon, a mid-size EV 4x4, as well as an EV version of the big, luxe Wagoneer called the Jeep Wagoneer S.

Wagoneer won’t be alone in the market for expensive luxury SUV EVs. Land Rover is telling anyone who’ll listen about the torture testing it is now performing on the upcoming Range Rover EV, subjecting prototypes to the 120-degree heat of the UAE’s desert. Arriving soon alongside the electric Range Rover is the battery-powered version of Mercedes-Benz’s G-Wagen, a $170,00 status symbol.
We may be on the cusp of seeing the titans of muscle embrace electricity. At last month’s L.A. Auto Show, Dodge’s machismo-dripping presentation of the Charger Daytona EV promised the brawny battery-powered pony car would “save our planet … from all those lame, soulless, weak-looking, self-driving sleep pods.” With silent power that more than matches its combustion days, the Charger should win converts to the church of instantaneous electric torque. Oh, and in 2025, we just might get a look at the fully electric Chevy Corvette that’s in the works.

For those with no interest in dropping a wheelbarrow of cash on an electric sports car, fear not: The Chevy Bolt is coming back. The plucky, affordable Bolt was the best-selling non-Tesla EV when GM suddenly gave it the axe to focus on its Ultium EV platform. Chevrolet says it’ll release the new, Ultium-based Bolt in 2025, and that this version will feature faster charging and other bells and whistles lacking in the original car.
Finally, the most fascinating offering to come next year is the 2025 Ram 1500 Ramcharger, the first time range-extender EV technology comes to one of America’s best-selling vehicles. Like a normal EV, the Ramcharger has electric motors to propel it, a battery to store electricity, and can be plugged in to charge the battery, however, it also carries a gasoline engine that can turn on to recharge the battery when necessary. If this hopefully seamless version of a hybrid convinces America’s legion of truck buyers, it’ll go a long way toward advancing the pace of EV adoption.
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The data center boom is everywhere you look in U.S. economic and emissions data.
This is an edition of Heatmap Daily, an evening review of the day’s news written by our executive editor. Sign up for it here.
It isn’t exactly a new thought, but I’ve been struck recently by how many trends in America’s economic and environmental data are fundamentally about the data center boom and the return of electricity demand:
First, the Energy Information Administration reported this week that U.S. emissions grew by more than 2% last year, driven by surging electricity demand and an increase in coal-fired generation. What caused that higher power demand? New factories and data centers — as well as record summertime cooling demand.
Second, many of the new factories driving that higher power demand are themselves producing goods that are … let’s say … data center-adjacent. There are the enormous new semiconductor fabs, of course. But Ford and General Motors have also set up new production lines (or repurposed old ones) to manufacture grid-scale batteries to meet power demand.
Third, take a look at the recent U.S. spending on private non-residential construction — in other words, everything American companies are building that is not houses, condos, or apartments.
The construction industry’s spent almost $60 billion on data centers over the past year, which is more than it spent on all other office buildings combined (and more than it spent building warehouses, too). Just a handful of categories — data centers, power plants, electricity infrastructure, and certain kinds of electronics manufacturing — now make up a third of all U.S. private non-residential construction investment. They’ve never made up such a large share of construction spending since data collection began in 2014.
As The New York Times recently noted, the American economy is unusually dependent on the American stock market right now — and the stock market is unusually dependent on artificial intelligence. This week, investors started to balk at the enormous spending hyperscalers are planning to keep building out the AI boom; Alphabet’s shares dropped 8% this week after it boosted its planned 2026 capital expenditure and signaled 2027 will be even bigger. If the data center boom started to slow down in earnest, then more than just that budget will change.
Speaking of which, my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote earlier this week about how many businesses are struggling to even estimate their carbon emissions from artificial intelligence. The carbon accounting startup Watershed recently unveiled a new formula to help companies get a sense of their AI-related emissions.
But even that formula is still limited by the amount of data hyperscalers publish — and they don’t publish that much. Google, for instance, is the only AI company that has (laudably) provided estimates of its emissions on a per-prompt basis. Yet no company has published its per-token emissions, or how emissions sync up with particular models or regions.
So Emily asked Google: Why aren’t you — or any other model provider — disclosing this kind of data yet?
The tech company didn’t get back to us until after we’d published Emily’s story. But its response was interesting enough that I wanted to quote some of it here.
The problem is “industry consensus,” Cooper Elsworth, a Google spokesperson, told us. “There is currently very little consensus on how to comprehensively and fairly measure the serving environmental impact of generative AI (such as text generation),” he wrote. “Without standardized, ‘apples-to-apples’ frameworks, it is difficult to compare different providers accurately.”
That’s partly because energy use — and emissions data — can vary from site to site and depend on “custom-built hardware, software compilers, and advanced inference techniques.” And he claimed Google doesn’t always have the measurement hardware in place to provide such specific estimates: “Providing precise, repeatable data requires highly advanced measurement infrastructure,” he said. “For example, software-based energy monitoring tools often suffer from sampling biases. For our study, we had to step away from top-down averages and directly measure actual energy at the physical power supply unit (PSU) level across our deployed fleet. Not all providers have the telemetry or data sets required to benchmark their operations at this level of granularity.”
Read Emily’s story to understand the other reasons why estimating — or even “guesstimating” — AI-related carbon emissions is so challenging.
A conversation with Emma Uridge of the Kansas Health Institute.
This week’s conversation is with Emma Uridge, analyst with the Kansas Health Institute. Uridge spent copious hours analyzing state and local laws on data center development to best understand how policymakers are responding to the potential environmental public health impacts of large AI infrastructure, including power and water. The report, which came out this week, also goes in depth into those health impacts. I reached out to her to discuss what she sees as must-watch territory for our readers on this emerging policy arena.
Our conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
What is actually being done on policy when it comes to data centers — beyond moratoria of course?
So first I’d like to just talk about the point of moratoria. It’s helpful to talk about how these policies emerge in the first place. One area where moratoria are helpful is when a data center is proposed but the county has no approach for how they’d like to potentially regulate them. That’s temporary, most of the time. It lets local governments conduct research on the various impacts and also negotiate community benefits, ones that can mitigate any potential negative impacts — like Lancaster Pennsylvania, which instituted a community benefit agreement that maximized the potential benefits of development while mitigating what large data centers can do. That agreement looked at capping municipal water use at 20,000 gallons per day and requiring 100% clean energy. It had financial penalties for non-compliance. The company also committed $20 million to their local economic development and clean energy fund. There are ways to negotiate with developers.
We also see amendments to existing zoning. Data center proposals are increasingly popping up in rural areas, many of which are unzoned, so there’s no way a county can negotiate unless there’s a moratorium in place.
Other policy solutions include different performance standards or requiring on-site renewable energy, like what Jefferson County, Missouri, looked at. Also setback requirements, mandatory noise buffers, ending by-right zoning.
Where are local governments getting ideas for regulating data centers?
A lot of the technical information comes from developers. That can in cases be seen as a biased source of information. I wouldn’t say there’s a dedicated group providing assistance to local governments when a project is proposed — which is a similar story to wind industry development, where we have only a handful of consultants who provide technical advice. It can be really helpful to get a multi-disciplinary approach to hearing information. It can be helpful to have the utility commission, public health folks, those in academia, as well as the developer.
As of right now, especially in rural areas, local governments have a hard task of balancing pushback while getting the most accurate, evidence-based, neutral information to make decisions. That balance can be contentious.
What is the federal government doing on data center policy? How is the Trump administration approaching it?
A few things there. In the early days, the drive was for AI expansion and to be competitive with foreign adversaries. Now due to the amount of public pushback in red and blue localities and a more cautious approach.
I’m not seeing a lot of actual policy movement at this time.
I know the EPA is looking at the chemicals used in cooling data centers because when that water is cycled through the system, some of it is discharged into the water system, so they’re looking at the Toxic Substances and Control Act for monitoring that.
How much of an impact does this minimal federal role have on industry behavior?
Y’know, this isn’t specific to data centers. This is true for all kinds of large-scale development: there’s a need to require some sort of federal monitoring and regulation.
That’s where I see an emerging role for public health. At the federal level, there could be policy movement towards requiring some sort of environmental monitoring at data centers to make sure they’re operating responsibility. Looking at specific water use relative to water availability and what happens when there’s a time of severe, persistent drought. With air quality too — we’ve seen areas where the grid isn’t as reliable so their diesel generators are kicking on more and affecting air quality for residents.
We’re just not seeing all of that right now. We need corporate disclosure.
What do you see as the most important public health impacts from data center development?
It varies by localities. The most discussed obviously is water usage. One thing I’d note about my conversations with folks enthusiastic around emerging tech is, there are still questions that need to be asked about the capacity of localities to support a data center. Like a small town in Kansas may only be using 40% of their water for their utility needs. If a data center came online, how much of that water goes to the data center?
One area underexplored within the public health discipline is energy poverty and energy security. The ability of a household to meet the needs of everything energy provides in our lives. It’s known we have an aging electric grid but we’re not talking enough about large-scale blackouts when the grid is not sufficient to support some of these new data centers.
Plus more of the week’s big development fights.
1. Laramie County, Wyoming — Meta is fighting the fine it received in the Cheyenne data center water pollution controversy, and the conflict between the tech giant and the city’s small board of public utilities is continuing to spill out into the public.
2. Niagara County, New York — This county just rejected a solar project’s highway work permits in a show of retaliation against the state’s Office of Renewable Energy Siting.
3. Barron County, Wisconsin — The anti-solar protest is the new campaign stop in deep red Wisconsin.
4. Chesapeake, Virginia — A large battery storage project on the Virginia coastline is on the rocks amidst rampant local opposition.
5. Lewis County, West Virginia — West Virginia is now a key battleground in the fight over transmission, as a line spanning all of West Virginia and Maryland — and cutting through Data Center Alley in Virginia — causes compounding consternation.