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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 That model’s 204-mile range looks puny and outdated by today’s standards, however.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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Under the sheet metal it’s basically a Toyota — but maybe that’s okay.
I’ve seen these cupholders before. The same goes for the pair of wireless phone charging mats in this Subaru EV, the wheel that spins to select drive or reverse, and the storage cubby between the driver and shotgun seat with its awkwardly positioned “open” button. Even the big central touchscreen and its software are fundamentally identical to the ones I remember — right down to the navigation system’s voice-activated assistant represented by a weird on-screen bubble.
It’s no coincidence the interior of the new Subaru Trailseeker feels so familiar: I just saw it a couple of months ago while test-driving the Toyota CH-R. The two Japanese carmakers have been co-developing the bones of their electric cars together for several years now. Their dueling lineups of new models are, to a large degree, the same vehicles under the sheet metal: The Toyota CH-R and Subaru Uncharted small crossovers are effectively twins. So, too, are the Subaru Trailseeker I drove this week and the Toyota Bz Woodland, the stretched, outdoorsy version of Toyota’s EV.
Sharing parts and even platforms is nothing new. Car companies have partnered with their rivals in the past to split research and development costs. Subie and Toyota have been following this playbook since the gasoline era; in the 2010s they created a lovely small sports car badged as either the Subaru BRZ or the Scion FR-S (back when Toyota used the Scion brand to sell sportier, more “youthful” cars in America).

But sharing has become a more pressing issue in the era of electric driving, as the legacy car companies look for ways to save money as they spend billions learning how to transition their businesses toward battery power. Honda, the other Japanese auto giant, borrowed the General Motors platform to build the Prologue, its most recent attempt at an EV for America. That car sold competitively with the other non-Tesla EVs in the U.S., demonstrating there were some Honda drivers hungry for their brand to make a new EV. But that approach only got Honda so far. The company’s attempts to build a better EV from the ground up have stalled, and it has now canceled an ambitious slate of planned vehicles.
As for Toyota and Subaru, there is much to be gained from this tactic. If you’re a driver simply pondering whether to switch from the gas-powered Outback to the Trailseeker with your next Subaru purchase, you might not care that electric Subarus are just Toyotas on the inside. Still, sharing technology also raises the question: If a Subaru is just a Toyota under the skin, then is calling the car a Subaru enough for the brand’s devotees? The answer, I think, is a possibly surprising “yes.”
At the simplest level, Subaru’s electric cars do succeed in feeling like distinct vehicles. In this clip, one of Toyota’s lead engineers explains some of the philosophical differences that lead the two companies to build different products on top of the same bones. To simplify: Subaru builds with acceleration and sportiness in mind, while Toyota is more focused on braking and safety.
You can feel the difference. Toyota scales up the power depending on how much you pay, from 168 horsepower in the entry-level Bz to 375 horsepower for the outdoorsy Bz Woodland.

Subaru offers all-wheel-drive and 375 horsepower with every trim level of the Trailseeker, and the car is zippy and eager. The high ground clearance and road trip-ready roof rack certainly makes the EV feel appropriately Subaru. While the other vehicles that came out of this partnership were built at Toyota factories in Japan, Trailseeker (and its Toyota twin) were built at a Subaru factory.
And for a long vehicle with lots of storage space in the back, Trailseeker is pretty efficient. I made a decent 3.5 miles per kilowatt-hour on a highway drive from L.A to Santa Barbara, and the Subaru would top 4 miles per kilowatt-hour at city speeds. That efficiency is important, as it stretches the EV’s real-world range above 250 miles, giving it the legs it needs to visit the far-flung outdoorsy destinations Subaru drivers like to visit.
The trouble with co-development is that Subaru’s EVs, though they are fun and capable vehicles, are stuck with the same problems as Toyota’s. The Subaru also doesn’t feature fun or game-changing EV features like a frunk or one-pedal driving. Owners complain that there’s no way to, say, change the charging maximum to from 80% to 100% once a charging session has started, a simple task that can be accomplished with a tap on a phone app in other vehicles.
The car’s built-in navigation system, meanwhile, can list nearby EV chargers if you know where to ask, but it doesn’t incorporate them into its route planning like a Tesla, Rivian, or even Hyundai would do. This is more annoying than you might think, especially in this muddled moment in charging. Trailseeker, having adopted the Tesla NACS plug that is now becoming the industry standard, can charge at some Superchargers — but Tesla doesn’t allow other brands’ EVs at all of its stations, and you have to check their app to see which are okay. Lots of older third-party charging stations, meanwhile, still use the CCS plug that used to be common on EVs, so you’d need an adapter to plug in the Subaru there. That means that in the Trailseeker, you need either a charging strategy in advance or a co-pilot in the passenger seat checking multiple phone apps for you. (These issues can be solved somewhat by using one’s own apps through Apple CarPlay.)
What the Trailseeker is not, most fundamentally, is a Rivian. When that company teased the R2 and R3 a couple of years ago, we said it had the opportunity to dominate an outdoorsy, all-wheel-drive space in the car market that was more or less vacant because Subaru had dragged its feet on electrifying, having released only the disappointing Solterra. R2 is finally available, and compared to Trailseeker, the Rivian is much closer to the Tesla model of what an EV should be — its interface is far more sophisticated, and foundationally, it just feels so much more like a vehicle that was built from the ground up to be electric, not a car built by a legacy automaker still trying to figure out what an EV should be.
But here’s the thing: A lot of drivers, including plenty of Subaru lifers, don’t want the Tesla model. This Reddit post nicely captures the tension: EV-focused reviewers like me invariably notice what’s missing in a vehicle like Trailseeker compared to other electric cars. When you compare the Subie to gas-powered vehicles, though, you notice what’s there — the basic competencies like off-road ruggedness, roof racks, and honest-to-goodness door handles that make people love Subarus in the first place.
The price doesn’t hurt, either. Trailseeker’s key performance features — all-wheel drive, 375 horsepower, 280 miles of maximum range — are available on the simplest version that starts at $39,995, while the top-of-the-line $46,555 version gets more creature comforts. Toyota doesn’t sell an entry-level version of the Trailseeker’s twin, the Bz Woodland, only a fully-decked out edition that’s more than $45,000. Rivian’s fancier versions of R2, by contrast, cost well into the $50,000, with a $45,000 base model due in 2027.
Trailseeker, in other words, is a reasonably affordable, good EV that just works — and that you can buy at the same dealership across town that sold you your last two Outbacks. Which is all a lot of Subaru drivers ever really wanted.
Current conditions: The Pacific is facing a traffic jam of storms, with Hurricane Karina, Tropical Storm Lowell, and Tropical Storm Marie all raging at once • Temperatures in Charlotte, North Carolina, America’s secondary banking capital after New York, are nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit amid a regionwide heatwave • Tropical Storm Edouard knocked out power from more than 81,000 households in Texas and Louisiana.
Call it the scramble for Caracas. For the first time since the dawn of the 21st century, the South American nation with the world’s largest known oil reserves is open for business to Americans. Eight months after U.S. forces arrested former dictator Nicolás Maduro in his home and Washington backed his vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, as the new leader, Venezuela is becoming a hotbed for American energy companies. On Wednesday, Chevron announced plans to double its production in Venezuela with a $7 billion investment. “We were trying to work at what I call Trump speed,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said at a signing ceremony at the Miraflores Palace, according to The Wall Street Journal. “President Trump didn’t want a nudge or a slow drift in a positive direction. He wanted to see as fast as possible a transformation in Venezuela.”
The energy equipment behemoth GE Vernova, meanwhile, inked its own deal to repair large portions of Venezuela’s power grid, Bloomberg reported.

U.S. exports of liquified natural gas averaged 17.4 billion cubic feet per day in the first six months of this year, 23% more than the same period in 2025, according to the latest analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The agency projected that overseas sales will mostly stay flat through the end of the year before rising to 18.7 billion cubic feet per day in the first half of 2027. The world demands lots of gas right now. The biggest impediment to selling more is capacity. New and expanded export terminals “boosted LNG exports at the fastest rate since the United States began large-scale exports in 2016,” EIA found.
While natural gas and gasoline are different fuels entirely, the boom in the export market for one has come during a domestic price surge for the other. Diesel is selling for $5.69 per gallon, according to AAA data. Regular gas is now averaging $4.12 per gallon nationwide. But diesel is particularly worrying. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote last month, “now is the worst time for diesel to get expensive,” since it’s a critical moment in farmers’ growing seasons when tractors and other equipment need fuel.
The fashion industry, particularly the cheaply-made fast-fashion brands, are notorious for pollution. Typically that comes in the form of dyed rivers and microplastics from polyester fibers. But the planet-heating gases coming from the apparel sector are on the rise. Emissions climbed 6.3% in 2024, following a 7.5% spike the previous year, according to a new report by the Apparel Impact Institute. That, according to Bloomberg, increased fashion’s emissions by roughly a gigaton, or “about the same as the entire climate footprint of Japan.”
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SB Energy, the division of the Japanese giant Softbank that’s focused on building the infrastructure for artificial intelligence, is seeing such a boom it’s going public. Chip behemoth Nvidia is backing the deal to start trading the stock on the Nasdaq. “The reason Nvidia is on our part of the equation here is that, you know, helps us to unlock things like investment-grade financing. It helps to ensure the project is a success,” SB Energy CEO Rich Hossfeld told CNBC.
Still, the company cautioned that it “may face community opposition, local moratoria, and hyper-local dissent, including growing public resistance to AI and AI-related infrastructure.” Polling from Heatmap Pro last month showed that three-quarters of Americans now oppose data centers in their backyards.
To put it in the modern parlance of today’s youth: Japan’s nuclear sector used to mog most of its peers in East Asia. When the 2011 Fukushima accident occurred, Japan got the ick on atomic energy. Now it’s once again ascending to nuclear maxing — er, nuclearmaxxing. On Wednesday, NucNet reported that a high-level Japanese council chaired by the prime minister adopted a new policy that calls for “maximum use” of atomic energy in the country.
Russia, meanwhile, is leaning into floating nuclear power plants. The country launched the world’s first small modular reactor in 2019 aboard the Akademik Lomonosov, a Siberia-bound barge designed to carry a power plant. In May, I told you that Rosatom was considering building more. On Wednesday, World Nuclear News reported that the Kremlin-controlled nuclear company is establishing a facility specifically designed to produce floating nuclear plants.
Maersk is going old school. The shipping giant just signed a deal to install the first wind sail on a container ship as the shipping industry looks for ways to get off heavily-emitting bunker fuel. The sail, according to the Financial Times, is a 115-foot rotor designed by the British company Anemoi to function without taking up a lot of space in the areas where containers go.
The Pacific Northwest fire season is about to get even worse.
I turned on the heat this week for the first time since spring. Tuesday started out mild, damp, and overcast here in Seattle — the kind of weather the city still conjures in the popular imagination, even if about 50 days a year now are warmer than they used to be because of climate change. Summers here may be getting longer, but this morning felt truly like fall, and in the uninsulated shed where I do most of my writing, I briefly turned on the space heater to stave off the nip.
The same slow-moving low-pressure system responsible for the moody weather in the Puget Sound region will also go far in curbing the state’s wildfires, per Tuesday’s update to the National Wildland Significant Fire Potential Outlook. It’s almost obscenely good luck: September is historically one of the worst times of year for wildfire in the Pacific Northwest, after the summer’s high temperatures have dried out all the fuels but before the autumn rains arrive.
Worse still, though, is the tax on wildland firefighters. They call the month “Snaptember” because the physical and mental health effects of a long firefighting season begin to catch up with the more than 21,000 of them currently on assignment. That is especially true in a year like 2026, the worst fire season in the Pacific Northwest in 30 years. Nationwide, more than 8.2 million acres have burned, 164% of the 10-year average for this point in the year. The National Preparedness Level has sat at its highest level, 5, since mid-July, meaning that fire resources, personnel, and the seasonal hires who make up the bulk of the workforce are stretched to their absolute limit. There is no breathing room — 68 fires ignited yesterday alone, following 140 new ignitions on Monday. Some of the crews fighting the country’s biggest fires have come from as far away as New Zealand to help out.
The good news: The wet start to the month will drop the Pacific Northwest from above-average to normal fire potential for the first half of September, offering a much-needed break. But the brief weather pattern won’t undo August’s damage, including below-average rainfall across the region and the spread of “exceptional drought.” Temperatures ran as much as 8 degrees above average in parts of Oregon, and in southwest Idaho, an abundance of dried juniper, grasses, and shrubs has created, in fire-industry parlance, “an above-average fully cured fine fuel crop” — in normal terms, that means there’s a lot of tinder ready to burn. The entire state of Washington is under a precautionary burn ban until the end of the month.
What follows could be truly nasty. “Outlooks favor above-normal temperatures with no indication of a sustained wet pattern, meaning drying may quickly resume once the early September systems depart,” Tuesday’s report reads. Making matters worse, “Historical analogs and past transitions into El Niño,” such as the one we’re in now, “suggest an elevated likelihood of at least one moderately strong east‑wind day in September, further reinforcing opportunity for new significant fires to arise when lightning or human ignitions occur.” A similar situation — east, downslope winds and summer-cured dry fuels — compounded into the disastrous September fires of 2020, which burned over 11% of the entire Oregon Cascades ecoregion. (While El Niño historically produces above-average temperatures and lower rainfall in the Northwest in the fall, the greatest impacts will like come after the report’s outlook period.)
Drought now covers 57% of the country, and other regions could also pop off this month, further drawing on limited resources. The report highlighted northern California, the southern Plains, the Lower Mississippi Valley, and Florida as other regions with above-average fire potential heading into September. In the Southern Area in particular, which includes Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and southwestern Alabama, the suppressed Atlantic hurricane season has resulted in extreme drought “second only to the last very strong El Niño of 2015,” the report found. Above-average significant fire potential could “very well continue” as late as November.
By then, at least, the Northwest will have “probabilities for more organized storm systems,” particularly beginning in the second half of October, when precipitation will hopefully pick back up. Imagine that: Looking forward to the winter drizzle, which was once the great drawback of living in the Northwest.
But by the time Snaptember is through with us, I worry that those cold, dark, wet days of December will feel far away yet.