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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 That model’s 204-mile range looks puny and outdated by today’s standards, however.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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Trump’s “data center dividend” appears to have backfired. Our latest poll results help explain why.
This year’s midterm elections called into question the efficacy of a push to pay local residents directly in exchange for building data centers.
Before the elections, I profiled the campaign for politicians to embrace the data center “dividend,” a policy idea modeled off Alaska’s Permanent Fund, which doles out checks to residents from profits off state oil, gas and mineral royalties. The Bitcoin Policy Institute, a tech policy think tank, was one of the first to trumpet the concept, but it was quickly taken up by President Donald Trump, who started raising it in speeches and on social media. “If companies want to make their Data Centers popular, pay the community, and/or individuals within the community, a ‘dividend,’” Trump posted to Truth Social on October 21.
Clearly the idea didn’t stop the bleeding. Democrats trounced Trump’s party in the midterms on a message that was heavy on attacks against data centers. But that still doesn’t explain why direct payments did so little to move the American public.
A Heatmap Pro poll conducted in early-to-mid October, right before the midterm elections, gives us an answer. As part of a broader survey of 2,500 registered voters, we asked about the idea — what we believe to be the first independent poll on direct payments for data centers by a news organization. We asked respondents whether there was a specific dollar amount they’d accept as a one-time cash payment in exchange for a data center being built near them. We also gave them the option to say no amount of money was sufficient.
Shockingly, a majority of people surveyed said they’d reject the data center cash payment in any amount. Among those who said they’d actually take the money, the median figure was around $10,000. The average was a whopping $146,000, skewed by the number of people who wrote $999,999, the maximum allowed by the survey.
This tracks what we’re seeing play out in communities where developers have tried this idea. In Hazle Township, Pennsylvania, NorthPoint — developer of an Amazon-linked data center project — proposed $10,000 cash payments to residents, no catch. Residents compared it to a bribe. In De Soto, Kansas, data center developer Digital Realty is offering annual $1,000 tax credits for a decade to neighbors of its proposed data center project. That proposal has been reportedly met with mixed reviews, too.
Clearly one of the problems here is that data centers not only face public perception issues around their local impacts, but are also more broadly associated with systemic inequality in the U.S. economy. The same Heatmap Pro survey found that a majority of voters believed AI companies have more control over the government than the oil and gas industry, pharmaceutical companies, banks, or other large industries.
Shaunna Thomas, executive director of Democratic-allied super PAC Guardrails Alliance, told me that during the campaign season they found that residents often associated the dividends with bribes, and that the president’s support for direct payments ultimately fed into voter sentiments about the tech sector controlling the government and society.
“People don’t want to have a conversation about distribution of wealth disconnected from a conversation about distribution of power,” Thomas said. “Specifically because Trump was saying that, we started hearing from voters in focus groups that it didn’t work for them. They’re hearing it as a bribe. They’re hearing they may get some sort of short-term economic or financial incentive to accept a technology they don’t trust is designed to help them.”
The Heatmap Pro survey results about cash payments ultimately reveal how emotionally driven the data center debate has become, said Sam Lyman of the Bitcoin Policy Institute. I asked Lyman to respond to the results because I thought they called into question the political effectiveness of the proposal we’d discussed months earlier. Lyman stipulated that he thinks the one-time payment nature of the question may have undermined the results, saying he prefers the dividends be paid out “in perpetuity.” But he acknowledged they also show “there’s still a lot of education to be done on data centers, what they do, and the impacts they have on the places where they’re built.”
“I think there’s a lot of Americans out there who have legitimate concerns that the future economy doesn’t include them. That’s something that needs to be addressed,” said Lyman, who said he laid part of the blame on what he called “irresponsible rhetoric” from AI industry executives about their technology’s impacts on society. “With data center dividends, the idea behind this policy is to help Americans understand the AI economy includes them. To give them a very material stake in that economy as it gets built out, especially in the rural communities that make data centers possible in the first place.”
Congressional seats were more likely to flip in states where bills rose fastest, according to our partners on the Electricity Price Hub.
The rise in household electricity costs over the past couple of years followed elected officials to the ballot box last week. But the pattern didn't hold evenly: Congressional seats flipped most often in states where bills rose fastest, while governors and regulators, the officials closest to rate decisions, were judged on very different terms.
No analysis can account for exactly why someone voted the way they did. Still, polling just before and after the election has made clear that soaring utility bills and the cost of living were at the forefront of voters’ minds. It’s easy to imagine that a South Carolina voter who backed Trump in 2024 and is now paying about $20 per month more for electricity might have been more inclined to vote for Annie Andrews for Senate than the president’s pick, Darline Graham. While we can’t yet make a causal claim about how increases in voters’ average monthly bills influenced their decisions, we can look at where bills rose and where seats changed hands.
To do that, we use data from Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub to unpack the correlation between rising electricity bills under the second Trump administration and the electoral swings of this year’s midterms. Nationally, average electricity bills are up 10% since the start of the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the House popular vote swung 15 points toward Democrats compared to 2024’s presidential results, according to data from The New York Times.
A swing that size would have flipped many seats regardless of bills. The more telling question is whether seats flipped beyond what the swing predicts. Among seats where the incumbent party was vulnerable (those won by less than 15 points in 2024), states with above-average bill growth matched or exceeded the expected losses. States with below-average growth flipped fewer seats than a uniform 15-point swing would predict.
Further, nearly two-thirds of the 44 House seats Democrats flipped were in states where the average electricity bill grew faster than the national average over the past year, and one in five were in states where bill growth was double the national average. If Democrats flip the Senate seat in Alaska, then seven out of the nine Democratic pickups in the Senate will be in states with above national average one-year bill growth.
States with fast-rising bills differ in other ways, from their mix of competitive seats to their exposure to broader economic trends. Our bill growth figures are also statewide averages, and bills can vary widely within a state. The overall trend is in line with expectations, but the relationship between rising bills and electoral outcomes goes deeper.
Elections for governor or other statewide positions are historically less nationalized than their federal counterparts. That makes them a weaker test of national frustration with bills, but allows for additional analysis on how local conditions shape voters’ choices.
State races are not fully isolated from national trends. The Blue Tsunami flipped five gubernatorial seats, with zero pickups in the reverse direction so far. (Alaska is still undecided.) But those flips weren't concentrated in high-growth states. Three of the five (Georgia, Iowa, and Texas) came in states with some of the lowest bill growth over the past year. Meanwhile, the incumbent party held governorships in high-growth states at a higher rate than the national environment would predict, though Alaska could affect these results.
A few moderate Republican governors even held on in otherwise blue states. Incumbency certainly played a part, but the holds also demonstrate where voters targeted their backlash. In the Northeast, New Hampshire re-elected Governor Kelly Ayotte by four points, despite the Democratic Senate candidate carrying the state by 14 points. Vermont voters re-elected Phil Scott by six points. Both states had double-digit bill growth since President Trump took office, with average bills increasing by 18% and 15%, respectively.
On the other end, Democratic candidate Rob Sand flipped an open governorship in Iowa, outperforming the Democratic Senate candidate on the ballot. Statewide average bills in Iowa have grown at some of the slowest rates nationally; however growth rates vary across the state. Governor-elect Sand ran furthest ahead of his party’s Senate candidate in counties where bills rose the most.
The lessons of state-level races are less clear than federal ones. In states with popular incumbents, affordability backlash may have focused on a Republican-controlled Congress, while voters most affected by rising costs within a state sought new leadership in their state capital.
Another set of key players in electricity affordability, state energy regulators, were also on the ballot in these midterm elections. The general election mostly spared these races from the anti-incumbent party fervor, with only one state out of nine (Georgia) flipping control of their commission. These races, which were in more predominantly Republican states, largely followed partisan voting shares of other races in these states, with the greatest fervor around unseating establishment officials occurring during the primaries or last year’s off-cycle elections. That is not the end of the story, however: Utility commissioners are appointed, rather than elected, in most states, meaning there is more turnover to come.
The lack of electoral backlash toward the regulators who sign off on rate increases may indicate a lack of voter awareness of how different policymakers influence their bill. It may also highlight how national coverage has focused on rising generation costs, such as the Mid-Atlantic’s capacity cost spike, which pushes greater blame towards federal officials than state regulators that have less purview over generation prices that pass through to residential customers.
Utility costs alone didn’t produce this year’s Democratic wave, and the data can’t tell us precisely how much they contributed. But a below-the-hood look at the data shows a consistent pattern: the party broadly in power in Washington lost the most ground where bills rose fastest, while governors and regulators were judged on local circumstances, from incumbency to long-running rate fights. With new majorities in both chambers and rate cases pointing to more increases, there is an opportunity for this new Congress to meet voters’ demands and bring costs down.
On Meta’s green materials, China’s SMR wave, and Alaskan crude
Current conditions: The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has declared the ongoing El Niño a “super” version of the weather patterns that could be the most intense ever recorded • Storm Charles deluged Madeira, Portugal’s island exclave, as hundreds of flights were canceled to and from the Iberian country • Temperatures in New York City are set to drop as low as 39 degrees Fahrenheit as a nor’easter pummels the American Northeast ahead of what’s forecast to be a brisk but sunny weekend.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stepped down Thursday amid a ballooning scandal over his extramarital affairs with a Chinese spy and at least two employees of the world’s top designer of microchips for artificial intelligence, according to press reports. His departure, and the controversy left in his wake, poses a test for AI stocks, which took a battering last week after Democrats’ blue wave victory in Congress, and of what The Wall Street Journal called “the great-man theory that the course of history is often determined by singular individuals.” SpaceX Elon Musk (who said it “would be an honor” to hire Huang) is plowing ahead with plans to invest more than $74 billion at two supercomputing campuses in Texas and Arizona that are designed to train frontier AI models, Investor’s Business Daily reported. While the company says it plans to work with local generators to power the Arizona site, the Texas campus is expected to run on behind-the-meter natural gas-fired generation. Such huge new sources of demand for natural gas risk driving up prices for regular consumers, Sonia Aggarwal and Jamie Van Nostrand wrote yesterday in a piece for our Ideas section that called for a Gas Customer Protection Pledge. “It’s simple supply and demand.”
Meta, meanwhile, struck a series of deals to make the physical material that builds its data centers greener. In back-to-back partnerships announced on Thursday, the Facebook owner agreed to buy low-carbon cement from the Massachusetts startup Sublime Systems and green steel from Sweden’s Stegra. While the supply of green steel has not yet caught up with demand, Meta said it would fulfill its contract with environmental attribute certificates that “let us act on those emissions now, with third-party verification, and direct demand toward production that is still coming online. That is how the market for green steel gets built.”
I cannot think of any New York Times editorial board endorsement that swung a race in last week’s midterm elections. But the paper’s opinion section leaders made a splash Thursday morning by giving the Senate’s permitting reform deal its full-throated backing. “Anyone who cares about climate change should cheer this bill,” the paper wrote. “And a party that just won an election on affordability should not pass up a chance to start delivering immediately.” The headline pointedly read: “Democrats, take the deal.”
But the argument has a glaring omission: It does not address the most potent source of opposition to the bill. “Unsurprisingly, the Time’s [sic] Editorial Board says nothing about tribes, even while tribal issues are central to negotiations,” Julian Brave NoiseCat, the Academy Award-nominated documentarian and writer and member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen in British Columbia, wrote in a post on X. “It is absolutely outrageous how little American cultural, political, and economic elites know about Indigenous peoples and our concerns.”
China is building more nuclear reactors at home than any other country. Nearly all 30-plus of them — created by two state-owned nuclear giants — are large-scale conventional reactors. But more than 20 startups in the country are now racing to develop small modular reactors, according to a tally published Thursday in the South China Morning Post. Founded last year, Weilan NuEnergy, a Shanghai-based startup looking to develop water-cooled SMRs, said the push by private companies to build out an SMR industry to compete with the sector emerging in the U.S. is relatively recent. “There were no similar domestic competitors when we launched,” Hu Po, Weilan’s chief executive, told Hong Kong’s English-language newspaper of record. “This allowed us to successfully recruit a cohort of outstanding engineers from the industry with extensive practical experience. Building a high-caliber team is our greatest competitive advantage at present.” While the commercialization of SMRs has only just begun, Hu said he expected the technology to spread overseas. “Just like China’s other large-scale energy projects, while we will fully secure and meet domestic energy needs, we will certainly actively pursue a global footprint,” Hu said.
Just look at renewables. At the United Nations COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey, China signed a $15 billion deal to sell 7 gigawatts of solar and wind to the host country, along with battery storage capacity and 4 gigawatts of transmission infrastructure. “This cooperation will not only increase our renewable energy capacity but also facilitate technology transfer, making a very significant contribution to the production of wind turbine equipment in our country and the development of our domestic industry,” Alparslan Bayraktar, Turkey’s minister of energy and natural resources, wrote in a post on X.
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California’s energy regulators ordered the state’s three major investor-owned utilities to jointly propose a common framework for coordinating distributed energy resources such as rooftop solar and home batteries. The proposal, announced late last month and reported by Utility Dive on Thursday, sets a deadline of next October to show how the DER load can be orchestrated and dispatched. “Our decision gives families and businesses more options to charge a car, electrify a home, or expand operations while reducing the need for costly upgrades,” the California Public Utilities Commission’s Christine Harada said in a statement. “Those options need to be easy to understand and easy to use, people shouldn’t need an engineering degree to benefit.”
In New York, meanwhile, the state took what it called “a significant step in its effort to develop at least 1 gigawatt” of new nuclear power upstate. On Thursday, the New York Power Authority approved 10 developers’ requests to qualify as potential vendors. “In qualifying 10 major players in the nuclear industry, NYPA has strengthened its ability to directly advance the development of the first nuclear facility in New York in generations,” NYPA CEO Justin Driscoll said in a statement.

It’s been exactly 6,645 days since then-Alaska Governor Sarah Palin stood on stage at the 2008 Republican National Convention and vowed to “drill, baby, drill.” The three-word slogan — still widely used in American politics today — has far outlasted the former Republican vice presidential nominee, whose relevance faded years ago. But Alaska is, indeed, drilling. New analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows a projected 13% uptick in crude production in the state next year. That’s more than double the 6% increase in 2026. “If realized, these annual production increases will be the largest since the 1980s, when Alaskan crude production peaked at 2.0 million barrels per day,” the agency wrote.

China’s electric vehicle champion has unveiled a new integrated charging system powered by solar panels. Built in the Abu Dhabi desert, the new station — which looks like a gas pump — features panels, batteries, ultra-fast charging, and a robotic arm that automatically plugs into the vehicle. “We are providing clean energy generation, energy storage and ultra-fast charging together, and we are making the charging experience smarter, simpler and more seamless for drivers around the world,” Stella Li, BYD’s executive vice president, said in a statement.