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Sixty years ago, college kids raced across the country in EVs.
Volkswagen calls its new EV minivan “the electric reincarnation of the iconic Microbus.” But while the ID.Buzz may be a touchscreens-and-LEDs update on the bare-bones icon of the Sixties, it is far from the first electrified take on the VW bus.
On an August morning in 1968, a Volkswagen bus jammed full of Caltech students who had hacked it to run on battery power departed their home base in Pasadena, California. Their destination: Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of rival MIT. At the same moment, MIT students in an electrified Chevy Corvair left the East Coast bound for the West.
“I came up with the crazy idea of a cross-country electric car race between Caltech and MIT,” said Wally Rippel, the student who owned that electrified VW bus and challenged MIT to the 1968 race, while reminiscing about the competition in a lecture at Caltech last Thursday night. [Editor’s note: Caltech is where the author does his day job.] “There would be some interest there, and it would stimulate interest in research at Caltech and MIT.”
The great electric car race of 1968 carried the energy of a world’s fair, offering gawkers along its transcontinental route the chance to see the vehicles of the future. It would be another half-century before the EV finally went mainstream, of course. But the Caltech-MIT competition presaged what electric car builders and drivers would need to overcome, and their race is a reminder that the electric car wasn’t just an idea forsaken soon after the dawn of the automotive industry and then suddenly resurrected by Tesla. All along, engineers and scientists imagined another way.
Climate change is the reason for the whole electric vehicle revolution this century, but it wasn’t the animating force for the EV tinkerers of the ‘60s. Wally Rippel, who owned the Caltech VW bus, and his compatriots were focused on solving smog and air pollution, the car-related environmental calamities of that era. In his Caltech talk, Rippel compared the air quality of that smoggy era to the fire-and-brimstone atmosphere of hell itself. “I don’t think any of you could understand it if you didn’t live in Pasadena in the ‘60s,” he said.
Since 80% of L.A.’s smog came from automotive exhaust, Rippel came to the conclusion that the internal combustion engine should be replaced. The question was, replaced with what? Fuel cells were used during the space race of the 1960s, but they were maddeningly expensive and could provide only 1/20th of the energy he needed to move a car. After seeing electric-powered golf carts around campus, he thought of the electric car.
Just like the climate activists to come, they faced their doubters when the EV race got under way. Team member Dick Rubenstein reminisced in an article about the race: “I remember the service station attendant at Amboy. He thought it was all a joke and asked: 'What do you need an electric car for, anyway? What air pollution?'”
The challenges of long-distance EV driving were all present in 1968. Rippel wondered, like many people do today, how much more electricity the nation would need to power a country full of EVs. After whipping out his slide rule and performing a few calculations, he determined the U.S. would need 20 to 25 percent more electricity, a reasonable goal.
Rippel and company needed charging stations, of course. The Electric Fuel Propulsion Corporation of Michigan worked with utilities to set up 55 charging stations on the route across the country. Now, those stops didn’t look quite like the Tesla Superchargers of today, located in outlet mall parking lots. Rippel explained that some of their stops amounted to nothing more than a connection to a power line tower or a wire coming up from a manhole.
It typically took 45 to 60 minutes to recharge using the onboard 30kW charger that Rippel put in the bus. That’s not that far off from today’s times, even though the students ran lead-acid and nickel-cadmium batteries rather than the lithium-ion that is today’s state of the art. (Caltech’s VW carried a literal ton of batteries to store 16 kWh of energy.) Still: After blowing fuses and causing a power outage in Seligman, Arizona, the Caltech team had to start charging at a lower speed in order to avoid overloading the technology of the time.
Range anxiety was naturally worse, given the experimental technology and the need to make it to the next station on the list. Both teams had chase cars accompanying their EV and occasionally resorted to towing the electric car when mechanical gremlins struck. Caltech towed a generator along just in case.
The biggest enemy? Heat. Today’s EV batteries suffer under extreme temperatures, with heat degrading battery life and cold diminishing range. But modern EVs have sophisticated cooling mechanisms to help protect the cells. The student EVs did not have this. They resorted to a simpler fix: dumping ice on the batteries during charging stops.
Wrote Rubenstein: “We finally solved our battery overheating problem in McLean, Texas. While the car was charging, I went into town to buy some rubber tubing and a rubber syringe bulb. We got some small ice cubes and put them on the batteries, then used the tubing to siphon the water out of the battery enclosure. We used the syringe bulb to start the siphon. That was our handy-dandy cooling system, for which I blushingly accept credit.”
In other ways, their simple EV technology is startlingly familiar. The VW bus nearly didn’t make it to the charging stop in the desert of Needles, California, but used the downhill grade into town to put some charge back on the battery, just as regenerative braking in today’s EVs saves energy when the car is decelerating or rolling downhill. (Today, Needles is home to several EV fast-charging stations, befitting its nature as one of the rare pit stops on this lonely stretch of desert highway.)
The article in Caltech’s Engineering & Science magazine concludes by saying future lead-cobalt rechargeable batteries might reach 250 miles of range — just about what lithium-ion batteries were actually doing a half-century later, when cars like the Tesla Model 3 arrived.
The race ended nine days later, on September 4. MIT reached the end of the line first, by about a day and a half. But, per the agreed-upon rules, its team was dinged with many hours’ worth of time penalties because of how often the electric Chevy Corvair had to be towed — including across the finish line. The EV van from Pasadena, for all its own troubles, reached MIT under its own power and was, eventually, declared the winner.
In retrospect, the race looks like a one-off — a moment when young scientists with a dream tried to show the world a better way but decades before the world was ready to see it. In fact, though, this calamitous, makeshift Cannonball Run left threads that led to the electrification of vehicles that’s finally happening around the world.
The next generation of idealistic auto engineers created the Sunraycer, a 1980s solar-powered race car that crossed the Australian Outback. Its success led to the GM Impact, a 1990 concept EV meant to show the world what was possible. And the Impact led to the fabled, doomed GM EV1.
EV1 is remembered as the electric car that wasn’t, the victim in the case of Who Killed the Electric Car? But attempts like it and the AC Propulsion tZero in the 1990s showed that EVs were not only possible, but could be downright cool if you did them right. The rest is history.
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Add it to the evidence that China’s greenhouse gas emissions may be peaking, if they haven’t already.
Exactly where China is in its energy transition remains somewhat fuzzy. Has the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases already hit peak emissions? Will it in 2025? That remains to be seen. But its import data for this year suggests an economy that’s in a rapid transition.
According to government trade data, in the first fourth months of this year, China imported $12.1 billion of coal, $100.4 billion of crude oil, and $18 billion of natural gas. In terms of value, that’s a 27% year over year decline in coal, a 8.5% decline in oil, and a 15.7% decline in natural gas. In terms of volume, it was a 5.3% decline, a slight 0.5% increase, and a 9.2% decline, respectively.
“Fossil fuel demand still trends down,” Lauri Myllyvirta, the co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, wrote on X in response to the news.
Morgan Stanley analysts predicted Friday in a note to clients that this “weak downstream demand” for coal in China would “continue to hinder coal import volume.”
Another piece of China’s emissions and coal usage puzzle came from Indonesia, which is a major coal exporter. Citing data from trade data service Kpler, Reuters reported Friday that Indonesia’s thermal coal exports “have dropped to their lowest in three years” thanks to “weak demand in China and India,” the world’s two biggest coal importers. Indonesia’s thermal coal exports dropped 12% annually to 150 million tons in the first third of the year, Reuters reported.
China’s official goal is to hit peak emissions by 2030 and reach “carbon neutrality” by 2060. The country’s electricity grid is largely fueled by coal (with hydropower coming in at number two), as is its prolific production of steel and cement, which is energy and, specifically, coal-intensive. For a few years in the 2010s, more cement was poured in China than in the whole 20th century in the United States. China also accounts for about half of the world’s steel production.
At the same time, China’s electricity demand growth is being largely met by renewables, implying that China can expand its economy without its economy-wide, annual emissions going up. This is in part due to a massive deployment of renewables. In 2023, China installed enough non-carbon-emitting electricity generation to meet the total electricity demand of all of France.
China’s productive capacity has shifted in a way that’s less carbon intensive, experts on the Chinese energy system and economy have told Heatmap. The economy isshifting more toward manufacturing and away from the steel-and-cement intensive breakneck urbanization of the past few decades, thanks to a dramatically slowing homebuilding sector.
Chinese urban residential construction was using almost 300 million tons of steel per year at its peak in 2019, according to research by the Reserve Bank of Australia, about a third of the country’s total steel usage. (Steel consumption for residential construction would fall by about half by 2023.) By contrast, the whole United States economy consumes less than 100 million tons of steel per year.
To the extent the overall Chinese economy slows down due to the trade war with the United States, coal usage — and thus greenhouse gas emissions — would slow as well. Although that hasn’t happened yet — China also released export data on Friday that showed sustained growth, in spite of the tariff barriers thrown up by the Trump administration.
All of the awesome earth-moving and none of the planet- or lung-harming emissions.
Construction is a dirty business, literally and figuratively. Mud and gunk and tar come with the territory for those who erect buildings and pave roads for a living. And the industrial machines that provide the muscle for the task run on hulking diesel engines that spew carbon and soot as they work.
Heavy equipment feels like an unlikely place to use all-electric power in order to ditch fossil fuels. The sheer size and intense workload of a loader or excavator means it has enormous energy needs. Yet the era of electric construction equipment has begun, with companies such as Volvo, Komatsu, and Bobcat all now marketing electric dirt movers and diggers. One big reason why: Full-size machines create the opportunity to make construction projects quieter and cleaner — a potentially huge benefit for those that happen in dense areas around lots of people.
Volvo, for example, appeared at last week’s Advanced Clean Transportation Expo in Anaheim, California, primarily to tout its efforts to reduce emissions in the trucking industry via hydrogen-powered semis, electric trucks, and technological refinements to reduce pollution such as nitrous oxide from traditional diesel. But the Swedish brand also trotted out its clean power dirt movers.
The L120 electric loader that is now taking reservations has a lifting capacity of 6 metric tons on pure electric power, making it useful for job sites such as recycling centers and ports. To see such a beast in person — and displayed on pristine convention-center carpet as if it were this year’s Ford Mustang, no less — is an odd and humbling experience that elicits a little-boy level of glee at beholding a big machine. Its bucket, large enough to carry a basketball team, seems to exist on a scale that is too big for battery power, yet Volvo claims the L120 can match the performance of its diesel brethren.
Volvo also brought an electric excavator, the machine used for shoveling out huge bucketfuls of earth. The EC230 Electric is based on the diesel-powered machine of the same name, but with a stack of batteries adding up to 450 kilowatt-hours of capacity and 650 volts of power give the excavator seven to eight hours of runtime on clean electric power.
“Going to the 600-volt battery packs with similar power density that we’re using in [semi] trucks allowed us to take that into the larger construction equipment,” Keith Brandis, VP of policy and regulatory affairs for Volvo North America, told me. “A big breakthrough for us was making sure that the duty cycle — the vibration, the harshness, the temperature extremes — was proven. We have coolant that runs throughout that battery pack, so we precondition the temperatures for very cold starts as well as during very hot temperatures.”
Indeed, the two big boys on display in Anaheim expand Volvo’s lineup of electric construction machines up to seven. The new full-size offerings also take battery power up to a scale needed for serious projects, where it could cut the noise and pollution that emanate from a site. Volvo says its e-machines are already at work on the restoration project in New York City’s Battery Park, at the southern end of Manhattan, where the local government made quiet and clean construction equipment a priority.
Volvo is not alone in this space. Komatsu builds a slate of electric excavators in a variety of sizes leading up to the 20-ton PC210LCE, which the Japanese brand introduced in 2023.
At the smaller end, Bobcat now builds battery-powered mini-loaders and compact excavators. Caterpillar made an EV dump truck a couple of years ago, and more heavy-duty electric machines for industries like mining are on the way.
Although electric loaders and excavators have begun to match the capability of their combustion-powered cousins and have reached a battery runtime that spans a full workday, Volvo and other heavy equipment manufacturers face a few hurdles in convincing more construction companies to go electric. Just like with passenger cars, there is the matter of price. Battery-powered equipment costs more up front, so companies must be convinced that the savings they’ll reap via reduced fuel and maintenance costs will make the electric equipment less expensive in the long run.
And just like with passenger cars, incentives play an outsized role in affordability. Brandis noted that municipalities often have fixed budgets for equipment replacement, which is inconvenient when clean, electric equipment costs substantially more. “We typically rely on purchase incentives or infrastructure incentives, grants, or vouchers that are available,” he said, such as California’s HVIP voucher for zero-emission heavy equipment.
Then there is the construction version of range anxiety, simply ensuring there is enough electricity at any job site to recharge a division of electric loaders. At locations where sufficient electrical infrastructure is already in place, Volvo is helping electric buyers install switchgears, meters, and EV chargers built to talk to the big machines. “It eliminates one other problem point for the customer because we’ve already proven that the operability is there with the equipment,” Brandis told me.
The problem with construction, however, is that sometimes it takes place in remote locations far from easy connections. At ACT, Ray Gallant of Volvo construction equipment said this is the point at which the power has to come to the customer. Volvo recently acquired the battery production business of Proterra, which, among other things, would help the corporation develop battery electric storage solutions that it could deploy remotely — at a far-flung job site, say.
“When we’re in remote sites, we have to take the electrons to the electric machines,” he said.
The lawmakers from opposite parties discussed the Inflation Reduction Act and working together to pass legislation at Heatmap’s Energy Entrepreneurship 2025 event.
Will Republicans’ reconciliation bill successfully gut the Inflation Reduction Act?
A Democratic and Republican senator speaking last week at Heatmap’s Energy Entrepreneurship 2025 event predicted that it will not.
A proposal effectively killing the IRA “wouldn’t make it through the House,” Senator John Curtis of Utah, a Republican, said flatly at the event.
“If you believe that democracy does follow representation, those House members from those states are going to fight like hell to maintain those credits,” Senator John Hickenlooper, a Democrat of Colorado, agreed. He argued that 70% of the credits and benefits in Biden’s flagship climate law go to red states.
“I think you’re going to find enough Republicans push back on the value of these credits that there will be a thoughtful discussion and very careful review of each one. And as you know from the number of people that have spoken up on this, I think we’re in a good place, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be pushed and poked and prodded,” Curtis added, referencing the Republican signatories of letters sent to party leaders urging the preservation of the credits. Curtis and Hickenlooper both were optimistic about the chances of the credits surviving the budget reconciliation underway.
Consensus, not compromise, was the name of the game at Heatmap’s D.C. Climate Week event, which saw Heatmap executive editor Robinson Meyer sit down with the senators to discuss their approach to climate policy and bipartisan collaboration.
Robinson Meyer, Senator John Curtis, and Senator John Hickenlooper.Taylor Mickal Photography,
Curtis and Hickenlooper have worked together on the Co-Location Energy Act, which ensures that wind and solar projects can be developed on land already leased for other types of energy projects, and the Fix Our Forests Act, which emphasizes wildfire mitigation and forest health.
Thursday’s discussion also touched on working with the Trump administration on climate and energy policy. Curtis revealed that he spoke to all of Donald Trump’s nominees, including Chris Wright, about his work in the House on the Conservative Climate Caucus. “They all knew about it, and they all supported it,” he noted, adding that EPA administrator Lee Zeldin was a member of the Caucus when he served in the House.
“I think it's very important for me, for Coloradans, for me to have Chris Wright's cell phone number and be able to talk to him,” Hickenlooper stated, emphasizing that he’s willing to work with the Trump administration to achieve Colorado’s climate goals.
The Co-Location Energy Act was “common sense,” according to Curtis. The act was introduced back in December by himself and Congressman Mike Levin, a Democrat from California. “Two thirds of [Utah] is owned by the federal government, and if you say that’s off the table for development, that’s a huge problem,” he said.
Fix Our Forests, which passed the House in January after being introduced by Congressmen Scott Peters, a Democrat from California and Bruce Westerman, a Republican of Arizona, “is a case study in how we can get things done,” Curtis noted. The key to speaking to conservatives about climate change, he said, is avoiding divisive language, comparing the wrong approach to a coercive time-share presentation. “The salesman says to you, ‘do you love your kids?’ and you feel like you're backed into a corner,” he explained. “I think the way we approach this oftentimes puts Republicans on the defensive.”
Hickenlooper agreed, “You never persuade someone to change their mind about something that really matters by telling them why they’re wrong and why you’re right.”