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Simpler electric vehicles would not only be cheaper — they’d last longer too.
If you haven’t heard, the dumbphone is back. Vexed by their emotionally ruinous smartphone addiction, plenty of people, including those of the tech-savvy younger generations, are turning their backs on iPhones and Androids to embrace internet-free cellphones that walked right out of the 1990s.
The impossibility of TikTok is not the dumbphone’s only winning feature. Flagship smartphones are expensive and delicate. Despite Apple’s soft cooing about the iPhone’s beautiful facade, you must shield that design behind a plastic case at all times, lest you drop your $1,200 investment and ruin it. Dumbphones, though, are rugged and cheap. They do their job without fuss or pretense. They are an appliance, and they know it.
This attitude needs to come to electric cars.
Ever since the rise of Tesla, it’s become a popular cliche to say electric vehicles are just smartphones on wheels, closer in spirit to the devices of Silicon Valley than to the combustion cars of Detroit. The comparison is apt. In addition to running on a large lithium-ion battery, today’s EVs are typically controlled through massive touchscreens. They are reliant upon software that receives over-the-air updates to fix its bugs and upgrade its features, just like your phone.
Like your mobile device, today’s EVs tend to present themselves as closed boxes not to be tinkered with. Some people go to the trouble of fixing a cracked screen or a withered battery to keep their smartphone running longer. For the most part, though, the tech giants have convinced people over the past two decades that phones should be replaced, not repaired, once they start to show their age.
Positioning EVs as fancy gadgets was a natural strategy to get Americans to lust after them, and to differentiate them from the gas-powered vehicles that came from an analog age. And it’s not hard to see why electric car makers would be keen to copy the “replace-don’t-repair” dynamic that arose around phones (to say nothing of the subscription creep that will ask you to pay extra monthly fees for car features).
But there’s no rule that says it must be this way. Electric cars don’t have to be defined by smartphone aesthetics and touchscreens and proprietary software; they don’t have to present as impenetrable to the garage mechanic. There is a better world where they are not only less expensive but also purposefully modular and obviously repairable, where parts, including the battery, could be swapped in to keep the car on the road as long as possible. They could feel rugged, like an old Buick LeSabre that just runs forever, rather than fragile and disposable.
I’m not just harping on this because America needs a simpler, more affordable EV to help the transition to electric. It’s also a sustainability issue. Gas-powered cars have grown more reliable and long-lasting over the years, and their increasing longevity means the average auto could be expected to reach 12 years and 200,000 miles, with lots of fluids, belts, brake pads, spark plugs, and cracked gaskets replaced along the way. They just keep on chugging, and emitting.
Electric cars are mechanically simpler. So it’s possible that, if their major components could be easily replaced, the vehicles themselves could last even longer, like an electric car of Theseus. It’s been done, even with today’s EVs. A 10-year-old Tesla Model S in Europe reportedly just surpassed 2 million kilometers, or about 1.24 million miles on the odometer. The EV has been through four battery packs and 14 motors to reach that wild total.
Few EV owners will go this hard to keep their vehicle on the road, but plenty of them will be presented with a simpler choice. The battery warranty of a current EV typically expires at 100,000 miles, and guarantees only that the pack won’t suffer more than 30 percent degradation during that time. Afterward, you’re on your own. So when a battery goes kaput at 150,000 miles, or has lost half its original range, EV drivers will face the classic car conundrum: whether to sink more money into an old car or buy a new one.
If the cost of batteries and motors really does fall in the near future once EVs go mainstream and technology advances, then more people will choose the former. What would make that choice even easier, however, is the feeling that your vehicle was really built for the long haul — that, unlike your phone, it isn’t simply one software update it can’t handle from becoming obsolete.
The alternative vision of EVs is out there. When I was first covering the Maker Faire hacker festival a dozen years ago, there were already guys out there who’d teach you how to hack a first-generation Mazda into a dead-simple electric car. (In the garage at Caltech, where I work, there’s someone who’s clearly done the same to a 1980s Porsche.) Like replacing 14 motors in an old Tesla, this is much more than the ordinary car owner wants to undertake. But it shows what is possible.
Tesla is apparently back in the race to make an affordable American EV, though it’s impossible to ever imagine the little Tesla being a dumbphone on wheels. Others, like Ford, are still trying. Perhaps with its EVs to come, the big Detroit brand can channel the spirit of the Ford Escort I drove in college: a plucky underdog that keeps on running, no matter how many people back into you in that icy parking lot.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.