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The future of automotive design looks awfully familiar.
If you survey Americans who are considering an electric vehicle, some of their opinions are perfectly predictable. New polling released last week by the car publication Edmunds found that U.S. car shoppers want more range, they want more affordable options, and they want lots of SUVs and crossovers. Few respondents were excited about electric pickup trucks. Hardly anybody — just 5% — wanted a minivan EV.
Poor, poor pitiful minivan. Even as its bigger sibling undergoes a renaissance as the road-tripping influencer’s ride of choice, few people are out there posting thirsty #MinivanLife pics of a Chrysler Town & Country. People are importing vintage Japanese microvans and embracing other oddball shapes to stand out against a world full of Toyota RAV4s. Yet, despite ongoing rumblings about a comeback, the true minivan remains mired in tired stereotypes: It is the dorky dadmobile that appears in your driveway the day you buy a white pair of New Balance sneakers.
The thing is, a minivan is exactly what people want. And in the EV age, it could get even better.
Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast recently compared the biological concept of carcinization — the way everything wants to become a crab — to the convergent evolution of cars. In Robinson Meyer’s metaphor, automotive designs keep coming back to the minivan. After all, it has the primary features most families seek, namely three-row seating and lots of cargo space for kid stuff. But because the minivan is a loathed emblem of domesticity, carmakers continue to disguise its function in other forms.
This has been going on for generations. The bulbous station wagon, effectively a shorter minivan, was once the country’s de facto family car. Its parental uncoolness led to the rise of the minivan — which then became loaded with its own “soccer mom” cultural baggage and fell out of favor. In the 1990s, parents in search of a hipper, rugged alternative embraced the squared-off SUV instead. Three decades later, those boxes on wheels have mostly morphed into the rounded crossovers that dominate the roads today — vehicles that are, fundamentally, just minivans stretched into a shape that shouts, “I am anything but.”
Tastes change, of course. And if Americans are going to switch to electric cars, then it’s imperative the car companies electrify the vehicles they want. The problem with the never-ending SUV-crossover craze is that minivans are objectively better for the lives we actually lead.
A minivan handles better because it generally has a lower center of gravity than high-riding SUVs, which were built as if their owners were going to ford a riverbed on the way to their middle child’s xylophone recital. This is one reason car journalists have continued to praise the minivan over the years even as car buyers have spurned them.
Minivans have a variety of other features that make them better family cars than crossovers are. They’re roomy. They’re easy to get into and out of, especially when you’re loading or unloading children or car seats. The sliding doors prevent your offspring from dinging the next car over in the parking lot.
But because minivans have only a cult following these days and don’t sell big numbers, the electrified options are few. Online discussions about the best EV family car often come back to the plug-in hybrid Chrysler Pacifica because three-row EV crossovers are still rare and the all-electric Volkswagen ID.Buzz, a revival of the old VW bus that would be America’s first mainstream minivan EV, hasn’t arrived yet.
Volkswagen
There are cool concepts like Mercedes-Benz’s and interesting international options like the Volvo EM90, touted as a “living room on wheels” made with a signature clean Scandinavian aesthetic. They are aimed at the Chinese market because of America’s minivan disdain.
Mercedes-Benz
Sadly, it’s looking less and less likely that the startup Canoo’s space-pod people-conveyors, which one would call “vans” for lack of a better term, will ever come to fruition. No fully electric EV minivan is on sale here so far. Google “EV minivan” and you might get sponsored ads for Tesla, Rivian, and Subaru — whose electric offerings are decidedly not vans — as well as Reddit threads that ask why we don’t have more electrified minivan options yet.
Canoo
It’s too bad, because vans are great and could get even better via electrification. A long, heavy battery slung along the bottom of a van will add to its low center of gravity while providing a large number of kilowatt-hours. The voluminous cargo space inside EV minivans (and full-size vans like the electric Sprinter) will give small businesses a way to decarbonize. A fun bonus of EV life is being able to use the battery’s electricity to power the climate control and other accessories without having to run a combustion engine the whole time. That makes it easier to keep the whole family happy even if you’re waiting in the parking lot, and it will make the cabin an enjoyable place to kill time once AI starts doing all the driving. (There is one big problem still to be solved: making a minivan’s fold-flat seats, a game-changing feature, work when there’s a big battery down there.)
As we recently noted, the family-car-sized hole in the EV market is starting to be filled in. The Kia EV9 has introduced a true three-row crossover EV to the U.S., and more like it will soon follow. It stands to reason that, eventually, today’s minivan standards like the Toyota Sienna and Honda Odyssey will electrify alongside everything else, creating a battery-powered offering for the small but growing niche populated by van people.
Still, the minivan deserves better. Perhaps when its EV version finally arrives, drivers will get bored of the conformist crossover and realize that the electric van can.
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Almost half of developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
The solar energy industry has a big farm problem cropping up. And if it isn’t careful, it’ll be dealing with it for years to come.
Researchers at SI2, an independent research arm of the Solar Energy Industries Association, released a study of farm workers and solar developers this morning that said almost half of all developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
Unveiled in conjunction with RE+, the largest renewable energy conference in the U.S., the federally-funded research includes a warning sign that permitting is far and away the single largest impediment for solar developers trying to build projects on farmland. If this trend continues or metastasizes into a national movement, it could indefinitely lock developers out from some of the nation’s best land for generating carbon-free electricity.
“If a significant minority opposes and perhaps leads to additional moratoria, [developers] will lose a foot in the door for any future projects,” Shawn Rumery, SI2’s senior program director and the survey lead, told me. “They may not have access to that community any more because that moratoria is in place.”
SI2’s research comes on the heels of similar findings from Heatmap Pro. A poll conducted for the platform last month found 70% of respondents who had more than 50 acres of property — i.e. the kinds of large landowners sought after by energy developers — are concerned that renewable energy “takes up farmland,” by far the greatest objection among that cohort.
Good farmland is theoretically perfect for building solar farms. What could be better for powering homes than the same strong sunlight that helps grow fields of yummy corn, beans and vegetables? And there’s a clear financial incentive for farmers to get in on the solar industry, not just because of the potential cash in letting developers use their acres but also the longer-term risks climate change and extreme weather can pose to agriculture writ large.
But not all farmers are warming up to solar power, leading towns and counties across the country to enact moratoria restricting or banning solar and wind development on and near “prime farmland.” Meanwhile at the federal level, Republicans and Democrats alike are voicing concern about taking farmland for crop production to generate renewable energy.
Seeking to best understand this phenomena, SI2 put out a call out for ag industry representatives and solar developers to tell them how they feel about these two industries co-mingling. They received 355 responses of varying detail over roughly three months earlier this year, including 163 responses from agriculture workers, 170 from solar developers as well as almost two dozen individuals in the utility sector.
A key hurdle to development, per the survey, is local opposition in farm communities. SI2’s publicity announcement for the research focuses on a hopeful statistic: up to 70% of farmers surveyed said they were “open to large-scale solar.” But for many, that was only under certain conditions that allow for dual usage of the land or agrivoltaics. In other words, they’d want to be able to keep raising livestock, a practice known as solar grazing, or planting crops unimpeded by the solar panels.
The remaining percentage of farmers surveyed “consistently opposed large-scale solar under any condition,” the survey found.
“Some of the messages we got were over my dead body,” Rumery said.
Meanwhile a “non-trivial” number of solar developers reported being unwilling or disinterested in adopting the solar-ag overlap that farmers want due to the increased cost, Rumery said. While some companies expect large portions of their business to be on farmland in the future, and many who responded to the survey expect to use agrivoltaic designs, Rumery voiced concern at the percentage of companies unwilling to integrate simultaneous agrarian activities into their planning.
In fact, Rumery said some developers’ reticence is part of what drove him and his colleagues to release the survey while at RE+.
As we discussed last week, failing to address the concerns of local communities can lead to unintended consequences with industry-wide ramifications. Rumery said developers trying to build on farmland should consider adopting dual-use strategies and focus on community engagement and education to avoid triggering future moratoria.
“One of the open-ended responses that best encapsulated the problem was a developer who said until the cost of permitting is so high that it forces us to do this, we’re going to continue to develop projects as they are,” he said. “That’s a cold way to look at it.”
Meanwhile, who is driving opposition to solar and other projects on farmland? Are many small farm owners in rural communities really against renewables? Is the fossil fuel lobby colluding with Big Ag? Could building these projects on fertile soil really impede future prospects at crop yields?
These are big questions we’ll be tackling in far more depth in next week’s edition of The Fight. Trust me, the answers will surprise you.
Here are the most notable renewable energy conflicts over the past week.
1. Worcester County, Maryland –Ocean City is preparing to go to court “if necessary” to undo the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s approval last week of U.S. Wind’s Maryland Offshore Wind Project, town mayor Rick Meehan told me in a statement this week.
2. Magic Valley, Idaho – The Lava Ridge Wind Project would be Idaho’s biggest wind farm. But it’s facing public outcry over the impacts it could have on a historic site for remembering the impact of World War II on Japanese residents in the United States.
3. Kossuth County, Iowa – Iowa’s largest county – Kossuth – is in the process of approving a nine-month moratorium on large-scale solar development.
Here’s a few more hotspots I’m watching…
The most important renewable energy policies and decisions from the last few days.
Greenlink’s good day – The Interior Department has approved NV Energy’s Greenlink West power line in Nevada, a massive step forward for the Biden administration’s pursuit of more transmission.
States’ offshore muddle – We saw a lot of state-level offshore wind movement this past week… and it wasn’t entirely positive. All of this bodes poorly for odds of a kumbaya political moment to the industry’s benefit any time soon.
Chumash loophole – Offshore wind did notch one win in northern California by securing an industry exception in a large marine sanctuary, providing for farms to be built in a corridor of the coastline.
Here’s what else I’m watching …