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You can take advantage of rising inventory.
First of all, I want everyone to just take a deep breath and calm down.
Despite data that indicates much slower sales than many anticipated, the American electric vehicle market is not collapsing before it ever really took off. EVs are not failed experiments, public and private investments into battery plants and public chargers are not about to evaporate, and we are not collectively doomed to be driving coal-rolling trucks for lack of a better option until we’ve extinguished most non-cockroach life on this planet.
Three things are true, however. The first is that EVs remain expensive like any new technology, and while that means they aren’t flying off dealer lots in record time, sales are still growing fast — including globally. The second is that Tesla is still posting record revenues and huge sales. Its rapid-fire price cuts have paid off handsomely; the Model 3 and Model Y are lapping everyone else in the EV race because they’re screaming deals. That fact alone has me not worried about declining EV demand.
The third thing is that now may actually be a good time to buy an EV, if you know where to look.
Do you feel better now?
EV adoption remains a long-term (though increasingly difficult) goal for many automakers. More EVs are coming and prices are expected to drop over time as the technology develops and batteries are built stateside. But while immediate action is needed on multiple fronts to reduce carbon emissions, it’s tough to ask many families to spend $60,000 on a Hyundai in this economy. And EVs piling up at car dealerships reflects this trend, but it doesn’t reflect a lack of interest, experts told me.
“I don't think that's fair to say no one wants EVs,” said Brian Moody, the executive editor of Cox Automotive, the research firm that sounded the alarm about EV inventory increasing. “I don't think that's accurate.”
Moody added, “One thing that we see is that about 50% of shoppers say they're open to the idea of getting an electric car, so that's a pretty good number and that probably bodes well for the future. But that doesn't necessarily translate to sales tomorrow.”
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Cox Automotive’s data indicates U.S. car dealers had a more than 100-day supply of EVs on their lots on average by the end of June — 60 days is considered healthy — and the average EV lists for $63,486. So at a time when interest rates are high and car buyers’ budgets are squeezed, Moody said they may find a $36,000 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid more appealing than a $50,000 fully electric Hyundai Ioniq 6. “I think the good thing about EVs today is they provide consumers a choice,” he said.
Tom McParland has firsthand experience helping buyers to navigate these choices. He runs a consulting service that helps people purchase cars and contributes car-buying advice columns to publications like Jalopnik. (Full Disclosure: I was previously editor-in-chief of that site, where he was one of our contributors.) His service helps about 20 to 30 people a month to buy a car.
McParland said that last year, he was turning away customers who wanted to buy a Ford F-150 Lightning or a Mustang Mach-E because there were none to be found or because dealer markups were so extraordinarily high.
Now, he’s seen a “mixed bag” lately when it comes to EVs: “If I look at how many of my clients in 2023 are requesting EVs or plug-in [hybrids], there’s definitely an uptick overall compared to last year,” he said. However, “as soon as the tax credit rules changed, I saw a big dropoff in the level of interest for those cars,” he said. “Nobody was asking me for Ioniq 5s,” he added, referring to Hyundai’s cyberpunk-looking Model Y competitor.
For a few months at the start of the year, nearly every EV qualified for generous tax breaks. But by spring, only North American-built cars with North American-built batteries could get the incentives, excluding options from Kia, Hyundai, Volvo, BMW, Toyota, and others. And while car dealers don’t want those cars taking up space on lots forever, there’s only so much they can do — or are willing to do, McParland said.
“Dealers can only go so deep until the math no longer makes sense,” he said. “They are not going to discount that car 20% and lose 50% on the back end just to move it.” Also, while a kind of loophole allows more brands to qualify for tax breaks if they’re leased, McParland said he’s a bit skeptical that this always equals a good deal because the price cuts are baked into a lower residual value at the end of your term.
But it’s not that buyers aren’t willing to go green at all. To Moody’s point about hybrids, McParland said he’s seen a huge spike in buyer interest in those cars this year.
“If somebody comes to me looking for a Honda, they don't care about a gas Honda,” he said. “They want an Accord Hybrid, or they want a CR-V hybrid. Because the price delta between the gas and the hybrid version is not much.”
That’s a net positive for the planet. Hybrid cars are still a remarkable tool for reducing emissions right now in ways that may be easier to live with until a more robust EV charging network gets built out. Having said that, McParland told me to forget about deals on hybrid cars. “There’s no deals there because the demand is so high,” he said.
So where can you get deals on a green car right now, especially one that doesn’t use gasoline at all?
Some cursory hunting revealed a number of 2022 model-year EVs that are still “new” cars — maybe they’ve been at the dealership that long and just have a few hundred or thousand miles on them — and are going for almost fire-sale prices. Take this 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5 with just 2,562 miles for a very tempting $40,000 even (about $6,000 to $10,000 off the average price.) Or this Kia EV6 with 7,353 miles and a $37,991 price tag. I’d seen a few examples recently of the Mustang Mach-E that also fit that bill.
There’s also still the Chevrolet Bolt, which is soon to be discontinued and has some outdated charging tech but is going out with a mid-$20,000 fire-sale bang. Not only are they eligible for the full $7,500 tax credit, but some states are giving extra incentives. In Colorado, for instance, you might be able to pick up one of the last new Bolts for around $15,000 after all the tax credits kick in.
On the manufacturer's side, Ford slashed the prices of the F-150 Lightning pickup (after raising them this year amid supply chain issues) by up to $10,000 this week, leaving the base Lightning Pro at $51,990. Now, that’s still more expensive than it was a year ago, but hey, a deal’s a deal. (It’s also eligible for the full $7,500 tax credit.)
McParland added that he’s seen some more aggressive deals on BMW and Mercedes-Benz’s electric models as part of their summer sales events as well. One reason might be that neither automaker has any fully electric car that qualifies for a U.S. tax credit at the moment. (For the record, I’m a fan of BMW’s i4 electric sport sedan, and other people seem to be too; BMW’s actually doing very well on the EV sales front this year.)
“We're seeing some manufacturer incentives… more so on the higher end of the market,” McParland said. So maybe not great news if you want a commuter on a budget, but not bad if you can stand to treat yourself a bit.
And there’s always Tesla. While McParland said some of his customers have been turned off by the CEO’s recent antics or just want some variety — “People have come to me, and this is the exact conversation. I want EV but I don't want to buy a Tesla, that sort of thing,” he said — the fact is that the cars’ specs are still among the best out there. So are the deals. Between Tesla’s own price cuts and the EV tax incentives, these are hot sellers for good reason right now. “And you’ve got people looking into used ones now that there are so many out there,” McParland said.
Moody added that there are other ways to save on EV ownership besides just the car, too. Many manufacturers offer deals on home chargers or are throwing them in for free. There are also state and federal tax incentives to help cover the cost of charging. “I would not just call a place someplace up and buy [a charger,]” he said. “I would do a lot of research and see if I could get one for free or at a discounted rate.”
Finally, McParland said patience may be a virtue as the year goes on and new model-year cars hit dealerships. That’s when they get more aggressive at moving the older stuff.
“My prediction is that as we start to get closer to the fall, the deals might even get better than they are now,” he said. “I think we're still in the early stages of this ‘too much inventory’ situation.”
America is past the “early adopter” stage of EVs, when people were evangelizing gas-free cars but had few choices and terrible options for living with them. But we’re not in the critical mass stage, either. Getting to that point could take a number of years; transitioning to zero-emission transportation was never going to happen overnight, even if we need it to.
In the meantime, if you see EV ownership in your future, be on the lookout for great deals as much as you are for public chargers near your place.
Read more about EVs:
Tesla Is Still Winning the EV Race
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With the federal electric vehicle tax credit now gone, automakers like Ford and Hyundai have to find other ways to make their electric cars affordable.
We finally know what Tesla means by an “affordable” electric vehicle. On Tuesday, the electric automaker revealed the stripped-down, less-fancy “Standard” version of its best-selling Model Y crossover and Model 3 sedan. These EVs will sell for several thousand dollars less than the existing versions, which are now rebranded as “Premium.”
These slightly cheaper Ys and 3s aren’t exactly the $25,000 baby Tesla that many fans and investors have anticipated for years. But the announcement is an indication of where the electric vehicle market in the United States may be headed now that the $7,500 federal tax credit for purchasing an EV is dead and gone. Automakers have spent the past few months rejiggering their lineups and slashing prices as much as they can to make sure sales don’t crater without the federal incentive.
The impending end of the tax credit on September 30 helped propel Tesla to record sales numbers in the third quarter of 2025. It was a stark reversal from months of disappointing sales stemming from factors like increased competition and Elon Musk’s political antics that alienated potential buyers. Money talks, of course; Tesla sent me a blitz of emails to make sure I didn’t forget what a good deal I could get before September’s end. But now, with the deadline passed, Musk’s company needed a new shot in the arm to stop sales from falling off a cliff.
The budget Teslas are, indeed, lesser vehicles. They have simpler headlights, less power, and less range than the now-Premium versions. They even come in fewer colors. But the prices — $40,000 for a Model Y Standard and $37,000 for a Model 3 Standard — effectively mirror what those cars would have cost if the tax credit were still in place. In other words, you can still buy a Tesla in the $35,000 to $40,000 range. It just won’t be as good a Tesla as you used to be able to get for the money.
The tax credit deadline had looked like one that would demarcate two distinct EV eras, with October 1 acting as the beginning of new, less-affordable time. But it turns out things aren’t quite so black and white. Lots of automakers are experimenting with ways to soften the financial blow for those who still want to get into an EV. After all, there’s always a loophole.
For example, as the September tax credit deadline approached, Reuters reported on a scheme orchestrated by Ford and General Motors to allow the American car giants to keep the good times going by buying their own cars. It goes like this: Before the September 30 deadline, the financing arms of these big corporations began the process of purchasing a host of their own vehicles from their dealerships. By making the down payment before the end of September, Ford and GM qualified these vehicles for the federal tax benefit. (They even checked with the IRS to make sure this plot was legitimate, Reuters said.) They plan to pass on the savings by leasing those vehicles back to everyday Americans.
According to Car and Driver, a number of citizens did something similar to what the corporations devised — that is, some buyers made their first payments on EVs that won’t be delivered to them for weeks or months in order to qualify for the tax break. These shenanigans are for the short term, though. Ford and GM could pre-purchase only so many of their own vehicles, and Ford said this deal effectively extends the tax credit only another quarter, through the end of December.
The bigger question is whether the automakers can — or will — simply cut prices on their EVs to make the loss of federal incentives sting a little less.
That’s the plan at Hyundai. The Korean giant has announced an enormous price cut on its successful Ioniq 5, one that more than makes up for the vanishing federal incentive. The most basic version of that car will fall from $42,600 to $35,000, putting it on par with the Chevy Equinox EV that’s been a hit at that price. Fancier versions of the Ioniq 5 will fall by more than $9,000 for the 2026 model year. Hyundai and its partner Kia are offering some of the best October lease deals, too.
Other car companies have begun to follow suit. BMW will simply offer a $7,500 discount on its electric models for those who take delivery by the end of October. Stellantis, the parent company of Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, and others, will do the same for electric sales through the end of the year. No word yet on what happens after these deals expire.
Incentives like the federal tax credit for EVs aren’t meant to last forever, of course. In theory, their purpose is to lift up a new technology until it can compete at scale with the tech that has been around forever.
Whether electric cars have reached that point is a contentious question. Ford has only just announced a roadmap to overhaul its entire EV production system in order to stop losing billions on electric vehicles. Hyundai’s EVs are profitable — or, at least they were before the Trump administration began monkeying with tax incentives and tariffs. A batch of more affordable EVs are on the way, though the ever-changing map of tariffs makes it unclear exactly how much they’ll cost when they finally arrive.
The short-term picture may well be that electric cars continue to be a loss leader for some automakers still trying to find their footing in the space. Whether their shareholders will tolerate this long enough for the margins to become sustainable — well, that’s the real question.
Current conditions: In the Atlantic, the tropical storm that could, as it develops, take the name Jerry is making its way westward toward the U.S. • In the Pacific, Hurricane Priscilla strengthened into a Category 2 storm en route to Arizona and the Southwest • China broke an October temperature record with thermometers surging near 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the southeastern province of Fujian.
The Department of Energy appears poised to revoke awards to two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported Tuesday. She got her hands on an internal agency project list that designated nearly $24 billion worth of grants as “terminated,” including Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub and Louisiana's Project Cypress, a joint venture between the DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks. An Energy Department spokesperson told Emily that he was “unable to verify” the list of canceled grants and said that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,”referring to the canceled grants the department announced last week. Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.” Heirloom’s head of policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said the company wasn’t aware of any decision the Energy Department had yet made.
While the list floated last week showed the Trump administration’s plans to cancel the two regional hydrogen hubs on the West Coast, the new list indicated that the Energy Department planned to rescind grants for all seven hubs, Emily reported. “If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told her. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses.”
Remember the Tesla announcement I teased in yesterday’s newsletter? The predictions proved half right: The electric automaker did, indeed, release a cheaper version of its midsize SUV, the Model Y, with a starting price just $10 shy of $40,000. Rather than a new Roadster or potential vacuum cleaner, as the cryptic videos the company posted on CEO Elon Musk’s social media site hinted, the second announcement was a cheaper version of the Model 3, already the lower-end sedan offering. Starting at $36,990, InsideEVs called it “one of the most affordable cars Tesla has ever sold, and the cheapest in 2025.” But it’s still a far cry from Musk’s erstwhile promise to roll out a Tesla for less than $30,000.
That may be part of why the company is losing market share. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, Tesla’s slice of the U.S. electric vehicle sales sank to its lowest-ever level in August despite Americans’ record scramble to use the federal tax credits before the September 30 deadline President Donald Trump’s new tax law set. General Motors, which sold more electric vehicles in the third quarter of this year than in all of 2024, offers the cheapest battery-powered passenger vehicle on the market today, the Chevrolet Equinox, which starts at $35,100.
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Trump’s pledge to revive the United States’ declining coal industry was always a gamble — even though, as Matthew reported in July, global coal demand is rising. Three separate stories published Tuesday show just how stacked the odds are against a major resurgence:
As you may recall from two consecutive newsletters last month, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said “permitting reform” was “the biggest remaining thing” in the administration’s agenda. Yet Republican leaders in Congress expressed skepticism about tacking energy policy into the next reconciliation bill. This week, however, Utah Senator Mike Lee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, called for a legislative overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act. On Monday, the pro-development social media account Yimbyland — short for Yes In My Back Yard — posted on X: “Reminder that we built the Golden Gate Bridge in 4.5 years. Today, we wouldn’t even be able to finish the environmental review in 4.5 years.” In response, Lee said: “It’s time for NEPA reform. And permitting reform more broadly.”
Last month, a bipartisan permitting reform bill got a hearing in the House of Representatives. But that was before the government shutdown. And sources familiar with Democrats’ thinking have in recent months suggested to me that the administration’s gutting of so many clean energy policies has left Republicans with little to bargain with ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Soon-to-be Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi.Yuichi Yamazaki - Pool/Getty Images
On Saturday, Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party elected its former economic minister, Sanae Takaichi, as its new leader, putting her one step away from becoming the country’s first woman prime minister. Under previous administrations, Japan was already on track to restart the reactors idled after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. But Takaichi, a hardline conservative and nationalist who also vowed to re-militarize the nation, has pushed to speed up deployment of new reactors and technologies such as fusion in hopes of making the country 100% self-sufficient on energy.
“She wants energy security over climate ambition, nuclear over renewables, and national industry over global corporations,” Mika Ohbayashi, director at the pro-clean-energy Renewable Energy Institute, told Bloomberg. Shares of nuclear reactor operators surged by nearly 7% on Monday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, while renewable energy developers’ stock prices dropped by as much as 15%
Researchers at the United Arab Emirates’ University of Sharjah just outlined a new method to transform spent coffee grounds and a commonly used type of plastic used in packaging into a form of activated carbon that can be used for chemical engineering, food processing, and water and air treatments. By repurposing the waste, it avoids carbon emitting from landfills into the atmosphere and reduces the need for new sources of carbon for industrial processes. “What begins with a Starbucks coffee cup and a discarded plastic water bottle can become a powerful tool in the fight against climate change through the production of activated carbon,” Dr. Haif Aljomard, lead inventor of the newly patented technology, said in a press release.
Last week’s Energy Department grant cancellations included funding for a backup energy system at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, California
When the Department of Energy canceled more than 321 grants in an act of apparent retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown, Russ Vought, President Trump’s budget czar, declared that the money represented “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda.”
At least one of the grants zeroed out last week, however, was supposed to help keep the lights on at a children’s hospital.
The $29 million grant was intended to build a 3.3-megawatt long-duration energy storage system at Valley Children’s Hospital, a large pediatric hospital in Madera, California. The system would “power critical hospital operations during outage events,” such as when the California grid shuts down to avoid starting wildfires, according to project documents.
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s cancellation of funding for [the] long-duration energy storage demonstration grant is disappointing,” Zara Arboleda, a spokesperson for the hospital, told me.
Valley Children’s Hospital is a 358-bed hospital that says it serves more than 1.3 million children across California’s Central Valley. It has 116 neonatal intensive care unit beds and nationally ranked specialties in pediatric neurology, orthopedics, and lung surgery, among others.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has characterized the more than $7.5 billion in grants canceled last week as part of an ongoing review of financial awards made by the Biden administration. But the timing of the cancellations — and Vought’s gleeful tweets about them — suggests a more vindictive purpose. Republican lawmakers and President Trump himself threatened to unleash Vought as a kind of rogue budget cutter before the federal government shut down last week.
“We don’t control what he’s going to do,” Senator John Thune told Politico last week. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut,” Trump posted on the same day.
Up until this year, canceling funding that is already under contract with a private party would have been thought to be straightforwardly illegal under federal law. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has allowed the Trump administration to act with previously unimaginable freedom while it considers ruling on similar cases.
Faraday Microgrids, the contractor that was due to receive the funding, is already building a microgrid for the hospital. The proposed backup power system — which the grant stipulated should be “non-lithium-ion” — was supposed to be funded by the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, with the goal of finding new ways of storing electricity without using lithium-ion batteries, and was meant to work in concert with that new microgrid and snap on in times of high stress.
That microgrid project is still moving forward, Arboleda, the hospital’s spokesperson, told me. “Valley Children’s Hospital continues to build and soon will operate its microgrid announced in 2023 to ensure our facilities have access to reliable and sustainable energy every minute of every day for our patients and our care providers,” she added. That grid will contain some storage, but not the long-term storage system discussed in the official plan.
Faraday Microgrids, formerly known as Charge Bliss, didn’t respond to a request for comment, but its website touts its ability to secure grants and other government funding for energy projects.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Energy Department said that the grant was canceled because the project wasn’t feasible. “Following an in-depth review of the financial award, it was determined, among other reasons, that the viability of the project was not adequate to warrant further disbursements,” Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, told me.
The children’s hospital, at least, is in good company. On Tuesday, a Trump administration document obtained by Heatmap News suggested the Energy Department is moving to kill bipartisan-backed funding for two direct air capture hubs in Texas and Louisiana. And although California has lost the most grants of any state, the Energy Department has also sought to terminate funding for new factories and industrial facilities across Republican-governed states.
Editor’s note: This story initially misstated the number of neonatal intensive care unit beds at Valley Children’s Hospital. It has been corrected.