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Electric vehicles are so gloriously light on routine maintenance, people keep forgetting they still need some attention.
Tires wear down. Nothing could be more ordinary. And yet, when I suffered a blowout in my Tesla Model 3 this winter and decided to get a new set of four, I found myself pulled back into an unwelcome place: Pep Boys, or more specifically, the world of basic car maintenance.
EVs feel novel, like breaking with the clunkiness of the past to join the future. And in several ways, this sensation is true: The experience of driving, refueling, and, yes, maintaining your electric car is miles apart from the combustion life. EVs have the potential to require far less routine maintenance than what has come before. The difference is so stark that some EV owners may be lulled by their vehicle’s futurism into thinking it cares for itself.
But don’t be. This is still a car, after all, and it still requires your attention.
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The most noticeable part of maintaining an EV is what doesn’t require upkeep. An electric car doesn’t have engine oil or an oil filter that needs to be replaced during an inconvenient trip to the mechanic every 3,000 miles, one that carries the risk of being upsold some other service. It doesn’t have a radiator asking to be refilled with antifreeze. There are no belts and hoses beneath the hood that must be swapped out (there’s just the frunk, which is where I keep my shopping bags).
The absence adds up, especially when considering the calculus of car ownership over time. As has been widely noted, EVs typically carry a higher sticker price than their gas-powered counterparts. Federal and state tax incentives begin to cover the difference, and can make EVs very affordable if you live in a generous state like Colorado. Electricity (depending upon where you live) could be cheaper than gasoline, which lowers the lifetime cost of an electric compared to gas. The lack of oil changes and other basic maintenance can be a money-saver, too. I’ve now driven my Tesla more than 52,000 miles, which would have required 17 oil changes in a traditional vehicle.
Automakers will recommend some service on an EV, such as the occasional tire rotation, but nobody is going to make the happy-go-lucky EV owner actually do this (you should, though). Among the only chores that remind you an electric car is still a car are the need to put air in the tires and top off the wiper fluid.
The dearth of required basic maintenance creates an illusion, making it startlingly easy for owners to treat an EV like a mobile smartphone that needs no upkeep beyond the occasional software update. Look no further than the YouTube celebrity who ranted that his Tesla was unsafe to drive, only to have the entire internet point out the real problem: He had worn his tires down to the bone.
I carry an orange notebook in my glovebox to jot down major moments in my car’s life, a habit I surely picked up from my father. Over the first four years of EV ownership, it has remained mostly empty. This year, after replacing the tires at just past 50,000 miles, I also had to swap in a new 12-volt battery. (This is the small one like gas cars have — the place where you have to jump-start them. Tesla uses it for low-power applications like the windows and doors, so you don’t get locked inside if the big battery taps out.) In terms of routine maintenance, that’s about it.
What’s yet to come is something of an open question, since we still don’t know everything about how EVs age. Take brake pads, the parts that exert the physical pressure to slow down the car. Their lifespan can vary wildly based on how and where a person drives. If you glide to a gentle stop, they last. If you drive on lots of hills or constantly slam on the gas and the brake, they don’t.
On a normal maintenance schedule, I’d be due for new brake pads soon. With EVs, though, comes a complicating factor: regenerative braking. The vehicle slows itself down when the driver lifts her foot off the accelerator, feeding the recovered energy back into the battery. Once a person learns to drive this way, they need only hit the actual brake pedal when they suddenly need to stop very quickly. At one point, Elon Musk said this feature would negate the need to ever replace the brake pads in a Tesla. Although that, like many of his statements, was hyperbolic, I’ve learned to extend the life of my Model 3’s brake pads by barely using them.
Tires may be more problematic. EVs are heavy, and heavier vehicles tend to wear down their tires faster than lighter ones. This puts more microparticles into the environment and causes drivers more pain in the wallet. Given the glut of very heavy mega-EVs coming to the market, owners may find that the need to replace their tires negates the savings from gasoline not bought and oil changes not taken.
Unless they get a lemon — something with a manufacturing defect that requires frequent trips to the service center — EV owners should find that they invest less time and money maintaining their vehicles, at least in the short and medium term. The big question is, what happens in the long term?
As Heatmap has covered before, we simply don’t know yet. Of mass-market EVs, only the oldest Nissan Leafs and Tesla Model S’s have passed a decade on the road at this point. Once EVs have been on the road for a full lifetime, we’ll have a much better idea how much longer-term maintenance they need — for example, whether motors or crucial electrical components will wear out. And, crucially, how long those expensive batteries will really last.Read more about electric vehicles:
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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.