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The vibes are shifting yet again.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one already, but the supposed EV sales slump isn’t real. The overall growth rate has slowed somewhat, crushing any fantasy that America would accelerate to mostly electric driving in just a few years. But electric vehicles sales have been steadily rising amid a negative narrative, and they rose yet again in the third quarter of 2024.
Carmakers sold 346,309 of them from July to September, a 5% increase over the second quarter of this year and an 11% jump year-over-year. EVs reached 8.9% of all vehicles sold in America in the third quarter, prompting Cox Automotive (which owns Kelley Blue Book) to opine that 10% looks well within reach.
A look inside the numbers behind the news tells us a few important things about the state of EVs.
A lightning rod on wheels, the Cybertruck became a focal point for the anger and contempt lots of very online people feel toward Elon Musk and his support for Donald Trump. But as I noted a year ago for Heatmap, plenty of people want this car — either out of genuine affection for what it is and what it can do, or for the political statement they can make by owning one.
The numbers don’t lie. Despite a slow start, Tesla sold 16,692 Cybertrucks during the third quarter. That made it the number three EV in America behind Tesla’s Model Y and Model 3. The Cybertruck’s emergence, combined with better sales by a refreshed Model 3, helped to stop a slide at Tesla earlier this year caused by falling sales of the aging Models S, X, and Y.
As Tesla goes, so goes today’s EV market. Its slump in 2024 had hampered the growth of the industry at large; a rumored update to the industry-leading Model Y would be a shot in the arm for everybody. Yet even with Tesla stabilizing, Elon Musk’s dominance isn’t what it once was. The company’s market share, which hovered in the 70% range in 2019 and 2020, has fallen below 50%. With a growing slate of competitors, it may never cross above that threshold again.
Korean brands Hyundai and Kia had been the non-Tesla success story of the past year-plus, with American EV shoppers falling in love with the quirky Hyundai Ioniq 5 in particular. But General Motors seized second place in Q3 as some of its plans finally came to fruition. Chevy sold nearly 8,000 Blazer EVs and almost 10,000 Equinox EVs last quarter. That latter figure is particularly impressive given that the $35,000 base-level Equinox, which could fall below $30,000 after incentives, didn’t hit the market until October. The Cadillac Lyric found a niche. Even the preposterous GMC Hummer EV saw a big sales bump.
GM’s solid numbers don’t include the remarkable success of its partnership with Honda, who borrowed GM’s Ultium platform to build its first American EV, the Prologue. That vehicle sold 12,644 in the third quarter, outpacing GM’s own EV crossovers. (Perhaps the legion of loyal Honda buyers in America were just waiting for the brand to sell them an electric car.)
Chevy and Honda’s success came at the expense of some brands whose electric crossovers aren’t quite so new and exciting anymore. The Ioniq 5 dropped a tiny bit compared to the third quarter of 2023, just 0.5%. However, Ford’s Mustang Mach-E dropped by nearly 10% year over year, while the Volkswagen ID.4 tumbled by 57.8%.
Speaking of Ford, it wasn’t all bad news for GM’s rival. Ford’s EV division did better than Wall Street expected. Overall sales actually rose, with gains from the E-transit van and F-150 Lightning pickup truck balancing out falling numbers from the Mustang Mach-E. Even so, Ford is losing billions of dollars on its electric vehicles. The blue oval brand faces a double challenge: It needs to get a new EV on sale to juice sales while figuring out how to dramatically cut manufacturing costs.
Watch any car commercial and you’ll be reminded that incentives aren’t the sole domain of EVs. Brands and dealerships offer all kinds of rebates and discounts to move gasoline cars off the lot. Yet because of the size of the federal and state tax credits and rebates for buying electric, those incentives retain an outsized impact on sales. Cox points out that incentives made up 12% of the average price of an EV sold in the third quarter of this year, compared to just above 7% for other kinds of cars.
What’s especially dramatic, though, is the incentive-driven rise of the leased EV. Overall, Americans lease just over 20% of their new cars, not far from where the figure stood two years ago. At the end of 2022, less than 10% of Americans who got a new EV leased it. But in December of that year, the federal government announced many EVs that weren’t ineligible for tax credits when purchased outright would be eligible for those incentives if people leased them. Cox’s chart paints a stark picture, showing leases rocketing from about 9% to 43% of EV sales.
In their own EV makeup, that is. There are six car brands that have 10% of their U.S. sales or more from EVs: Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Jaguar, Audi, and Cadillac — luxury brands all — are five of them. (The other is Mini.)
This makes perfect sense, of course. Luxury brands sell fewer vehicles overall, so it’s easier for EVs to make a big dent in sales. They sell expensive cars, which makes it easier for buyers to swallow the higher cost of EVs. Their drivers have always been more likely to lease cars, even before leasing EVs in particular became so appealing.
In sum, it means that the luxury car brands — while selling fewer overall EVs than Chevy and Honda will eventually sell — will be the first to experience what it’s like for a legacy car brand when the scales tip to more EVs than not.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.