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Americans want a variety ... of crossovers.
America’s electric car market has a new champion. The automaking alliance of Hyundai Motor Group and Kia Motors is now the second biggest seller of electric cars in the United States, according to new data released last week by Bloomberg BNEF.
The two companies sold more than 117,000 electric vehicles in the United States last year, or about 8% of all new EVs nationwide, according to the research firm. Only Tesla, the industry’s longtime leader, sold more electric cars: It still commands about half of U.S. market share.
The two companies’ success is an encouraging sign in what was more broadly a weird year for the EV market. Scarcely more than a year ago, the public’s demand for electric cars overwhelmed available inventory, and dealers were selling every EV they could get their hands on.
But as gas prices have fallen, the growth in EV sales in the United States has slowed, and the market has gotten more uneven. Tesla, looking to shore up its market position, launched a price war last year that juiced sales but cut deep into its profits. Ford and General Motors, meanwhile, are suffering anemic sales and cutting back on their short-term EV plans.
Amid this patchy landscape, Hyundai and Kia’s growth stands out. While the two companies are technically independent, Hyundai owns about a third of Kia Motors, and they collaborate on vehicle design, engineering, and manufacturing. They also use the same vehicle “platforms,” a common set of parts that can be used across models.
Since the news came out last week, I’ve seen climate people on Twitter and elsewhere try to explain why it’s happening. Many of these explanations conform to the views that the urban, progressive climate commentariat already hold about the car market. Look, Hyundai and Kia are winning because they’re making smaller cars, not behemoth SUVs.
But the answer, while not quite the opposite, doesn’t line up with what many might wish. In fact, Hyundai and Kia are dominating the EV market right now by churning out a mostly unbroken stream of crossover and SUVs. All but one of their electric cars qualifies as an SUV or crossover; all of their plug-in hybrids are SUVs. It is this commitment to repetition — to giving the consumer a lot of choices on a central theme — that sets their product lines apart right now.
You can see the importance of this by looking at their models in more depth. Take the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and the Kia EV6, for instance, which have led EV sales at the two brands and which are built on the same platform. Each is an electrified take on the type of car that, for years now, Americans haven’t been able to get enough of: the compact crossover SUV. The Ioniq 5 and EV6 each have two rows of seating and 25 cubic feet of trunk space. They drive more or less like a car, sit high on the road like an SUV, and fall in the broad category of cars that — as a friend’s wife puts it — looks like a fist with its thumb stuck out.
The Ioniq 5 and EV6 are also really, really similar to the Mustang Mach E, Ford’s attempt at an electric crossover. In fact, if you look only at specs, they’re basically the same car. All three have the same length and width and take up about 95 square feet of road space. All three have five seats. All three have roughly the same size trunk, although the Ford’s is maybe slightly bigger. And all three have an entry-level model starting at about $42,000 — although the lowest trim Ford has slightly more range and horsepower, and costs about a grand more.
As you might expect from those specs, the Mach E narrowly outsold the Ioniq 5 and EV6 in the United States last year. Ford sold more than 40,000 Mach Es in 2023, while Hyundai moved nearly 34,000 Ioniq 5s and Kia sold 19,000 EV6s. But here’s the thing: The Mach E did not outsell the Ioniq 5 and EV6 combined. And unlike Ford, which only sells one electric SUV, Hyundai and Kia continued to flood the zone with SUV options for consumers.
How many options? Hyundai sold plug-in versions of its Tuscon and Santa Fe SUVs. Kia sold an electric version of its subcompact Niro SUV and a plug-in hybrid version of its Sportage SUV. And even though Kia only started selling its new three-row SUV, the EV9, in December, it had already delivered more than 1,000 of them by the end of the year.
In fact, only one electric car from Hyundai-Kia — the new Ioniq 6 — was designed like a traditional sedan. But it made up only around 8% of the alliance’s total sales. Hyundai and Kia achieved their commanding position by giving Americans what they want: a seemingly endless stream of SUVs and crossovers.
Now, it matters here that Kia and Hyundai are two different companies, so there is some automatic duplication in their product lines. It might never make sense for Ford or GM to sell cars as similar as the EV6 and Ioniq 5. But if we’re being honest, their SUV lineups are already pretty duplicative: Do most consumers understand the difference between a Ford Edge and a Ford Escape? There’s no reason Ford couldn’t add an Escape EV to its lineup — something a little smaller and a little cheaper. That’s exactly what Kia does with the EV Niro, after all.
It helps, too, that lots of Kia and Hyundai’s cars look like great deals for consumers. Many of their key offerings hover in the high $30,000s to mid $40,000s, seemingly the sweet spot for new family cars today. Even though Hyundai and Kia’s cars don’t qualify for the new EV tax credit, Americans can use the $7,500 federal tax credit if they lease a vehicle instead.
Hyundai especially has used this credit — and a creative mix of rebates and low-interest-rate offers — to bring down the monthly payment for consumers. (Nearly half of new Ioniq 5s are leased, according to BNEF, which is a much higher rate than normal for Hyundai’s cars.)
Finally, it helps that Kia and especially Hyundai are making more interesting-looking vehicles than any other automaker right now. Compared to the staid peoplemover that is, say, the Volkswagen ID.4, the Ioniq 5 is striking, novel, and seems to push EV design forward. Its pixelated taillights are unlike anything else on the road, and it’s an extremely charismatic vehicle to drive; it’s just a better product, overall, than other cars out there.
And that might be the most important lesson behind Hyundai and Kia’s success. For the past few decades, decarbonization advocates have gotten used to thinking about electric cars primarily as a market abstraction: Are they cheap? Are they available? Are they growing as a sector? But as the EV transition continues, we are going to have to think about them more as products, as specific tools that can improve someone’s life by their presence. The EV companies that ultimately win will make better products than their competitors — cars that bring together capability, design, and price in a special way. Right now, Hyundai and Kia are pushing to the front of that race.
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What if, instead of maintaining old pipelines, gas utilities paid for homes to electrify?
California just hit a critical climate milestone: On September 1, Pacific Gas and Electric, the biggest utility in the state, raised natural gas rates by close to $6 due to shrinking gas demand.
I didn’t say it was a milestone worth celebrating. But experts have long warned that gas rates would go up as customers started to use less of the fossil fuel. PG&E is now forecasting enough of a drop in demand, whether because homeowners are making efficiency improvements or switching to electric appliances, that it needs to charge everyone a bit more to keep up with the cost of maintaining its pipelines.
Shortly after the rate increase went into effect, however, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill aimed at addressing this exact problem. The new law gives PG&E and other utilities permission to use money they would have spent to replace aging, leaky pipelines to pay for the electrification of the homes served by those pipes — as long as electrifying the homes is cheaper. Instead of investing millions of ratepayer dollars into the gas system, utilities can start to decommission parts of it, shrinking gas use and fixed costs in tandem.
PG&E actually already has the freedom to do this, and has even completed a fair number of projects. But the utility has had limited success, mainly because of an anti-discrimination law that gives building owners the right to stick with natural gas. It only takes one gas stalwart to thwart a whole neighborhood’s prospects for free electric appliances, since in order to keep delivering gas to that one household, the utility has to invest in the entire section of pipeline serving the area. A 2023 report showed that while PG&E had completed more than 100 projects, it hadn’t been able to convince clusters of customers larger than five at a time to convert.
The new law doesn’t fundamentally change the anti-discrimination rule, known as a utility’s “duty to serve,” but it does relieve PG&E and others of this duty if at least two-thirds of the homeowners served by a given section of pipeline consent to getting off gas. For now, the legislation limits utilities to executing 30 such projects. But for those 30, as long as two-thirds consent, the utility can now tell the holdouts that it is retiring the pipeline, and that they have no choice but to get on the electric bandwagon.
“If a supermajority wants it, it can move forward,” Matt Vespa, a senior attorney from Earthjustice who worked on the legislation, told me. “Which I think is probably a good place to start from. You want to have a place where there’s significant buy-in.”
This strategy, sometimes called “zonal decarbonization” or “targeted electrification,” is one that many climate groups are advocating for as a way to achieve an orderly and equitable transition off of natural gas. The approach most states have taken so far — providing subsidies that gently prod consumers into going electric — results in a random pattern of adoption that can benefit some homeowners while harming others. It also does nothing to deter gas utilities from investing hundreds of millions of dollars in maintaining, replacing, or building new pipelines each year — investments that are set up to be recouped from ratepayers over the course of decades.
California isn’t the first place in the world to experiment with targeted electrification. The Swiss city of Zurich began systematically shutting down sections of its gas system in 2021, giving affected users about a decade of warning and offering partial compensation for the cost of new equipment. In Massachusetts, the utility Eversource is piloting a unique neighborhood-scale electrification project. The company hooked up 32 residential buildings and a few commercial businesses in the city of Framingham to a new underground network of pipes that carry water rather than natural gas, which in turn connect to geothermal heat pumps that use the water to heat or cool the air inside. There are more than a dozen such “thermal energy network” pilot projects in various stages in Massachusetts, New York, Colorado, Washington, Vermont, Maryland, and Minnesota.
But the new California program is unique in its scale and approach. For one thing, it applies to all gas utilities in the state. Beginning next summer, they will each need to submit maps to the utility commission that identify potential pipeline replacement projects; then, in 2026, regulators will use those maps to designate priority areas, giving precedence to low-income communities and households that lack heating or cooling. By July of that year, the commission must establish the rules of the pilot program, including a methodology for utilities to determine when electrification is more cost-effective than pipeline replacement, and rules for how utilities can pay for the projects and recover costs.
PG&E supported the bill and worked closely with its authors on the language. The utility declined an interview, but emailed me a statement saying the legislation “enables cost-effective, targeted electrification projects which will help avoid more expensive gas pipeline replacements, reducing gas system operating costs, and support the state’s and PG&E’s decarbonization goals.”
Utilities will still be spending ratepayer money on the electrification projects, but far less than they would have spent on pipeline infrastructure. For the remaining gas customers, it’s still possible rates will go up, though by less than they would have otherwise. Mike Henchen, a principal in the carbon-free buildings program at RMI, told me these pilot projects alone are not going to pull so many customers away from the gas system that it will put upward pressure on rates. The law caps the program at no more than 1% of a utility’s customers.
Vespa, the Earthjustice attorney, told me he originally worked on a more ambitious version of the bill that would have required utilities to avoid any new investments in the gas system when electrification was a cheaper alternative. But it was pared back and made voluntary in order to get it through the legislature. “The hope is that we'll get projects off the ground, we’ll get proof-of-concept,” he said. “I think there was a need to demonstrate some successful stories and then hopefully expand from there.”
While these pilots make sense, economically, for a dual gas and electric company like PG&E, one big question is whether the state’s gas-only utilities like Southern California Gas will take the initiative. (SoCalGas did not respond to my inquiry prior to publication, but the company did support the legislation.)
Looking ahead, even if lawmakers do expand the program to authorize every cost-effective project, this model can’t transition the entire state away from gas. These projects are more likely to pencil out in places with lower housing density, where a given section of pipeline is serving only a handful of homes. A fact sheet about the bill published by its lead sponsor, state senator David Min, says that “zero emissions alternatives” to pipeline replacement are only technically feasible and cost effective for about 5% of PG&E’s territory. “Gas customers won't be able to pay for the decommissioning of the whole gas system, or even 50% of it,” said Henchen.
In the meantime, however, there’s lots of low-hanging fruit to pluck. Targeted electrification of just 3% to 4% of gas customers across the state could reduce gas utility spending by $15 billion to $26 billion through 2045, according to an analysis by Energy and Environmental Economics.
“It’s a modest step,” said Vespa of the new law. “But I do think it’s meaningful to start moving forward and developing the frameworks for this.”
Revoy is already hitching its power packs to semis in one of America’s busiest shipping corridors.
Battery swaps used to be the future. To solve the unsolvable problem of long recharging times for electric vehicles, some innovators at the dawn of this EV age imagined roadside stops where drivers would trade their depleted battery for a fully charged one in a matter of minutes, then be on their merry way.
That vision didn’t work out for passenger EVs — the industry chose DC fast charging instead. If the startup Revoy has its way, however, this kind of idea might be exactly the thing that helps the trucking industry surmount its huge hurdles to using electric power.
Revoy’s creation is, essentially, a bonus battery pack on wheels that turns an ordinary semi into an EV for as long as the battery lasts. The rolling module carries a 525 kilowatt-hour lithium iron phosphate battery pack attaches to the back of the truck; then, the trailer full of cargo attaches to the module. The pack offers a typical truck 250 miles of electric driving. Founder Ian Rust told me that’s just enough energy to reach the next Revoy station, where the trucker could swap their depleted module for a fresh one. And if the battery hits zero charge, that's no problem because the truck reverts to its diesel engine. It’s a little like a plug-in hybrid vehicle, if the PHEV towed its battery pack like an Airstream and could drop it off at will.
“If you run out of battery with us, there's basically no range anxiety,” Rust said. “And we do it intentionally on our routes, run it down to as close to zero as possible before we hit the next Revoy swapping station. That way you can get the maximum value of the battery without having to worry about range.”
To start, a trucker in a normal, everyday semi pulls up to a Revoy station and drops their trailer. A worker attaches a fully charged Revoy unit to the truck and trailer—all in five minutes or less, Revoy promises. Once in place, the unit interfaces seamlessly with the truck’s drivetrain and controls.
“It basically takes over as the cruise control on the vehicle,” he said. “So the driver gets it up to speed, takes their foot off the gas, and then we actually become the primary powertrain on the vehicle. You really only have to burn diesel for the little bit that is getting onto the highway and then getting off the highway, and you get really extreme MPGs with that.”
The Revoy model is going through its real-world paces as we speak. Rust’s startup has partnered with Ryder trucking, whose drivers are powering their semis with Revoy EVs at battery-swap stops along a stretch of Interstate 30 in Texas and Arkansas, a major highway for auto parts and other supplies coming from Mexico. Rust hopes the next Revoy corridor will go into Washington State, where the ample hydropower could help supply clean energy to all those swappable batteries. Happily, he said, Revoy can expand piecemeal like this because its approach negates the chicken-and-egg problem of needing a whole nation of EV chargers to make the vehicles themselves viable. Once a truck leaves a Revoy corridor, it’s just a diesel-powered truck again.
Early data from the Ryder pilot shows that the EV unit slashed how much diesel fuel a truck needs to make it down the designated corridor. “This is a way we can reduce a path to reduce the emissions of our fleet without having to buy anything — and without having to have to worry about how much utilization we're going to have to get,” Mike Plasencia, group director of New Product Strategy at Ryder, told me.
Trucking represents one of the biggest opportunities for cutting the carbon emissions of the transportation sector. It’s also one of the most challenging. Heatmap has covered the problem of oversized SUV and pickup truck EVs, which need larger, more expensive batteries to propel them. The trucking problem is that issue on steroids: A semi can tow up to 80,000 pounds down an American highway.
There are companies building true EV semi trucks despite this tall order — Tesla’s has been road-testing one while hauling Pepsi around, and trucking mainstays like Peterbilt are trying their hand as well. Although the EV model that works for everyday cars — a built-in battery that requires recharging after a couple hundred miles — can work for short-haul trucks that move freight around a city, it is a difficult fit for long-haul trucking where a driver must cover vast distances on a strict timetable. That’s exactly where Revoy is trying to break in.
"We are really focused on long haul,” he told me. “The reason for that is, it's the bigger market. One of the big misconceptions in trucking is that it's dominated by short haul. It's very much the opposite. And it's the bigger emission source, it's the bigger fuel user."
Rust has a background in robotics and devised the Revoy system as a potential solution to both the high cost of EV semis and to the huge chunks of time lost to fueling during long-distance driving. Another part of the pitch is that the Revoy unit is more than a battery. By employing the regenerative braking common in EVs, the Revoy provides a redundancy beyond air brakes for slowing a big semi—that way, if the air brakes fail, a trucker has a better option than the runaway truck lane. The setup also provides power and active steering to the Revoy’s axle, which Rust told me makes the big rig easier to maneuver.
Plasencia agrees. “The feedback from the drivers has been positive,” he said. “You get feedback messages like, it felt like I was driving a car, or like I wasn't carrying anything.”
As it tries to expand to more trucking corridors across the nation, Revoy may face an uphill battle in trying to sell truckers and trucking companies on an entirely new way to think about electrifying their fleets. But Rust has one ace up his sleeve: With Revoy, they get to keep their trucks — no need to buy new ones.
On the DOE’s transmission projects, Cybertruck recalls, and Antarctic greening
Current conditions: Hurricane Kirk, now a Category 4 storm, could bring life-threatening surf and rip currents to the East Coast this weekend • The New Zealand city of Dunedin is flooded after its rainiest day in more than 100 years • Parts of the U.S. may be able to see the Northern Lights this weekend after the sun released its biggest solar flare since 2017.
The Energy Department yesterday announced $1.5 billion in investments toward four grid transmission projects. The selected projects will “enable nearly 1,000 miles of new transmission development and 7,100 MW of new capacity throughout Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, while creating nearly 9,000 good-paying jobs,” the DOE said in a statement. One of the projects, called Southern Spirit, will involve installing a 320-mile high-voltage direct current line across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi that connects Texas’ ERCOT grid to the larger U.S. grid for the first time. This “will enhance reliability and prevent outages during extreme weather events,” the DOE said. “This is a REALLY. BIG. DEAL,” wrote Michelle Lewis at Electrek.
The DOE also released a study examining grid demands through 2050 and concluded that the U.S. will need to double or even triple transmission capacity by 2050 compared to 2020 to meet growing electricity demand.
Duke Energy, one of the country’s largest utilities, appears to be walking back its commitment to ditch coal by 2035. In a new plan released yesterday, Duke said it would not shut down the second-largest coal-fired power plant in the U.S., Gibson Station in Indiana, in 2035 as previously planned, but would instead run it through 2038. The company plans to retrofit the plant to run on natural gas as well as coal, with similar natural-gas conversions planned for other coal plants. The company also slashed projects for expanding renewables. According toBloomberg, a Duke spokeswoman cited increasing power demand for the changes. Electricity demand has seen a recent surge in part due to a boom in data centers. Ben Inskeep, program director at the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, a consumer and environmental advocacy group, noted that Duke’s modeling has Indiana customers paying 4% more each year through 2030 “as Duke continues to cling to its coal plants and wastes hundreds of millions on gasifying coal.”
The Edison Electric Institute issued its latest electric vehicle forecast, anticipating EV trends through 2035. Some key projections from the trade group’s report:
Tesla issued another recall for the Cybertruck yesterday, the fifth recall for the electric pickup since its launch at the end of last year. The new recall has to do with the rearview camera, which apparently is too slow to display an image to the driver when shifting into reverse. It applies to about 27,000 trucks (which is pretty much all of them), but an over-the-air software update to fix the problem has already been released. There were no reports of injuries or accidents from the defect.
A new study published in Nature found that vegetation is expanding across Antarctica’s northernmost region, known as the Antarctic Peninsula. As the planet warms, plants like mosses and lichen are growing on rocks where snow and ice used to be, resulting in “greening.” Examining satellite data, the researchers from the universities of Exeter and Hertfordshire, and the British Antarctic Survey, were shocked to discover that the peninsula has seen a tenfold increase in vegetation cover since 1986. And the rate of greening has accelerated by over 30% since 2016. This greening is “creating an area suitable for more advanced plant life or invasive species to get a foothold,” co-author Olly Bartlett, a University of Hertfordshire researcher, told Inside Climate News. “These rates of change we’re seeing made us think that perhaps we’ve captured the start of a more dramatic transformation.”
Moss on Ardley Island in the Antarctic. Dan Charman/Nature
Japan has a vast underground concrete tunnel system that was built to take on overflow from excess rain water and prevent Tokyo from flooding. It’s 50 meters underground, and nearly 4 miles long.
Carl Court/Getty Images