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Kia doubles down on its winning strategy with the EV3.
Sometimes, a car’s name tells you all you need to know.
When Kia turned out its first electric vehicles in the 2010s, the models amounted to gasoline cars retrofitted for battery power. The names, like Soul EV and Niro EV, implied as much. But once the Korean automaker started to make purpose-built electrics, it adopted a very literal naming system — one that outlines its vision to dominate the electric car industry.
First came the EV6. With racy styling and impressive power numbers, EV6 was built to compete in the increasingly crowded space of two-row electric crossovers that start north of $40,000, a category that includes the Ford Mustang Mach-E, the Volkswagen ID.4, and the Tesla Model Y. Next came EV9, the biggest vehicle on Kia’s numerical scale. Teased in a Super Bowl commercial and awarded World Car of the Year at the 2024 New York International Auto Show, the EV9 is one of the first three-row electric SUVs, built for the big family that wants to drive on battery power. Then came the Kia EV5. As the name suggests, this crossover (which won’t be sold in the United States for now because of sourcing complications with the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits) slots in just below the EV6 in price and size.
Now the Korean brand is filling in the smaller end of the range. Its latest reveal, announced Thursday morning, is the EV3, a boxy little crossover that will start in the $30,000s and will come to America next year or the year after (it’s going to Korea and Europe first). The offering is a key piece of the grand plan put together by Kia (and its owner, Hyundai) — and a sign that more entry-level EVs might be coming over the horizon.
Courtesy of Kia
To reach EV3’s more affordable price point, Kia dressed down some of the specs compared to its higher-numbered electric vehicles. Whereas EV9 is built with 800-volt capability for super-fast charging, its little brother gets a maximum of 400 volts — enough to charge up to 80% in 31 minutes, slower than the 24 minutes of the EV9.
EV3 posts 201 horsepower and 208 pound-feet of torque, with a claimed 0-60 miles per hour time of 7.5 seconds and a top speed of 105 miles per hour. Those aren’t eye-popping numbers compared to the performance-minded EVs we’ve seen from the likes of Tesla, which use the electric battery and motor’s instantaneous torque to make the car zip away from a stop light. But it’s plenty for people who just want an affordable little EV. Plus, the long-range version of EV3 is supposed to reach an impressive 372 miles of range, which blows away most current offerings, especially in that price range.
EV3 should find its way into the sub-$40,000 crossover space that’s finally starting to fill out. The Volvo EX30, which debuts soon, will also start in the mid-$30,000s. GM has finally started delivering the Chevy Equinox EV, which starts around $43,000 now (not counting tax credits) but is slated to see a base-trim $35,0000 version arrive later this year.
It’s not just about differentiating on price, either. EV3 will have about the same wheelbase as the dearly departed Chevy Bolt EUV, Road & Tracksays, and will be a little shorter than the Teslas Model 3 and Y. That’s good news for people who don’t want a giant EV and are waiting for the promised return of the Bolt or something like it.
Courtesy of Kia
With EV3, EV5, EV6, and EV9 revealed to the world, you don’t have to squint too hard to see how Kia might fill in the rest of the numbers on its way to selling an EV of every stripe. Rumors swirl of a cheap, subcompact Kia EV1 and EV2, which may or may not eventually come to America. EV4, already shown off as a fanciful concept car, is some kind of mad mixture of sedan, hatchback, and low crossover. EV7 may well be a three-row SUV that’s smaller and cheaper than the big EV9, positioning it to become the brand’s flagship electric crossover. EV8 looks to be a muscle car that can take the place of the petrol-powered Stinger.
Hyundai, the parent brand, has taken a slower but similar strategy. The Ioniq5 compact crossover and Ioniq6 streamlined sedan have both been EV success stories, with sales climbing while the rest of the world frets that EVs have stalled. The forthcoming Ioniq9, like the Kia EV9, will be a top-of-the-range three-row crossover, while Ioniq7 looks to be a slightly less ritzy version of the same concept.
As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer has pointed out, this approach has been the Korean automakers’ winning strategy. While others have pulled back on EVs in the face of early struggles or only gingerly dipped their toes in the water, Hyundai and Kia are cranking out crossovers of all sizes to plant their flag in every section of the marketplace. Kia is banking on the idea that this all-in strategy will help its EV sales make the enormous leap from 44,000 cars in the first quarter, a new record for the brand, to 1.6 million in 2030, or half of the 3.1 million vehicles of any kind it sold last year.
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On the fallout from the LA fires, Trump’s tariffs, and Tesla’s sales slump
Current conditions: A record-breaking 4 feet of snow fell on the Japanese island of Hokkaido • Nearly 6.5 feet of rain has inundated northern Queensland in Australia since Saturday • Cold Arctic air will collide with warm air over central states today, creating dangerous thunderstorm conditions.
President Trump yesterday agreed to a month-long pause on across-the-board 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, but went ahead with an additional 10% tariff on Chinese imports. China retaliated with new levies on U.S. products including fuel – 15% for coal and liquefied natural gas, and 10% for crude oil – starting February 10. “Chinese firms are unlikely to sign new long-term contracts with proposed U.S. projects as long as trade tensions remain high,” notedBloomberg. “This is bad news for those American exporters that need to lock in buyers before securing necessary financing to begin construction.” Trump recently ended the Biden administration’s pause on LNG export permits. A December report from the Department of Energy found that China was likely to be the largest importer of U.S. LNG through 2050, and many entities in China had already signed contracts with U.S. export projects. Trump is expected to speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week.
Insurance firm State Farm is looking to hike insurance rates for homeowners in California by 22% after the devastating wildfires that tore through Los Angeles last month. The company, which is the largest insurer in California, sent a letter to the state’s insurance commissioner, asking for its immediate approval to increase home insurance by 22% for homeowners, 15% for tenants and renters, and 38% for “rental dwelling” in order to “help protect California’s fragile insurance market.” So far, the firm has received more than 8,700 claims and paid out more than $1 billion, but it expects to pay more. “Insurance will cost more for customers in California going forward because the risk is greater in California,” the company said yesterday. “Higher risks should pay more for insurance than lower risks.” A report out this week found that climate change is expected to shave $1.5 trillion off of U.S. home values by 2055 as insurance rates rise to account for the growing risk of extreme weather disasters.
A new report outlines pathways to decarbonizing the buildings sector, which produces about one-third of global emissions. The analysis, from the Energy Transitions Commission, proposes three main priorities that need to be tackled:
“This will require collaboration right across sector, between governments, industry bodies, and private companies,” said Stephen Hill, a sustainability and building performance expert at building design firm Arup. “We need to be ambitious, but if we get it right we can cut carbon, generate value for our economy, and improve people’s quality of life through action like improving living conditions and reducing fuel poverty.”
Energy Transitions Commission
Fracking executive Chris Wright was confirmed yesterday as the new Energy Secretary. Wright is the CEO of the oilfield services firm Liberty Energy (though he has said he plans to step down) and a major Republican donor. He has a history of climate denialism. “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition,” Wright said in a video posted to LinkedIn last year. Although during his confirmation hearings, he struck a different tone, avowing that climate change is happening and is caused by the combustion of hydrocarbons. He expressed enthusiasm for certain clean energy technologies, including next-generation geothermal and nuclear. Wright will be tasked with executing President Trump’s planned overhaul of U.S. energy policy, and expansion of domestic energy production. The Department of Energy has a $50 billion budget and is also in charge of maintaining the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
A few new reports find Tesla is seeing sales drops in some key markets, possibly due to CEO Elon Musk’s push into politics. In California, Tesla registrations fell by about 12% last year, according to the California New Car Dealers Association, and the company’s EV market share in the state fell by 7.6%, while Kia, Hyundai, and Honda all made decent gains. “While high interest rates, tough competition, and the introduction of a restyled Model 3 sedan hurt the EV maker’s sales in California, the loss of business was likely exacerbated by Elon Musk’s involvement in the U.S. election,” Reutersreported. Tesla is also running into trouble across the pond, where Musk has been meddling in European politics, throwing his weight behind far-right parties. In the European Union, Tesla registrations fell 13% last year, but dropped 41% in Germany, the bloc’s biggest BEV market. Last month, Tesla registrations dropped by about 63% in France, 44% in Sweden, and 38% in Norway.
Researchers have developed a new variety of rice that has a higher crop yield than other varieties, but emits 70% less methane.
Artificial intelligence may extend coal’s useful life, but there’s no saving it.
Appearing by video connection to the global plutocrats assembled recently at Davos, Donald Trump interrupted a rambling answer to a question about liquefied natural gas to proclaim that he had come up with a solution to the energy demand of artificial intelligence (“I think it was largely my idea, because nobody thought this was possible”), which is to build power plants near data centers to power them. And a key part of the equation should be coal. “Nothing can destroy coal — not the weather, not a bomb — nothing,” he said. “But coal is very strong as a backup. It’s a great backup to have that facility, and it wouldn’t cost much more — more money. And we have more coal than anybody.”
There is some truth there — the United States does in fact have the largest coal reserves in the world — and AI may be offering something of a lifeline to the declining industry. But with Trump now talking about coal as a “backup,” it’s a reminder that he brings up the subject much less often than he used to. Even if coal will not be phased out as an electricity source quite as quickly as many had hoped or anticipated, Trump’s first-term promise to coal country will remain a broken one.
Yet in an unusual turn of events, the anticipated explosion of demand for electricity on its way over the next few years has led some utilities to scale back their existing plans to shutter coal-fired power plants, foreseeing that they’ll need every electron they can generate. Ironically, especially in Georgia, that need is driven by a boom in green manufacturing.
Nevertheless, coal’s decline is still remarkable. At the start of the 21st century, coal was the primary source of electricity generation in 32 states; now that number is down to 10 and dropping. As recently as 2007, coal accounted for half the country’s electricity; the figure is now 16%. Worldwide coal demand keeps increasing, mostly because of China and India. But here in the United States, the trajectory is only going in one direction.
Confronted with those facts, a politician could take one of two basic paths. The first is to make impossible promises to voters in coal country, telling them that the jobs that have disappeared will be brought back, their communities will be revitalized, and the dignity they feel they have lost will be returned.
That was the path Donald Trump took. He talked a lot about coal in 2016, making grand promises about the coal revival he would bring if elected. At a rally in West Virginia, he donned a hardhat, pretended to shovel some coal, and said, “For those miners, get ready, because you’re going to be working your asses off.” And in Trumpian style, if he couldn’t keep the promise, he’d just say he did. “The coal industry is back,” he said in 2018, a year which saw the second-most coal capacity retired in the country’s history to that point. “We’re putting our great coal miners back to work,” he said on the campaign trail in 2020, when the number of coal-producing mines in the U.S. declined by 18%.
When Trump took office in January 2017, there were just over 50,000 coal jobs left in the country after decades of decline. When he left office in 2021, the number was down to 38,000. The number is slightly higher today at around 43,000, but it’s still infinitesimal as a portion of the economy.
Trump’s failure to bring back coal jobs wasn’t because his affection for the fuel source was insincere. He certainly had as coal-friendly an administration as one could imagine; his second pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency was a coal lobbyist. But the triumvirate of forces that drove those job reductions — automation, emissions-limiting regulations, and competition from fracked natural gas — were irresistible.
The second path for a politician confronting the structural decline of coal is to take concrete steps to create new opportunities in coal country that offer people a better economic future. That was what the Biden administration tried to do. As part of its clean energy push, Biden put a particular focus on siting new projects in underserved communities, including in areas where coal still defines the culture even though the jobs are long gone. The administration also directed hundreds of millions of dollars in funding “to ensure former coal communities can take full advantage of the clean energy transition and continue their leading role in powering our nation,” in the words of then-Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. Or as the Treasury Department put it, the administration was working “to strengthen the economies of coal communities and other areas that have experienced underinvestment in past decades.” These were real commitments, backed up by real dollars.
Today, the new Trump administration is committed to freezing, reversing, and clawing back as much of Biden’s clean energy agenda as it can. Whether that includes these investments in coal country remains to be seen.
There’s good reason to believe it will, however, both because of the antipathy Trump and his team hold for anything that has Biden’s fingerprints on it, and because Trump understands the fundamental truth of his political relationship to coal country: Its support for him is unshakeable, no matter the policy outcome.
Take just one example: Harlan County, Kentucky, site of the extraordinary 1976 documentary Harlan County, USA, which chronicled a strike by miners demanding fair wages and working conditions. Coal is still being mined in Harlan County, but as of 2023, only 577 people there were employed in the industry, or about one in every 19 working-age people in the county. It remains overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly poor — and the voters there love Trump. He got 84.9% of the vote in 2016, 85.4% in 2020, and 87.7% in 2024.
It might be fair to ask what people in Harlan County and across coal country have to show for their support for the president. The absolute best he can offer them is that while coal will continue to decline under his presidency, it might decline a bit slower than it otherwise would have. Even if escalating electricity demand offers an opportunity for the coal industry, there’s little reason to believe it will reverse coal’s decline in America. At most it could flatten the curve, allowing some coal plants to remain in operation a few years longer than planned.
A future where coal is at most a miniscule part of America’s energy mix with a tiny labor force producing it seems inevitable. Most people in coal country understand that, as much as they might like it to be otherwise. If only their favorite politician would admit it to them — and commit to offering them more than fables — they could start building something better.
Companies, states, cities, and other entities with Energy Department contracts that had community benefit plans embedded in them have been ordered to stop all work.
Amidst the chaos surrounding President Trump’s pause on infrastructure and climate spending, another federal funding freeze is going very much under the radar, undermining energy and resilience projects across the U.S. and its territories.
Days after Trump took office, acting Energy Secretary Ingrid Kolb reportedly told DOE in a memo to suspend any work “requiring, using, or enforcing Community Benefit Plans, and requiring, using, or enforcing Justice40 requirements, conditions, or principles” in any loan or loan guarantee, any grant, any cost-sharing agreement or any “contracts, contract awards, or any other source of financial assistance.” The memo stipulated this would apply to “existing” awards, grants, contracts and other financial assistance, according to E&E News’ Hannah Northey, who first reported the document’s existence.
Justice40 was Biden’s signature environmental justice initiative. Community benefit plans were often used by Biden’s DOE to strengthen the potential benefits that projects could have on surrounding local economies and were seen as a vehicle for environmental justice. When we say often, we mean it: some high profile examples of these plans include those used for the Holtec Palisades nuclear plant restart in Michigan and the agency’s battery materials processing and recycling awards.
After Kolb’s edict went out, companies, states, cities, and other entities with DOE contracts that had community benefit plans embedded in them were ordered to stop all work, according to multiple letters to contract recipients reviewed by Heatmap News. “Recipients and subrecipients must cease any activities, including contracted activities, and stop incurring costs associated with DEI and CBP activities effective as of the date of this letter,” one letter reads, adding: “Costs incurred after the date of this letter will not be reimbursed.”
One such letter was posted by the University of Michigan research department in an advisory notice. The department’s website summarizes the letter as “directing the suspension” of all work tied to “any source of DOE funding” if it in any way involved “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs,” as well as Justice40 requirements and community benefits plans.
These letters state companies and other entities with community benefit plans in their contracts or otherwise involved in their funding awards would be contacted by DOE to make “modifications” to their contracts. They only cite President Trump’s executive orders that purportedly address Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practices; they do not cite a much-debated Office of Management and Budget memo freezing all infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act spending, which has been challenged in federal court. It is altogether unclear if any outcome of the OMB memo litigation is even relevant to this other freeze.
We reached out to the Energy Department about these letters for comment on how many entities may be impacted and why they targeted community benefit plans. We will update this story if we hear back.
A lot is still murky about this situation. It is unclear how many entities have been impacted and the totality of the impacts may be unknown for a while, because a lot of these entities supposed to get money may want to keep fighting privately to, well, still get their money. It’s also hazy if all entities that received these letters are continuing to do any construction or preparatory work or other labor connected to their funding not tied to the community benefit planning, or just halting the funded labor altogether.
The blast radius from this freeze is hard to parse, said Matthew Tejada, a former EPA staffer who most recently served as the agency’s deputy assistant administrator for environmental justice under the Biden administration. Tejada, who now works for the advocacy group NRDC and remains connected to advocates in the environmental justice space, said he was very much aware of this separate freeze when he was first reached by Heatmap. But “unless you’re able to really have a network of information bottom up from the recipients, it’s a bit of a black box we’re operating around because we’re not going to get transparency and information from the administration.“
“Part of their obvious strategy here is to create enough confusion as possible to make defending as difficult as possible. But I’m fairly certain the community and various others here -- local governments, tribes -- will have plenty to say about cutting through that chaos to make sure the will of Congress and the outcomes of these programs and projects are delivered upon.” He believes that any attempts to modify these contract awards “on the pretext of canceling the contract[s] will in all likelihood meet a legal challenge.”
But the ripple effects of this other freeze are starting to surface in local news accounts.
According to the Erie Times-News, the city of Erie, Pennsylvania currently cannot access funding for a city-wide audit for home energy efficiency. And a big road improvement project in the Mariana Islands – a U.S. territory – was nearly derailed by the freeze, according to the news outlet Mariana’s Variety, which reported project developers are just going to try and move forward without the remaining money provided under contract.
We’ll have to wait and see the breadth of the impacts here and whether this freeze will produce its own legal or regulatory rollercoaster. Hang on tight.