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The market for fancy electric vehicles is anybody’s game.
One-pedal driving is a revelatory perk. Lift your foot off the accelerator in an electric vehicle and its regenerative braking kicks in, slowing the car while channeling recovered energy back into the battery. Once a person masters the feel, it’s possible to drive for miles on end without touching the brake pedal.
There’s just one problem: it’s jerky. During 50,000 miles in my own EV, I’ve learned to gently let off the accelerator to minimize the jostling. But, like working the clutch in a stick-shift, this is an acquired skill. The issue vexed the engineers at Rolls-Royce who wanted their electrified offering to replicate the “champagne stop” chauffeurs must master: stopping so gently that the masters of the universe riding in the back spill nary a drop of bubbly. In the end, they dealt with the aggressiveness of regen braking by turning it off.
Preservation of prosecco is a small quirk among a batch of big questions about how to electrify the luxury car. On the surface, this sounds like a simple matter: replace the gasoline guts with an electric powertrain, and you’re done. However, although the traditional luxury brands have embarked on the inevitable transition to electric, it’s a little murky just what a luxury EV is, who gets to make one, and whether the future of luxury really means never driving yourself again.
In the gasoline days there was little confusion. Toyota, Honda, and Nissan had their upscale brands (Lexus, Acura, and Infiniti, respectively) to push more plush versions of what were, fundamentally, the same cars. Brands like BMW and Mercedes-Benz offered performance alongside leather cushiness, all at a price point attainable to the upper-middle class. Porsche pushed a kind of performance-first luxury; the likes of Bentley and Rolls-Royce sold unattainable exclusivity to the 1 percent.
Along the way to the mainstream EV, definitions got a little looser. Thanks to the zippy performance, sex appeal, and high price of the Model S and X, Tesla positioned these as luxury EVs and peeled away buyers from the likes of Bimmer and Benz. Yet in terms of creature comforts, it’s hard to call a Tesla luxurious. Its spartan interior, defined by enormous touchscreens and little else, reflects the minimalist design language of Silicon Valley, not the rich Corinthian leather of old-fashioned style. Tesla has also been dogged by complaints about manufacturing inconsistencies such as thin paint and uneven door panel gaps — the kind of things that make German engineers toss and turn at night.
Elon Musk’s followers in the EV startup space are experimenting with the limits of the “luxury car,” too. Lucid’s Air is a more traditional big, posh sedan, with ridiculous power numbers and interior that tries to toe the line between LED future and maximalist past. Rivian’s R1T and R1S, meanwhile, build on the fact that pickups and SUVs have morphed from utilitarian workhorses into oversized luxury rides that command prices north of $50,000 — which happened long before EVs entered the chat. It doesn’t hurt that selling a vehicle on luxury allows a company to charge more, which brings in precious revenue a startup needs to get on its feet and helps to mask the high cost of the battery (the big challenge for anyone trying to deliver the true budget EV).
Now the traditional luxury brands are coming in force. BMW’s first mass-produced EV, the rounded-cube i3, was an avatar of the previous decade’s idea of an electric vehicle, full of design quirks meant to communicate futurism and sustainability. The i4, produced starting in 2021, looks a lot more like, well, a BMW sedan, with an interior that melds the BMW look of old (lots of buttons and fancy accents) with a 14.9-inch curved display meant to be a wow feature. The story is similar at Mercedes-Benz. Inside, it is a cushy, plush take on the LED spaceship look. From the outside, the main clue to the EQS’s electrification is the sealed-off grille. (EVs don’t need the open grille to suck in lots of air like a combustion car does, making possible the Tesla Model 3’s stark closed mouth.)
Luxury EV-makers are also learning how to pamper their prospective buyers by sanding off the rough edges of EV ownership, like range anxiety. More miles generally means more battery and therefore, more money. Pricey models from Rivian, Tesla, and Lucid allow the well-heeled buyer to reach 400 miles of range or more, and the Mercedes EQS is EPA rated to 350 miles but may deliver even more in the real world. Meanwhile, the “entry” EV is stuck with 250 to 300, and BMW’s range barely breaks the 300 mark.
Rolls-Royce is smoothing out not only its champagne stops, but also its starts. The super-luxe electric Spectre doesn’t use its monstrous torque to rocket off the line, but instead is engineered to glide from a start in a way that makes the car’s enormous mass invisible to its occupants. Meanwhile, BMW and Mercedes seem to have solved the riddle of cornering and feel in an EV, with Car and Driver saying the i4 outperforms its gasoline counterpart. (It doesn’t hurt that EVs carry their big batteries along the bottom, giving them a low center of gravity.) Hyundai makes excellent EVs, but there’s no mistaking that you’re in a BMW.
Besides comfort and performance, luxury carmakers have typically marketed their offerings on advanced technology. Here, the future of luxury EVs comes into focus. The big vehicle technology yet to come is true autonomy — after all, what's more luxurious than having someone, or something, else do the driving?
EVs and autonomous driving technologies are already intertwined, mostly because of Musk’s public insistence on Tesla’s Autopilot features and vision for full self-driving — not to mention the many public controversies about the system’s failures. Things are set to stay that way as automakers, and especially luxury ones, race to be the first to offer new features.
A recent Los Angeles Timesstory about Mercedes-Benz’s $45 billion move to go all-electric by 2030 notes the brand’s desire to retake the luxury EV market from Tesla, and a big part of that is by pulling ahead of Musk’s brand on autonomy. This year, Mercedes became the first brand to be given explicit permission in the U.S. to go ahead with Level 3 autonomous features in a vehicle on public roads.
Level 3 is a turning point. Levels 0, 1, and 2 in the Society of Automotive Engineers’ classification scheme include technologies now widely available in vehicles. Think of lane-keep assist and adaptive cruise control. These features lessen the driver’s burden, but they do not replace her. Levels 4 and 5 represent something that could truly be called self-driving. Level 3 is the bridge: the first time when — at slow speeds, and only under controlled circumstances on chosen roadways — the car is permitted to drive.
It’s also the most harrowing. An expert who spoke to me in February about Mercedes’ plan called Level 3 a “nightmare scenario.” The main worry is over the “handoff,” the moment when the human must be ready to retake control from the machine. Handoffs have the potential to lead to confusion over who’s in charge, and even momentary confusion on the road can have dire consequences. Some safety experts question whether we should allow Level 3 autonomy on public streets at all.
Ultimately, those fears may be moot. This technology is coming, and the future of (not) driving will be spearheaded by luxury cars as their makers jockey for technological supremacy. But even if Mercedes or another legacy car company pulls ahead in autonomous tech, they will still find the EV market a wilder, more competitive space than the staid market for luxury combustion cars ever was.
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Breakthrough Energy is winding down its policy and advocacy office, depriving the Inflation Reduction Act of a powerful defender.
This is part of a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
A major chapter in climate giving has ended.
Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C., Heatmap News has learned.
The layoffs will effectively gut an organization central to the effort to enact the package of clean energy tax cuts passed during the Biden administration. They will also silence one of the few environmental nonprofits that supported nuclear energy, direct air capture, and other new zero-carbon energy innovations.
More than three dozen employees across the United States and Europe are affected by the layoffs, including the office’s senior leadership.
The layoffs, first reported by The New York Times, come amid a wider billionaire pullback from donating to climate causes. The president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund departed last month, and the fund has yet to name a permanent replacement. Gates had already significantly diminished his climate giving earlier this year, slashing Breakthrough Energy’s grantmaking budget last month.
Gates’s investments in clean energy companies do not seem affected by the cutback. Breakthrough Energy’s venture capital and investment arm, its fellows program, and its efforts to catalyze new green products remain intact.
“Gates and Breakthrough Energy remain committed to advancing the clean energy innovations needed to address climate change,” a Breakthrough Energy spokesperson told me in a statement. “Our work is focused on accelerating the transition to a cleaner, more prosperous world.”
The closure of Breakthrough’s policy arm — and the presumed end of its grant-making operation — will alter the world of climate nonprofits. Breakthrough Energy was unusual among environmental and energy nonprofits for its enthusiastic support of all forms of zero-carbon energy, including nuclear fission, geothermal power, carbon capture and removal, and nuclear fusion. Many other prominent nonprofits — even some that have shifted to principally fighting against climate change, like the Sierra Club — are more traditional and conservation-minded, and actively oppose the expansion of nuclear power.
“The closure of Breakthrough is indicative of a broader trend that often happens when there’s a change in power in Washington, which is a retreat from federal policy and also often a retreat from the center,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, told me. The Third Way energy team was funded in part by grants from Breakthrough Energy.
“Breakthrough played a critical role in elevating and making clean energy innovation policy very mainstream. That’s going to continue — in part because of … the partners who they brought together, who remain committed to working on this,” Freed added.
The unwinding of Breakthrough Energy’s policy and advocacy arm means that the group will not see the coming battle over the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean tax cuts, which some Republican lawmakers hope to repeal later this year as part of President Trump’s broader package of tax cuts. Gates was seen as instrumental to the lobbying effort to pass the IRA, meeting with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other lawmakers to support the 2022 legislation.
In an exclusive interview with Heatmap News in 2023, Gates warned that re-electing Donald Trump could derail the Inflation Reduction Act’s effectiveness.
“Right now, companies are responding to the IRA incentives. But you know, if you get Trump elected, and he really gets rid of it, there’s a lot of business plans that will [make people] feel foolish,” he said.
Even if Democrats ultimately enact new provisions similar to the IRA after Trump leaves office, Gates said, the damage of repealing the law would be permanent. “People [will] say, ‘Well, you’re asking me to make a 30-year investment. And half the time, I’m stupid.’”
Just over a year and one election later, Gates reportedly had a more than three-hour dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He later told Emma Tucker, The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief, that he was “frankly impressed” by the president-elect.
Tesla already looked beleaguered last week as a tumbling stock price tied to public anger at CEO Elon Musk wiped out more than a half-billion dollars in value. The slide erased all the gains the company had garnered since new Musk ally Donald Trump was reelected as president. On Monday the stock went into full freefall, losing 15% of its value in one day. By Tuesday, Trump had to pose with Tesla vehicles outside the White House to try to defend them.
With a crashing market valuation and rising rage against its figurehead, Tesla’s business is in real jeopardy, something that’s true regardless of Musk’s power in the federal government. If he can’t magically right the ship this time, this self-sabotaging MAGA turn will go down as one of the great self-owns.
Musk’s heel turn has also upended EV culture and meaning. Tesla ownership, once a signal of climate virtue for those who bought in early, has been rebranded as a badge of shame. I’m annoyed that a vehicle I chose for the purpose of not burning fossil fuels has become a political albatross, and that many drivers are resorting to self-flagellating bumper stickers in the hopes it will stop vandals from spray-painting their doors. I wish I knew then what we know now, of course. But what would have become of the EV revolution if we had?
When, exactly, we should have seen Elon’s true self is a question that will inspire countless arguments amid the wave of Tesla hate. Signs were there early. By 2018, before the Model 3 even hit the road, Musk had been hit by so much criticism of his bad tweets and weird behavior that the magazine I worked for at the time felt the need to publish a contrarian defense of him as just the kind of risk-taking innovator the world needs.
That angle aged like milk, but within it lay a few grains of truth. Tesla truly did the bulk of the work in transforming the image of the electric car from a dumpy potato that only climate advocates would ever own, like the original Nissan Leaf, into a desirable consumer product. This is the company’s signature achievement, one that kickstarted the widespread adoption of EVs.
As I’ve written before, Musk wasn’t exactly untainted by 2019, when I bought my own Model 3. The Tony Stark luster of the new space age entrepreneur had worn off as the man sullied himself with pointless “pedo guy” accusations leveled at a rescuer in the Thailand cave incident. But the man had the best electric vehicle on the market, and more importantly, the best charging network. Having just moved to Los Angeles and in need of a vehicle, I wanted an EV to be my family’s only car. Without a home charger in the apartment, I simply couldn’t have lived with a Chevy Bolt or Hyundai Kona EV and the inferior charging networks they relied on at the time.
Millions of people who bought Teslas between then and now made the same choice. Some did it because a Tesla became a status symbol; many others were like me, simply interested in the most practical EV they could get. The ascendance of the Model Y to the world’s best-selling car of any kind in 2023 — a fact that feels astonishing in this flood of horrible vibes and MAGA antagonism just two years later — turned countless people into EV drivers.
After Musk’s far-right reveal, sales are tanking in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and other places that just saw a Tesla boom. Many owners, at least those with the financial wherewithal to buy a new car based on the prevailing political winds, are trying to unload their Musk-affiliated vehicles.
All those people in search of a new ride have a much better selection of electric vehicles to choose from than I did in 2019, which, weirdly, is thanks to the legacy carmakers and new EV startups that raced to catch up to Tesla. If I hadn’t bought a Model 3 in 2019, I would’ve had to get a hybrid and keep burning gasoline. If you want to avoid Musk in 2025, there are great Hyundai, Chevrolet, and other EVs waiting for you.
This isn’t to say there’s no alternate history where electric vehicles take off without Tesla. It didn’t invent the EV. Other automakers were experimenting with EVs before Musk’s company took off and conquered the market, and government environmental goals pushed carmakers toward electrification. Yet it’s hard to argue we’d be where we are now, with tens of millions of EVs on the world’s roads, without the meteoric rise of Musk’s car brand.
It stinks, simply put, to say anything nice about Tesla now, even if one is stating facts. Yes, Musk’s success buoyed electrification on multiple fronts: selling tons of EVs, forcing the other automakers to get serious about their electrification goals, and building a charging network that let his vehicles go just about anywhere a gas car would go. It also made him the world’s richest man, giving him the resources to buy and ruin Twitter and then help Trump get re-elected and undo federal policy support for the very cars he helped popularize. He made the world a better place for a moment, then ruined it because he could.
As an EV advocate, I can’t ignore the fact that Tesla got us to here. But as a human, I eagerly await the time Musk’s company no longer dominates the market it created. Thank goodness, that time seems to be coming soon.
On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo
Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”
The grants were issued to a handful of nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was the single largest and most flexible program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Zeldin has been targeting the funds since taking office, suggesting they were awarded hastily and without proper oversight. Citibank, where the funds were being held, has frozen the accounts without offering grantees an explanation, prompting lawsuits from three of the nonprofit groups. The EPA’s latest move will no doubt escalate the legal battles. As Politicoexplained, the EPA can cancel the grant contracts if it can point to specific and “legally defined examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by the grantees,” but it hasn’t done that. House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation yesterday into the EPA’s freezing of the funds and Zeldin’s “false and misleading statements” about the GGRF program.
In other EPA news, the agency reportedly plans to eliminate its environmental justice offices, a move that “effectively ends three decades of work at the EPA to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities,” as The New York Timesexplained.
President Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports came into effect today. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has explained, the move could work against Trump’s plans of making America a leader in energy and artificial intelligence. “The reason has to do with a crucial piece of electrical equipment for expanding the grid,” Pontecorvo wrote. “They’re called transformers, and they’re in critically short supply.” Transformers are made using a specific type of steel called grain oriented electrical steel, or GOES. There’s only one domestic producer of GOES — Cleveland Cliffs — and at full capacity it cannot meet even half of the demand from domestic transformer manufacturers. On a consumer level, the tariffs are likely to raise costs on all kinds of things, from cars to construction materials and even canned goods.
The European Union quickly hit back with plans to impose duties on up to $28.3 billion worth of American goods. Trump had threatened to slap an extra 25% duty on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation for Ontario’s 25% surcharge on electricity (which was a response to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources), but held off after the surcharge was paused and the countries agreed to trade talks.
Wind and solar surpassed coal for power generation in the U.S. in 2024 for the first time, even as electricity demand rose, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal power peaked in 2007 but has since fallen to an all-time low, accounting for 15% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, while combined solar and wind generation rose to 17%.
Gas generation also grew by 3.3% last year, however, now accounting for 43% of the U.S. energy mix and resulting in an overall rise in power-sector emissions. But solar grew by 27%, remaining the nation’s fastest-growing power source and rising to 7% of the mix. Wind saw a more modest 7% rise, but still still accounted for 10% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Ember
“Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline,” according to the report. “The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.” The report emphasizes that the rise of batteries “will ensure that solar can grow cheaper and faster than gas.”
A group of major companies including tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Occidental Petroleum, have pledged to support a target of tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 “to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.” The pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, came together on the sidelines of the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference in Houston. According to a press release, “this is the first time major businesses beyond the nuclear sector have come together to publicly back an extensive and concerted expansion of nuclear power to meet increasing global energy demand.”
In case you missed it: Toyota plans to roll out an electric truck for the masses by 2026. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from a presentation the company gave last week in Brussels. Details haven’t been released, but Patrick George at InsideEVsspeculates it could be an electric Tacoma, or something more akin to the 2023 EPU Concept truck, but we’ll see. “While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn't love trucks the way Americans love trucks,” George wrote. “And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.”
President Trump and Elon Musk showed off Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn yesterday, with Trump (who doesn’t drive) pledging to buy one and to label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism. Tesla shares rose slightly, but are still down more than 30% for the month.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images