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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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It was a curious alliance from the start. On the one hand, Donald Trump, who made antipathy toward electric vehicles a core part of his meandering rants. On the other hand, Elon Musk, the man behind the world’s largest EV company, who nonetheless put all his weight, his millions of dollars, and the power of his social network behind the Trump campaign.
With Musk standing by his side on Election Day, Trump has once again secured the presidency. His reascendance sent shock waves through the automotive world, where companies that had been lurching toward electrification with varying levels of enthusiasm were left to wonder what happens now — and what benefits Tesla may reap from having hitched itself to the winning horse.
Certainly the federal government’s stated target of 50% of U.S. new car sales being electric by 2030 is toast, and many of the actions it took in pursuit of that goal are endangered. Although Trump has softened his rhetoric against EVs since becoming buddies with Musk, it’s hard to imagine a Trump administration with any kind of ambitious electrification goal.
During his first go-round as president, Trump attacked the state of California’s ability to set its own ambitious climate-focused rules for cars. No surprise there: Because of the size of the California car market, its regulations helped to drag the entire industry toward lower-emitting vehicles and, almost inevitably, EVs. If Trump changes course and doesn’t do the same thing this time, it’ll be because his new friend at Tesla supports those rules.
The biggest question hanging over electric vehicles, however, is the fate of the Biden administration’s signature achievements in climate and EV policy, particularly the Inflation Reduction Act’s $7,500 federal consumer tax credit for electric vehicles. A Trump administration looks poised to tear down whatever it can of its predecessor’s policy. Some analysts predict it’s unlikely the entire IRA will disappear, but concede Trump would try to kill off the incentives for electric vehicles however he can.
There’s no sugar-coating it: Without the federal incentives, the state of EVs looks somewhat bleak. Knocking $7,500 off the starting price is essential to negate the cost of manufacturing expensive lithium-ion batteries and making EVs cost-competitive with ordinary combustion cars. Consider a crucial model like the new Chevy Equinox EV: Counting the federal incentive, the most basic $35,000 model could come in under the starting price of a gasoline crossover like the Toyota RAV4. Without that benefit, buyers who want to go electric will have to pay a premium to do so — the thing that’s been holding back mass electrification all along.
Musk, during his honeymoon with Trump, boasted that Tesla doesn’t need the tax credits, as if daring the president-elect to kill off the incentives. On the one hand, this is obviously false. Visit Tesla’s website and you’ll see the simplest Model 3 listed for $29,990, but this is a mirage. Take away the $7,500 in incentives and $5,000 in claimed savings versus buying gasoline, and the car actually starts at about $43,000, much further out of reach for non-wealthy buyers.
What Musk really means is that his company doesn’t need the incentives nearly as bad as other automakers do. Ford is hemorrhaging billions of dollars as it struggles to make EVs profitably. GM’s big plan to go entirely electric depended heavily on federal support. As InsideEVsnotes, the likely outcome of a Trump offensive against EVs is that the legacy car brands, faced with an unpredictable electrification roadmap as America oscillates between presidents, scale back their plans and lean back into the easy profitably of big, gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks. Such an about-face could hand Tesla the kind of EV market dominance it enjoyed four or five years ago when it sold around 75% of all electric vehicles in America.
That’s tough news for the climate-conscious Americans who want an electric vehicle built by someone not named Elon Musk. Hundreds of thousands of people, myself included, bought a Tesla during the past five or six years because it was the most practical EV for their lifestyle, only to see the company’s figurehead shift his public persona from goofy troll to Trump acolyte. It’s not uncommon now, as Democrats distance themselves from Tesla, to see Model 3s adorned with bumper stickers like the “Anti-Elon Tesla Club,” as one on a car I followed last month proclaimed. Musk’s newest vehicle, the Cybertruck, is a rolling embodiment of the man’s brand, a vehicle purpose-built to repel anyone not part of his cult of personality.
In a world where this version of Tesla retakes control of the electric car market, it becomes harder to ditch gasoline without indirectly supporting Donald Trump, by either buying a Tesla or topping off at its Superchargers. Blue voters will have some options outside of Tesla — the industry has come too far to simply evaporate because of one election. But it’s also easy to see dispirited progressives throwing up their hands and buying another carbon-spewing Subaru.
Republicans are taking over some of the most powerful institutions for crafting climate policy on Earth.
When Republicans flipped the Senate, they took the keys to three critical energy and climate-focused committees.
These are among the most powerful institutions for crafting climate policy on Earth. The Senate plays the role of gatekeeper for important legislation, as it requires a supermajority to overcome the filibuster. Hence, it’s both where many promising climate bills from the House go to die, as well as where key administrators such as the heads of the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency are vetted and confirmed.
We’ll have to wait a bit for the Senate’s new committee chairs to be officially confirmed. But Jeff Navin, co-founder at the climate change-focused government affairs firm Boundary Stone Partners, told me that since selections are usually based on seniority, in many cases it’s already clear which Republicans are poised to lead under Trump and which Democrats will assume second-in-command (known as the ranking member). Here’s what we know so far.
This committee has been famously led by Joe Manchin, the former Democrat, now Independent senator from West Virginia, who will retire at the end of this legislative session. Energy and Natural Resources has a history of bipartisan collaboration and was integral in developing many of the key provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act — and could thus play a key role in dismantling them. Overall, the committee oversees the DOE, the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, so it’s no small deal that its next chairman will likely be Mike Lee, the ultra-conservative Republican from Utah. That’s assuming that the committee's current ranking member, John Barrasso of Wyoming, wins his bid for Republican Senate whip, which seems very likely.
Lee opposes federal ownership of public lands, setting himself up to butt heads with Martin Heinrich, the Democrat from New Mexico and likely the committee’s next ranking member. Lee has also said that solving climate change is simply a matter of having more babies, as “problems of human imagination are not solved by more laws, they’re solved by more humans.” As Navin told me, “We've had this kind of safe space where so-called quiet climate policy could get done in the margins. And it’s not clear that that's going to continue to exist with the new leadership.”
This committee is currently chaired by Democrat Tom Carper of Delaware, who is retiring after this term. Poised to take over is the Republican’s current ranking member, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. She’s been a strong advocate for continued reliance on coal and natural gas power plants, while also carving out areas of bipartisan consensus on issues such as nuclear energy, carbon capture, and infrastructure projects during her tenure on the committee. The job of the Environment and Public Works committee is in the name: It oversees the EPA, writes key pieces of environmental legislation such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, and supervises public infrastructure projects such as highways, bridges, and dams.
Navin told me that many believe the new Democratic ranking member will be Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, although to do so, he would have to step down from his perch at the Senate Budget Committee, where he is currently chair. A tireless advocate of the climate cause, Whitehouse has worked on the Environment and Public Works committee for over 15 years, and lately seems to have had a relatively productive working relationship with Capito.
This subcommittee falls under the broader Senate Appropriations Committee and is responsible for allocating funding for the DOE, various water development projects, and various other agencies such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
California’s Dianne Feinstein used to chair this subcommittee until her death last year, when Democrat Patty Murray of Washington took over. Navin told me that the subcommittee’s next leader will depend on how the game of “musical chairs” in the larger Appropriations Committee shakes out. Depending on their subcommittee preferences, the chair could end up being John Kennedy of Louisiana, outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, or Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. It’s likewise hard to say who the top Democrat will be.
Inside a wild race sparked by a solar farm in Knox County, Ohio.
The most important climate election you’ve never heard of? Your local county commissioner.
County commissioners are usually the most powerful governing individuals in a county government. As officials closer to community-level planning than, say a sitting senator, commissioners wind up on the frontlines of grassroots opposition to renewables. And increasingly, property owners that may be personally impacted by solar or wind farms in their backyards are gunning for county commissioner positions on explicitly anti-development platforms.
Take the case of newly-elected Ohio county commissioner – and Christian social media lifestyle influencer – Drenda Keesee.
In March, Keesee beat fellow Republican Thom Collier in a primary to become a GOP nominee for a commissioner seat in Knox County, Ohio. Knox, a ruby red area with very few Democratic voters, is one of the hottest battlegrounds in the war over solar energy on prime farmland and one of the riskiest counties in the country for developers, according to Heatmap Pro’s database. But Collier had expressed openness to allowing new solar to be built on a case-by-case basis, while Keesee ran on a platform focused almost exclusively on blocking solar development. Collier ultimately placed third in the primary, behind Keesee and another anti-solar candidate placing second.
Fighting solar is a personal issue for Keesee (pronounced keh-see, like “messy”). She has aggressively fought Frasier Solar – a 120 megawatt solar project in the country proposed by Open Road Renewables – getting involved in organizing against the project and regularly attending state regulator hearings. Filings she submitted to the Ohio Power Siting Board state she owns a property at least somewhat adjacent to the proposed solar farm. Based on the sheer volume of those filings this is clearly her passion project – alongside preaching and comparing gay people to Hitler.
Yesterday I spoke to Collier who told me the Frasier Solar project motivated Keesee’s candidacy. He remembered first encountering her at a community meeting – “she verbally accosted me” – and that she “decided she’d run against me because [the solar farm] was going to be next to her house.” In his view, he lost the race because excitement and money combined to produce high anti-solar turnout in a kind of local government primary that ordinarily has low campaign spending and is quite quiet. Some of that funding and activity has been well documented.
“She did it right: tons of ground troops, people from her church, people she’s close with went door-to-door, and they put out lots of propaganda. She got them stirred up that we were going to take all the farmland and turn it into solar,” he said.
Collier’s takeaway from the race was that local commissioner races are particularly vulnerable to the sorts of disinformation, campaign spending and political attacks we’re used to seeing more often in races for higher offices at the state and federal level.
“Unfortunately it has become this,” he bemoaned, “fueled by people who have little to no knowledge of what we do or how we do it. If you stir up enough stuff and you cry out loud enough and put up enough misinformation, people will start to believe it.”
Races like these are happening elsewhere in Ohio and in other states like Georgia, where opposition to a battery plant mobilized Republican primaries. As the climate world digests the federal election results and tries to work backwards from there, perhaps at least some attention will refocus on local campaigns like these.