You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
The hot hatch is a car enthusiast’s car. Neither garage tinkerer nor street racer can resist a practical hatchback stuffed with enough power to push your brains back into the headrest and handling to outdrive cars that cost twice as much. At last, the category’s standard-bearer, the Volkswagen GTI, is drifting into its electrified future. VW has revealed the ID.GTI Concept, a preview of the fully battery-powered GTI to come a few years down the line.
With the GTI EV en route, we can cross off the hot hatch as a car category without an electric champion. The arrival of the Rivian R1T and Ford F-150 Lightning have put full battery-powered pickups into America’s hypercompetitive truck market. Yet even as automakers turn over their lineups to include more and more EV versions of the gas cars they’ve always built, there are still glaring holes — car categories where nary an EV has arisen, and models that demand to become an EV. Here are some electrics on its way, and some that should be.
Heatmap Illustration/Rivian
The Rivian R1T is a dream machine, every bit the shimmering, LED-laden pickup truck of the future that lots of people expected from Elon Musk before he revealed, well, something else. The truck’s R1S counterpart packages the same guts into an SUV form that’s more practical for some. But both come with an aspirational price to go with their aspirational design. The starting prices near $70,000 leave lots of Rivian fans out in the cold, waiting for the company to debut an offering within reach.
The EV startup’s R2 platform aims to support a smaller and less expensive, but still rugged and capable, pickup truck and SUV. In an interview with Heatmap earlier this year, Rivian CEO R.J. Scaringe said the company wants to roll out the new vehicles in 2026 at a price of $40,000 to $45,000.
Jeep
Other 4x4s can pose on a boulder or traverse a trail that’s turned to muck, but none have the old-time military looks and mechanics that make the Wrangler iconic. Updating a legend is always tricky. In 2021, Jeep went halfway to electrifying the Wrangler, creating the 4xe plug-in hybrid that Car & Driverderided as a “science fair project.”
This time around, no half-measures. For the 2024 model year, Jeep is slated to release a true Wrangler EV for the enthusiast who seeks an emissions-free way to terrorize the environment. In truth, lots of people who occasionally — or never — drive off-road own a Wrangler because, simply, they fell in love with it. Transforming the One True Jeep into an EV will make bombing around the urban jungle a little easier on the wallet as well as the atmosphere.
Get one great climate story in your inbox every day:
Volkswagen
VW struck a countercultural nerve when, in 2017, it unveiled the concept of an electrified VW Microbus and made flower power aspirants everywhere say, “shut up and take my money.” This, of course, is not your grandmother’s hippie wagon. To bring the bus into the 21st century VW ditched the underdog, fix-it-yourself ethos of the original for a whiz-bang software-controlled EV that costs north of $40,000. But damn if it isn’t cute.
ID.Buzz recently made its American debut, and is finally going on sale in the U.S. as a 2025 model. What the world needs now is Buzz, sweet Buzz — read Heatmap’s coverage for more.
Fiat
We need a fun little EV. The original Fiat 500e tried to deliver on that by putting a battery in the beloved city car, but that electrified taste of Italy could barely top 80 miles of range and was discontinued a few years back.
The newer, better version currently driving around the roads of Europe is coming to America in 2024 and should be able to offer twice as many miles per charge, at around 160. That pales in comparison to the numbers that new big EVs can deliver (hey, you can only cram so much battery into a microcar). But if you’re an urban dweller with an eye for style, it’s enough to get by.
Chevrolet
Wait long enough and lots of iconic performance cars — the Alfa Romeo Giulia, the Dodge Charger Daytona — will go electric. Not just to keep with the times, but also to take advantage of the instantaneous torque available from an electric motor that makes EVs zip off the line. In terms of hype, though, it’s still the Corvette that matters most.
The launch of every new Corvette is, well, a whole to-do. That’s doubly true now, because a Corvette EV is coming perhaps as soon as 2025 and may produce ridiculous power numbers. In addition, it may bring with it an entire sub-brand of Corvette-branded cars that don’t say “Chevy” anywhere, including a spicy crossover SUV.
Canoo
Nobody can be told what Canoo is. You have to see the EV startup’s very rounded concept truck and van — which look like police vehicles mocked up for an episode of Black Mirror — for yourself.
The future pod of a van, called the Canoo Lifestyle Vehicle, bucks convention as often as possible. On the outside, its styling is like nothing else. On the inside, for example, its seating can be shifted so occupants face one another or move to make a ton of empty floor space.
Amid a sea of vehicles that all look the same, the Canoo’s over-the-top quirkiness earned plenty of early devotees and aspirant buyers. Whether they’ll actually get to part with their cash in exchange for the vehicles is another matter entirely: Canoo has endured corporate restructuring and, while it has managed to produce a few vehicles for clients such as NASA, it is always close to running out of money before it gets around to selling cars to people.
Heatmap Illustration/Tesla
Once upon a time, $35,000 was the magic number — the mark Tesla would hit with its unicorn affordable EV that became the Model 3. While few people navigated the hurdles necessary to actually get one that cheap, the entry-level Model 3s like mine got close.
Now the whispers conjure a $25,000 Tesla, one that would truly put EVs in line with the most affordable gas-burning vehicles. CEO Elon Musk teased the possibility in 2020 and pegged the promised price to the possibility of slashing battery production costs.
Tesla famously enjoys the whooshing sound deadlines make as they fly by, so the $25k model may be several years away — especially since we have no idea what it would look like. But if Musk and company roll out a compact sedan or hatchback with 250 miles of range at anything close to that price, Tesla may not be able to keep them in stock.
Heatmap Illustration/Chrysler
Let me tell you the car journalist’s mantra: Actually, minivans are good. When I was an editor at Popular Mechanics, the test-drivers would race to the defense of the minivan: Unlike the high-riding crossover that replaced it as this century’s de facto kid-mover, the minivan rides lower to the ground like a car, and those iconic sliding doors and removable seats make it easy to load and unload stuff.
Nevertheless, the SUV has left the much-maligned minivan in the dust. The people’s champion for electrified minivan drivers has been the Chrysler Pacifica plug-in hybrid, which delivers just 32 miles of electric-only range but is the only PHEV vehicle in its class. The good news for minivan loyalists: Chrysler is committed to electrifying its lineup, which means a full EV Pacifica is probably in the works.
(The ID.Buzz and Canoo are, arguably, modern reinventions of the form, but they feel so far removed from the archetype of the American minivan as to be in their own category.)
Heatmap Illustration/Mazda
Let me now tell you the car journalist’s other mantra: Actually, the Miata is good. Like the minivan, the Miata was slandered by ‘90s popular culture as too wimpy, too effeminate. Just like the Minivan, the Miata is actually delightful to drive and beloved by the people who test vehicles for a living.
Mazda hit a home run with the excellent current Miata, which it has been making since 2015. But the brand has been among the slowest to adopt electric powertrains, so a true Miata EV (unless you have the engineering chops to convert one to battery power) remains many years away. The next Miata will be “electrified,” but to what extent — whether this means a hybrid or a true EV — is unknown.
Heatmap Illustration/Ford
Once represented by classic vehicles like the Ford Ranger and Chevy S-10, America’s small truck market grew critically endangered when pickups became super-luxury vehicles that can cost north of $50,000. Ford struck a blow for the reasonably-sized utilitarian truck when it introduced the Maverick to slot into its lineup below the Ranger (which has grown to mid-size in the intervening years) and promptly sold a ton of the little trucks.
No battery-powered small pickup has yet come along, but when it does, the Maverick Lightning, Ranger Lightning, or whatever it is will find a horde of happy buyers.
Read more about EVs:
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Smothered, covered, and recharged.
Picture, if you will, the perfect electric vehicle charging stop. It sits right off a well-traveled highway. It has decent bathrooms, preferably ones that are open 24/7. It gives drivers and road-tripping families a simple way to occupy themselves during the 15 to 30 minutes it takes to refill the battery, the most obvious solution being a meal that can be consumed within that time window.
In other words, it is a Waffle House.
The beloved chain of budget restaurants spread across the American South said last week that it would begin to install DC fast chargers in 2026. Built by BP, the charging stalls will be able to deliver up to 400 kilowatts of electricity and will include plugs with both the Combined Charging System standard (the plug used by most non-Tesla EVs to date) and the North American Charging System standard (the formerly proprietary Tesla plug that is slowly becoming the standard for the industry at large). At last, Americans can get their hash browns smothered, covered, and recharged.
We won’t see every Waffle House in the country become an electron depot overnight. BP said it is planning installations at about 50 sites right now; Waffle House has around 2,000 locations in the United States. Yet the addition of charging — and not just charging, but high-speed charging — at the Waffle House is just what the American EV experience needs.
Where fast chargers are built has been driven by a few factors. Notably, there is necessity from the EV driver’s point of view and practicality for the charging company. Charging depots along major highways and interstates make electric road trips possible, but many prime pit stops between big cities are in the middle of nowhere, which makes it a challenge to provide amenities to resting drivers. In the empty California desert between L.A. and San Francisco, for example, Tesla built Superchargers at iconic steak restaurants and at existing travel plazas with your expected array of gas stations and fast food restaurants. I’ve also stopped numerous times at an impromptu, formerly unpaved site rushed together to accommodate holiday traffic; for months it featured nothing but plugs and portable bathrooms sitting in the dirt.
In cities and suburbs, it’s not uncommon to find charging stations at outlet malls and shopping centers. It makes sense: These places have lots of parking spaces, room for the necessary electrical infrastructure, and stores and restaurants to provide some level of amusement or distraction. If it so happens that you need to go to the REI or Sephora anyway, then so much the better. Mercedes-Benz is trying to class up this setup by putting its luxury charging sites at high-end malls and providing primo, covered parking spaces.
But the game changer is the Waffle House. Businesses have long realized the benefit of adding EV chargers, either as a serendipitous perk for customers who arrive in electric need, or as an enticement for EV owners to patronize their business rather than the competitor with no plugs. Mostly, though, those businesses install Level 2 “destination” chargers that are roughly equivalent to what drivers get in their garage if they pay for the upgrade: 240 volts, or enough to provide 20 to 30 miles of range per hour.
That’s perfect for a hotel, where patrons who snag a charger can wake up the next morning with a full battery, just as they would at home. I made it across sparse Utah country this way. At a grocery store or a restaurant it’s less useful. It’s a pleasant bonus to add a few miles of juice during an errand. What would be better would be filling up the whole battery while you’re inside the Whole Foods.
The problem, however, is timing. Chargers are a shared resource. For optimal EV charging that works for everybody, drivers move their cars as soon as they’re done to open the stall for someone else, which is why many fast-charging operators ding drivers with idle fees if they stay plugged in. So not every activity is a perfect match. It’s pretty annoying to leave your half-filled cart inside Trader Joe’s to go move the car, or to rush through shopping so you finish by the time the battery does. I’ve been through plenty of situations where I couldn’t get back to my Model 3 right away, and so even though it was about to finish charging at 80%, I used the phone app to bump up the limit to 90% or higher to keep the session going.
You know what is a decent match? The Waffle House. You can probably finish your All-Star Special in time, and if you can’t, no problem. This isn’t fine dining; you can leave the table a moment to hop out to the parking lot and unplug the EV.
Putting chargers at the places Americans love to go anyway, whether road tripping or not, would be a wonderful little way to boost their desirability. My native Nebraska has Superchargers co-located with Runzas at towns along the interstate, a welcome trend that must expand. Let Wisconsinites fill the battery while crushing a frozen custard at Culver’s. Give us chargers at the Cracker Barrel so I can finally solve that unholy peg game. Continue the California trend of putting plugs at the In N Out. If the charging stop is someplace you want to go anyway, the minutes required melt away.
Current conditions: The first U.S. heat wave of the year begins today in the West, with a record high of 107 degrees Fahrenheit possible in Redding, California • India is experiencing its earliest monsoon in 16 years• Power was largely restored in southeast Texas by early Wednesday after destructive winds left nearly 200,000 without electricity.
The global average temperature is expected to “remain at or near” the 2-degree Celsius threshold within the next five years, the World Meteorological Organization shared in a new report Wednesday morning. The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement set a warming limit to under 2 degrees C above pre-industrial times, although the WMO’s prediction will not immediately mean the goal has been broken, since that threshold is measured over at least two decades, the Financial Times reports. Still, WMO’s report represents “the first time that scientists’ computer models had flagged the more imminent possibility of a 2C year,” FT writes. Other concerning findings include:
You can find the full report here.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been in disarray since its acting administrator was fired in early May for defending the agency before Congress. His successor, David Richardson, began his tenure by threatening staff. According to an internal FEMA memo obtained by The Handbasket, however, the picture is worse than mere dysfunction: Stephanie Dobitsch, the associate administrator for policy and program analysis, wrote to Richardson last week warning him that the agency’s “critical functions” are at “high risk” of failure due to “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.”
Of particular concern is the staffing at the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, which The Handbasket notes contains the nuclear bunker “where congressional leaders were stashed on 9/11,” and which, per Dobitsch, is now “at risk of not being fully mission capable.” FEMA’s primary disaster response office is also on the verge of being unable to “execute response and initial recovery operations and may disrupt life-saving and life-sustaining program delivery,” the memo goes on. Hurricane season begins on Sunday, and wildfires are already burning in the West. You can read the full report at The Handbasket.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a religious liberty appeal by the San Carlos Apache Tribe to stop the mining company Rio Tinto from proceeding with its plan to build one of the largest copper mines in the world at Oak Flat in Arizona, which the Tribe considers sacred land. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas said in a dissent that they would have granted the Tribe’s petition, with Gorsuch calling the court’s decision a “grave mistake” that could “reverberate for generations.” The Trump-appointed justice argued that “before allowing the government to destroy the Apaches’ sacred site, this Court should at least have troubled itself to hear their case.”
I traveled to Superior, Arizona, last year to learn more about Rio Tinto’s project, which analysts estimate could extract enough copper to meet a quarter of U.S. demand. “Copper is the most important metal for all technologies we think of as part of the energy transition: battery electric vehicles, grid-scale battery storage, wind turbines, solar panels,” Adam Simon, an Earth and environmental sciences professor at the University of Michigan, told me of the project. But many skeptics say that beyond destroying a culturally and religiously significant site, there is not the smelting capacity in the U.S. for all of Rio Tinto’s raw copper, which the company would likely extract from Oak Flat and send to China for processing. According to court documents, Oak Flat could be transferred to Rio Tinto’s subsidiary Resolution Copper as soon as June 16. In a statement, Wendsler Nosie Sr. of Apache Stronghold — the San Carlos Apache-led religious nonprofit opposing the mine — said, “While this decision is a heavy blow, our struggle is far from over.”
MTA
New York won a court order on Tuesday temporarily preventing the Trump administration from withholding funding for state transportation projects if it doesn’t end congestion pricing, Gothamist reports. The toll, which went into effect in early January, charges most drivers $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th street, and has been successful at reducing traffic and raising millions for subway upgrades. The Trump administration has argued, however, that the toll harms poor and working-class people by “unfairly” charging them to “go to work, see their families, or visit the city.”
The Federal Highway Administration warned New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority that it had until May 28 to end the program, or else face cuts to city and state highway funding. Judge Lewis J. Liman blocked the government from the retaliatory withholding with the court order on Tuesday, which extends through June 9, arguing the state would “suffer irreparable harm” without it. Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, celebrated the move, calling it a “massive victory for New York commuters, vindicating our right as a state to make decisions regarding what’s best for our streets.”
European Union countries agreed on Tuesday to dramatically scale back the bloc’s carbon border tariff so that it will cover only 10% of the companies that currently qualify, Reuters reports. The scheme applies a fee on “imported goods that is equivalent to the carbon price already paid by EU-based companies under the bloc’s CO2 emissions policies,” with the intent of protecting Europe-based companies from being undercut by foreign producers in countries that have looser environmental regulations, Reuters writes. The EU justified the decision by noting that the approximately 18,000 companies to which the levy still applies account for more than 99% of the emissions from iron, steel, aluminum, and cement imports, and that loosening the restriction will benefit smaller businesses.
The famous “climate stripes” graphic — which visualizes the annual increases of global average temperature in red and blue bands — has been updated to include oceanic and atmospheric warming. “We’ve had [these] warming estimates for a long time, but having them all in one graphic is what we’ve managed to do here,” the project’s creator, Ed Hawkins, told Fast Company.
And coal communities and fracking villages and all the rest.
Amid last month’s headlines about departures from the Department of Energy, the exits of Brian Anderson and Briggs White received little attention. Yet their departures foreshadowed something larger: the quiet dismantling of federal support for the economic diversification of fossil fuel–dependent regions of the country.
Anderson and White led the Energy Communities Interagency Working Group, created by a 2021 executive order to coordinate the federal strategy to support coal–reliant regions through a global transition to cleaner energy. This Biden-era strategy recognized that communities where employment opportunities and tax bases depend on fossil fuels face serious risks — local levels of prosperity generally rise and fall with production levels — and they require support to build new engines of economic activity.
In contrast, President Donald Trump’s prescription for fossil fuel communities is to produce more fossil fuels. In addition to cutting clean energy incentives, the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives last week seeks to directly support fossil fuel production by accelerating leasing and permitting, lowering royalty rates, and repealing the methane emissions fee.
History suggests that Trump’s ability to help fossil fuel communities by boosting production is limited — similar efforts in Trump’s first term failed to significantly alter the trajectory of coal, oil, or natural gas output. But the funding cuts codified in the current reconciliation bill could do real harm by dismantling federal programs that support economic diversification. Communities that depend on fossil fuel industries will be vulnerable to severe economic shocks when demand for their products eventually declines.
The need to help transitioning regions isn’t new, but federal support for struggling communities has long been stigmatized. In 1980, a federal commission urged policymakers to focus less on struggling places and more on helping individuals move to where opportunity existed. President Ronald Reagan used this report to justify cutting federal economic development programs, including proposing to eliminate the Appalachian Regional Commission. Congress did not fully abolish the ARC, but its budget was slashed nearly in half, leading to staff reductions and the phasing out of the programs designed to bolster the economy of the persistently struggling region.
In the decades that followed, manufacturing towns were largely left to fend for themselves as globalization accelerated. A study by MIT’s David Autor and colleagues showed that 86% of the manufacturing job losses from trade shocks in the early 2000s were still reflected in depressed local employment rates in 2019. Most workers didn’t find new jobs or migrate.
If the loss of dominant employers causes “miniature Great Depressions” in local economies across the country, then a rapid decline in fossil fuels spells acute risks for communities that depend on these industries for jobs and public revenues. We see this happening already in coal-reliant regions. In Boone County, West Virginia, coal production declined by over 80% from 2009 to 2019, causing the county’s gross domestic product to decline by over 60%. Three of Boone’s 10 elementary schools were forced to close.
President Trump entered office in 2017 pledging to “bring the coal industry back 100%” with a deregulatory strategy much like the one his administration is pursuing today. But during his first four-year term, domestic coal mining employment fell by 26%, and coal-fired power plant capacity declined by 13%, demonstrating the futility of doubling down on an economic model when macroeconomic forces are working against it.
These outcomes are not inevitable. Four-hundred miles west of Boone, the far more economically diverse Hopkins County, Kentucky was able to weather its own 75% decline in coal production without a comparable economic crash. In Germany’s Ruhr Valley, the German government paired a coal phase-out with over €100 billion in long-term investments — new universities, industrial incentives, environmental restoration, and worker retraining. While some towns in the region are still struggling, the Ruhr Valley’s shift from a coal powerhouse to a more diverse, knowledge-based economy shows that fossil fuel regions can reinvent themselves.
Recent policies in the U.S. began to take similar steps. As part of a broader federal place-based economic strategy, the American Rescue Plan dedicated hundreds of millions to rebuilding coal communities in 2021. Then came the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which included billions for cleaning up abandoned mines and orphaned oil wells and funding large-scale demonstration projects for carbon capture and hydrogen production. The Inflation Reduction Act added bonus tax credits and carve-outs to grant programs that target fossil fuel communities.
The now-defunct Energy Communities Interagency Working Group helped knit these efforts together. It served as a clearinghouse for funding opportunities, published “how-to” guides for local leaders, and deployed “rapid response teams” to coal regions.
To be sure, the strategy had limitations. Most programs focused narrowly on coal regions and clean energy solutions, and the IWG had minimal funding for its coordinating efforts. But the strategy shift marked real progress and has generated promising early signs, such as an iron air battery manufacturing facility at an old steel mill in Weirton, West Virginia, carbon capture projects in North Dakota and Texas, and “hydrogen hubs” in the Gulf Coast and Appalachia.
Under the Trump administration, that progress is at risk. Government efficiency initiatives have already led to the gutting of federal programs best positioned to support investments in fossil fuel communities, including the Loan Programs Office, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. and the Federal Thriving Communities Network Initiative.
Trump’s budget proposes severe cuts to the federal support for regional economic development, including eliminating the Economic Development Administration, the federal agency dedicated to helping communities strengthen their local economies.
The reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives is a step toward codifying those cuts — with reductions in non-defense discretionary annual spending of $163 billion (over 20%) — and it would also eliminate most of the tax credits and grant programs that encourage investments in energy infrastructure projects in fossil fuel communities. Certain policies that are especially well suited for fossil fuel communities, like incentives for enhanced geothermal energy, may be phased out before ever really getting off the ground.
Rolling back support for fossil fuel communities will curb these regions’ opportunities to build new engines of economic prosperity. Without credible, lasting commitments from the federal government, many fossil fuel communities have little choice but to stick to the economic model they know best, despite their vulnerability to the eventual end of fossil fuels.