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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.
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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.
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Geothermal is getting closer to the big time. Last week, Fervo Energy — arguably the country’s leading enhanced geothermal company — announced that its Utah demonstration project had achieved record production capacity. The new approach termed “enhanced geothermal,” which borrows drilling techniques and expertise from the oil and gas industry, seems poised to become a big player on America’s clean, 24/7 power grid of the future.
Why is geothermal so hot? How soon could it appear on the grid — and why does it have advantages that other zero-carbon technologies don’t? On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse speak with a practitioner and an expert in the world of enhanced geothermal. Sarah Jewett is the vice president of strategy at Fervo Energy, which she joined after several years in the oil and gas industry. Wilson Ricks is a doctoral student of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, where he studies macro-energy systems modeling. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I just wanted to hit a different note here, which is, Sarah, you’ve alluded a few times to your past in the oil and gas industry. I think this is true across Fervo, is that of course, the technologies we’re discussing here are fracking derived. What has your background in the oil and gas industry and hydrocarbons taught you that you think about at Fervo now, and developing geothermal as a resource?
Sarah Jewett: There are so many things. I mean, I’m thinking about my time in the oil and gas industry daily. And you’re exactly right, I think today about 60% of Fervo’s employees come from the oil and gas industry. And because we are only just about to start construction on our first power facility, the percentage of contractors and field workers from the oil and gas industry is much higher than 60%.
Jesse Jenkins: Right, you can’t go and hire a bunch of people with geothermal experience when there is no large-scale geothermal industry to pull from.
Jewett: That’s right. That’s right. And so the oil and gas industry, I think, has taught us, so many different types of things. I mean, we can’t really exist without thinking about the history of the oil and gas industry — even, you know, Wilson and I are sort of comparing our learning rates to learning rates observed in various different oil and gas basins by different operators, so you can see a lot of prior technological pathways.
I mean, first off, we’re just using off the shelf technology that has been proven and tested in the oil and gas industry over the last 25 years, which has been, really, the reason why geothermal is able to have this big new unlock, because we’re using all of this off the shelf technology that now exists. It’s not like the early 2000s, where there was a single bit we could have tried. Now there are a ton of different bits that are available to us that we can try and say, how is this working? How is this working? How’s this working?
So I think, from a technological perspective, it’s helpful. And then from just an industry that has set a solid example it’s been really helpful, and that can be leveraged in a number of different ways. Learning rates, for example; how to set up supply chains in remote areas, for example; how to engage with and interact with communities. I think we’ve seen examples of oil and gas doing that well and doing it poorly. And I’ve gotten to observe firsthand the oil and gas industry doing it well and doing it poorly.
And so I’ve gotten to learn a lot about how we need to treat those around us, explain to them what it is that we’re doing, how open we need to be. And I think that has been immensely helpful as we’ve crafted the role that we’re going to play in these communities at large.
Wilson Ricks: I think it’s also interesting to talk about the connection to the oil and gas industry from the perspective of the political economy of the energy transition, specifically because you hear policymakers talk all the time about retraining workers from these legacy industries that, if we’re serious about decarbonizing, will unavoidably have to contract — and, you know, getting those people involved in clean energy, in these new industries.
And often that’s taking drillers and retraining some kind of very different job — or coal miners — into battery manufacturers. This is almost exactly one to one. Like Sarah said, there’s additional expertise and experience that you need to get really good at doing this in the geothermal context. But for the most part, you are taking the exact same skills and just reapplying them, and so it allows for both a potentially very smooth transition of workforces, and also it allows for scale-up of enhanced geothermal to proceed much more smoothly than it potentially would if you had to kind of train an entire workforce from scratch to just do this.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Why the new “reasoning” models might gobble up more electricity — at least in the short term
What happens when artificial intelligence takes some time to think?
The newest set of models from OpenAI, o1-mini and o1-preview, exhibit more “reasoning” than existing large language models and associated interfaces, which spit out answers to prompts almost instantaneously.
Instead, the new model will sometimes “think” for as long as a minute or two. “Through training, they learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes,” OpenAI announced in a blog post last week. The company said these models perform better than their existing ones on some tasks, especially related to math and science. “This is a significant advancement and represents a new level of AI capability,” the company said.
But is it also a significant advancement in energy usage?
In the short run at least, almost certainly, as spending more time “thinking” and generating more text will require more computing power. As Erik Johannes Husom, a researcher at SINTEF Digital, a Norwegian research organization, told me, “It looks like we’re going to get another acceleration of generative AI’s carbon footprint.”
Discussion of energy use and large language models has been dominated by the gargantuan requirements for “training,” essentially running a massive set of equations through a corpus of text from the internet. This requires hardware on the scale of tens of thousands of graphical processing units and an estimated 50 gigawatt-hours of electricity to run.
Training GPT-4 cost “more than” $100 million OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has said; the next generation models will likely cost around $1 billion, according to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, a figure that might balloon to $100 billion for further generation models, according to Oracle founder Larry Ellison.
While a huge portion of these costs are hardware, the energy consumption is considerable as well. (Meta reported that when training its Llama 3 models, power would sometimes fluctuate by “tens of megawatts,” enough to power thousands of homes). It’s no wonder that OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman has put hundreds of millions of dollars into a fusion company.
But the models are not simply trained, they're used out in the world, generating outputs (think of what ChatGPT spits back at you). This process tends to be comparable to other common activities like streaming Netflix or using a lightbulb. This can be done with different hardware and the process is more distributed and less energy intensive.
As large language models are being developed, most computational power — and therefore most electricity — is used on training, Charlie Snell, a PhD student at University of California at Berkeley who studies artificial intelligence, told me. “For a long time training was the dominant term in computing because people weren’t using models much.” But as these models become more popular, that balance could shift.
“There will be a tipping point depending on the user load, when the total energy consumed by the inference requests is larger than the training,” said Jovan Stojkovic, a graduate student at the University of Illinois who has written about optimizing inference in large language models.
And these new reasoning models could bring that tipping point forward because of how computationally intensive they are.
“The more output a model produces, the more computations it has performed. So, long chain-of-thoughts leads to more energy consumption,” Husom of SINTEF Digital told me.
OpenAI staffers have been downright enthusiastic about the possibilities of having more time to think, seeing it as another breakthrough in artificial intelligence that could lead to subsequent breakthroughs on a range of scientific and mathematical problems. “o1 thinks for seconds, but we aim for future versions to think for hours, days, even weeks. Inference costs will be higher, but what cost would you pay for a new cancer drug? For breakthrough batteries? For a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis? AI can be more than chatbots,” OpenAI researcher Noam Brown tweeted.
But those “hours, days, even weeks” will mean more computation and “there is no doubt that the increased performance requires a lot of computation,” Husom said, along with more carbon emissions.
But Snell told me that might not be the end of the story. It’s possible that over the long term, the overall computing demands for constructing and operating large language models will remain fixed or possibly even decline.
While “the default is that as capabilities increase, demand will increase and there will be more inference,” Snell told me, “maybe we can squeeze reasoning capability into a small model ... Maybe we spend more on inference but it’s a much smaller model.”
OpenAI hints at this possibility, describing their o1-mini as “a smaller model optimized for STEM reasoning,” in contrast to other, larger models that “are pre-trained on vast datasets” and “have broad world knowledge,” which can make them “expensive and slow for real-world applications.” OpenAI is suggesting that a model can know less but think more and deliver comparable or better results to larger models — which might mean more efficient and less energy hungry large language models.
In short, thinking might use less brain power than remembering, even if you think for a very long time.
On Azerbaijan’s plans, offshore wind auctions, and solar jobs
Current conditions: Thousands of firefighters are battling raging blazes in Portugal • Shanghai could be hit by another typhoon this week • More than 18 inches of rain fell in less than 24 hours in Carolina Beach, which forecasters say is a one-in-a-thousand-year event.
Azerbaijan, the host of this year’s COP29, today put forward a list of “non-negotiated” initiatives for the November climate summit that will “supplement” the official mandated program. The action plan includes the creation of a new “Climate Finance Action Fun” that will take (voluntary) contributions from fossil fuel producing countries, a call for increasing battery storage capacity, an appeal for a global “truce” during the event, and a declaration aimed at curbing methane emissions from waste (which the Financial Times noted is “only the third most common man-made source of methane, after the energy and agricultural sectors”). The plan makes no mention of furthering efforts to phase out fossil fuels in the energy system.
The Interior Department set a date for an offshore wind energy lease sale in the Gulf of Maine, an area which the government sees as suitable for developing floating offshore wind technology. The auction will take place on October 29 and cover eight areas on the Outer Continental Shelf off Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. The area could provide 13 gigawatts of offshore wind energy, if fully developed. The Biden administration has a goal of installing 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030, and has approved about half that amount so far. The DOI’s terms and conditions for the October lease sale include “stipulations designed to promote the development of a robust domestic U.S. supply chain for floating wind.” Floating offshore wind turbines can be deployed in much deeper waters than traditional offshore projects, and could therefore unlock large areas for clean power generation. Last month the government gave the green light for researchers to study floating turbines in the Gulf of Maine.
In other wind news, BP is selling its U.S. onshore wind business, bp Wind Energy. The firm’s 10 wind farm projects have a total generating capacity of 1.3 gigawatts and analysts think they could be worth $2 billion. When it comes to renewables, the fossil fuel giant said it is focusing on investing in solar growth, and onshore wind is “not aligned” with those plans.
The number of jobs in the U.S. solar industry last year grew to 279,447, up 6% from 2022, according to a new report from the nonprofit Interstate Renewable Energy Council. Utility-scale solar added 1,888 jobs in 2023, a 6.8% increase and a nice rebound from 2022, when the utility-scale solar market recorded a loss in jobs. The report warns that we might not see the same kind of growth for solar jobs in 2024, though. Residential installations have dropped, and large utility-scale projects are struggling with grid connection. The report’s authors also note that as the industry grows, it faces a shortage of skilled workers.
Interstate Renewable Energy Council
Most employers reported that hiring qualified solar workers was difficult, especially in installation and project development. “It’s difficult because our projects are built in very rural areas where there just aren't a lot of people,” one interviewee who works at a utility-scale solar firm said. “We strive to hire as many local people as possible because we want local communities to feel the economic impact or benefit from our projects. So in some communities where we go, it is difficult to find local people that are skilled and can perform the work.”
The torrential rain that has battered central Europe is tapering off a bit, but the danger of rising water remains. “The massive amounts of rain that fell is now working its way through the river systems and we are starting to see flooding in areas that avoided the worst of the rain,” BBC meteorologist Matt Taylor explained. The Polish city of Nysa told its 44,000 residents to leave yesterday as water rose. In the Czech Republic, 70% of the town of Litovel was submerged in 3 feet of flooding. The death toll from the disaster has risen to 18. Now the forecast is calling for heavy rain in Italy. “The catastrophic rainfall hitting central Europe is exactly what scientists expect with climate change,” Joyce Kimutai, a climate scientist with Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, toldThe Guardian.
A recent study examining the effects of London’s ultra-low emissions zone on how students get to school found that a year after the rules came into effect, many students had switched to walking, biking, or taking public transport instead of being driven in private vehicles.