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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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And it only gets worse from here.
Hot and humid weather stretching from Maine to Missouri is causing havoc for grid operators: blackouts, brownouts, emergency authorizations to exceed environmental restrictions, and high prices.
But in terms of what is on the grid and what is demanded of it, this may be the easiest summer for a long time.
That’s because demands on the grid are growing at the same time the resources powering it are changing. Between broad-based electrification, manufacturing additions, and especially data center construction, electricity load growth is forecast to grow several percent a year through at least the end of the decade. At the same time, aging plants reliant on oil, gas, and coal are being retired (although planned retirements are slowing down), while new resources, largely solar and batteries, are often stuck in long interconnection queues — and, when they do come online, offer unique challenges to grid operators when demand is high.
For the previous 20 years, load growth has been relatively steady, Abe Silverman, a research scholar at Johns Hopkins, explained to me. “What’s different is that load is trending up,” he said. “When you’re buying and making arrangements for the summer, you have to aim a bit higher.”
Nowhere is the combined and uneven development of the grid’s supply and demand more evident than in PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest electricity market, spanning from Washington, D.C. to Chicago. The grid now has to serve new load in Virginia’s “data center alley,” while aggressive public policy promoting renewables in states such as Maryland and New Jersey has made planning more complicated thanks to the different energy generation and economic profiles of wind, solar, and batteries compared to gas and coal.
PJM hit peak load on Monday of just over 161,000 megawatts, within kissing distance of its all-time record of 165,500 megawatts and far north of last year’s high demand of 152,700, with load hitting at least 158,000 megawatts on Tuesday. Forecast high load this year was around 154,000 megawatts. Earlier this spring, PJM warned that for the first time, “available generation capacity may fall short of required reserves in an extreme planning scenario that would result in an all-time PJM peak load of more than 166,000 megawatts.”
While that extreme demand has not been seen on the grid during this present heat wave, we’re still early in the year. Typically, PJM’s demand peaks in July or even August; according to the consulting firm ICF, the last June peak was in 2014, while demand last year peaked in July. On Monday, real time prices got just over $3,000 a megawatt, and reached just over $1,800 on Tuesday.
“This is a big test. A lot of capacity has retired since 2006 and the resource mix has changed some,” Connor Waldoch, head of strategy at GridStatus, told me. While exact data on the resource mix over the past 20 years isn’t available, Waldoch said that many of the fossil fuel plants on the grid — including those that help set the price of electricity — are quite old.
PJM’s operators have issued a “maximum generation alert” that will extend to Wednesday, warning generators and transmission owners to defer or cancel maintenance so that “units stay online and continue to produce energy that is needed.”
PJM also issued a load management alert, a warning that PJM may call upon some 8,000 megawatts of electricity users who have been paid in advance to reduce demand when the grid calls for it. Already, some large users of electricity in Virginia have reduced their power demand as part of the program. There are historically around one or two uses of demand response per year in each of the electricity market’s 21 zones.
“Demand response is a real hero,” Silverman said.
Elsewhere in the hot zone, thousands of customers of the New York Independent Systems Operator lost or saw reduced power on Monday, along with over 100,000 customers affected by voltage reductions. On Tuesday, NYISO issued an “energy watch” meaning that “operating reserves are expected to be lower than normal,” and asking customers to reduce their power consumption.
Further north, oil and coal made up 10% of the fuel mix in ISO New England by Monday night, according to GridStatus data. The region has greatly expanded behind-the-meter solar generation since 2010, which as of 2 p.m. Monday was generating over 21% of the region’s power. But the grid as a whole hasn’t been able to keep up, thanks to a nationally anomalous shortage of gas capacity and still-insufficient battery storage. As the sun faded, so too did New England’s renewable generation.
“You don’t see coal very often in the New England fuel mix,” Waldoch told me. In fact, there is only one remaining coal plant in New England, which can typically power around 440,000 homes — though that’s based on normal electricity usage. On days like the past few, it may power far fewer.
Moving into Tuesday, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright invoked emergency authorities to allow Duke Energy in the Carolinas to run certain of its units “at their maximum generation output levels due to ongoing extreme weather conditions and to preserve the reliability of bulk electric power system.”
The strained grid and high prices come as grid operators question how effectively their current and planned generation capacity can meet future demand. These questions have become especially pressing in PJM, which last year shelled out billions of dollars in payments to largely fossil fuel generators in what’s known as a capacity auction. That’s already translating to higher costs for consumers — in some cases as high as 20%. But even that could be nothing compared to what’s coming.
“If you take the current conditions that PJM is dealing with right now and you add tens of gigawatts of data to center demand, they would be in trouble,” Pieter Mul, an energy and infrastructure advisor at PA Consulting, told me.
Right now, Mul said, PJM can muddle through. “It is all hands on deck. Our prices are quite high. They’ve invoked some various emergency conditions.” But that’s before all those data centers are even online. “It’s a 2026, ’27, and beyond question,” Mul said.
Today, however, “it’s mostly just very hot weather.”
The state’s senior senator, Thom Tillis, has been vocal about the need to maintain clean energy tax credits.
The majority of voters in North Carolina want Congress to leave the Inflation Reduction Act well enough alone, a new poll from Data for Progress finds.
The survey, which asked North Carolina voters specifically about the clean energy and climate provisions in the bill, presented respondents with a choice between two statements: “The IRA should be repealed by Congress” and “The IRA should be kept in place by Congress.” (“Don’t know” was also an option.)
The responses from voters broke down predictably along party lines, with 71% of Democrats preferring to keep the IRA in place compared to just 31% of Republicans, with half of independent voters in favor of keeping the climate law. Overall, half of North Carolina voters surveyed wanted the IRA to stick around, compared to 37% who’d rather see it go — a significant spread for a state that, prior to the passage of the climate law, was home to little in the way of clean energy development.
But North Carolina now has a lot to lose with the potential repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has pointed out. The IRA brought more than 17,000 jobs to the state, per Climate Power, along with $20 billion in investment spread out over 34 clean energy projects. Electric vehicle and charging manufacturers in particular have flocked to the state, with Toyota investing $13.9 billion in its Liberty EV battery manufacturing facility, which opened this past April.
North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis was one of the four co-authors of a letter sent to Majority Leader John Thune in April advocating for the preservation of the law. Together, they wrote that gutting the IRA’s tax credits “would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning, and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.” It seems that the majority of North Carolina voters are aligned with their senator — which is lucky for him, as he’s up for reelection in 2026.
The new Nissan Leaf is joining a whole crop of new electric cars in the $30,000 range.
Here is an odd sentence to write in the year 2025: One of the most interesting electric vehicles on the horizon is the Nissan Leaf.
The Japanese automaker last week revealed new images and specs of the redesign it had teased a few months ago. The new Leaf, which will arrive in 2026, is a small crossover that’s sleeker than, say, a Tesla Model Y, but more spacious than the previous hatchback versions of the car. Nissan promises it will have a max range above 300 miles, while industry experts expect the company to target a starting price not too far above $30,000.
The updated Leaf won’t be one of those EVs that smokes a gas-powered sports car in a drag race, not with the 214 horsepower from that debut version and certainly not with the 174 horsepower from the cheaper version that will arrive later on. Its 150-kilowatt max charging speed lags far behind the blazing fast 350-kilowatt charging capability Hyundai is building into its Ioniq electric vehicles. But because it lacks some of these refinements, the new Nissan may arrive as one of the most compelling of the “affordable” EVs that are, finally, coming to drivers.
Not bad for a car that had become an electric afterthought.
The original Nissan Leaf was a revelation merely for its existence. Never mind that it was a lumpy potato derived from the uninspired Nissan Versa — here was the first mass-market electric car, heralding the age of the EV and welcomed with plenty of “car of the year” laurels at the dawn of the 2010s. Its luster would not last, however, as the arrival of the Tesla Model S a couple of years later stole the world’s attention. The second-generation Leaf that arrived in 2017 was an aesthetic and technological leap forward from its predecessor, with a range that topped 200 miles in its most advanced form. It was, for the time, a pretty good EV. Almost immediately, it was overshadowed by the introduction of Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y, which catapulted Elon Musk’s company into complete dominance of the global EV market.
It took nearly a decade for Nissan (which fell into corporate mismanagement and outright crisis in the meantime) to update the stale and outdated Leaf. As a result, you might think the new version of the OG EV will arrive just in time to be outshone again. Yet the peculiar nature of the evolving electric car market has created an opportunity for the Leaf to finally grow and thrive.
There was a time when the mythical affordable Tesla could have taken the brand into the entry-level car market, and perhaps below the magic starting price of $30,000. But that has turned out to be a distraction dangled in front of fanboys and investors. In reality, Musk effectively killed the idea as he instead rolled out the Cybertruck and pivoted the company toward the dream of total vehicle autonomy.
Thanks to Tesla’s refusal to act like a normal car company, the affordable EV market is still there for the taking. Some are already in the game: Hyundai’s little Kona Electric starts at $33,000, and I’ve lauded Chevrolet for building a base version of the Equinox EV that starts around $35,000. In the next year or so, an influx of EVs in the $30,000 to $35,000 range might really change the game for electric-curious buyers.
The new Leaf is suddenly a big part of that mix. No, it won’t compete on price with a comparable combustion Nissan like the Kicks crossover that starts in the low $20,000s (not without the $7,500 tax credit, which would have made the new crop of affordable EVs directly cost-competitive with entry-level gas cars). The Leaf is likely to start just above $30,000, with the price creeping higher for buyers who opt for better performance or more range (and as I’ve noted numerous times, you ought to buy all the range you can afford if an EV is going to be your main car).
Arriving next year to compete with the Leaf is the new Chevy Bolt, another revival of an early EV icon. Experts expect a similar price range there. The anticipated Kia EV3 should come to America eventually with a starting cost around $35,000. The Jeff Bezos-backed Slate electric truck shocked the world with its promise of a bare-bones EV in the $20,000s — but, by the time the average buyer adds enough amenities to make it liveable, most Slate trucks will probably top $30,000.
Elon Musk may have abdicated his role as the Leaf’s antagonist via his refusal to build an affordable car, but erstwhile ally Donald Trump is poised to assume the role. Since the Leaf is slated to be built in Japan, the EV would be subject to whatever tariffs might be in place by the time it goes on sale next year. A 25% tariff, plus the federal government’s flip to punishing EVs with penalties instead of rewarding them with incentives, would kill the car’s value proposition in the U.S. Perhaps, then, it will become the next great affordable EV — for everybody else.