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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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Current conditions: Yosemite could get 9 inches of snow between now and Sunday • Temperatures will rise to as high as 104 degrees Fahrenheit in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, as Central and Southeast Asia continue to bake in a heatwave • Hail, tornadoes, and severe thunderstorms will pummel the U.S. Heartland into early next week.
It was a busy week of earnings calls for the clean energy sector, which, as a whole, saw investment dip by nearly $8 billion in the first three months of the year. Tariffs — especially as they impact the battery supply chain — as well as changes to federal policy under the new administration and electricity demand were the major themes of the week, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote.
Like companies across many different sectors, inverter and battery maker Enphase, turbine manufacturer GE Vernova, Tesla, and the utility NextEra all mentioned the tariffs in their earnings reports and calls. Enphase, for one, is bracing for as much as 8% knocked off its gross margin by the third quarter, while Tesla’s highly-anticipated call managed expectations for the rest of the year, with the company citing the difficulty measuring “the impacts of global trade policy on the automotive and energy supply chains, our cost structure, and demand for durable goods and related services.” Meanwhile, on Thursday, Xcel Energy — which recently reached settlements for its role in the ignition of the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history and the largest wildfire in Texas history — reported missing first-quarter estimates and feeling the squeeze of high interest rates at a time of soaring, data-center-driven electricity demand.
The Department of Justice’s lawyers warned the Department of Transportation that its case against New York City’s congestion pricing program is likely a loser. We know this because someone mistakenly uploaded the DOJ’s memo into the court record for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s lawsuit challenging Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s actions. Whoops.
As my colleague Emily Pontecorvo reports, the leaked memo was dated before Duffy announced “he would put a moratorium on any new federal approvals for transit projects in Manhattan until the state shut down the tolling program.” But as Emily goes on to say, the memo “warns that continuing down this route could open up both the department and Duffy personally to further probes.” The New York Times adds that the DOT has since replaced the DOJ lawyers who authored the memo and plans to transfer the case to the civil division of the Justice Department in Washington.
More than 100 new cars and vehicles are expected to debut at the 2025 Shanghai Auto Show, which began on Wednesday and runs through next Friday. Of the approximately 1,300 total vehicles on display, 70% are new energy vehicles, according to Gu Chunting, the vice chairman of the Council for the Promotion of International Trade Shanghai, one of the event’s organizers.
The show is already off to an exciting start. Volkswagen is showcasing 50 new models, including three electrified concept vehicles specifically targeted at the Chinese market: the ID. Aura sedan, the ID. Evo SUV, and ID. Era three-row SUV, a hybrid with over 621 miles of range. BYD’s Denza line also premiered its Z, a luxury electric vehicle designed to compete with Tesla and Porsche. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but most people will find the Denza Z to be drop dead gorgeous,” Clean Technica raved.
That’s not all. The Faw Group, a Chinese state-owned car manufacturer, showed off a flying vehicle with a range of 124 miles, while fellow Chinese automaker Changan Automobile announced an autonomous flying car that reportedly already has government approval to transport passengers, per IoT World Today. France’s Le Monde was wowed by China’s innovations all around: “Gone are the days when the vast exhibition space had one hall dedicated to foreign brands and another for Chinese ones. Today, each Chinese group occupies a hall, showcasing domestic brands and leaving only some space for foreigners around the edges.”
Volkswagen
In a private ceremony Thursday night, President Trump signed an executive order to “unleash” deep-sea mining. The order — which directs the secretaries of Interior and Commerce to accelerate “the process of renewing and issuing seabed mineral exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits” for the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf and “areas beyond national jurisdiction”— is an attempt to offset China’s dominance of the critical minerals supply chain. Deep-sea mining operations harvest “nodules” that take millions of years to form and contain minerals like nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese necessary for lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, among other applications. “For too long, we’ve been over reliant on foreign sources, and today this historic announcement marks a big step in the right direction to onshore these resources that are critical to national homeland security,” a senior administration official told reporters on Thursday, as reported by CNN.
Deep-sea mining is controversial due to how little we know about the ocean’s abyss, including the potential impact of large-scale mining operations on marine biodiversity and carbon sequestration. The United States has largely abstained from the deliberations of the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority, which determines whether and how to mine the seabed for critical minerals. The industrial mining of international waters, as cued up by Trump’s executive order, is opposed by “nearly all other nations,” The New York Times writes, and is “likely to provoke an outcry from America’s rivals and allies alike.”
It has already been a tragic year for wildfires, with more than 57,000 acres of Los Angeles and the surrounding hillsides burned in January. Now, AccuWeather is predicting that fires in the U.S. could “rapidly escalate” and burn up to 9 million acres total this year, well above the historic average of 7 million acres and close to the 8.9 million acres that burned in 2024.
Specifically, AccuWeather predicts an extreme fire season in the Northwest, northern Rockies, Southwest, and South Central states, particularly as late summer and fall approach. “There was plenty of rain and snow across Northern California this winter. All of that moisture has supported a lot of lush vegetation growth this spring,” AccuWeather’s lead long-range expert, Paul Pastelok, said. “That grass and brush will dry out and become potential fuel for wildfires this fall,” when any “trigger mechanism … could cause big wildfire problems.”
AccuWeather
Slate Auto, a three-year-old Jeff Bezos-backed startup, has announced an EV truck that will cost less than $20,000 after the federal tax credit and before customization. “It’s the Burger King of trucks,” writes Car and Driver, because “it’s affordable” and “lets customers ‘have it their way’ with a lengthy accessory list, including one that turns this pickup into an SUV.”
Three weeks after “Liberation Day,” Matador Resources says it’s adjusting its ambitions for the year.
America’s oil and gas industry is beginning to pull back on investments in the face of tariffs and immense oil price instability — or at least one oil and gas company is.
While oil and gas executives have been grousing about low prices and inconsistent policy to any reporter (or Federal Reserve Bank) who will listen, there’s been little actual data about how the industry is thinking about what investments to make or not make. That changed on Wednesday when the shale driller Matador Resources reported its first quarter earnings. The company said that it would drop one rig from its fleet of nine, cutting $100 million of capital costs.
“In response to recent commodity price volatility, Matador has decided to adjust its drilling and completion activity for 2025 to provide for more optionality,” the company said in its earnings release.
In February, Matador was projecting that its capital expenditures in 2025 would be between $1.4 and $1.65 billion.This week, it lowered that outlook to $1.3 to $1.55 billion. “We’re very open to and want to have reason to grow again,” Matador’s chief executive Joseph Foran said on the company’s earnings call Thursday. “This is primarily a timing matter. Is this a temporary thing on oil prices? Or is this a new world we live in?”
Mizuho Securities analyst William Janela wrote in a note to clients Thursday morning that, as the first oil exploration and production company to report its earnings this go-round, Matador would be “somewhat of a litmus test for the sector: we don't believe the market was expecting E&Ps to announce activity reductions this soon, but MTDR's update could signal more cuts to come from peers over the next few weeks.”
West Texas Intermediate crude oil prices are currently sitting at just below $63, up from around $60 in the wake of President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements. While the current price is off its lows, it’s still well short of the almost $84 a barrel crude prices were at around this time last year.
The price decline could be attributable to any number of factors — macroeconomic uncertainty due to the trade war, production hikes by foreign producers — but whatever the cause, it has made an awkward situation for the Trump administration’s energy strategy.
The iShares U.S. Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF, which tracks the American oil and gas exploration industry, is down 9% for the year and more than 13% since “Liberation Day,” while the rest of the market has almost recovered as the Trump administration has indicated it may ease up on some of his more drastic tariff policies.
If other drillers follow Matador’s investment slowdown, it could imperil Trump’s broader energy policy goals.
Trump has both encouraged other countries to produce more oil (and bragged about lower oil prices) while also exhorting American drillers to “drill, baby, drill,”with enticements ranging from kneecapping emissions standards to a reduced regulatory burden.
As Heatmap has written, these goals sit in conflict with each other. Energy executives told the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas that they need oil prices ranging from $61 to $70 a barrelin order to profitably drill new wells. If prices fall further, “what would happen is ‘Delay, baby, delay,’”Wood Mackenzie analyst Fraser McKay wrote Wednesday. “We now expect global upstream development spend to fall year-on-year for the first time since 2020.”
A $65 per barrel price “dents” margins for drillers, meaning “growth capex and discretionary spend will be delayed,” McKay wrote.
Matador also announced that it had authorized $400 million worth of buybacks, and itsstock price rose some 4% on the earnings announcement, indicating that Wall Street will reward drillers who pull back on drilling and ramp up shareholder payouts.
“We’ve got the tools in the toolbox, including the share repurchase, to make Matador more value quarter by quarter,” Foran said. Rather than “blindly” pouring capital into growth, Matador would aim for a “measured pace,” he explained. “And if you mean what you say about a measured pace, that means when prices get a little lower, you take a few more moments to think about what you’re doing and don’t rush into things.”
At San Francisco Climate Week, everything is normal — until it very much isn’t.
San Francisco Climate Week started off on Monday with an existential bang. Addressing an invite-only crowd at the Exploratorium, a science museum on the city’s waterfront, former vice president and long-time climate advocate Al Gore put the significance and threat of this political moment — and what it means for the climate — in the most extreme terms possible. That is to say, he compared the current administration under President Trump to Nazi Germany.
“I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil,” Gore conceded before going on: “But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil.” Just as German philosophers in the aftermath of World War II found that the Nazis “attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false,” Gore said, so too is Trump’s administration “trying to create their own preferred version of reality,” in which we can keep burning fossil fuels forever. With his voice rising and gestures increasing in vigor, Gore ended his speech on a crescendo. “We have to protect our future. And if you doubt for one moment, ever, that we as human beings have that capacity to muster sufficient political will to solve this crisis, just remember that political will is itself a renewable resource.”
The crowd went wild. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took the stage and reminded the crowd that Gore has been telling us this for decades — maybe it’s time we listen. But I missed all that. Because just a few miles away, things were getting a little more in the weeds at the somewhat less exclusive venture capital-led panel entitled “The Economics of Climate Tech: Building Resilient, Scalable, and Sustainable Startups.” Here, I learned about a new iron-sodium battery chemistry and innovations in transformers for data centers, microgrids, and EV charging infrastructure.
I heard Tom Chi, founding partner of At One Ventures, utter sentences such as “parity dies because of capex inertia,” referring to the need to make clean tech not only equivalent to but cheaper than fossil-fuels on a unit economics basis. Such is the duality of climate week during the Trump administration — occasionally lofty in both its alarm and its excitement, but more often than not simply business-as-usual, interrupted by bouts of heady doom or motivational proclamations.
Some panels, like the one I moderated on the future of weather forecasting using artificial intelligence, made it a full hour without discussing Trump, tariffs, or tax credits at all. So far, that’s held true for a number of talks on how AI can be a boon to climate tech. It makes sense — the administration is excited about AI, and there’s really no indication that Trump has given any thought to either the positive or negative climate externalities of it.
But rapid data center buildout and the attendant renewables boom that it may (or may not) bring will certainly be influenced by the administration’s fluctuating policies, an issue that was briefly discussed during another panel: “AI x Energy: Gridlocked or Grid Unlocked?” Here, representatives from Softbank, Pacific Gas & Electric, and the data center builder and operator Switch touched on how market uncertainty is making it difficult to procure energy for data centers — and to figure out the cost of building a data center, period.
“There is a lot of refiguring and rereading contracts and looking at the potential exposure to things like the escalation in the cost of steel for construction projects,” Skyler Holloway of Switch said. Pinning down a price on the energy required to power data centers is also a bottleneck, Gillian Clegg, vice president of energy policy and procurement at PG&E explained. “For projects that want to connect between now and 2030, any kind of uncertainty or delay means that the generation doesn't get to the market,” Clegg said. “Maybe the load gets there first, and you have an out of balance situation.”
Everyone acknowledges that uncertainty is bad for business, and that delays related to funding, contracts, and construction can kill otherwise viable companies. But unsurprisingly, nobody here has admitted that said uncertainty might put them out of business, or even deeply in the red.Every panel I attend, I find myself wondering whether a founder or investor is finally going to raise their voice, à la Al Gore, and tell the audience that while their company’s business model is well and good, the Trump administration’s illogical antipathy towards green-coded tech and ill-conceived trade war is throwing the underlying logic — sound as it may have been just a year ago — into disarray.
None of the seven energy, food, and agricultural startups that presented at the nonprofit climate investor Elemental Impact’s main show, for instance, discussed the impacts of the administration’s policies on their businesses. Rather, they maintained a consistently upbeat tone as they described the promise of their concepts — which ranged from harnessing ocean energy to developing plant-based fertilizers to using robotics for electronics recycling — and the momentum building behind them. Nuclear and geothermal companies, seemingly poised to be the clean tech winners of Chris Wright’s Department of Energy, have been especially optimistic this week.
But really, what else can climate tech companies and investors be expected to do right now besides, well, rise and grind? It’s not like anybody has answers as to what’s coming down the policy pike. In a number of more casual conversations this week, a common sentiment I heard was that it’s not necessarily a bad time to be an early-stage startup — keep your head down, focus on research and prototyping, and reassess the political environment when you’re ready to build a pilot or demonstration plant. As for later-stage companies and venture capital firms, they’re likely working to ensure that their business models and portfolios really aren’t dependent on government subsidies, grants, or policies — as they keep assuring me is the case.
Even that might not be enough these days though. Chi said he’s always tailored his investments with At One Ventures towards companies that are viable based on unit economics alone, no subsidies and no green premium. So he wasn’t initially worried about his portfolio when Trump was elected. “None of our business models were invalidated by the election,” he said. “The only way that we could be in trouble is if they mess it up so bad that it ruins all of business, not just climate …”
Oops.
If there’s one dictum that I would expect to hold, though, it’s that the startups that make it through this period will likely be around for the long haul. I’ve been hearing that sentiment since the election, and Mona ElNagger, a partner at Valo Ventures, echoed it once again this week. “Microsoft and Apple were founded in the mid 1970s, which was a time of severe recession and stagflation. Amazon started at the tail end of a big recession in the early 1990s,” ElNagger reminded the audience at the Economics of Climate Tech panel, which she moderated. “Companies that survive and actually thrive in such periods share a common thread of resilience.”
As that panel wrapped up, things got existential once more as Chi’s talk moved from describing his investment thesis to the moment at large. “This time period in history is going to bring us tragedy after tragedy, and it’s really that moment that we’re going to understand the deep underlying structure of half of the world that we’ve built, and also the character of who we are,” Chi told the audience. It was unclear whether we were even talking about climate tech anymore. Chi continued, “It’s in that time period that we are going to step up and become whatever we are meant to be or not at all.”
The crowd sat there, a little stunned. Were we, in this very moment, becoming who we were meant to be? I took a bite of my free sushi as the networking and hobnobbing began.