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Which might make one wonder: Why is Subaru not the Subaru of EVs?
When the Rivian R3 rolled onto the stage in Orange County, car fans saw a flicker of the past. The truncated EV reminded automotive Twitter and Threads of throwback off-road hatchbacks with unusual shapes — the Lancia Delta, AMC Gremlin, Lada Niva, and even the maligned Yugo. It reminded me, in spirit more than silhouette, of the Subaru Outback from a quarter-century ago.
Remember the old Outback? Before it blew up and became just another crossover in a sea of indistinguishable cars, the Outback was a two-tone granola wagon with lesbian cred and font stylings borrowed from Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was a cobbled-together quirky legend built for specific tribes, particularly those who wanted to traverse the craggy roads and highways of America’s backcountry. Its sluggish acceleration couldn’t compare with a futuristic torque monster like the R3 will be, yet it inspired a cult following among the road atlas generation of adventurers that Rivian hopes to duplicate in the age of massive touchscreens.
Even as its cars became more generic and ordinary in the 21st century, Subie kept its marketing efforts aimed at the outdoorsy, dog-loving folks who had become loyal to the brand. However, while its fans are the kind of people with a clear, vested interest in addressing climate change, the world’s “we love the parks” car company has dragged its toes on joining the electric vehicle revolution that hopes to slash the car industry’s carbon emissions. Subaru’s electric aversion left a giant hole in the market for an adventure EV, one that Rivian seeks to fill.
We’ve been hard on Toyota for coasting on the sustainability reputation of the Prius. The world’s largest automaker has been content to tout its “electrified” lineup of mostly hybrids and plug-in hybrids, waiting for EV technology and infrastructure to mature before it jumps in. Subaru, for all its exercises in Earth mother branding, has done the same.
To its credit, Subie made most of its cars follow “partial zero emissions” standards reflected by the PZEV badge you see on the back of a modern Forester. This means the engine burns normal gasoline, but is built with characteristics that reduce smog-forming air pollutants. PZEV tech does nothing to reduce a car’s greenhouse emissions, but it’s about the best a non-hybrid, plain-old combustion car can do.
But Subaru never bothered to build even a Prius-esque MPG-maximizer. And it has been even more reluctant than its partner, Toyota, to join the battery revolution. Subaru’s only entry, the now-canceled plug-in hybrid variant of the Crosstrek, posted a paltry 17 miles of electric range before reverting to gas. According to Green Car Reports, the hybrid Crosstrek was effectively a “compliance car” — something automakers build to satisfy stringent regulations like the state of California’s, not because they believe in the vehicle.
The Crosstrek PHEV can die because Subaru finally has an EV: the Solterra, built on the tech platform Subaru developed in cahoots with Toyota. It is the same car as Toyota’s debut EV, the bZ4x, but with Subaru badges. The Solterra’s angular looks surely will appeal to somebody, and the car will satisfy superfans’ desire for any fully electric Subaru. But the Solterra is an uninspired crossover with a 228-mile range that can’t compare with the current state of the art. It certainly hasn’t generated the reaction of the R3.
For those willing to ignore the climate crisis, the naked business case for ignoring zero-emission technology in the present is clear. Even as the EV age bubbles up around them, the least-electric car brands are selling lots and lots of cars. Americans bought more than 15 million vehicles in 2023, and 632,000 of them were Subarus, a 14% increase from the year before. Subaru didn’t lose money on EVs like Ford has as it tries to establish its battery business. With EVs now stuck between early adopters and the mainstream, it’s possible to make the case that the holdouts are cynical, but smart.
It’s also not easy to build an electric car that does what a Subaru is supposed to do. I’ve driven across the empty expanses of the American West in a two-wheel-drive Tesla Model 3 that started its life with an EPA-rated 240 miles per charge. It was challenging. Subzero temperatures at Bryce Canyon punished the battery. The craggy, icy road into Canyonlands National Park pushed the iffy ground clearance to its limit. The range was barely enough for us to tempt fate by leaving the interstate and crossing the rugged interior of Utah, a decision that saw me end up borrowing — you guessed it — a friendly stranger’s old Subaru Outback while my Tesla charged.
You’d want an small electric vehicle built for adventure to ride taller and go farther. Well, they built one. It’s a Rivian. The rally car-inspired R3 promises to pair fat tires and promising ground clearance with outdoorsy-minded details such as fold-flat seats, a movie-projecting rooftop tent, and a rear-mounted cargo box. The new Rivians should come with at least 300 miles of range, which ought to be enough to reach most far-flung locales as the map of fast-charging stations continues to fill in.
This isn’t to say Subie doomed itself by dithering. For all the excitement over Rivian’s new offerings, the R2 remains at least two years away from realization, and the little R3 even longer. Besides, Rivian’s biggest obstacle isn’t Subaru, but survival. The startup burns through billions of dollars each year and needs to persist on sales of its large, expensive R1 SUVs and trucks until the mass-market models go on sale.
In the meantime, Subaru could trot out a battery-powered Crosstrek and sell a bunch of them to people who’ve been buying fossil fuel Subies for decades. That looks like the plan: The brand now says it will launch a quartet of EV crossovers (possibly the current Crosstrek-Outback-Forester-Ascent lineup, but electric) by 2026, just in time to compete with the R2 and R3, and build 400,000 EVs per year by 2028.
Yet something has been lost. Every time Subaru trots out a new gas-burning vehicle on a stage meant to mimic the high desert or advertises its corporate contributions to the National Park system, it tries to reinforce its status as the car for the Earth-conscious. Stalling on EVs may have been the easy business decision, but the brand has given away excitement that it could have owned, if only they’d trotted out an EV with the spirit of that quirky old Outback.
Or do an Impreza hot hatch EV. As the response to the R3 demonstrated, we’re ready.
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From Kansas to Brooklyn, the fire is turning battery skeptics into outright opponents.
The symbol of the American battery backlash can be found in the tiny town of Halstead, Kansas.
Angry residents protesting a large storage project proposed by Boston developer Concurrent LLC have begun brandishing flashy yard signs picturing the Moss Landing battery plant blaze, all while freaking out local officials with their intensity. The modern storage project bears little if any resemblance to the Moss Landing facility, which uses older technology,, but that hasn’t calmed down anxious locals or stopped news stations from replaying footage of the blaze in their coverage of the conflict.
The city of Halstead, under pressure from these locals, is now developing a battery storage zoning ordinance – and explicitly saying this will not mean a project “has been formally approved or can be built in the city.” The backlash is now so intense that Halstead’s mayor Dennis Travis has taken to fighting back against criticism on Facebook, writing in a series of posts about individuals in his community “trying to rule by MOB mentality, pushing out false information and intimidating” volunteers working for the city. “I’m exercising MY First Amendment Right and well, if you don’t like it you can kiss my grits,” he wrote. Other posts shared information on the financial benefits of building battery storage and facts to dispel worries about battery fires. “You might want to close your eyes and wish this technology away but that is not going to happen,” another post declared. “Isn’t it better to be able to regulate it in our community?”
What’s happening in Halstead is a sign of a slow-spreading public relations wildfire that’s nudging communities that were already skeptical of battery storage over the edge into outright opposition. We’re not seeing any evidence that communities are transforming from supportive to hostile – but we are seeing new areas that were predisposed to dislike battery storage grow more aggressive and aghast at the idea of new projects.
Heatmap Pro data actually tells the story quite neatly: Halstead is located in Harvey County, a high risk area for developers that already has a restrictive ordinance banning all large-scale solar and wind development. There’s nothing about battery storage on the books yet, but our own opinion poll modeling shows that individuals in this county are more likely to oppose battery storage than renewable energy.
We’re seeing this phenomenon play out elsewhere as well. Take Fannin County, Texas, where residents have begun brandishing the example of Moss Landing to rail against an Engie battery storage project, and our modeling similarly shows an intense hostility to battery projects. The same can be said about Brooklyn, New York, where anti-battery concerns are far higher in our polling forecasts – and opposition to battery storage on the ground is gaining steam.
And more on the week’s conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Carbon County, Wyoming – I have learned that the Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project.
2. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – Anti-offshore wind advocates are pushing the Trump administration to rescind air permits issued to Avangrid for New England Wind 1 and 2, the same approval that was ripped away from Atlantic Shores offshore wind farm last Friday.
3. Campbell County, Virginia – The HEP Solar utility-scale project in rural Virginia is being accused of creating a damaging amount of runoff, turning a nearby lake into a “mud pit.” (To see the story making the rounds on anti-renewables social media, watch this TV news segment.)
4. Marrow County, Ohio – A solar farm in Ohio got approvals for once! Congratulations to ESA Solar on this rare 23-acre conquest.
5. Madison County, Indiana – The Indiana Supreme Court has rejected an effort by Invenergy to void a restrictive county ordinance.
6. Davidson County, North Carolina – A fraught conflict is playing out over a Cypress Creek Renewables solar project in the town of Denton, which passed a solar moratorium that contradicts approval for the project issued by county officials in 2022.
7. Knox County, Nebraska – A federal judge has dismissed key aspects of a legal challenge North Fork Wind, a subsidiary of National Grid Renewables, filed against the county for enacting a restrictive wind ordinance that hinders development of their project.
8. Livingston Parish, Louisiana – This parish is extending a moratorium on new solar farm approvals for at least another year, claiming such action is necessary to comply with a request from the state.
9. Jefferson County, Texas – The city council in the heavily industrial city of Port Arthur, Texas, has approved a lease for constructing wind turbines in a lake.
10. Linn County, Oregon – What is supposed to be this county’s first large-scale solar farm is starting to face pushback over impacts to a wetlands area.Today’s sit-down is with Nikhil Kumar, a program director at GridLab and an expert in battery storage safety and regulation. Kumar’s folks reached out to me after learning I was writing about Moss Landing and wanted to give his honest and open perspective on how the disaster is impacting the future of storage development in the U.S. Let’s dive in!
The following is an abridged and edited version of our conversation.
So okay – walk me through your perspective on what happened with Moss Landing.
When this incident occurred, I’d already been to Moss Landing plenty of times. It caught me by surprise in the sense that it had reoccurred – the site had issues in the past.
A bit of context about my background – I joined GridLab relatively recently, but before that I spent 20 years in this industry, often working on the integrity and quality assurance of energy assets, anything from a natural gas power plant to nuclear to battery to a solar plant. I’m very familiar with safety regulation and standards for the energy industry, writ large.
Help me understand how things have improved since Moss Landing. Why is this facility considered by some to be an exception to the rule?
It’s definitely an outlier. Batteries are very modular by nature, you don’t need a lot of overall facility to put battery storage on the ground. From a construction standpoint, a wind or solar farm or even a gas plant is more complex to put together. But battery storage, that simplicity is a good thing.
That’s not the case with Moss Landing. If you look at the overall design of these sites, having battery packs in a building with a big hall is rare.
Pretty much every battery that’s been installed in the last two or three years, industry has already known about this [risk]. When the first [battery] fire occurred, they basically containerized everything – you want to containerize everything so you don’t have these thermal runaway events, where the entire battery batch catches fire. If you look at the record, in the last two or three years, I do not believe a single such design was implemented by anybody. People have learned from that experience already.
Are we seeing industry have to reckon with this anyway? I can’t help but wonder if you’ve witnessed these community fears. It does seem like when a fire happens, it creates problems for developers in other parts of the country. Are developers reckoning with a conflation from this event itself?
I think so. Developers that we’ve talked to are very well aware of reputational risk. They do not want people to have general concern with this technology because, if you look at how much battery is waiting to be connected to the grid, that’s pretty much it. There’s 12 times more capacity of batteries waiting to be connected to the grid than gas. That’s 12X.
We should wait for the city and I would really expect [Vistra] to release the root cause investigation of this fire. Experts have raised a number of these potential root causes. But we don’t know – was it the fire suppression system that failed? Was it something with the batteries?
We don’t know. I would hope that the details come out in a transparent way, so industry can make those changes, in terms of designs.
Is there anything in terms of national regulation governing this sector’s performance standards and safety standards, and do you think something like that should exist?
It should exist and it is happening. The NFPA [National Fire Prevention Association] is putting stuff out there. There might be some leaders in the way California’s introduced some new regulation to make sure there’s better documentation, safety preparedness.
There should be better regulation. There should be better rules. I don’t think developers are even against that.
OK, so NFPA. But what about the Trump administration? Should they get involved here?
I don’t think so. The OSHA standards apply to people who work on site — the regulatory frameworks are already there. I don’t think they need some special safety standard that’s new that applies to all these sites. The ingredients are already there.
It’s like coal power plants. There’s regulation on greenhouse gas emissions, but not all aspects of coal plants. I’m not sure if the Trump administration needs to get involved.
It sounds like you're saying the existing regulations are suitable in your view and what’s needed is for states and industry to step up?
I would think so. Just to give you an example, from an interconnection standpoint, there’s IEEE standards. From the battery level, there are UL standards. From the battery management system that also manages a lot of the ins and outs of how the battery operates —- a lot of those already have standards. To get insurance on a large battery site, they have to meet a lot of these guidelines already — nobody would insure a site otherwise. There’s a lot of financial risk. You don’t want batteries exploding because you didn’t meet any of these hundreds of guidelines that already exist and in many cases standards that exist.
So, I don’t know if something at the federal level changes anything.
My last question is, if you were giving advice to a developer, what would you say to them about making communities best aware of these tech advancements?
Before that, I am really hoping Vistra and all the agencies involved [with Moss Landing] have a transparent and accountable process of revealing what actually happened at this site. I think that’s really important.