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For better or for worse, Americans will soon get to drive a fortress without having to worry about the price of gasoline.
The debut of the Tesla Cybertruck in November 2019 was less a car show-and-tell and more a screaming, all-caps metaphor. The meme-able moment when Tesla design chief Franz von Holzhausen flung a metal orb at the war rig’s windows, shattering the shatterproof glass, felt like an open invitation to belittle the hubris of it all.
That’s exactly what happened. Gleeful tweets ridiculed the Cybertruck’s stainless steel body, awkward proportions, and poorly rendered pointy shape. Some mocked the steel monstrosity for being useless for the things trucks are supposed to do — actual work and off-road driving — or for having the kind of glaring build quality problems that have always plagued Tesla.
Four years after its botched reveal, and two years after it was originally supposed to go on sale, Cybertruck finally has an official launch date of November 30. Unusually, Elon Musk has tempered expectations for the oft-delayed vehicle, saying Tesla “dug its own grave” with its goals for the Cybertruck. And as delivery day approaches, the truck is still ridiculed online by those who see either a billionaire’s man-boy obsession or the EV equivalent of Homer Simpson’s car of the future: too adolescent, too ridiculous, too Pontiac Aztek-y to succeed.
They are probably wrong. Make no mistake, the Cybertruck is a stupid vehicle. But that doesn’t mean it’s a stupid idea.
Back in 2019, before Musk showcased his polarizing idea of a pickup truck, many enthusiasts envisioned something more mundane. Imagined renderings of the Tesla truck pictured a traditional pickup silhouette with just enough future-feeling design cues. In other words, something a lot more like the Rivian R1T. When Musk instead revealed the demon love child of a tank and a DeLorean, the natural question became, Why?
One answer is beginning to become clear: the market for an EV that looks like a typical pickup truck isn’t as vibrant as many have thought.
Now that the legacy automakers have gotten serious about electrification, that category is filling up. Rivian’s and the Ford-150 Lightning are now available. Ubiquitous trucks like the Chevy Silverado and Ram 1500 have EV versions en route. It’s easy to see why. Given America’s overwhelming preference for big crossovers and pickup trucks, the car companies assumed they could replicate the same dynamic with EVs. But, as Heatmap has reported, something is rotten in the state of electric trucks. New research has shown that startlingly few pickup owners, around 10 percent, say they’re interested in buying an EV truck. While truck-loving Americans will have a variety of electrified choices to pick from, they may not want any of them.
There are plenty of possible reasons. EV trucks are expensive, though, to be fair, Americans have shown they’re willing to pay a huge sticker price for luxury-laden trucks. Limited range could be to blame, especially since range takes an extra hit when a pickup truck is towing. There’s also the fact that pickups are especially popular where prevailing political opinion isn’t particularly friendly to EVs.
Tesla, meanwhile, is playing a different game. The Cybertruck may have a bed in the back and “truck” in its name, but Musk’s steel beast hardly resembles the familiar pickup shape. Aesthetically, it’s closer to the militaristic look of the GMC Hummer EV — except the Cybertuck is likely to cost around half as much.
It’s also entirely possible that, for all the derision from certain corners of the internet, the Cybertruck has a wide base of interested buyers, and that the Venn diagram of Cybertruck shoppers and other EV truck shoppers doesn’t include all that much overlap.
There are Musk fanboys, of course. There are those for whom the angular, aggro posture is a feature, not a bug, and who would love to terrorize the streets of America in stainless steel. Drivers whose primary desire is that their vehicle feel “rugged” or “powerful” will take a long look at Cybertruck, as will those whose sole reason for living is to troll and antagonize the kind of people who think Elon Musk is a fool.
Others will buy the seemingly impractical vehicle for utterly pragmatic reasons, like feeling their family is safe and protected on streets increasingly crowded with other monster trucks. This feeling, along with a preference for riding high rather than sitting low in a car, helped to buoy the SUV craze of the 1990s when American families began to choose big rolling boxes over traditional cars. The Hummer H2, the original fortress on wheels, sold more than 29,000 vehicles per year between 2003 and 2005. Its slightly lighter cousin, the H3, sold even more up until 2007 — when both Hummers were crushed by rising gas prices that more than doubled from 2003 to 2008. With the Cybertruck, Americans can get what they always wanted: the chance to drive a moving castle without having to worry about the price of gasoline.
Cybertruck’s size also allows for large batteries. Originally, Musk teased double- and triple-motor tiers that would give Cybertruck 400 or 500 miles of driving range, a leap forward from what’s commonly available now. That could entice some EV buyers who prize range above all else. My wife — having lived with a Model 3 that started with 240 miles — even said, what the hell, she’d consider one if Elon really did deliver 400 miles of range for a reasonable price (early reports suggest it’ll debut with 350).
As for the Cybertruck’s faults? Manufacturing inconsistencies certainly haven’t stopped Tesla from selling cars. Experts notice design problems like the Cybertruck’s departure angle, which would impede any attempts to traverse rugged terrain. However, the open secret among car journalists is that many car buyers — probably most — don’t particularly care about body roll, panel gaps, or other issues that gnaw at reviewers. They notice whether a car looks cool, feels safe, and has enough space for all their kids’ stuff.
None of this is to excuse what the Cybertruck is. Exact specs are yet to be revealed, but the truck is sure to be big and heavy, making it an exemplar of the oversized EV problem. It would be better for the nation as a whole if EV buyers decide they want smaller, lighter cars that use less energy and are less of a threat to pedestrians and other, less armored cars.
But the basic fact of our era remains: If electric cars are going to be a big part of the climate solution by helping us reduce carbon emissions, then people have to buy them. That, for better or worse, means giving the public what they want. Even if it’s the Cybertruck.
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Since July 4, the federal government has escalated its assault on wind development to previously unimaginable heights.
The Trump administration is widening its efforts to restrict wind power, proposing new nationwide land use restrictions and laying what some say is the groundwork for targeting wind facilities under construction or even operation.
Since Trump re-entered the White House, his administration has halted wind energy leasing, stopped approving wind projects on federal land or in federal waters, and blocked wind developers from getting permits for interactions with protected birds, putting operators that harm a bald eagle or endangered hawk at risk of steep federal fines or jail time.
For the most part, however, projects either under construction or already operating have been spared. With a handful of exceptions — the Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, the Atlantic Shores development off the coast of New Jersey and the Empire Wind project in the New York Bight — most projects with advanced timelines appeared to be safe.
But that was then. In the past week, a series of Trump administration actions has presented fresh threats to wind developers seeking everyday sign-offs for things that have never before presented a potential problem. Renewables developers and their supporters say the rush of actions is intended to further curtail investment in wind after Congress earlier this summer drastically curtailed tax breaks for wind and solar.
“I don’t think they even care if it’ll stand judicial review,” Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center, told me. “It’s just going to chill anyone with limited capital from going to [an] agency.”
First up: The Transportation Department last Tuesday declared that it would now call for a national 1.2-mile property setback — that is, a mandatory distance requirement — for all wind facilities near railroads and highways.
When it announced the move, the DOT claimed it had “recently discovered” that the Biden administration had “overruled a safety recommendation for dozens of wind energy projects” related to radio frequencies near transportation corridors, suggesting the federal government would soon be stepping in to rectify the purported situation. To try and support this claim, the agency released a pair of Biden-era letters from a DOT spectrum policy office related to Prairie Heritage, a Pattern Energy wind project in Illinois, one recommending action due to radio issues and a subsequent analysis that no longer raised concerns.
Citing these, the DOT stated that political officials had overruled the concerns of safety experts and called on Congress to investigate. It also suggested that “33 projects have been uncovered where the original safety recommendation was rescinded.” DOT couldn’t be reached for comment in time for publication. Pattern Energy declined to comment.
Buried in this announcement was another reveal: DOT said that it would instruct the Federal Aviation Administration to “thoroughly evaluate proposed wind turbines to ensure they do not pose a danger to aviation” — a signal that a once-routine FAA height clearance required for almost every wind turbine could now become a hurdle for the entire sector.
At the same time, the Department of the Interior unveiled a twin set of secretarial orders that went beyond even its edict of just the week before, requiring that all permits for wind and solar go through high-level political screening.
First, also on Tuesday, the department released a mega-order claiming the Biden administration “chose to misapply” the law in approving offshore wind projects and calling on nearly every branch of the agency to review “any regulations, guidance, policies, and practices” related to a host of actions that occur before and after a project receives its final record of decision, including right-of-way authorizations, land use plan amendments and revisions, and environmental and wildlife permit and analyses. Among its many directives, the order instructed Interior staff to prepare a report on fully-approved offshore wind projects that may have impacts on “military readiness.” It also directed the agency’s top lawyer to review all “pending litigation” against a wind or solar project approval and identify cases where the agency could withdraw or rescind it.
Then came Friday. As I scooped for Heatmap, Interior will no longer permit a wind project on federal land if it would produce less energy per acre than a coal, gas, or nuclear facility at the same site. This happens to be a metric where wind typically performs worse than its more conventional counterparts; that being the case, this order could amount to a targeted and de facto ban on wind on federal property.
Taken in sum, it’s difficult not to read this series of orders as a message to the entire wind industry: Avoid the federal government at all costs, if you can help it.
What does the future of wind development look like in the U.S. if you have to work around the feds at every turn? “It’s a good question,” John Hensley, senior vice president for markets and policy analysis at the American Clean Power Association, told me this afternoon. The challenge is that “as we see more and more of these crop up, it becomes more and more difficult to move these projects forward — and, somewhat equally important, it becomes difficult to find the financing to develop these projects.”
“If the financing community is unwilling to take on that risk then the money dries up and these projects have a lower likelihood of happening,” Hensley said, adding: “We haven’t reached the threshold where all activity has ground to a stop, but it certainly has pushed companies to re-evaluate their portfolios and think about where they do have this regulatory risk, and it pushes the financing community to do the same. It’s just putting more barriers in place to move these projects forward.”
Anti-wind activists, meanwhile, see these orders as a map to the anti-renewables Holy Grail: forcibly decommissioning projects that are already in service.
On the same day as the mega-order, the coastal vacation town of Nantucket, Massachusetts, threatened legal action against Vineyard Wind, the offshore wind project that experienced a construction catastrophe during the middle of last year’s high tourist season, sending part of a turbine blade and shards of fiberglass into the waters just offshore. The facility is still partially under construction, but is already sending electrons to the grid. Less than 24 hours later, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative legal group tied to other lawsuits against offshore wind projects, filed a petition to the Interior Department requesting that it reconsider prior permits for Vineyard Wind and halt operations.
David Stevenson, a former Trump adviser who now works with the offshore wind opponent Caesar Rodney Institute, told me he thinks the Interior order laid out a pathway to reconsider approvals. “Many of us who have been plaintiffs in various lawsuits have suggested to the Secretary of the Interior that there are flaws, and the flaws are spelled out in the lawsuits to the permit process.”
Nick Krakoff, a senior attorney with the pro-climate action Conservation Law Foundation, had an identical view to Stevenson’s. “I’m certainly not aware of this ever being done before,” he told me, noting that the Biden administration paused new oil and gas leases but didn’t do a “systematic review” of a sector to find “ways to potentially undo prior permitting decisions.”
Democrats in Congress have finally started speaking up about this. Last week four Democrats — led by Martin Heinrich, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee — sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum arguing that the secretarial orders would delay any decision related to renewable energy in general, “no matter how routine.” A Democratic staffer on the committee, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the letter, told me privately that “fear is where this is headed.”
“They’re just building a record that will ultimately allow them to not approve future projects, and potentially deny projects that have already been approved,” the staffer said. ”They have all these new hoops they have to go through, and if they’re saying these things aren’t in the public interest, it’s not hard to see where they are going.”
The $7 billion program had been the only part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund not targeted for elimination by the Trump administration.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to cancel grants awarded from the $7 billion Solar for All program, the final surviving grants from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, by the end of this week, The New York Times is reporting. Two sources also told the same to Heatmap.
Solar for All awarded funds to 60 nonprofits, tribes, state energy offices, and municipalities to deliver the benefits of solar energy — namely, utility bill savings — to low-income communities. Some of the programs are focused on rooftop solar, while others are building community solar, which enable residents that don’t own their homes to access cheaper power.
The EPA is drafting termination letters to all 60 grantees, the Times reported. An EPA spokesperson equivocated in response to emailed questions from Heatmap about the fate of the program. “With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law,” the person said.
Although Solar for All was one of the programs affected by the Trump administration’s initial freeze on Inflation Reduction Act funding, EPA had resumed processing payments for recipients after a federal judge placed an injunction on the pause. But in mid-March, the EPA Office of the Inspector General announced its intent to audit Solar for All. The results of that audit have not yet been published.
The Solar for All grants are a subset of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, most of which had been designated to set up a series of green lending programs. In March, Administrator Lee Zeldin accused the program of fraud, waste, and abuse — the so-called “gold bar” scandal — and attempted to claw back all $20 billion. Recipients of that funding are fighting the termination in an ongoing court case.
State attorneys generals are likely to challenge the Solar for All terminations in court, should they go through, a source familiar with the state programs told me.
All $7 billion under the program has been obligated to grantees, but the money is not yet fully out the door, as recipients must request reimbursements from the EPA as they spend down their grants. Very little has been spent so far, as many grantees opted to use the first year of the five-year program as a planning period.
Without the federal tax credit and until battery prices come down, automakers will have to argue that pricey EVs are worth it.
America’s federal tax credit for buying an electric car was supposed to be the great equalizer, an incentive meant to solve for the fact that EVs have long been more expensive than the polluting fossil fuel vehicles they must replace.
That tax credit is now dead. Thanks to the Republican budget reconciliation bill pushed through Congress this summer, the incentive will die after September 30 of this year.
Its demise comes at a particularly inopportune time. For a long time, even a $7,500 benefit wasn’t enough to make many of the best electric cars cost-competitive with their gasoline-powered rivals. Slowly, that had begun to change: More EVs with a starting MSRP in the $30,000 range, such as the base-level Chevy Equinox EV, could compete directly on price with internal combustion once the tax credit (along with any state and local incentives) was taken into consideration.
Without the tax credit, most EVs can’t compete on price alone. Battery production costs are falling, but not fast enough for a new EV in America to cost the same as a comparable gas car. With electricity prices seemingly set to rise, the appeal of never again buying gasoline isn’t as strong. At the same time, the federal government has been trying to add new, nonsensical taxes on EV ownership. Cars.com says the tax credit was a major reason half of EV owners cited for choosing their vehicle, and that it’s driving the decision for about half of curious buyers.
Add it all up and a big group of American shoppers who might have considered buying an EV if the dollars and cents added up probably won’t, at least for now. The mess leaves electric vehicle makers in a precarious position. They must convince American drivers that EVs are simply superior — more capable, more dependable, and more fun. As longtime Rivian executive Jiten Behl told InsideEVs’ Patrick George last week: “Forget they’re electric for a moment. They’re just better cars. And a better product will always win.”
That argument is an existential one for Rivian, which Behl departed last year. Deliveries of its long-awaited R1S SUV started in 2022, and since then the vehicle has become a Range Rover-replacing status symbol in my part of Los Angeles. But after three years, most people with the means and desire to buy a $70,000 to $80,000 EV have done so, yet the company’s more affordable R2 and R3 vehicles remain at least a year away.
Rivian’s solution for the meantime is to push the limit of electric vehicle performance, dollars be damned. This summer, I’ve driven triple-motor Tri Max versions of both the R1S and the R1T pickup trucks. Zooming from a stop, its 800-plus horsepower and instantaneous torque is whiplash-inducing. Put in Conserve mode and the vehicles approach 400 miles of range, enough to obliterate range anxiety. There’s plenty of power for towing and off-roading, plus all the other functionalities that make EVs better than combustion cars: using the vehicle battery to power one’s home or other uses, Dog Mode, or tapping into battery power to pre-condition the cabin on a scorching or frigid day.
Gas vehicles have modes, of course. Over the past decade or two, drivers have gotten used to the way that “sport” or “eco” modes subtly change the character of a car. In a super-EV like the Rivian, having so much capability at your fingertip feels like the EV could become a totally different car at the push of a button. For the Tri Max models, this level of muscular competence costs north of $100,000. But such prowess speaks to someone out there. Rivian has been developing the more-ultimate-than-ultimate electric vehicle, a quad-motor version with horsepower in the four digits, for those in the “money is no object” tax bracket who’ve been convinced that electric is better (or at least that electric is the future, and they want to own it).
A more telling case will be next year’s arrival of the R2, a two-row electric SUV meant to cost in the neighborhood of $45,000. Without the tax credit, prospective buyers can’t tell themselves that it’s really in the $30,000s. On price, then, it’s competing with BMW SUVs, not Chevys.
This is nothing new for the EV market. Selling electrics as luxury cars with a high price tag helps to mask the cost of the battery, and it brings in more revenue for a startup company like Rivian that desperately needs it. Tesla sold a lot of cars this way even though its refinements, build quality, and creature comforts weren’t quite up to par compared to a Mercedes-Benz or a BMW. Part of the luxury people paid for was the feeling of owning the cool new thing, at least back before Tesla’s brand was tainted.
It’s a bit trickier for legacy car companies, who are struggling to navigate shifting attitudes and incentives in America and to compete against cheap, Chinese-made EVs abroad. Take the Hyundai Ioniq 9 that arrived this summer. Hyundai and Kia are the farthest along of the traditional brands in selling great EVs to Americans, and the Ioniq 9 may be the best electric offering for families that need a three-row vehicle to accommodate their tribe. Thanks in part to the hulking 110-kilowatt hour battery needed for this boat to have 300 miles of EPA-rated range, however, the Ioniq 9 starts at $59,000 — more than $20,000 higher than Hyundai’s similarly sized, gas-powered Palisade.
Even a $7,500 benefit wouldn’t bridge such a divide between electric and gas. So, Hyundai bet all along that, incentives or not, buyers would find the Ioniq 9 to be the premium product that it proved to be during my road trip test drive in one this past weekend. Where the Palisade comes with 291 horsepower from its gas engine, Ioniq 9’s 422 electric horsepower allowed the big vehicle to accelerate effortlessly onto the highway and zoom up the Grapevine mountain pass that leads into Los Angeles, dusting plenty of combustion-powered cars huffing and puffing to get uphill. It is remarkably spacious and startlingly quiet, even when putting out lots of power.
My top-of-the-line Ioniq 9 had numerous tech features meant to make it feel special, like the enormous curved touchscreen that spanned from dashboard to center console and the heads-up display — specs that feel futuristic and attempt to justify the extra cost. But let’s be real. For anyone who’d choose a $60,000 EV over the same company’s $40,000 gas-guzzling SUV, it comes down to the simple, everyday advantages of an electric car: Your home is your gas station and you begin every day with a full tank. You’re sitting on a big battery full of electricity that can be used for more than driving, whether that’s backing up your home appliances during a blackout or just air-conditioning your dog while you run into the drugstore. No oil changes. No belts, sparks plugs, or antifreeze to worry about. No tailpipe emissions poisoning your city’s air or filling your garage with carbon monoxide. Immediate power at your feet. And, of course, the possibility of one day running the family car entirely on clean energy.
None of those reasons will change the financial calculation and make the EV less expensive in the long run. For now, the argument for EVs is that you get what you pay for. When more Americans experience a premium EV, that might be enough to convince them that electric is worth the extra cash, tax credit or not.