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Spoiler: None of them feels great.
“Delete, delete, delete,” Elon Musk reportedly told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, describing his approach to management. “Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough.”
Musk has taken his own advice: He is slicing to the bone. Earlier this week, he dismissed the head of Tesla’s Supercharger network, Rebecca Tinucci, as well as her more than 500-person team. As of today, Tesla has only a barebones crew, at best, tasked with maintaining and expanding its high-speed car charging network. It has already pulled out of a planned expansion in New York City.
Musk also laid off what remained of the company’s policy and new vehicle teams. These severe cuts follow layoffs announced in March, when Musk dismissed about 10% of Tesla’s employees. According to Electrek, the two events may be related: Musk asked Tinucci to make deeper cuts in her team in April, she pushed back, and he fired her to set an example. The company has cut more than 14,000 employees worldwide since the beginning of the year.
The news is — and there is no way of sugarcoating this — either sort of stupid, bad, or very bad for the electric vehicle transition. Here are three ways of looking at it:
Over the past year, every other major automaker in the United States has switched to Tesla’s charging plug, the North American Charging Standard, or NACS. They have struck deals that will let them use much of Tesla’s existing Supercharger network; Ford is in the process of mailing its drivers a free NACs adapter plug. These agreements were meant to give consumers more certainty about the EV transition: No matter what car they bought, they would be able to use most of Tesla’s superior charging network.
Now, that certainty is gone. Which chargers will work in the future? How much more will the Tesla network expand? And what will happen to those deals with automakers now that the Supercharger team is gone? The employees laid off this week included those who worked closely with other companies.
At least publicly, Ford is keeping its cool. “Our plans for our customers do not change,” Marty Günsberg, communications director for Ford’s electric vehicle division, told Heatmap. And yet contractors and others with business in front of Tesla's charging team were left completely in the dark Tuesday, their emails bouncing back from addresses that no longer existed, according to E&E News. No other equivalent charging network exists in the U.S., meaning there's no other easy place for them to go.
Musk, for his part, has intimated that the company will begin to look into wireless charging. Although wireless charging may make slightly more sense for self-driving cars — the car could drive itself into a given spot, et voilà! — it is a puzzling decision from a man who has said the only real constraints are those imposed by the laws of physics. More than half of current and prospective EV owners say that they worry about charger availability and convenience, yet wireless charging is slower and less efficient than wired charging, meaning it will require more charging spots and each vehicle will have to stay there longer.
So again we must ask, why? The answer may lie in the animal spirits of the market — and Elon’s dependence on the market for his personal wealth. Tesla’s stock has more or less held steady since the cuts. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote, Musk has spun the layoffs as part of a corporate turn away from selling electric vehicles, chargers, and home batteries and toward achieving artificial intelligence and autonomous driving.
That is partly because Musk must keep justifying — or, if we really want to be blunt, propping up — Tesla’s astronomical share price, which itself is premised on the idea that Tesla is a technology company, not a car company. In order to do that, he must continually steer his sometimes-profitable company toward the buzziest, most hyped-up phenomenon in the economy. Never mind his actually existing EV charger business; that can’t justify the fantasy of the share price. He needs to find something new.
One of the more useful ways of understanding Elon Musk is that he seeks to create and control private infrastructure. SpaceX creates privatized access to rocket launches. Starlink allows for privatized access to the global, satellite-provided internet. The Hyperloop — to the degree that it existed at all — sought to create a privatized and individualized form of mass transit. (Musk, fittingly, hates public transit.) Even Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now rechristened X, reflected a desire to enclose the public sphere.
And for the past year, you could understand Tesla in the same light. Sure, Tesla was an electric vehicle company. But it was rapidly becoming an infrastructure company. Through its deals with other automakers, it was cementing itself as the premier provider of electric vehicle charging in the United States. It was also the part of the company that elicited the least suspicion from Tesla’s many critics. Drivers might not always be able to rely on a third-party charger, but a Tesla Supercharger? It worked.
It hasn’t always been this way. For years, the Supercharger network seemed like Tesla’s key competitive advantage, its Warren Buffett-style moat. If you wanted access to America’s most famous and reliable fast-charging network, you had to buy a Tesla. But starting with Ford a year ago, Musk struck deals with other automakers allowing their cars to use some of its charger network. At the same time, Tesla also bowed to federal pressure and standardized its NACS charger with SAE International. That helped it win more than $17 million in grants from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to build even more chargers.
Why pull back now? None of the options is very encouraging. The most hopeful answer is Tesla-specific: Maybe demand for the automaker’s vehicles is sinking so quickly that Musk is, in essence, reaching for things he can throw overboard. Tesla has historically relied on Chinese consumers to buoy its sales, but it has hemorrhaged market share in China as the country’s home-grown automakers have come out with newer and often superior EVs. But things there took a turn for the better earlier this week as Musk won approval (albeit conditional) to use Tesla’s so-called Full Self-Driving software on Chinese roads. And even if a sales slump were the explanation, why also ditch the team working on new vehicles at Tesla?
The other possibilities are bleaker. BloombergNEF has ballparked that Tesla’s charging business could generate $740 million in annual profits by 2030. But that relies on Musk’s estimate that the Supercharging business has a 10% margin. If that margin has since shrunk — or if its chargers just aren’t getting used as much as Tesla once anticipated — then further investment right now might not make sense.
That’s a problem, though, as most prospective buyers say that there need to be even more public chargers before they would consider buying an EV. If the economics don’t justify a further investment in chargers, however, even with all that apparently pent up demand, then the country is in a pickle. In that case, Musk’s decision looks self-defeating, a panicky and downturn-averse reaction that will ultimately undercut the market for Tesla’s cars.
About the only bright spot here is that Musk has surrendered hundreds of the most talented charging employees to the market. Tesla excelled at using a mix of policy and engineering prowess to integrate their chargers into local utilities’ systems and rate structures; other automakers can now snap up the people with those skills.
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The Senate’s reconciliation bill essentially repeals the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, abolishing fines for automakers that sell too many gas guzzlers.
A new provision in the Senate reconciliation bill would neuter the country’s fuel efficiency standards for automakers, gutting one of the federal government’s longest-running programs to manage gasoline prices and air pollution.
The new provision — which was released on Thursday by the Senate Commerce Committee — would essentially strip the government of its ability to enforce the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, or CAFE standards.
The CAFE rules are the government’s main program to improve the fuel economy of new cars and light-duty trucks sold in the United States. Over the past 20 years, the rules have helped push the fuel efficiency of new vehicles to record highs even as consumers have adopted crossovers and SUVs en masse.
But the Republican reconciliation bill would essentially end the program as a practical concern for automakers. It would set all fines issued under the program to zero, stripping the government of its ability to punish automakers that sell too many polluting vehicles.
“It would essentially eviscerate the standard without actually doing so directly,” Ann Carlson, a UCLA law professor who led the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2022 to 2023, told me.
“‘It says that, ‘We have standards here, but we don’t care if you comply or not. If you don’t comply, we’re not going to hold you responsible,’” she said.
Representatives for the Senate Commerce Committee did not respond to an immediate request for comment. A talking points memo released by the committee on Thursday said that the new bill would “[bring] down automobile prices modestly by eliminating CAFE penalties on automakers that design cars to conform to the wishes of D.C. bureaucrats rather than consumers.”
Since 1975, Congress has required the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (pronounced NIT-suh) to set annual fuel efficiency standards for new cars and light trucks sold in the United States. The rules generally require new vehicles sold nationwide to get a little more fuel efficient, on average, every year.
The rules have remained in effect — with varying levels of stringency — for 50 years, although they have generally encouraged automakers to get more efficient since Congress strengthened the law on a bipartisan basis in 2007.
In model-year 2023, the most recent period for which data is available, new cars and light trucks achieved a real-world fuel economy of 27.1 miles per gallon, an all-time high. The vehicle fleet was set to hit another record high in 2024, according to last year’s report.
Opponents of the fuel economy rules argue that the regulations increase the sticker price of new cars and trucks and push automakers to build less profitable vehicles. The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that published Project 2025, has called the rules a “backdoor EV mandate.”
The rules’ supporters say that the standards are necessary because consumers don’t take fuel costs — or the environmental or public health costs of air pollution — into account when buying a vehicle. They say the rules keep gasoline prices low for all Americans by encouraging fuel efficiency across the board.
The strict Biden-era rules were projected to save consumers $23 billion in gasoline costs, according to an agency analysis. The American Lung Association said that the rules would prevent more than 2 million pediatric asthma attacks and save hundreds of infant lives by 2050.
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has targeted the fuel economy rules as part of a wide-ranging effort to roll back Biden-era energy policy. On January 28, as his first official act, Duffy ordered NHTSA to retroactively weaken the rules for all cars and light trucks sold after model-year 2022.
On Friday, Duffy separately issued a legal opinion that would restrict NHTSA’s ability to include electric vehicles in its real-world estimates of the country’s fuel economy rules. The opinion sets up the next round of CAFE rules to be considerably weaker than existing law.
But the new Republican reconciliation bill, if adopted, would render those rules moot.
Under current law, automakers must pay a fine when the average fuel economy of the vehicles they sell exceeds the fuel economy standard set for that year. Automakers can avoid paying that penalty by buying “credits” from other car companies that have done better than the rules require.
The fine’s size is set by a formula written into the law. That calculation includes the number of cars sold above the fuel-economy threshold, how much those cars exceeded it, and a $5 multiplier. The GOP tax bill rewrites the law to set the multiplier to zero dollars.
In essence, no matter how much an automaker exceeds the fuel economy rules, the GOP reconciliation bill will now multiply their fine by zero.
The original CAFE law contains a second formula allowing the government to set even higher penalties if doing so would achieve “substantial energy conservation.” The new reconciliation bill sets the multiplier in this formula, too, to zero dollars.
The CAFE law’s penalties can be significant. The automaker Stellantis, which owns Fiat and Chrysler, recently paid more than $426 million in penalties for cars sold from model year 2018 to 2020. Last year, General Motors paid a $38 million fine for light trucks sold in model year 2020.
The CAFE provision in the GOP mega-bill seems designed to skirt past the Byrd rule, a Senate rule that policies in reconciliation bills must affect revenue, spending, or generally have more than a “merely incidental” effect on the federal budget.
But Carlson, the former NHTSA acting administrator, doubted whether the provision should really survive a Byrd bath.
Zeroing out the fines is “not really about revenue,” she said, but about compliance with the law. “This is a way to try to couch repeal of CAFE in revenue terms instead of doing it outright.”
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nassau County, New York – Opponents of Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project are now suing to stop construction after the Trump administration quietly lifted its stop-work order.
2. Somerset County, Maryland – A referendum campaign in rural Maryland seeks to restrict solar development on farmland.
3. Tazewell County, Virginia – An Energix solar project is still in the works in this rural county bordering West Virginia, despite a restrictive ordinance.
4. Allan County, Indiana – This county, which includes portions of Fort Wayne, will be holding a hearing next week on changing its current solar zoning rules.
5. Madison County, Indiana – Elsewhere in Indiana, Invenergy has abandoned the Lone Oak solar project amidst fervent opposition and mounting legal hurdles.
6. Adair County, Missouri – This county may soon be home to the largest solar farm in Missouri and is in talks for another project, despite having a high opposition intensity index in the Heatmap Pro database.
7. Newtown County, Arkansas – A fifth county in Arkansas has now banned wind projects.
8. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma – A data center fight is gaining steam as activists on the ground push to block the center on grounds it would result in new renewable energy projects.
9. Bell County, Texas – Fox News is back in our newsletter, this time for platforming the campaign against solar on land suitable for agriculture.
10. Monterey County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire story continues to develop, as PG&E struggles to restart the remaining battery storage facility remaining on site.
A conversation with Biao Gong of Morningstar
This week’s conversation is with Biao Gong, an analyst with Morningstar who this week published an analysis looking at the credit risks associated with offshore wind projects. Obviously I wanted to talk to him about the situation in the U.S., whether it’s still a place investors consider open for business, and if our country’s actions impact the behavior of others.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
What led you to write this analysis?
What prompted me was our experience in assigning [private] ratings to offshore wind projects in Europe and wanted to figure out what was different [for rating] with onshore and offshore wind. It was the result of our recent work, which is private, but we’ve seen the trend – a lot of the big players in the offshore wind space are kind of trying to partner up with private equity firms to sell their interests, their operating offshore wind assets. But to raise that they’ll need credit ratings and we’ve seen those transactions. This is a growing area in Europe, because Europe has to rely on offshore wind to achieve its climate goals and secure their energy independence.
The report goes through risks in many ways, including challenging conditions for construction. Tell me about the challenges that offshore wind faces specifically as an investment risk.
The principle behind offshore wind is so different than onshore wind. You’re converting wind energy to electricity but obviously there are a bunch of areas where we believe it is riskier. That doesn’t mean you can’t fund those projects but you need additional mitigants.
This includes construction risk. It can take three to five years to complete an offshore wind project. The marine condition, the climate condition, you can’t do that [work] throughout the year and you need specialized vehicles, helicopters, crews that are so labor intensive. That’s versus onshore, which is pre-fabricated where you have a foundation and assemble it. Once you have an idea of the geotechnical conditions, the risk is just less.
There’s also the permitting process, which can be very challenging. How do you not interrupt the marine ecosystem? That’s something the regulators pay attention to. It’s definitely more than an onshore project, which means you need other mitigants for the lender to feel comfortable.
With respect to the permitting risk, how much of that is the risk of opposition from vacation towns, environmentalists, fisheries?
To be honest, we usually come in after all the critical permitting is in place, before money is given by a lender, but I also think that on the government’s side, in Europe at least, they probably have to encourage the development. And to put out an auction for an area you can build an offshore wind project, they must’ve gone through their own assessment, right? They can’t put out something that they also think may hurt an ecosystem, but that’s my speculation.
A country that did examine the impacts and offer lots of ocean floor for offshore is the U.S. What’s your take on offshore wind development in our country?
Once again, because we’re a rating agency, we don’t have much insight into early stage projects. But with that, our view is pretty gloomy. It’s like, if you haven’t started a project in the U.S., no one is going to buy it. There’s a bunch of projects already under construction, and there was the Empire Wind stop order that was lifted. I think that’s positive, but only to a degree, right? It just means this project under construction can probably go ahead. Those things will go ahead and have really strong developers with strong balance sheets. But they’re going to face additional headwinds, too, because of tariffs – that’s a different story.
We don’t see anything else going ahead.
Does the U.S. behaving this way impact the view you have for offshore wind in other countries, or is this an isolated thing?
It’s very isolated. Europe is just going full-steam ahead because the advantage here is you can build a wind farm that provides 2 or 3 gigawatts – that’s just massive. China, too. The U.S. is very different – and not just offshore. The entire renewables sector. We could revisit the U.S. four or five years from today, but [the U.S.] is going to be pretty difficult for the renewables sector.