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The Changli is weird, about $1,000, and a surprisingly compelling vision of the future.
If you’re trying to solve a problem, it’s unlikely that anyone is going to look over your efforts, scribble things on a pad, scowl, and then say, “Have you tried half-assing it? Really phone it in?” This almost never happens. And yet it's precisely what I think needs to happen for electric cars to live up to their potential. They need to suck far, far more than they currently do. I know this sounds like what many experts would call “a terrible idea” and “stupid,” but I’m confident in this belief for one very notable reason: I’ve lived it.
For the past few years, I’ve used and enjoyed an electric car that is, by the standards of any EV available on the mass market today, terrible. I’m talking about something with about 1/10th the range, about 1/250th the horsepower (and that’s being generous), and maybe 1/5th the maximum speed of a modern EV. These are the sort of specs that should be charitably considered garbage.
And yet, despite it all, what I’ve learned is that not only are such meager capabilities enough for a shocking amount of my transportation needs, the whole experience has been downright fun. Yes, fun.
The car I’m talking about is called the Changli Freeman, and I believe it is the cheapest car in the world. In fact, that was the initial reason I bought it. You see, my job is to write about and do things with interesting cars, so when the pandemic arrived in 2020, that put a real crimp in my usual plans of traveling to people with strange cars all over the country and driving them, on video, to the delight of audiences in the high severals.
So, stuck at home, I hatched a new plan: I’d bring the interesting cars to me! Well, one interesting car, and that interesting car would be the cheapest new car one could buy.
My research brought me to a category of automobile that is known in their native land, China, as 老头乐, something that translates to “old man happy car.” That’s because this type of car is primarily sold to elderly folks in second-tier cities who need something to get to the market or pick up grandkids from school. Slow is just fine, and the legality of these cars, even in their native China, is muddy, at best. But they are definitely cars, of a sort.
At $930, the Changli was the cheapest of the cheap. Add in the necessary five 12V lead-acid batteries, which aren’t included in the base price, and the bill lurches up to $1,200, still absolutely, impossibly, floor-settingly dirt cheap for a new car of any kind.
Oh, and perhaps equally incredibly, I found this car on the website Alibaba.com, and bought it online, just like you would buy a video game console that looks like a Playstation 5 but perversely only plays 40-year-old Nintendo games.
Sure, shipping from China and all of the related customs hassles brought the total cost to about $3,300, but even so, we’re still talking about something wildly inexpensive. We’re still comfortably lying down on that bottom tier, and if you need further proof of this, here’s a video of me when I first got it and had to take it out of the massive cardboard box it shipped in:
Unboxing The World's Cheapest New Car Reveals It's So Much Better Than You Thinkwww.youtube.com
Now, aside from the fact that my new car arrived in a cardboard box, what you should note is my raw, unmitigated delight.
I had been genuinely ready to accept what would effectively be a plastic porta-potty-type body on a crude, flimsy chassis with a chain-driven axle and an effective operational lifespan roughly on par with your average mosquito. But that’s not what I got. What I got was a very cleverly-designed little car with an all-steel body, all the required legal lights and indicators, a windshield wiper, heater, radio with an MP3 player, and even a freaking backup camera. It was so much better than I ever could have imagined.
I later brought the Changli to Munro and Associates, one of the leading vehicular evaluation companies in the world, a place where major automotive manufacturers bring competitors' products to determine how they’re built and how much it costs to make them.
Sandy Munro, who runs the company, was genuinely stunned by what the Changli had to offer, and how it was made:
Sandy Munro Attempts To Demystify The Absurdly Low Cost Of The Changliwww.youtube.com
Remember, these are the reactions of someone who has torn down every major electric car on the market, from Teslas to Fords to BMWs. He knows what he’s talking about.
The specs on the car aren’t exactly impressive: 1.1 horsepower electric motor, 60V of batteries which gave a (tested) range of 27 miles, and a top speed of about 25 mph or so, though something around 20 was more common. My kid is able to run up a hill faster than the Changli can get up it. And yet, somehow, it works.
Here's What The World's Cheapest Electric Car Is Like To Drivewww.youtube.com
It actually does more than just work; it’s a usable transportation solution for far more of my normal transportation needs than I’d have ever guessed. While it may have come into my life as a curio, it very rapidly became an actually useful conveyance.
I used it to go to the grocery store. I sometimes took my kid to school in it, or to a friend’s house. I picked up take-out. I got parts from the auto parts store when one or more of my “real” cars needed repair. I met friends out at restaurants or galleries or clubs in town, and when I did, I could always park where no one else could, nose-to-curb or in tiny nooks behind dumpsters or any number of other small, forgotten spaces.
I did all of the sorts of mundane, low-distance, low-speed personal transportation acts that we all do, and which command a far larger percentage of our day-to-day transportation needs than many of us realize.
Now, I live in an environment where this sort of thing is perhaps unusually possible. It’s a college town, so there’s a lot of fairly dense commerce surrounded by a lot of low-speed streets, which makes it ideal for using a low-speed neighborhood electric vehicle (as it’s technically classed). According to the rules of this vehicle classification, which varies a lot from state-to-state, I can drive my absurd little machine on any street with a speed limit of 35 mph or less, though I think I can cross streets with higher limits.
There’s no highway travel, of course, but that’s not a restriction I’d need to be told to obey, as trying to drive this thing on a highway would be like shoving a sloth into the path of a cattle stampede. Were I to be in an accident with something like an F-150, I’d probably end up accordian’d like a cartoon coyote.
What I learned was that about 75% of my daily transportation needs could be accomplished with this shockingly minimal machine, and, even better, done with more fun than getting in a full-sized car. It was even easier than driving my regular cars! It was quiet and leisurely and everyone who saw this refugee from Cartoonistan greeted it with amused bewilderment or a smile or both.
Compared to a real EV like, say, a Tesla Model 3, this thing is a joke. But it’s a joke that can get to and from the grocery store in about the same amount of time when driving through town, and accomplish pretty much the same job, for a tiny fraction of the price and without hauling around an extra 3,000 pounds of car and battery that were, for the purposes of a trip like a grocery run, just dead weight.
There’s something in the automotive industry known as “vehicle demand energy,” which basically refers to the amount of energy needed to simply put the whole car in motion. The vehicle demand energy of a Tesla or a Ford Mach-E or even a Nissan Leaf is orders of magnitude higher than what the Changli demands, and for an awful lot of driving, that’s wasted energy.
If we’re really serious about using EVs to make a real dent in climate issues and energy usage, then we should adjust our thinking to make room for Changli-type vehicles.
Side by side with a “real car,” the Changli looks like a comical, shrunken subset, but compared to other minimalistic electric, low-speed transportation solutions like an e-bike, it feels like being carried in a luxurious, silken-draped litter. Unlike an e-bike, you’re still enjoying complete protection from the weather, and since you’re not teetering on a pair of wheels, but are rather cozily lounging inside a metal box, you can carry so much more stuff.
That’s why a minimal car-esque EV like the Changli is viable for transporting, say, tubs of Chinese food home or taking your kid to school: It’s a car, not a bike. It’s an obvious thing to note, but it’s a big deal when it comes to actually using the thing.
Sure, you can’t take a roadtrip in a Changli, but you knew that from the moment you looked at it. It is just a case of the right tool for the right job. Live somewhere dense, with a lot of low-speed travel? Maybe a Changli makes sense! Live on a compound and it’s a 45-minute trip if you need dental floss? Maybe not. There will always be a place for long-range, comfortable and safe EVs, capable of high speeds and long road trips, but they don’t need to be your daily driver.
Perhaps many of us will have small, fun, a-bit-better-than-Changli-type vehicles that we drive day-to-day, and then take majestic powerful, long-range EVs on the occasional road trip.
This doesn’t have to be a punishment. I’m a gearhead, I love cars and driving, and I can honestly say my driving experiences in the Changli have been a blast. I even took it to a track event. I’m pretty sure I hit 26 mph, and, like any car at its limit, it was pretty fun, making those bagel-sized tires squeal and feeling that tall, silly body lean and tilt like a drunk on an escalator.
Already in Europe we’re starting to see some realization that this sort of category is viable; French carmaker Citroën has a cheap, $10,000-ish car called the Ami that is classified under European quadracycle laws, which is essentially a category for low-speed city cars, which make a lot of sense the dense urban landscapes found all over Europe.
The Ami’s speed is limited to 28 mph (I suspect it’s technically capable of more), and it can go about 47 miles on a full charge, both of which are enough for the job it’s designed to do. The more I think about cars like the Changli and the Ami, the more I think they should be far, far more common than they are.
If we want to really change the transportation landscape in a way that’s good for the climate, is less demanding on the difficult rare-earth resources required to make EV batteries (for the resources that go into the battery of one full-range and power EV, you can likely make at least three short-range-use EVs), and yet still preserves so much of the personal transportation freedom that we’ve all grown to expect, then its time to really think about scaling down the sorts of vehicles that we use for all the little drives we do.
And, remember, it’s not a punishment. It’ll be fun. I know, because, again, I’m doing it, in the most minimal, ridiculous way possible.
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The widely circulating document lists more than 68 activities newly subject to upper-level review.
The federal government is poised to put solar and wind projects through strict new reviews that may delay projects across the country, according to a widely circulating document reviewed by Heatmap.
The secretarial order authored by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Gregory Wischer is dated July 15 and states that “all decisions, actions, consultations, and other undertakings” that are “related to wind and solar energy facilities” will now be required to go through multiple layers of political review from Burgum’s office and Interior’s Office of the Deputy Secretary.
This new layer of review would span essentially anything Interior and its many subagencies would ordinarily be consulted on before construction on a project can commence — a milestone crucial for being able to qualify for federal renewable energy tax credits under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The order lists more than 68 different activities newly subject to higher-level review, including some basic determinations as to whether projects conform with federal environmental and conservation laws, as well as consultations on compliance with wildlife protection laws such as the Endangered Species Act. The final item in the list sweeps “any other similar or related decisions, actions, consultations, or undertakings” under the order’s purview, in case there was any grey area there.
In other words, this order is so drastic it would impact projects on state and private lands, as well as federal acreage. In some cases, agency staff may now need political sign-offs simply to tell renewables developers whether they need a permit at all.
“This is the way you stall and kill projects. Intentionally red-tape projects to death,” former Biden White House clean energy adviser Avi Zevin wrote on Bluesky in a post with a screenshot of the order.
The department has yet to release the document and it’s unclear whether or when it will be made public. The order’s existence was first reported by Politico; in a statement to that news outlet, the department did not deny the document’s existence but attacked leakers. “Let’s be clear: leaking internal documents to the media is cowardly, dishonest, and a blatant violation of professional standards,” the statement said.
Interior’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Heatmap about when this document may be made public. We also asked whether this would also apply to transmission connected to solar and wind. You had better believe I’ll be following up with the department to find out, and we’ll update this story if we hear back from them.
Two former Microsoft employees have turned their frustration into an awareness campaign to hold tech companies accountable.
When the clean energy world considers the consequences of the artificial intelligence boom, rising data center electricity demand and the strain it’s putting on the grid is typically top of mind — even if that’s weighed against the litany of potential positive impacts, which includes improved weather forecasting, grid optimization, wildfire risk mitigation, critical minerals discovery, and geothermal development.
I’ve written about a bunch of it. But the not-so-secret flip side is that naturally, any AI-fueled improvements in efficiency, data analytics, and predictive capabilities will benefit well-capitalized fossil fuel giants just as much — if not significantly more — than plucky climate tech startups or cash-strapped utilities.
“The narrative is a net impact equation that only includes the positive use cases of AI as compared to the operational impacts, which we believe is apples to oranges,” Holly Alpine, co-founder of the Enabled Emissions Campaign, told me. “We need to expand that conversation and include the negative applications in that scoreboard.”
Alpine founded the campaign alongside her partner, Will Alpine, in February of last year, with the goal of holding tech giants accountable for the ways users leverage their products to accelerate fossil fuel production. Both formerly worked for Microsoft on sustainability initiatives related to data centers and AI, but quit after what they told me amounted to a string of unfulfilled promises by the company and a realization that internal pressure alone couldn’t move the needle as far as they’d hoped.
While at Microsoft, they were dismayed to learn that the company had contracts for its cloud services and suite of AI tools with some of the largest fossil fuel corporations in the world — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell — and that the partnerships were formed with the explicit intent to expand oil and gas production. Other hyperscalers such as Google and Amazon have also formed similar cloud and AI service partnerships with oil and gas giants, though Google burnished its sustainability bona fides in 2020 by announcing that it would no longer build custom AI tools for the fossil fuel industry. (In response to my request for comment, Microsoft directed me to its energy principles, which were written in 2022, while the Alpines were still with the company, and to its 2025 sustainability report. Neither addresses the Alpines’ concerns directly, which is perhaps telling in its own right.)
AI can help fossil fuel companies accelerate and expand fossil fuel production throughout all stages of the process, from exploration and reservoir modeling to predictive maintenance, transport and logistics optimization, demand forecasting, and revenue modeling. And while partnerships with AI hyperscalers can be extremely beneficial, oil and gas companies are also building out their own AI-focused teams and capabilities in-house.
“As a lot of the low-hanging fruit in the oil reserve space has been plucked, companies have been increasingly relying on things like fracking and offshore drilling to stay competitive,” Will told me. “So using AI is now allowing those operations to continue in a way that they previously could not.”
Exxon, for example, boasts on its website that it’s “the first in our industry to leverage autonomous drilling in deep water,” thanks to its AI-powered systems that can determine drilling parameters and control the whole process sans human intervention. Likewise, BP notes that its "Optimization Genie” AI tool has helped it increase production by about 2,000 oil-equivalent barrels per day in the Gulf of Mexico, and that between 2022 and 2024, AI and advanced analytics allowed the company to increase production by 4% overall.
In general, however, the degree to which AI-enabled systems help expand production is not something companies speak about publicly. For instance, when Microsoft inked a contract with Exxon six years ago, it predicted that its suite of digital products would enable the oil giant to grow production in the Permian Basin by up to 50,000 barrels by 2025. And while output in the Permian has boomed, it’s unclear how much Microsoft is to thank for that as neither company has released any figures.
Either way, many of the climate impacts of using AI for oil and gas production are likely to go unquantified. That’s because the so-called “enabled emissions” from the tech sector are not captured by the standard emissions accounting framework, which categorizes direct emissions from a company’s operations as scope 1, indirect emissions from the generation of purchased energy as scope 2, and all other emissions across the value chain as scope 3. So while tailpipe emissions, for example, would fall into Exxon’s scope 3 bucket — thus requiring disclosure — they’re outside Microsoft’s reporting boundaries.
According to the Alpines’ calculations, though, Microsoft’s deal with Exxon plus another contract with Chevron totalled “over 300% of Microsoft’s entire carbon footprint, including data centers.” So it’s really no surprise that hyperscalers have largely fallen silent when it comes to citing specific numbers, given the history of employee blowback and media furor over the friction between tech companies’ sustainability targets and their fossil fuel contracts.
As such, the tech industry often ends up wrapping these deals in broad language highlighting operational efficiency, digital transformation, and even sustainability benefits —- think waste reduction and decreasing methane leakage rates — while glossing over the fact that at their core, these partnerships are primarily designed to increase oil and gas output.
While none of the fossil fuel companies I contacted — Chevron, Exxon, Shell, and BP — replied to my inquiries about the ways they’re leveraging AI, earnings calls and published corporate materials make it clear that the industry is ready to utilize the technology to its fullest extent.
“We’re looking to leverage knowledge in a different way than we have in the past,” Shell CEO Wael Sawan said on the company’s Q2 earnings call last year, citing AI as one of the tools that he sees as integral to “transform the culture of the company to one that is able to outcompete in the coming years.”
Shell has partnered since 2018 with the enterprise software company C3.ai on AI applications such as predictive maintenance, equipment monitoring, and asset optimization, the latter of which has helped the company increase liquid natural gas production by 1% to 2%. C3.ai CEO Tom Siebel was vague on the company’s 2025 Q1 earnings call, but said that Shell estimates that the partnership has “generated annual benefit to Shell of $2 billion.”
In terms of AI’s ability to get more oil and gas out of the ground, “it’s like getting a Kuwait online,” Rakesh Jaggi, who leads the digital efforts at the oil-services giant SLB, told Barron’s magazine. Kuwait is the third largest crude oil producer in OPEC, producing about 2.9 million barrels per day.
Some oil and gas giants were initially reluctant to get fully aboard the AI hype train — even Exxon CEO Darren Woods noted on the company’s 2024 Q3 earnings call that the oil giant doesn’t “like jumping on bandwagons.” Yet he still sees “good potential” for AI to be a “part of the equation” when it comes to the company’s ambition to slash $15 billion in costs by 2027.
Chevron is similarly looking to AI to cut costs. As the company’s Chief Financial Officer Eimear Bonner explained during its 2024 Q4 earnings call, AI could help Chevron save $2 to $3 billion over the next few years as the company looks towards “using technology to do work completely differently.” Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco’s CEO Amin Nasser told Bloomberg that AI is a core reason it’s been able to keep production costs at $3 per barrel for the past 20 years, despite inflation and other headwinds in the sector.
Of course, it should come as no surprise that fossil fuel companies are taking advantage of the vast opportunities that AI provides. After all, the investors and shareholders these companies are ultimately beholden to would likely revolt if they thought their fiduciaries had failed to capitalize on such an enormous technological breakthrough.
The Alpines are well aware that this is the world we live in, and that we’re not going to overthrow capitalism anytime soon. Right now, they told me they’re primarily running a two-person “awareness campaign,” as the general public and sometimes even former colleagues are largely in the dark when it comes to how AI is being used to boost oil and gas production. While Will said they’re “staying small and lean” for now while they fundraise, the campaign has support from a number of allies including the consumer rights group Public Citizen, the tech worker group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, and the NGO Friends of the Earth.
In the medium term, they’re looking toward policy shifts that would require more disclosure and regulation around AI’s potential for harm in the energy sector. “The only way we believe to really achieve deep change is to raise the floor at an international or national policy level,” Will told me. As an example, he pointed to the EU’s comprehensive regulations that categorize AI use cases by risk level, which then determines the rules these systems are subject to. Police use of facial recognition is considered high risk, for example, while AI spam filters are low risk. Right now, energy sector applications are not categorized as risky at all.
“What we would advocate for would be that AI use in the energy sector falls under a high risk classification system due to its risk for human harm. And then it would go through a governance process, ideally that would align with climate science targets,” Will told me. “So you could use that to uplift positive applications like AI for methane leak detection, but AI for upstream scenarios should be subject to additional scrutiny.”
And realistically, there’s no chance of something like this being implemented in the U.S. under Trump, let alone somewhere like Saudi Arabia. And even if such regulations were eventually enacted in some countries, energy markets are global, meaning governments around the world would ultimately need to align on risk mitigation strategies for reigning in AI’s potential for climate harm.
As Will told me, “that would be a massive uphill battle, but we think it’s one that’s worth fighting.”
A longtime climate messaging strategist is tired of seeing the industry punch below its weight.
The saga of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains at least one clear lesson for the clean energy industry: It must grow a political spine and act like the trillion-dollar behemoth it is. And though the logic is counterintuitive, the new law will likely provide an opportunity to build one.
The coming threat to renewable energy investment became apparent as soon as Trump won the presidency again last fall. The only questions were how much was vulnerable, and through what mechanisms.
Still, many clean energy leaders were optimistic that Trump’s “energy abundance” agenda had room for renewables. During the transition, one longtime Republican energy lobbyist told Utility Dive that Trump’s incoming cabinet had a “very aggressive approach towards renewables.” When Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper introduced would-be Secretary of Energy Chris Wright at the fracking executive’s confirmation hearing, he vouched for Wright’s clean energy cred. Even Trump touted Wright’s experience with solar.
At least initially, the argument made sense. After all, energy demand is soaring, and solar, wind, and battery storage account for 95% of new power projects awaiting grid connection in the U.S. In red states like Texas and Oklahoma, clean energy is booming because it’s cheap. Just a few months ago, the Lone Star State achieved record energy generation from solar, wind, and batteries, and consumers there are saving millions of dollars a day because of renewables. The Biden administration funneled clean energy and manufacturing investment into red districts in part to cultivate Republican support for renewables — and to protect those investments no matter who is president.
As a result, for the past six months, clean energy executives have absorbed advice telling them to fly below the radar. Stop using the word “climate” and start using words like “common sense” when you talk to lawmakers. (As a communications and policy strategist who works extensively on climate issues, I’ve given that specific piece of advice.)
But far too many companies and industry groups went much further than tweaking their messaging. They stopped publicly advocating for their interests, and as a result there has been no muscular effort to pressure elected officials where it counts: their reelection campaigns.
This is part of a broader lack of engagement with elected officials on the part of clean energy companies. The oil and gas industry has outspent clean energy on lobbying 2 to 1 this year, despite the fact that oil and gas faces a hugely favorable political environment. In the run up to the last election, the fossil fuel industry spent half a billion dollars to influence candidates; climate and clean energy advocates again spent just a fraction, despite having more on the line. My personal preference is to get money out of politics, but you have to play by the rules as they exist.
Even economically irresistible technologies can be legislated into irrelevance if they don’t have political juice. The last-minute death of the mysterious excise tax on wind and solar that was briefly part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was a glaring sign of weakness, not strength — especially given that even the watered-down provisions in the law will damage the economics of renewable energy. After the law passed, the President directed the Treasury Department to issue the strictest possible guidance for the clean energy projects that remain eligible for tax credits.
The tech industry learned this same lesson over many years. The big tech companies started hiring scores of policy and political staff in the 2010s, when they were already multi-hundred-billion dollar companies, but it wasn’t until 2017 that a tech company became the top lobbying spender. Now the tech industry has a sophisticated influence operation that includes carrots and sticks. Crypto learned this lesson even faster, emerging almost overnight as one of the most aggressive industries shaping Washington.
Clean energy needs to catch up. But lobbying spending isn’t a panacea.
Executives in the clean energy sector sometimes say they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Democrats and the segment of potentially supportive Republicans at the local and federal levels talk and think about clean energy differently. And the dissonance makes it challenging to communicate honestly with both parties, especially in public.
The clean energy industry should recognize that the safest ground is to criticize and cultivate both parties unabashedly. The American political system understands economic self interest, and there are plenty of policy changes that various segments of the clean energy world need from both Democrats and Republicans at the federal and state levels. Democrats need to make it easier to build; Republicans need to support incentives they regularly trumpet for other job-creating industries.
The quality of political engagement from clean energy companies and the growing ecosystem of advocacy groups has improved. The industry, disparate as it is, has gotten smarter. Advocates now bring district-by-district data to policymakers, organize lobby days, and frame clean energy in terms that resonate across the aisle — national security, economic opportunity in rural America, artificial intelligence, and the race with China. That’s progress.
But the tempo is still far too low, and there are too many carrots and too few sticks. The effects of President Trump’s tax law on energy prices might create some leverage. If the law damages renewable energy generation, and thereby raises energy prices as energy demand continues to rise, Americans should know who is responsible. The clean energy sector has to be the messenger, or at least orchestrate the messaging.
The campaigns write themselves: Paid media targeting members of Congress who praised clean energy job growth in their districts and then voted to gut jobs and raise prices; op-eds in local papers calling out that hypocrisy by name; energy workers showing up at town halls demanding their elected officials fight for an industry that’s investing billions in their communities; activating influencers to highlight the bright line between Trump’s law and higher electricity bills; and more.
If renewable energy is going to grow consistently in America, no matter which way the political wind blows, there must be a political cost to crossing the sector. Otherwise it will always be vulnerable to last-minute backroom deals, no matter how “win-win” its technology is.