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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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Current conditions: In the Atlantic, the tropical storm that could, as it develops, take the name Jerry is making its way westward toward the U.S. • In the Pacific, Hurricane Priscilla strengthened into a Category 2 storm en route to Arizona and the Southwest • China broke an October temperature record with thermometers surging near 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the southeastern province of Fujian.
The Department of Energy appears poised to revoke awards to two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported Tuesday. She got her hands on an internal agency project list that designated nearly $24 billion worth of grants as “terminated,” including Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub and Louisiana's Project Cypress, a joint venture between the DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks. An Energy Department spokesperson told Emily that he was “unable to verify” the list of canceled grants and said that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,”referring to the canceled grants the department announced last week. Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.” Heirloom’s head of policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said the company wasn’t aware of any decision the Energy Department had yet made.
While the list floated last week showed the Trump administration’s plans to cancel the two regional hydrogen hubs on the West Coast, the new list indicated that the Energy Department planned to rescind grants for all seven hubs, Emily reported. “If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told her. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses.”
Remember the Tesla announcement I teased in yesterday’s newsletter? The predictions proved half right: The electric automaker did, indeed, release a cheaper version of its midsize SUV, the Model Y, with a starting price just $10 shy of $40,000. Rather than a new Roadster or potential vacuum cleaner, as the cryptic videos the company posted on CEO Elon Musk’s social media site hinted, the second announcement was a cheaper version of the Model 3, already the lower-end sedan offering. Starting at $36,990, InsideEVs called it “one of the most affordable cars Tesla has ever sold, and the cheapest in 2025.” But it’s still a far cry from Musk’s erstwhile promise to roll out a Tesla for less than $30,000.
That may be part of why the company is losing market share. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, Tesla’s slice of the U.S. electric vehicle sales sank to its lowest-ever level in August despite Americans’ record scramble to use the federal tax credits before the September 30 deadline President Donald Trump’s new tax law set. General Motors, which sold more electric vehicles in the third quarter of this year than in all of 2024, offers the cheapest battery-powered passenger vehicle on the market today, the Chevrolet Equinox, which starts at $35,100.
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Trump’s pledge to revive the United States’ declining coal industry was always a gamble — even though, as Matthew reported in July, global coal demand is rising. Three separate stories published Tuesday show just how stacked the odds are against a major resurgence:
As you may recall from two consecutive newsletters last month, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said “permitting reform” was “the biggest remaining thing” in the administration’s agenda. Yet Republican leaders in Congress expressed skepticism about tacking energy policy into the next reconciliation bill. This week, however, Utah Senator Mike Lee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, called for a legislative overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act. On Monday, the pro-development social media account Yimbyland — short for Yes In My Back Yard — posted on X: “Reminder that we built the Golden Gate Bridge in 4.5 years. Today, we wouldn’t even be able to finish the environmental review in 4.5 years.” In response, Lee said: “It’s time for NEPA reform. And permitting reform more broadly.”
Last month, a bipartisan permitting reform bill got a hearing in the House of Representatives. But that was before the government shutdown. And sources familiar with Democrats’ thinking have in recent months suggested to me that the administration’s gutting of so many clean energy policies has left Republicans with little to bargain with ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Soon-to-be Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi.Yuichi Yamazaki - Pool/Getty Images
On Saturday, Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party elected its former economic minister, Sanae Takaichi, as its new leader, putting her one step away from becoming the country’s first woman prime minister. Under previous administrations, Japan was already on track to restart the reactors idled after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. But Takaichi, a hardline conservative and nationalist who also vowed to re-militarize the nation, has pushed to speed up deployment of new reactors and technologies such as fusion in hopes of making the country 100% self-sufficient on energy.
“She wants energy security over climate ambition, nuclear over renewables, and national industry over global corporations,” Mika Ohbayashi, director at the pro-clean-energy Renewable Energy Institute, told Bloomberg. Shares of nuclear reactor operators surged by nearly 7% on Monday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, while renewable energy developers’ stock prices dropped by as much as 15%
Researchers at the United Arab Emirates’ University of Sharjah just outlined a new method to transform spent coffee grounds and a commonly used type of plastic used in packaging into a form of activated carbon that can be used for chemical engineering, food processing, and water and air treatments. By repurposing the waste, it avoids carbon emitting from landfills into the atmosphere and reduces the need for new sources of carbon for industrial processes. “What begins with a Starbucks coffee cup and a discarded plastic water bottle can become a powerful tool in the fight against climate change through the production of activated carbon,” Dr. Haif Aljomard, lead inventor of the newly patented technology, said in a press release.
Last week’s Energy Department grant cancellations included funding for a backup energy system at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, California
When the Department of Energy canceled more than 321 grants in an act of apparent retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown, Russ Vought, President Trump’s budget czar, declared that the money represented “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda.”
At least one of the grants zeroed out last week, however, was supposed to help keep the lights on at a children’s hospital.
The $29 million grant was intended to build a 3.3-megawatt long-duration energy storage system at Valley Children’s Hospital, a large pediatric hospital in Madera, California. The system would “power critical hospital operations during outage events,” such as when the California grid shuts down to avoid starting wildfires, according to project documents.
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s cancellation of funding for [the] long-duration energy storage demonstration grant is disappointing,” Zara Arboleda, a spokesperson for the hospital, told me.
Valley Children’s Hospital is a 358-bed hospital that says it serves more than 1.3 million children across California’s Central Valley. It has 116 neonatal intensive care unit beds and nationally ranked specialties in pediatric neurology, orthopedics, and lung surgery, among others.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has characterized the more than $7.5 billion in grants canceled last week as part of an ongoing review of financial awards made by the Biden administration. But the timing of the cancellations — and Vought’s gleeful tweets about them — suggests a more vindictive purpose. Republican lawmakers and President Trump himself threatened to unleash Vought as a kind of rogue budget cutter before the federal government shut down last week.
“We don’t control what he’s going to do,” Senator John Thune told Politico last week. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut,” Trump posted on the same day.
Up until this year, canceling funding that is already under contract with a private party would have been thought to be straightforwardly illegal under federal law. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has allowed the Trump administration to act with previously unimaginable freedom while it considers ruling on similar cases.
Faraday Microgrids, the contractor that was due to receive the funding, is already building a microgrid for the hospital. The proposed backup power system — which the grant stipulated should be “non-lithium-ion” — was supposed to be funded by the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, with the goal of finding new ways of storing electricity without using lithium-ion batteries, and was meant to work in concert with that new microgrid and snap on in times of high stress.
That microgrid project is still moving forward, Arboleda, the hospital’s spokesperson, told me. “Valley Children’s Hospital continues to build and soon will operate its microgrid announced in 2023 to ensure our facilities have access to reliable and sustainable energy every minute of every day for our patients and our care providers,” she added. That grid will contain some storage, but not the long-term storage system discussed in the official plan.
Faraday Microgrids, formerly known as Charge Bliss, didn’t respond to a request for comment, but its website touts its ability to secure grants and other government funding for energy projects.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Energy Department said that the grant was canceled because the project wasn’t feasible. “Following an in-depth review of the financial award, it was determined, among other reasons, that the viability of the project was not adequate to warrant further disbursements,” Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, told me.
The children’s hospital, at least, is in good company. On Tuesday, a Trump administration document obtained by Heatmap News suggested the Energy Department is moving to kill bipartisan-backed funding for two direct air capture hubs in Texas and Louisiana. And although California has lost the most grants of any state, the Energy Department has also sought to terminate funding for new factories and industrial facilities across Republican-governed states.
Editor’s note: This story initially misstated the number of neonatal intensive care unit beds at Valley Children’s Hospital. It has been corrected.
Rob and Jesse break down China’s electricity generation with UC San Diego’s Michael Davidson.
China announced a new climate commitment under the Paris Agreement at last month’s United Nations General Assembly meeting, pledging to cut its emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035. Many observers were disappointed by the promise, which may not go far enough to forestall 2 degrees Celsius of warming. But the pledge’s conservatism reveals the delicate and shifting politics of China’s grid — and how the country’s central government and its provinces fight over keeping the lights on.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Michael Davidson, an expert on Chinese electricity and climate policy. He is a professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds a joint faculty appointment at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Jacobs School of Engineering. He is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and he was previously the U.S.-China policy coordinator for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Your research and other people’s research has revealed that basically, when China started making capacity payments to coal plants, in some cases, it didn’t have the effect on the bottom line of these plants that was hoped for, and also we didn’t really see coal generation go down or change in the year that it happened. It wasn’t like they were paying these plants to stick around and not run. They were basically paying these plants, it seems like, to do the exact same thing they did the year before, but now they also got paid. And maybe that was needed for their economics, we can talk about it.
Why did coal get those payments and not, say, batteries or other sources of spare capacity, like pumped hydro storage, like nuclear? Why did coal, specifically, get payments for capacity? And does it have to do with spinning reserve? Or does it have to do with the political economy of coal in China?
Michael Davidson: When it came out, we said exactly the same thing. We said, okay, this should be a technology neutral payment scheme, and it should be a market, not a payment, right? But China’s building these things up little by little. Over time we’ve seen, historically, actually, a number of systems internationally started with payments before they move to markets because they realize that you could get a lot more competitive pressure with markets.
The capacity payment scheme for coal is extremely simple, right? It says, okay, for each province, we’re going to say what percentage of our benchmark coal investment costs are we going to subsidize. It’s extremely simple. It does not account for how much you’re using it at a plant by plant level. It does not account for other factors, renewables, etc. It’s a very coarse metric. But I wouldn’t say that it had had some, you know, perverse negative effect on the outcome of what coal generation is. Probably more likely is that these payments were seen, for some, as extra support. But then for some that are really hurting, they’re saying, okay, well then we will maybe put up less obstacles to market reforms.
But then on top of that, you have to put in the hourly energy demand growth story and say, okay, well you have all these renewables, but you don’t have enough storage to shift to evening peaks. You are going to rely on coal to meet that given the current rigid dispatch system. And so you’re dispatching them kind of regardless of whether or not you have the payment schemes.
I will say that I was a skeptic, right? Because when people told me that China should put in place a capacity market, I said, China has overcapacity. So if you have an overcapacity situation, you put in place a market, the prices should be zero. So what’s the point? But actually, when you’re looking out ahead with all of this surplus coal capacity that you’re trying to push down, you’re trying to push those capacity factors of those coal plans from 50%, 60%, down to 20% or even lower, they need to have other revenue schemes if you’re not going to dramatically open up your spot markets, which China is very hesitant to do — very risk averse when it comes to the openness of spot markets, in terms of price gaps. So that’s a necessary part of this transition. But it can be done more efficiently, and it should done technology neutral.
And by the way that is happening in certain places. That’s a national scheme, but we actually see that the implementation — for example, Shaanxi province, we have a technology neutral scheme that would include other resources, not just coal.
Mentioned:
China’s new pledge to cut its emissions by 2035
What an ‘ambitious’ 2035 electricity target looks like for China
China’s Clean Energy Pledge is Clouded by Coal, The Wire China
Jesse’s upshift; Rob’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.