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Why Patagonia, REI, and just about every other gear retailer are going PFAS-free.
Hiking gear exists so that, when nature tries to kill you, it is a little less likely to succeed. Sometimes this gear’s life-saving function is obvious — a Nalgene to carry extra water so you don’t die of thirst, or a fist-sized first-aid kit so you don’t bleed to death — while other things you don’t necessarily purchase with the thought that they might one day save your life. Like, say, a small Swiss Army Knife. Or, in my case, a raincoat.
Last summer, on a casual day hike in Mount Rainier National Park, my family was overtaken by a storm that, quite literally, rose up out of nowhere. It had been a sunny, clear day when we left the parking lot; at four miles in, we were being lashed by hail and gale-force winds on an exposed alpine trail, with no trees or boulders nearby for shelter.
Then, one member of our hiking party tripped.
In the split second before she stood up and confirmed she could walk out on her own, my mind raced through what I had in my pack. Stupidly, I had nothing to assemble a makeshift shelter, no warmer layers. But I did have my blue waterproof rainshell. In weather as extreme as the storm off Rainier that day, keeping dry is essential; if we’d had to wait out the rain due to a broken ankle, we’d have become soaked and hypothermic long before help arrived. My raincoat, I realized during those terrifying seconds, could save my life.
But what made my raincoat so trustworthy that day on the mountain could also, in theory, kill me — or, more likely, kill or sicken any of the thousands of people who live downstream of the manufacturers that make waterproofing chemicals and the landfills where waterproof clothing is incinerated or interred. Outdoor apparel is typically ultraprocessed and treated using perfluoroalkyl and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, a class of water- and stain-resistant “forever chemicals” that are more commonly referred to as PFAS (pronounced “pee-fass”). After decades of work by environmental groups and health advocates, states and retailers are finally banning the sale of textiles that have been treated with the chemicals, which in the outdoor industry often manifest in the form of Gore-Tex membranes or “durable water repellent” treatments.
These bans are fast approaching: Beginning in 2025 — less than 12 months from now — California will forbid the sale of most PFAS-treated textiles; New York will restrict them in apparel; and Washington will regulate stain- and waterproofing treatments, with similar regulations pending or approved in a number of other states. Following pressure from activists, the nation’s largest outdoor retailer, REI, also announced last winter that it will ban PFAS in all the textile products and cookware sold in its stores starting fall 2024; Dick’s Sporting Goods will also eliminate PFAS from its brand-name clothing.
This will upend the outdoor apparel industry. Some of the best coats in the world — legendary gear like Arc’teryx’s Beta AR and the traditional construction of the Patagonia Torrentshell — use, or until recently used, PFAS in their waterproofing processes or in their jackets’ physical membranes. Though the bans frequently allow vague, temporary loopholes for gear intended for “extreme wet conditions” or “expeditions,” such exceptions will be closed off by the end of the 2020s. (Patagonia has “committed to making all membranes and water-repellent finishes without [PFAS] by 2025,” Gin Ando, a spokesperson for the company, told me; Arc’teryx spokesperson Amy May shared that the company is “committed to moving towards PFAS-free materials in its products.”)
Even if you aren’t buying expedition-level gear, your closet almost certainly contains PFAS. A 2022 study by Toxic-Free Future found the chemicals in nearly 75% of products labeled as waterproof or stain-resistant. Another study found that the concentration of fluorotelomer alcohols, which are used in the production of PFAS, was 30 times higher inside stores that sold outdoor clothing than in other workplaces.
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The reason outdoor companies have historically loved PFAS so much is simple: The chemicals are unrivaled in their water repellency. PFAS are manufactured chains of fluorine-carbon bonds that are incredibly difficult to break (the precise number of carbons is also used in the naming process, which is why you’ll hear them called “C8” or “C6,” sometimes, as well). Because of this strong bond, other molecules slip off when they come into contact with the fluorine-carbon chain; you can observe this in a DIY test at home by dripping water onto a fabric and watching it roll off, leaving your garment perfectly dry.
It is also because of this bond that PFAS are so stubbornly persistent — in the environment, certainly, but also in us. An estimated 98% to 99% of people have traces of PFAS in their bodies. Researchers have found the molecules in breast milk, rainwater, and Antarctica’s snow. We inhale them in dust and drink them in our tap water, and because they look a little like a fatty acid to our bodies, they can cause health problems that we’re only beginning to grasp. So far, PFAS have been linked to kidney and testicular cancer, decreased fertility, elevated cholesterol, weight gain, thyroid disease, the pregnancy complication pre-eclampsia, increased risk of preterm birth and low birth weight, hormone interference, and reduced vaccine response in children.
Chemical companies and industry groups often argue that certain PFAS are demonstrably worse than others; the so-called “long-chain” molecules, for instance, are thought to have higher bioaccumulation and toxicity potential, and have mostly been replaced by “short-chain” molecules. But as Arlene Blum, a pioneering mountaineer and the founder of the Green Science Policy Institute, an environmental advocacy organization that opposes PFAS, told me, “in all the cases that we’ve studied,” forever chemicals have been found “to be harmful in one way or another,” whether they’re short or long.
From a health perspective, the good news is that activists are winning. While initial efforts to protect humans and the environment from PFAS in the mid-2000s resulted only in the voluntary phase-out of long-chain chemicals like PFOA and PFOS, the new laws target the entire class of thousands of compounds to prevent an ongoing game of whack-a-mole with chemical manufacturers. (A recent report by The Guardian found that the chemical industry spent $110 million in the last two U.S. election cycles trying to thwart or slow the various bans.) Public pressure campaigns mounted against ostensibly sustainability-minded companies like REI have prompted store-initiated PFAS bans that will also influence future gear sold in the United States. (REI was long a PFAS laggard, and was even hit in 2022 with a class-action lawsuit over allegedly marketing PFAS-containing clothes as “sustainable.” The company declined to comment for this story. Dick’s Sporting Goods did not respond to requests for comment.)
But as the days tick closer to the first PFAS bans coming into effect in stores this fall, outdoor apparel companies are still scrambling to redesign their clothing. Some alternatives to PFAS do exist — Blum swears by her PFAS-free Black Diamond jacket — though even the most ardent supporters of the forever chemical bans will admit the waterproofing alternatives haven’t 100% caught up yet.
“The main concern that most people have in the industry is the amount of work that it’s going to take to meet these guidelines,” Chris Steinkamp, the head of advocacy at the trade association Snowsports Industries America, told me. “Because PFAS is omnipresent. Unfortunately, they’re pretty much in everything.”
Many outdoor apparel companies genuinely want to comply with the coming bans, Karolína Brabcová, the campaign manager for toxic chemicals in consumer products at Arnika, a Czech environmental non-profit, told me. “It’s not such a matter of greenwashing here,” she said. “It’s more about the fact that you’ve got the chemical industry on one side and the downstream users joining the consumers on the other side. And the downstream users don’t know everywhere the PFAS are being used; it’s a business secret.”
In one case detailed by Bloomberg, the Swedish company Fjällräven had stopped using PFAS in its products, only to learn from a 2012 Greenpeace investigation that the chemicals were still present in its apparel. “A supplier using fluorochemistry on another company’s products was cross-contaminating Fjällräven’s,” the Bloomberg authors write, adding that “subsequent testing revealed” just having “products in stores near products from other companies that used the chemicals still resulted in low levels of contamination.”
It isn’t always the case, however, that clothing manufacturers are unwitting victims of chemical sloppiness. Some apparel companies have taken advantage of the alphabet soup of chemical names to look more sustainable than they are. “We’ve seen in recent years products labeled as ‘PFOA-free’ or ‘PFOS-free,’ which suggests that they do not contain the long-chain PFAS that have largely been phased out from production in the United States,” Blum warned me. “That’s really misleading because oftentimes it’s a signal a product likely contains other PFAS chemicals, which may be just as persistent and may also be quite toxic in production to disposal.”
The reason I could count on my raincoat to protect me in the mountains, though, was because, like most expedition-level gear, it is made of a membrane manufactured by Gore-Tex, with an additional DWR waterproofing finish that also contains PFAS. Gore-Tex is known in the outdoors industry for making the holy grail of performance fabrics: Its membranes are waterproof, durable, and breathable enough to exercise in, a challenging and impressive combination to nail. But to achieve this, the company has traditionally used the fluoropolymer PTFE, a notorious forever chemical you probably know by the trademarked name Teflon.
This technology — or rather, these chemicals — are incredibly and irresistibly good at what they do. “The terrible truth,” Wired wrote in its list of raincoat recommendations updated this past December, “is that if you’re going to be exposed [to inclement weather] for multiple hours, you are probably not going to be able to rely on a [PFAS]-free DWR to keep hypothermia at bay.”
When I reached out to Gore-Tex about its use of PFAS, company spokesperson Julie Evans told me via email that “there are important distinctions among materials associated with the term PFAS” and that the fluoropolymers Gore uses, such as PTFE, “are not the same as those substances that are bioavailable, mobile, and persistent.” She stressed that “not all PFAS are the same” and that PTFE and the other fluoropolymers in the Gore arsenal meet the standards of low concern, and are “extremely stable and do not degrade in the environment,” are “too large to be bioavailable,” and are “non-toxic [and] safe to use from an environmental and human perspective.” The National Resource Defense Council, by contrast, writes that PFAS polymers like PTFE, “when added as a coating or membrane to a raincoat or other product, can pose a toxic risk to wearers, just as other PFAS can.”
Some of the environmental health advocates I spoke with said Gore-Tex’s language was misleading. Mike Schade, the director of Toxic-Free Future’s Mind the Store program, which pressures retailers to avoid stocking items that use hazardous chemicals, told me that while it is “laudable that the company has phased some PFAS out of their products … what we’re concerned about is the entire class. We think it’s misleading to consumers and to the public to suggest that other PFAS are not of environmental concern.”
Blum, of the Green Science Policy Institute, admitted that while “probably your Gore-Tex jacket won’t hurt you” — there is limited evidence that PFAS will leech into your body just from wearing it — there’s a more significant issue at the heart of the PFAS debate. “When you go from the monomer to the polymer” in the chemical manufacturing process, she said, it “contaminates the drinking water in the area where it’s made.” The disposal process — and especially incineration, a common fate for discarded clothing — is another opportunity for PFAS to shed into the environment. People who live near landfills and chemical manufacturing plants in industrial hubs like Michigan and many cities in Bangladesh suffer from PFAS at disproportionate levels.
So then, where do we go from here? Hikers, skiers, mountaineers, fly-fishers — they all still need clothing to stay dry. “Our industry is committed to performance and making sure that the gear that people are sold can live up to the standards that athletes need,” Steinkamp said. “I know that is top of mind, and that’s what’s making [the transition] so hard.”
But it also might be the case that our gear is too waterproof. “When we think about the intended performance of outdoor gear, there’s a lot of expectation that your gear will keep you extremely dry,” Kaytlin Moeller, the regional sustainability manager at Fenix Outdoor North America, the parent company of outdoors brands like Fjällräven and Royal Robbins, told me. “But when we really start to look at it,” she added, “I think part of the question is: What is the level of functionality that is really necessary for the customer to have a positive experience outdoors and be prepared for their adventure?”
It’s probably less than you think; consumers frequently don Everest-level technologies to walk their dogs for 15 minutes in a drizzle. “As responsible creators of products, it’s our job to balance functionality with impact,” Moeller said. “And in terms of [PFAS], it just wasn’t worth the risk and the carcinogenic qualities to continue putting that treatment on our products when there are other innovative coatings and constructions that we can use.”
Those alternatives, like innovative fabric weavings and proprietary waxes, might not sound as high-tech as hydrophobic chemicals. Still, for the vast majority of regular people — and even most outdoor recreators — it’s likely more than enough to stay comfortably dry. “We’ve been going into the outdoors for hundreds and hundreds of years without these chemicals,” Schade pointed out. “We can do it again.”
Luckily for everything and everyone on the planet, new waterproofing products are getting better by the day. Gore-Tex has spent “the better part of the last decade” developing its new PFAS-free “ePE membrane,” Evans told me. Short for expanded polyethylene, ePE is fluorine-free (albeit, derived from fossil fuels) and has been adopted by Patagonia, Arc’teryx, and others in the outdoor industry as a PFAS-free alternative. Evans described it as feeling “a little lighter and softer” than old-school Gore-Tex, but “with all the same level of performance benefits” as the historic products.
Other companies, including Patagonia, have been transparent about their phase-out goals and the ongoing difficulties of the PFAS-free transition; Gin, the Patagonia spokesperson, told me that as of this fall, “92% of our materials by volume with water-repellent chemistries are made without” PFAS, and that the new waterproofing “stands up to the demands of our most technical items.” Deuter, Black Diamond, Outdoor Research, Jack Wolfskin, Mammut, Marmot, and prAna are among other outdoor brands that are working to remove PFAS from their gear.
“We have to work together, collaboratively, if we really want to eliminate them — to the point of the verbiage around being [PFAS]-free,” Moeller stressed. “No one can be [PFAS]-free ‘til everyone in the industry is, because of the risk of cross-contamination.”
Then there are the consumers who will need to adjust. I admit, in the weeks before beginning the reporting for this article, I bought myself another raincoat. It was on sale from one of my favorite outdoor brands, and I was attracted to its aggressively cheerful shade of Morton Salt-girl yellow, which I thought would also help me stand out in the case of a future emergency.
At the time, I hadn’t even thought to check what it was made of; what mattered to me was how, when I slipped it on, I became amphibious — like some kind of marine mammal, slick and impervious to the rain. Stepping out of my front door and into a downpour, I felt practically invincible.
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Businesses were already bracing for a crash. Then came another 50% tariff on Chinese goods.
When I wrote Heatmap’s guide to driving less last year, I didn’t anticipate that a good motivation for doing so would be that every car in America was about to get a lot more expensive.
Then again, no one saw the breadth and depth of the Trump administration’s tariffs coming. “We would characterize this slate of tariffs as ‘worse than the worst case scenario,’” one group of veteran securities analysts wrote in a note to investors last week, a sentiment echoed across Wall Street and reflected in four days of stock market turmoil so far.
But if the economic downturn has renewed your interest in purchasing a bike or e-bike, you’ll want to act fast — and it may already be too late. Because Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs stack on top of his other tariffs and duties, the U.S. bicycle trade association PeopleForBikes calculated that beginning on April 9, the day the newest tariffs come into effect, the duty on e-bikes from China would be 79%, up from nothing at all under President Biden. The tariff on most non-electric bikes from China, meanwhile, would spike to 90%, up from 11% on January 1 of this year. Then on Tuesday, the White House announced that it would add another 50% tariff on China on top of that whole tariff stack, starting Wednesday, in retaliation for Beijing’s counter-tariffs.
Prior to the latest announcement, Jay Townley, a founding partner of the cycling industry consulting firm Human Powered Solutions, had told me that if the Trump administration actually followed through on a retaliatory 50% tariff on top of those duties, then “we’re out of business because nobody can afford to bring in a bicycle product at 100% or more in tariffs.”
It’s difficult to overstate how existential the tariffs are for the bicycle industry. Imports account for 97% of the bikes purchased in the United States, of which 87% come from China, making it “one of the most import-dependent and China-dependent industries in the U.S.,” according to a 2021 analysis by the Coalition for a Prosperous America, which advocates for trade-protectionist policies.
Many U.S. cycling brands have grumbled for years about America’s relatively generous de minimis exemption, a policy of waiving duties on items valued at less than $800. The loophole — which is what enables shoppers to buy dirt-cheap clothes from brands like Temu, Shein, and Alibaba — has also allowed for uncertified helmets and non-compliant e-bikes and e-bike batteries to flood the U.S. market. These batteries, which are often falsely marketed as meeting international safety standards, have been responsible for deadly e-bike fires in places like New York City. “A going retail for a good lithium-ion replacement battery for an e-bike is $800 to $1,000,” Townley said. “You look online, and you’ll see batteries at $350, $400, that come direct to you from China under the de minimis exemption.”
Cyclingnews reported recently that Robert Margevicius, the executive vice president of the American bicycle giant Specialized, had filed a complaint with the Trump administration over losing “billions in collectable tariffs” through the loophole. A spokesperson for Specialized defended Margevicius’ comment by calling it an “industry-wide position that is aligned with PeopleForBikes.” (Specialized did not respond to a request for clarification from Heatmap, though a spokesperson told Cyclingnews that de minimis imports permit “unsafe products and intellectual property violation.” PeopleForBikes’ general and policy counsel Matt Moore told me in an email that “we have supported reforming the way the U.S. treats low-value de minimis imports for several years.”)
Trump indeed axed China’s de minimis exemption as part of his April 2 tariffs — a small win for the U.S. bicycle brands. But any protection afforded by duties on cheap imported bikes and e-bikes will be erased by the damage from high tariffs imposed on China and other Asian countries. Fewer than 500,000 bicycles in a 10 million-unit market are even assembled in the United States, and essentially none is entirely manufactured here. “We do not know how to make a bike,” Townley told me flatly. Though a number of major U.S. brands employ engineers to design their bikes, when it comes to home-shoring manufacturing, “all of that knowledge resides in Taiwan, China, Vietnam. It isn’t here.”
In recent years, Chinese factories had become “very proficient at shipping goods from third-party countries” in order to avoid European anti-dumping duties, as well as leftover tariffs from Trump’s first term, Rick Vosper, an industry veteran and columnist at Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, told me. “Many Chinese companies built bicycle assembly plants in Vietnam specifically so the sourcing sticker would not say ‘made in China,’” he added. Of course, those bikes and component parts are now also subject to Trump’s tariffs, which are as high as 57% for Vietnam, 60% for Cambodia, and 43% for Taiwan for most bikes. (A potential added tariff on countries that import oil from Venezuela could bump them even higher.)
The tariffs could not come at a worse time for the industry. 2019 marked one of the slowest years for the U.S. specialty retail bike business in two decades, so when COVID hit — and suddenly everyone wanted a bicycle as a way of exercising and getting around — there was “no inventory to be had, but a huge influx of customers,” Vosper told me. In response, “major players put in huge increases in their orders.”
But by 2023, the COVID-induced demand had evaporated, leaving suppliers with hundreds of millions of dollars in inventory that they couldn’t move. Even by discounting wholesale prices below their own cost to make the product and offering buy-one-get-one deals, dealers couldn’t get the bikes off their hands. “All the people who wanted to buy a bike during COVID have bought a bike and are not ready to buy another one anytime soon,” Vosper said.
Going into 2025, many retailers were still dealing with the COVID-induced bicycle glut; Mike Blok, the founder of Brooklyn Carbon Bike Company in New York City, told me he could think of three or four tristate-area shops off the top of his head that have closed in recent months because they were sitting on inventory.
Blok, however, was cautiously optimistic about his own position. While he stressed that he isn’t a fan of the tariffs, he also largely sells pre-owned bikes. On the low end of the market, the tariffs will likely raise prices no more than about $15 or $20, which might not make much of a difference to consumer behavior. But for something like a higher-end carbon fiber bike, which can run $2,700 or higher and is almost entirely produced in Taiwan, the tariffs could mean an increase of hundreds of dollars for customers. “I think what that will mean for me is that more folks will be open to the pre-owned option,” Blok said, although he also anticipates his input costs for repairs and tuning will go up.
But there’s a bigger, and perhaps even more obvious, problem for bike retailers beyond their products becoming more expensive. “What I sell is not a staple good; people don’t need a bike,” Blok reminded me. “So as folks’ discretionary income diminishes because other things become more expensive, they’ll have less to spend on discretionary items.”
Townley, the industry consultant, confirmed that many major cycling brands had already seen the writing on the wall before Trump announced his tariffs and begun to pivot to re-sale. Bicycling Magazine, a hobbyist publication, is even promoting “buying used” as one of its “tips to help you save” under Trump’s tariffs. Savvy retailers might be able to pivot and rely on their service, customer loyalty, and re-sale businesses to stay afloat during the hard days ahead; Moore of PeopleForBikes also noted that “repair services may increase” as people look to fix what they already have.
And if you don’t have a bike or e-bike but were thinking about getting one as a way to lighten your car dependency, decarbonize your life, or just because they’re cool, “there are still good values to be found,” Moore went on. “Now is a great time to avoid a likely increase in prices.” Townley anticipated that depending on inventory, we’re likely 30 to 40 days away from seeing prices go up.
In the meantime, cycling organizations are scrambling to keep their members abreast of the coming changes. “PeopleForBikes is encouraging our members to contact their elected representatives about the very real impacts these tariffs will have on their companies and our industry,” Moore told me. The National Bicycle Dealers Association, a nonprofit supporting specialty bicycle retailers, has teamed up with the D.C.-based League of American Bicyclists, a ridership organization, to explore lobbying lawmakers for the first time in decades in the hopes that some might oppose the tariffs or explore carve-outs for the industry.
But Townley, whose firm Human Powered Solutions is assisting in NBDA’s effort, shared a grim conversation he had at a recent trade show in Las Vegas, where a new board member at a cycling organization had asked him “what can we do” about Trump’s tariffs.
“I said, ‘You’re out of time,” Townley recalled. “There isn’t much that can be done. All we can do is react.”
Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.
Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.
But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.
Trump administration officials — including the president himself — have touted cheaper oil to suggest that the economic response to the tariffs hasn’t been all bad. On Sunday, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told NBC, “Oil prices went down almost 15% in two days, which impacts working Americans much more than the stock market does.”
Trump picked up this line on Truth Social Monday morning. “Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION,” he wrote. He then spent the day posting quotes from Fox Business commentators echoing that idea, first Maria Bartiromo (“Rates are plummeting, oil prices are plummeting, deregulation is happening. President Trump is not going to bend”) then Charles Payne (“What we’re not talking about is, oil was $76, now it’s $65. Gasoline prices are going to plummet”).
But according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, pointing to falling oil prices as a stimulus is just another example of the “4D chess” theory, under which some market participants attribute motives to Trump’s trade policy beyond his stated goal of reducing trade deficits to as near zero (or surplus!) as possible.
Instead, oil markets are primarily “responding to the recession risk that comes from the tariff and the trade war,” Dutta told me. “That is the main story.” In short, oil markets see less global trade and less global production, and therefore falling demand for oil. The effect on household consumption, he said, was a “second order effect.”
It is true that falling oil prices will help “stabilize consumption,” Dutta told me (although they could also devastate America’s own oil industry). “It helps. It’ll provide some lift to real income growth for consumers, because they’re not spending as much on gasoline.” But “to fully offset the trade war effects, you basically need to get oil down to zero.”
That’s confirmed by some simple and extremely back of the envelope math. In 2023, households on average consumed about 700 gallons of gasoline per year, based on Energy Information Administration calculations that the average gasoline price in 2023 was $3.52, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics put average household gasoline expenditures at about $2,450.
Let’s generously assume that due to the tariffs and Trump’s regulatory and diplomatic efforts, gas prices drop from the $3.26 they were at on Monday, according to AAA, to $2.60, the average price in 2019. (GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haanwrote Monday that the tariffs combined with OPEC+ production hikes could lead gas prices “to fall below $3 per gallon.”)
Let’s also assume that this drop in gas prices does not cause people to drive more or buy less fuel-efficient vehicles. In that case, those same 700 gallons cost the average American $1,820, which would generate annual savings of $630 on average per household. If we went to the lowest price since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about $3 per gallon, total consumption of 700 gallons would cost a household about $2,100, saving $350 per household per year.
That being said, $1,820 is a pretty low level for annual gasoline consumption. In 2021, as the economy was recovering from the Covid recession and before gas prices popped, annual gasoline expenditures only got as low as $1,948; in 2020 — when oil prices dropped to literally negative dollars per barrel and gas prices got down to $1.85 a gallon — annual expenditures were just over $1,500.
In any case, if you remember the opening paragraphs of this story, even the most generous estimated savings would go nowhere near surmounting the overall rise in prices forecast by the Yale Budget Lab. $630 is less than $3,800! (JPMorgan has forecast a more mild increase in prices of 1% to 1.5%, but agrees that prices will likely rise and purchasing power will decline.)
But maybe look at it this way: You might be able to drive a little more than you expected to, even as your costs elsewhere are going up. Just please be careful! You don’t want to get into a bad accident and have to replace your car: New car prices are expected to rise by several thousand dollars due to Trump’s tariffs.
With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.
More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.
That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.
Yet lots of those cars are still around. I see a few prowling my workplace parking garage or roaming the streets of Los Angeles. With the faded performance of their old batteries, these long-running EVs aren’t good for much but short-distance city driving. Ignore the outdated battery pack for a second, though, and what surrounds that unit is a perfectly serviceable EV.
That’s exactly what a new brand of EV restorers see. Last week, car site The Autopiancovered DIYers who are scooping up cheap old Leafs, some costing as little as $3,000, and swapping in affordable Chinese-made 62 kilowatt-hour battery units in place of the original 24 kilowatt-hour units to instantly boost the car’s range to about 250 miles. One restorer bought a new battery on the Chinese site Alibaba for $6,000 ($4,500, plus $1,500 to ship that beast across the sea).
The possibility of the (relatively) simple battery swap is a longtime EV owner’s daydream. In the earlier days of the electrification race, many manufacturers and drivers saw simple and quick battery exchange as the solution for EV road-tripping. Instead of waiting half an hour for a battery to recharge, you’d swap your depleted unit for a fully charged one and be on your way. Even Tesla tested this approach last decade before settling for good on the Supercharger network of fast-charging stations.
There are still companies experimenting with battery swaps, but this technology lost. Other EV startups and legacy car companies that followed Nissan and Tesla into making production EVs embraced the rechargeable lithium-ion battery that is meant to be refilled at a fast-charging station and is not designed to be easily removed from the vehicle. Buy an electric vehicle and you’re buying a big battery with a long warranty but no clear plan for replacement. The companies imagine their EVs as something like a smartphone: It’s far from impossible to replace the battery and give the car a new life, but most people won’t bother and will simply move on to a new car when they can’t take the limitations of their old one anymore.
I think about this impasse a lot. My 2019 Tesla Model 3 began its life with a nominal 240 miles of range. Now that the vehicle has nearly six years and 70,000 miles on it, its maximum range is down to just 200, while its functional range at highway speed is much less than that. I don’t want to sink money into another vehicle, which means living with an EV’s range that diminishes as the years go by.
But what if, one day, I replaced its battery? Even if it costs thousands of dollars to achieve, a big range boost via a new battery would make an older EV feel new again, and at a cost that’s still far less than financing a whole new car. The thought is even more compelling in the age of Trump-imposed tariffs that will raise already-expensive new vehicles to a place that’s simply out of reach for many people (though new battery units will be heavily tariffed, too).
This is no simple weekend task. Car enthusiasts have been swapping parts and modifying gas-burning vehicles since the dawn of the automotive age, but modern EVs aren’t exactly made with the garage mechanic in mind. Because so few EVs are on the road, there is a dearth of qualified mechanics and not a huge population of people with the savvy to conduct major surgery on an electric car without electrocuting themselves. A battery-replacing owner would need to acquire not only the correct pack but also potentially adapters and other equipment necessary to make the new battery play nice with the older car. Some Nissan Leaf modifiers are finding their replacement packs aren’t exactly the same size, shape or weight, The Autopian says, meaning they need things like spacers to make the battery sit in just the right place.
A new battery isn’t a fix-all either. The motors and other electrical components wear down and will need to be replaced eventually, too. A man in Norway who drove his Tesla more than a million miles has replaced at least four battery packs and 14 motors, turning his EV into a sort of car of Theseus.
Crucially, though, EVs are much simpler, mechanically, than combustion-powered cars, what with the latter’s belts and spark plugs and thousands of moving parts. The car that surrounds a depleted battery pack might be in perfectly good shape to keep on running for thousands of miles to come if the owner were to install a new unit, one that could potentially give the EV more driving range than it had when it was new.
The battery swap is still the domain of serious top-tier DIYers, and not for the mildly interested or faint of heart. But it is a sign of things to come. A market for very affordable used Teslas is booming as owners ditch their cars at any cost to distance themselves from Elon Musk. Old Leafs, Chevy Bolts and other EVs from the 2010s can be had for cheap. The generation of early vehicles that came with an unacceptably low 100 to 150 miles of range would look a lot more enticing if you imagine today’s battery packs swapped into them. The possibility of a like-new old EV will look more and more promising, especially as millions of Americans realize they can no longer afford a new car.