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A victory for activists also represents a political gamble for the president.
Perhaps the biggest political test of the climate movement has now arrived.
There are a few ways to think about this. But first, the facts: The Biden administration will temporarily stop approving new liquified natural gas export terminals, allowing the Energy Department to study the effect that they have on the climate, the White House announced on Friday.
The decision is a victory for climate activists, who had demanded President Joe Biden halt the growth of what may be the country’s most important fossil fuel industry. It also throws into question whether some of the biggest pending LNG projects — such as Calcasieu Pass 2, or CP2, a proposed Louisiana terminal that activists have dubbed a “carbon mega bomb” — will ultimately get built.
The pause could also complicate Biden’s foreign policy, which has used America’s status as a major energy supplier to pacify allies and wield economic might. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and throttled gas supplies to Europe, the United States has used its vast stores of liquified natural gas to supply allied countries with energy that conventional estimates say is less climate-polluting than coal.
In a statement, Biden framed the pause as a crucial part of his administration’s ambitious climate policy.
“From Day One, my administration has set the United States on an unprecedented course to tackle the climate crisis at home and abroad,” Biden said. “This pause on new LNG approvals sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time.
While the approvals are paused, the Energy Department will study the effect liquified natural gas export terminals could have on domestic and global greenhouse gas emissions. That review will likely last more than a year, almost certainly pushing a final decision until after the presidential election.
Biden also said the pause could be suspended in the case “of unanticipated and immediate national security emergencies.”
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm joined a call with reporters on Thursday. “As our exports increase,” she said, “we must review export applications using the most comprehensive up-to-date analysis of the economic, environmental and national security considerations.”
Although the United States only began exporting liquified natural gas in 2016, it is now the world’s top exporter of the fossil fuel. And the country’s dominance in the industry is growing. By 2027, a slate of new liquified natural gas facilities
are set to open in North America, including several in the U.S., doubling the continent’s export capacity.
I think it’s fair to say that the Biden administration took many climate experts — a different class than activists, to be clear — by surprise. Liam Denning, a Bloomberg columnist who is no enemy of the green transition, dubbed the pause “clever, clever politics and bad policy.”
The activist case against liquified natural gas turns on an incendiary new analysis by Robert Howarth, a Cornell professor of ecology and environmental biology, that claims exporting natural gas could be significantly worse than coal for the climate. Howarth’s analysis has not been published in a scientific journal, but it has been cited repeatedly by the climate journalist and activist Bill McKibben, who has emerged as perhaps the leading opponent of building the new terminals. Using Howarth’s math, CP2 and other export terminals start to look worse than the Willow pipeline in Alaska that the Biden administration approved last year.
It’s hard to imagine Biden making this decision if the campaign wasn’t freaking out about getting Gen Z and younger Millennials to vote. The president’s polling among young voters has been so abysmal lately that it defied belief at first, and young voters widely oppose how America is handling Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip. This is more than a messaging problem: Young voters have a substantive policy disagreement with the Biden administration about the most salient international issue of the last six months.
The administration seems to be hoping a pause on LNG approvals will help reverse that dismal momentum. Yet doing so will bring its own electoral risks. In November, Heatmap polled roughly 1,000 Americans about key climate issues. While we didn’t ask what Biden should do about natural gas pipelines specifically, we did ask a more wide-ranging question about the recent March to End Fossil Fuels, which drew tens of thousands of demonstrators to New York in September. Protesters demanded, among other things, that Biden suspend or revoke approvals for all new fossil-fuel infrastructure.
Here was our mouthful of a poll question:
In September, more than 50,000 people marched in New York City demanding that the Biden administration and Congress “end fossil fuels.” These activists want the Biden administration to stop all oil exports, block new oil and gas pipelines from being built, and ban any company from drilling on government-owned land. These policies would increase gasoline prices, but some scientists say they are essential to slowing down the dangerous increase in global temperatures. Do you support or oppose the Biden administration and Congress adopting policies aimed at permanently ending the oil, gas, and coal industries?
Respondents were split — and, frankly, confused. Forty-two percent of Americans opposed ending the fossil-fuel industry; 41% supported it. Nearly 20% of Americans said they were unsure what Biden and Congress should do. And while sunsetting the fossil fuel industry won majority support among Democrats and liberal independents, a plurality of moderate independents said they would oppose such a policy. Two-thirds of Republicans rejected it, too.
I will confess that I am not sure that the American public, in practice, is as split on taking aggressive steps to end the fossil-fuel industry as the poll finds. That’s because elsewhere in our poll, we found that 62% of Americans said they supported the federal government “making it easier to drill for fossil fuels and build new fossil fuel pipelines.” Some sizable percentage of voters seemingly want Biden both to support fossil fuels and kill fossil fuels — a logical impossibility.
But the results of the fossil fuel march question become more interesting — and more politically relevant, I think — when you break them out by age group. The young and the old, we found, were divided on the fossil fuel industry. Slightly more than half of adults aged 18 to 34 said Biden and Congress should work to shut it down. But most older adults, defined here as anyone 65 and older, opposed such a move.
When you look deeper beneath the hood, those results get even more complicated. Of the young adults who support ending the fossil-fuel industry, most said they were “somewhat” in support of the idea. But of the older adults who opposed it, a majority were “strongly” against the idea. In other words, the largest share of young people were weakly for ending the fossil-fuel industry, while the largest share of older people were strongly against it.
That poses a dilemma for Biden. While younger and middle-aged adults drive social media discourse and shape media coverage, it is the old who consistently show up to vote. In that way, the fossil-fuel industry is — like the Gaza war — a young/old scissor issue; it divides the electorate along age lines in a way guaranteed to alienate some part of the president’s coalition. (Of course, most older Americans won’t see much of the consequences of greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuels in their lifetime — but that fact, while ethically relevant, does not have immediate electoral bearing.)
The one grace for the president is that the fossil-fuel issue doesn’t divide Democrats as much, per se; about two-thirds of older Democrats said that they would back a plan to shut down the oil and gas industry. Yet self-identified independents, whom the president must win in November, were more evenly split. There is no easy out.
McKibben has declared provisional victory over the issue. “Joe Biden has just done more than any president before him to check the expansion of dirty energy,” he wrote on X when the first unconfirmed reports broke. “This is the biggest check any president has ever applied to the fossil fuel industry, and the strongest move against dirty energy in American history,” he later elaborated. I will be curious if that message breaks through — it is an endorsement that I think many young voters would be surprised to hear.
Under Biden, Congress has passed the most aggressive climate legislation in U.S. history — not only in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act, with its tax incentives for clean energy, but also the bipartisan infrastructure law, which directed hundreds of billions to public transit and next-generation energy research. Yet instead of celebrating that victory, many climate-concerned young voters — or at least the environmentalist groups that purport to speak for them — spent much of 2023 fixated on the president’s approval of the Willow pipeline. While I’ve never seen a scientific sample, it’s pretty clear that the negative news about Willow broke through among young voters to a far greater extent than the positive news about the IRA, even though the IRA will reduce greenhouse gas emissions far more than the Willow pipeline will increase them.
With the LNG pause, the Biden administration has avoided another Willow “betrayal”-style story among the youngs. But it may also have invited negative coverage from other factions of the press — including business and energy analysts who doubt Howarth’s analyses and remain more equivocal about LNG. This is why this moment is such a test for climate activists: If they cannot generate a positive news cycle for the president at this moment — or rather, if they can’t convince young people that Biden has done something good on climate change — then their utility in the coalition will come into question.
Below all of this lurks a possibility that would be truly toxic for climate politics: that the social media-driven environment in which younger adults marinate can only direct attention to negative stories. What if X, Instagram, and TikTok generate outrage and nihilism far more easily than support and solidarity? That would be dangerous not only for climate politics, but also for the entire progressive agenda, which requires the public — perhaps above all — to believe in the possibility of mutual uplift and civic competency.
Biden is presiding over a country in profound transition, trying to manage and redirect subterranean rivers of history that — much to his campaign’s chagrin — remain well outside his control. The United States is stuck between two regimes, two economies: the fossil-fueled, Middle East-managing policy of old, and the clean, climate-friendlier, Asia-focused policy of the future. Voters are split, too. As much as Biden officials and young people might want to push the economy toward the latter, America keeps getting dragged back toward the former — by its economy, by its electorate, and by events themselves.
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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.