You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Implementing the new rules could mean reshaping the entire U.S. energy system.
The most generous, lucrative, and all-around lavish subsidy in President Joe Biden’s climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, is the new tax credit for clean hydrogen production. Under the policy, a company can get a bounty of up to $3 for each kilogram of hydrogen made with clean electricity that it produces and sells. There are few legal limits to what a company can earn.
So it figures, then, that this subsidy has been the subject of maybe the most acrimonious, dramatic, hair-tearing fight over the law so far, one that saw snoozy lobbyists and power plant operators take out Spotify spots and full-page New York Times ads in order to make their point.
On Friday, the first phase of that battle ended — and the side supported by most environmental groups claimed a provisional victory. The Biden administration proposed strict rules governing the tax credit, designed to ensure that only zero-carbon electricity meeting rigorous standards can be used to make subsidized hydrogen. The rules, which some industry groups allege could stunt the field in its infancy, will have far-reaching consequences not only for hydrogen itself, but for how America’s power grid prepares for an age of abundant, zero-carbon electricity. It will create a system for organizing clean electricity that could soon determine how companies, consumers, and the federal government buy and sell that electricity — even when it has nothing to do with hydrogen.
But all of that is in the future. Now, to get the highest value of the tax credit, companies must — like other subsidies in the law — demonstrate that they paid a prevailing wage and took advantage of local apprenticeship programs.
They also must demonstrate that they used clean, zero-carbon electricity to power their electrolyzers, the energy-hungry machines that pull hydrogen out of water or other molecules. And defining clean electricity has proven to be an enormous challenge. However the Biden administration chose to define it, someone was going to be left out — or let in.
Consider just one hypothetical. Pretend you own a fancy new electrolyzer. If you buy power for it from a wind farm that’s already hooked up to the grid, then another power plant will have to replace the electrons that you’re now using. That marginal electricity will probably have to come from a coal or natural gas power plant, meaning that it will need to burn extra fuel, meaning it will release extra carbon pollution. Does that mean that the electricity that you bought is actually clean? And if not, do you still get the tax credit?
Earlier this year, climate groups proposed that any clean electricity used to make hydrogen had to meet three requirements: It had to come from a truly new source of power on the grid; it had to generate power at the same time that it was used; and it had to be produced on essentially the same grid where it was used. The Biden administration largely adopted those requirements in Friday’s proposal. On a briefing call with reporters ahead of the rule's release, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo was effusive about the new rule’s benefits. “We’ve developed a structure that will drive innovation and create good-paying jobs in this emerging industry while strengthening our energy security and reducing emissions in hard-to-transition sectors of the economy,” he said.
Not everyone feels that way. Senator Joe Manchin, who provided a key vote for the IRA, told Bloomberg that the draft is “horrible” and promised that “we are fighting it.”
“It doesn’t do anything the bill does. They basically made it 10 times more stringent for hydrogen,” he said. The trade group for the nuclear industry has also expressed its “disappointment,” arguing, more or less correctly, that the proposal “effectively eliminates all existing clean energy from qualifying” for the credit.
But debate about the proposal has not quite run on green vs. industry lines. Air Products, the world’s largest hydrogen producer, has backed the administration’s approach, as have half a dozen other hydrogen companies. So has Synergetic, a hydrogen developer that recently left the trade group the American Clean Power Association to protest its laxer stance. “Consumer groups are behind these rules, and environmental justice has also come out to express support,” Rachel Fakhry, a policy director at the Natural Resource Defense Council, told me.
The excessive focus on the hydrogen tax credit has been, in one sense, surprising. If you care most about cutting carbon pollution in the near-term, the hydrogen tax credit is unlikely to be the most important part of the IRA. Other policies — such as the clean electricity tax credit, which could add vast amounts of new wind and solar to the grid, or new subsidies for electric vehicles — will likely reduce greenhouse gas pollution by far more in the next decade.
But a clean hydrogen industry could soon be crucial to the climate fight. Hydrogen could eventually be used to fuel medium- and heavy-duty trucks, which are responsible for roughly a quarter of the country’s transportation emissions.
It could also decarbonize the production of steel, chemicals, and fertilizer, all of which require fossil fuels today. These are a looming climate problem: By the middle of this decade, heavy industry will pollute the climate more than any other sector of the American economy, according to the Rhodium Group, an independent research firm.
Yet this does not explain why the hydrogen tax credit attracted so much attention. It became a big fight, in short, because it stood the biggest chance of backfiring. Because the tax credit is so generous, incentivizing hydrogen companies to use more and more power, it risked gobbling up too much electricity and distorting the country’s power markets. In the disaster-movie scenario, the tax credit could wind up like the federal government’s ethanol subsidies, which have cost billions while doing nothing to help the climate.
The hydrogen tax credit “has been the most challenging piece of policy that we’ve had to contend with,” John Podesta, the White House adviser in charge of implementing the IRA, told me on the sidelines of COP28 in Dubai earlier this month.
He described the administration as balancing between two extremes. On the one hand, overly strict rules could cause companies to invest more in so-called “blue hydrogen,” which is produced by separating natural gas and capturing the resulting carbon. Yet overly loose rules could cause emissions to balloon and power prices to soar.
“We could kind of blow it in either direction, I think,” he said.
This hasn’t always been seen as a problem. Since the IRA passed last year, the clean hydrogen tax credit has stood out for its extreme generosity, which goes far beyond what is contemplated by other tax credits in the law.
Once the Treasury Department decides that a hydrogen project qualifies for the tax credit, for instance, then that project can receive credits for the next 10 years. For five of those years, it can even get that money as a direct payment from the government, rather than as a tax cut. What’s more, projects can qualify for the tax credit as long as they begin construction by 2033. That means the tax credit will still be used well into the 2040s, even if Congress does not extend it.
Almost no other policy in the law spends federal dollars so lavishly or directly. Manchin, who negotiated the final text of the IRA with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, has long championed the hydrogen industry and seen it as a way to use fossil-fuel assets, such as pipelines, in the energy transition.
Soon after the IRA passed, however, climate advocates realized that this generosity could pose risks to the rest of the law. In the summer of 2022, Wilson Ricks, an engineering Ph.D. student at Princeton, was interning for the Department of Energy, studying how to measure the climate impact of hydrogen produced by electrolysis.
Ricks had already concluded that the “lifecycle” of the electricity used to make hydrogen mattered: If electricity from a nuclear power plant was sent to an electrolyzer instead of the power grid, thereby forcing a natural-gas plant to turn on and send power to the grid instead, then so-called “clean hydrogen” could actually result in more climate pollution than the traditional approach of using natural gas to make hydrogen.
Then the IRA passed, and “potentially hundreds of billions of dollars hinged on that question,” he told me. In January, Ricks and his colleagues at Princeton’s ZERO Lab published a study urging the Biden administration to adopt stringent guidelines for the tax credit. Without hourly matching, they concluded, the subsidy could wreak havoc in the country’s electricity markets.
Ricks wasn’t the only expert suddenly worried about what a giant new hydrogen subsidy could do to electricity markets. Nearly a year earlier, Taylor Sloane, an energy developer for the utility and power company AES, virtually predicted the hydrogen fight in a Medium post.
“The reason it matters that we get these rules right is that we don’t want to have an environmental backlash against green hydrogen in a few years demonstrating how it actually increases emissions,” he wrote. “Getting the rules right from the start will ensure more stable long-term growth of green hydrogen.”
Ultimately, the administration decided that nearly all clean electricity used to produce hydrogen must meet three requirements — largely inherited from the climate groups’ proposals. They also mirror hydrogen regulations already adopted in the European Union.
First, the electricity must come from a relatively new source of zero-carbon power, such as a wind or nuclear plant: You can’t use electrons that once would have powered homes or cars to power an electrolyzer.
Second, the electricity must be produced at roughly the same time that it is used to make hydrogen: You can’t buy cheap solar power at noon and claim that you’re using it to make hydrogen at midnight.
Finally, the electricity must have been made on the same power grid that the electrolyzer itself is using: You can’t buy wind power in Iowa and claim that you’re using it to make hydrogen in Massachusetts.
Today, no power company in the country has a way of certifying that its electricity meets all three requirements of the new hydrogen rule — and none has any way of selling it, either. So the rules also require local power grids to set up and sell “energy attribute certificates,” or EACs, which certify that a given kilowatt-hour of electricity was produced on a certain grid, at a certain time, and using a certain source of clean energy.
Utilities and grid managers have until 2028 to launch this new system; until then, hydrogen companies can keep using the existing system of renewable energy credits, or RECs, which certify only that zero-carbon electricity was generated during a certain year.
Although this new system of EACs may sound like so much bureaucratic legerdemain, it could eventually become more important than the hydrogen tax credit itself, because it could all but reshape how the country’s electricity systems work.
Right now, even though the availability of clean energy rises and falls throughout the day — solar panels make more power at noon than at midnight, for instance — there is no way to buy or sell claims to that power. By creating a systematic way to describe and sell an hour of clean electricity, EACs could actually create a market for 24/7 clean electricity.
The existence of that system could alter corporate sustainability pledges, climate-friendly government orders, and even how companies measure their own progress toward meeting their Paris Agreement goals. Even though hundreds of American companies say that they buy their electricity from zero-carbon sources, only Google, Microsoft, and a few other companies have committed to buying 24/7 clean electricity.
“I know the administration faced absurd amounts of pressure given how lucrative this is,” Ricks told me. “But it seems like they pretty much held firm and went with the science.”
That said, the proposal kicks two issues down the road. It asks companies whether it should allow any exceptions to the general rule requiring that clean electricity come from clean sources. Some nuclear power plant operators, for instance, have argued that electricity from a nuclear plant should count toward the credit if the plant would otherwise be slated to shut down.
That decision could shape other administration priorities. Two of the government’s seven proposed “hydrogen hubs,” new industrial facilities funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law, are planning to use nuclear power to generate clean hydrogen. Under the current rules, these hubs may not qualify for the generous hydrogen tax credit, even though they could still earn billions in other subsidies.
The proposal also asks for advice about how to count so-called renewable natural gas, which is captured methane released from cows or landfills. Some environmentalists worry that the rules for this technology, if poorly drafted, could allow companies to engage in aggressive carbon accounting that does not align with reality. But so far, the Biden administration seems to have little appetite for that approach.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
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.