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The Inflation Reduction Act is already transforming America. But is it enough?
In the late spring, a scene happened that might have once — even a few years ago — seemed unimaginable.
Senator Joe Manchin and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm visited the town of Weirton, West Virginia, to celebrate the groundbreaking of a new factory for the company Form Energy. The factory will produce a new type of iron battery that could eventually store huge amounts of electricity on the grid, allowing solar and wind energy to be saved up and dispatched when needed.
Manchin was clear about why everyone was gathered in Weirton. “Today’s groundbreaking is a direct result of the Inflation Reduction Act, and this type of investment, in a community that has felt the impact of the downturn in American manufacturing, is an example of the IRA bill working as we intended,” he said.
It’s been nearly a year since the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s flagship climate law, passed. The law is successful. It is transforming the American energy system. And the Biden administration is implementing it as fast as it can: Since the law passed, the Treasury Department has published nearly three dozen pieces of complicated rules explaining how the IRA’s billions in subsidies can actually be used.
But is the IRA successful enough? The pace and scale of the climate challenge remains daunting. A recent report from the Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm, found that the United States would only meet its Paris Agreement goal of cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030 with more aggressive federal and state policy.
Here are some broad observations about how the IRA — and the broader project of American decarbonization — is going:
Politically, environmentally, no matter how you look at it: The power sector is the thumping heart of the I.R.A. Because engineers know how to generate electricity without producing carbon pollution — using wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear plants, and more — the sector is central to the law’s implicit plan to decarbonize the American economy, which requires, first, building as much zero-carbon electricity infrastructure as possible, while, second, shifting as much of the rest of the economy to using electricity — as opposed to oil, gas, or coal — as possible.
The electricity industry is also the site of perhaps the law’s most powerful climate policy — and its only policy tied to a national emissions-cutting goal. The law will indefinitely subsidize new zero-carbon electricity until greenhouse-gas pollution from the American power sector falls 75% below its 2022 levels. That means these tax credits could remain in effect until the 2060s, according to an analysis from the research firm Wood MacKenzie.
This was a first for American environmental law, and it remains poorly understood by the public. Even some experts claim that the electricity credits will phase out in 2032 with the I.R.A.’s other subsidies — when, in fact, 2032 is the earliest possible year that they could end.
Which is all to say that it’s early days for understanding the I.R.A.’s effect on the power sector. The data is provisional.
Yet the data is … good. Better than I expected when I started writing this article. The overwhelming majority of new electricity generation built nationwide this year — some 83% — will be wind, solar, or battery storage, according to federal data. Although that mostly reflects projects planned before the IRA was passed, it’s still a giant leap over previous years, and it suggests that the law might be giving clean electricity a boost at the margin:
The solar industry, in particular, is surging. The industry just had its best first quarter ever, with rooftop installations booming and some big utility-scale solar farms finally coming online.
But solar can’t power the entire grid, and other renewables are having more trouble. I’m particularly worried about offshore wind. To build a new offshore-wind project, companies bid for tracts of the ocean floor in a government-run auction. Yet many of those bids failed to account for 2021 and 2022’s rapid inflation, and some developers are now on the hook for projects that don’t pencil out. Most outside analysts now believe that the Biden administration will fall short of its goal to build 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.
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The boom in electric vehicle and battery manufacturing is clearly the I.R.A.’s brightest spot. (The two industries are one and the same: If you have a giant battery, you’re probably going to put it in an EV; and about a third of every EV’s value comes from the battery.)
Since the IRA passed, 52 new mining or manufacturing projects have been announced, representing $56 billion in new investment, according to a tracker run by Jay Turner, a Wellesley College professor. If you zoom out to all of Biden’s term, then more than $100 billion in EV investment has been announced, which will create more than 75,000 jobs, according to the Department of Energy.
It remains to be seen, however, whether this investment will produce the kind of durable, unionized voter base that the Biden administration hopes to form. So far, much of this investment has flowed to the Sunbelt — and in particular, to a burgeoning zone of investment from North Carolina to Alabama nicknamed the “Battery Belt.” These states are right-to-work states with a low cost-of-living, like much of the states that have absorbed manufacturing investment since the 1980s.
This might make Republicans think twice about undermining the IRA, but it might also be a missed opportunity.
In order to cheaply decarbonize its grid, America needs better power lines. Building long-range, interregional electricity transmission will allow the country to funnel clean energy to where it’s needed most. According to a team led by Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton engineering professor, 80% of the IRA’s carbon-reduction benefits could be lost if the United States doesn’t quicken the pace of new transmission construction. (Other models are less worried.)
Yet the effort to build more power lines — and the broader campaign to reform some rules governing permitting and land use, especially the National Environmental Policy Act — is probably over, at least in this Congress. Republican lawmakers figured out that Democrats are desperate for transmission reform, and they were prepared to make the party pay a high price for it — too high a price for much of the caucus. The bipartisan deal to raise the debt-ceiling also contained many of the moderate permitting reforms that Democrats might have accepted as part of a broader bargain over transmission.
Democrats are now stuck hoping that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, will make smaller, more technocratic improvements to the transmission process when they take a majority of the commission’s seats early next year.
The biggest programs in the IRA target mature technologies, like solar, wind, and EVs. But the law is full of unheralded programs meant to encourage the development of early-stage climate technologies, such as sustainable aviation fuel. By encouraging technological progress, these programs could abate hundreds of millions of tons of carbon a year in the decades after 2030. They may prove especially important at reducing emissions outside the United States, according to a new analysis from Rhodium Group.
Which is to say that they could be — from a world-historic perspective — some of the law’s most important policies. But for now, few of these programs have been implemented, and we don’t really know how they’re going to go.
Some of them may also be devilishly hard to set up. My colleague Emily Pontecorvo has reported on the difficulty of setting up the tax credits for green hydrogen, which are some of the law’s most generous. If successful, the credits could give the U.S. a major new industry to tackle the decarbonization challenge; if unsuccessful, they could screw up the American electricity system.
Right now, most of the law’s consumer-facing tax credits are continuations of old policies — such as the longstanding subsidy to install rooftop solar — rather than something new. Perhaps the most expansive subsidy that consumers have seen so far is the new $7,500 tax credit for leasing an electric vehicle.
But many more programs will eventually come, including the IRA’s rebates for heat pumps, induction stoves, and electric water heaters. Those programs, some of which must be administered by state offices, have largely yet to be set up. (Even so — and in keeping with other encouraging trends — heat pump sales outpaced furnace sales in the U.S. for the first time last year.)
The Department of Energy is an agency transformed. The IRA held out the opportunity that the agency could metamorphose from an R&D-focused nuclear-weapons storehouse into the federal government’s dynamo of decarbonization. The Biden administration — and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm — has seized that opportunity.
As I wrote earlier this year, the agency has stepped into the role of being America’s bureau of industrial policy, replete with its own in-house bank. It has published some of the most detailed and sophisticated federal industrial plans that I’ve ever seen.
And it is getting admirably specific about each of the technologies in its portfolio. In a recent report on the nascent hydrogen industry, for instance, the department said that companies might not build out enough infrastructure because they can’t count on future demand for clean hydrogen. (It’s impossible for firms to invest in making hydrogen if they can’t be sure anyone is going to buy it.) Then, earlier this week, the agency announced a new $1 billion program to buy hydrogen itself, thus providing that demand-side certainty that producers need.
Let’s return to renewables. The United States is striving — but will likely fail — to build 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. It is building a couple dozen gigawatts of new solar capacity every year. That may seem like a lot: One gigawatt of electricity is enough to power about 825,000 homes.
But annual power demand in the United States is closer to 4,000 gigawatts — and it’s on track to grow as we electrify more and more of the economy. While decarbonizing the grid isn’t as simple as switching one energy source for another, still, it would take more than a century to build 4,000 gigawatts of renewables electricity at our current rate.
It’s a similar story in electric cars. The growth is good: EV sales rose 50% year over year in the first half of 2023. But the challenge is daunting: Electric vehicles made up only 7% of all new car sales in the U.S. during the same period, and decarbonizing the car fleet will eventually require making virtually all new car sales EVs, and then — over the next decade — replacing the 275 million private vehicles on the road.
And that’s the story of the IRA — from renewables to EVs, geothermal to nuclear energy. The trends have never been better. The government has never tried to change the energy system so quickly or so thoroughly. That, by itself, is progress: For decades, the great obstacle of climate change was that the government wasn’t trying to solve it at all.
But decarbonization will require replacing hundreds of millions of machines that exist in the world — and doing it fast enough that we avoid dealing catastrophic damage to the climate system. The IRA is about to take on that challenge head-on. Now we find out if it’s up to the task.
The real work, in other words, is just beginning.
Read more from Robinson Meyer:
The East Coast’s Smoke Could Last Until October
The Weird Reasons Behind the Atlantic Ocean’s Crazy Heat
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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.