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:
We chatted about U.S. Wind’s project off the coast of Ocean City, oil jobs, and the future of the IRA.
I may have met the future of conservative climate politics on Tuesday, and he was standing next to piles of dead fish.
Larry Hogan, a Republican former governor of Maryland, is campaigning for an open Senate seat in one of the bluest states in the country. He faces an uphill run against Angela Alsobrooks, an acolyte of Vice President Kamala Harris and a Black woman who runs one of the state’s most populous and diverse counties, Prince George’s. Before President Biden dropped out as the Democrats’ nominee for president, internal polls indicated that Hogan had a chance; since Biden’s exit, despite Hogan’s name ID from eight years in Annapolis, his chances for victory now appear uncertain.
So I was surprised when, out of the blue, as Democrats were convening in Chicago around Harris as their nominee, Hogan’s team invited me out to a campaign stop along the Chesapeake Bay. Hogan was going to announce new plans on how he’d fight for protecting the Bay if elected, and I’d get to ask the candidate whatever I wanted about … climate. Not the usual offer from a Republican congressional campaign.
Hogan, however, has a long track record of bucking his party on climate change, and could be regarded as one of the most aggressive Republican governors on the issue in modern American history. In 2017, he signed into law one of the nation’s few state-wide fracking bans. In 2018, after then President Trump began pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, he joined with other states to meet the goals of the accord regardless. Three years later, he oversaw the creation of a plan to reduce Maryland’s emissions 50% by 2030 and achieving “net-zero” by 2045. Those emissions targets happen to be the same ones Alsobrooks has endorsed, too.
I went to his campaign website to see what it says about climate and found almost nothing. Nowhere on Hogan’s website is there a discussion of emissions or energy policy, and climate-related laws like the Inflation Reduction Act barely come up. The only possible reference I can find is one paragraph saying he’d “stand against unaffordable spending and mandates raising [the] cost of energy, food, and basic necessities.”
So I said yes. Not just because I’m a Marylander who deeply cares about the future of the planet, but also because of Hogan’s importance for the future of the IRA. If he somehow found a way to win, he’d be a crucial voice on the future of the landmark climate law, the fate of which will be decided next year as lawmakers look to rewrite tax policy.
That was why, on Tuesday I woke up at the crack of dawn and drove two hours to Tilghman Island, a bucolic enclave popular for fishing and tourism along the eastern shorelines of Maryland. It might’ve been a rural part of the state, but every now and then along my route I’d see an array of solar panels in front of a farm or a house. I arrived at the meeting place to find it was a seafood plant along the water. Hogan arrived right after me in a jet black SUV and exited in attire so casual you’d hardly recognize him as a two-term governor: a simple baseball cap, a dull blue shirt, and, believe it or not, shorts.
I walked alongside Hogan and people who ran the processing plant as they surveyed flats of oyster shells and the guts of catfish I was told were an invasive species in the area. Finally, Hogan and I settled down to chat in an open garage. There are “more Republicans who actually are more environmentally sensitive than you think,” he told me, “but they’re certainly not in the majority, and they’re not the ones getting all the attention. My hope is to try to be a voice to get them to do some of the things we did and focus on.”
Of the IRA himself, he told me, “It concerns me that it was rushed through in a very partisan way without a single Republican vote. I think there are some really good things in it. I think there’s some things that weren’t very well thought out.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Things that are going to have a more harmful effect on the economy and killing jobs,” he said, adding that “we ought to at least look at how to tweak it.”
That statement puzzled me — recent analysis indicates at least 334,000 new jobs have been created since the law was enacted in 2022. But writ large, the transition to clean energy will mean people lose jobs in the oil and gas industry — was that what he was referring to?
“Yeah. I mean, we’re not ready,” Hogan replied. “It was going to shut down existing industries without any transition period when we didn’t have the ability to provide enough energy to accomplish what we wanted. We just gotta figure out a way to make the transition, but you can’t do it too rapidly or it’s going to have the opposite impact.”
The funny thing about Republicans talking about climate and the IRA is that you essentially need a translator to know their positions. Lawmakers will say one thing on the record to a reporter and then the next minute say the exact opposite thing off the record. The truth is — and I know this from many years of covering Capitol Hill — many Republican politicians support the vast majority of this law and will never admit it.
Most voters today still do not know much about the IRA, or even what the Biden administration has done on climate change. That’s unlikely to change soon as Democrats have so far eschewed mentioning the topic much at all, including during their convention in Chicago this week. Congressional Democrats put a lot of time and effort over the last year into messaging the law and their other signature industrial policy achievements. But for now, it seems it’ll be largely absent from the campaign trail.
Should Republicans take full control of Congress and the presidency, the IRA is in legitimate danger from influential coalitions on the furthest flanks of the right-wing. Think the Heritage Foundation. The Freedom Caucus. The Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Jim Jordans and Lauren Boeberts roaming the halls of the Capitol. These power-brokers have proven through fights over the debt ceiling and government funding that they appear willing to put their votes where their mouths are to satisfy a political base of support that cares less about corporations and climate change than sticking it to liberals and the left. Hogan is correct that the IRA was passed entirely by Democrats without a single Republican vote, making it a ripe target for partisan pummeling.
And yet there’s so much in the IRA that Republicans typically should like. Climate policy that’s heavy on carrots for big business and light on penalties for corporate pollution has long been Republicans’ preferred route. Why does the most moderate Republican candidate for Senate in one of the nation’s bluest states have to bash the climate law at all, let alone claim its killing jobs? I’ll be honest, when I went out to the Bay to meet Hogan, I thought I was about to hear the first major Republican endorsement of the IRA.
I asked John Hart, a fellow Marylander who helps run the conservative climate group C3 Solutions, about why Hogan would claim the IRA is killing jobs when there’s no evidence to back that up. Hart authored a campaign messaging book for Republicans trying to talk about climate change and energy policy without denying the existence of the problem, on the one hand, or alienating their own voters on the other.
“It’s an American cultural and political problem,” Hart told me. “You have to be very cognizant of those head-scratching moments, and you have to address that very clearly.”
There’s two reasons why Republicans like Hogan have to bash the IRA even if they might support a lot of the underlying climate provisions, he said: GOP voters instinctually see such ideas as “picking winners and losers,” and the climate law has been lumped in with other policies like auto regulations that Republicans largely oppose.
“Candidates are viewing it not through the narrow lens of what that legislation alone does, but how it fits into a broader agenda,” Hart added. “With the IRA, [it becomes] part of a broader effort. A lot of Republicans do believe that the Biden administration wants to ban trucks.”
Hogan did not develop his approach to climate action overnight. While as governor, he pushed for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50% through 2030, he also opposed going any faster than that. (The legislature ultimately enacted the more aggressive plans without Hogan's signature.) The Alsobrooks campaign has attacked him on this, and in a statement to me said that if elected, “Larry Hogan would give [S]enate Republicans the majority they need to gut the IRA and roll back efforts to protect our environment.”
Blake Kernen, a spokesperson for the Hogan campaign, told me Hogan is “glad the [IRA] created clean energy jobs like he did as Governor in Maryland.” His concerns with the law have to do with “some of the new taxes and overspending in the bill [that] has and will contribute to inflation and job loss, and is disappointed that the bill was forced through a party line vote.”
Governor Hogan also loudly backed wind development off the Maryland coast, which is now a contentious issue along the eastern shore.
Ocean City, a popular vacation destination, is now considering legal action against the federal government if it approves efforts by U.S. Wind, a subsidiary of an Italian wind energy company, to actually build turbines off the state’s coastline. It’s a conflict that mirrors other fights waged by beach communities, resort areas, and fishing hubs against offshore wind. These parts of the country are far removed from cities and often Republican-leaning, and the loudest champions of these grievances have also been prominent GOP politicians. Most notable, of course, has been former President Donald Trump, who’s pledged to halt new permits, but Republican policymakers at all levels from New Jersey, New York, and Virginia, among others, have all been making political hay from wind farm projects in their states.
Hogan has made a name for himself in recent years as a bulwark against Trump and his brand of politics. But when I brought up Ocean City’s legal threat, his passionate support of the town led him to interrupt my question.
“They probably will and probably should [sue]. That’s an example where I was very supportive of wind energy and creating a market for that in our state to create jobs and further the production of wind energy. But on that project, there was not very much transparency. They didn’t work with the local community very much. That’s impacting the fishing industry, the tourism industry, and they’re concerned that their entire livelihoods are going to be ruined.”
Heatmap’s own polling shows the political vulnerability renewable energy faces from the environmental impacts of development. Yet earlier in our interview, Hogan had boasted about the jobs wind has brought to the transportation and logistics hub Tradepoint Atlantic in the Port of Baltimore. He spoke effusively about the jobs in industries like welding that wind development creates. (One tidbit: His campaign released an ad a few days ago featuring a Democrat-registered welder in Baltimore who says they’re voting for Hogan, with no mention of the wind industry.)
In my mind, at least, failing to build those turbines could present a bigger risk to Ocean City in the long run than building them. If we didn’t construct them, it would take away an opportunity to dramatically increase the amount of renewable energy available for Maryland to wean off of carbon-based power. Failing to do so would pose a longer-term threat to the town of Ocean City from sea level rise and intensifying extreme weather.
So I told Hogan that while, as a Marylander, I couldn’t imagine wind turbines at Ocean City, I also couldn’t stop thinking about the trade-offs. I asked him, how does he view those tradeoffs?
Hogan stood firm. “I think you can accomplish the goals without putting them on the beach. I think you move them further out. It’s a pretty simple process. The federal government required them to put them in a place that no one wants. There’s no reason for it.”
This began to sound like some sort of Republican party line, trying to sell voters on a vision of the future that derails the energy transition along the way. But as one of my personal favorite Republican-splainers on energy, Sarah Hunt of the Rainey Center, explained to me, this kind of misconstrues how politics ordinarily works.
The normal thing is that constituents go to their representatives and voice their concerns, and a lot of these beach towns and fishing areas just happen to be Republican. In other parts of the country like Louisiana, where the politicians are more open to offshore oil, they’re similarly supportive of offshore wind.
“I think that is individual to Maryland and specific areas of Maryland,” Hunt told me. “I think offshore wind is a wonderful thing. I think it’s legitimate to say it doesn’t belong everywhere, and I think it’s reasonable to have a process for communities to provide input into the placement of such projects.”
After Hogan and I concluded our interview, I drove home in the gas-powered car I inherited from my late grandparents and passed more solar paneling in front of rural homes. Driving over the Chesapeake Bay, I tried to imagine seeing wind turbines on the horizon one day, and a world where Republicans support tax credits for renewables while fighting to make sure those projects adhere to the Clean Water Act. May we live in interesting times, I guess.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that Maryland was already a member of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative when Hogan became governor.
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.