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After a decade of leadership, voters are poised to overturn two of its biggest achievements. What happened?
Twenty years ago, you could still get away with calling Redmond, Washington, an equestrian town. White fences parceled off ranches and hobby farms where horses grazed under dripping evergreen trees; you could buy live chicks, alfalfa, and Stetson hats in stores downtown. It wasn’t even unusual for Redmond voters to send Republicans to represent their zip code in the state legislature, despite the city being located in blue King County.
The Redmond of today, on the other hand, looks far more like what you’d expect from an affluent (and now staunchly progressive) suburb of Seattle. A cannabis dispensary with a pride flag and a “Black Lives Matter” sign in the window has replaced Work and Western Wear, and the new high-performing magnet school happens to share a name with one of the most popular cars in the neighborhood: Tesla. But Washington is a state full of contradictions, and among Redmond’s few remaining farms is one registered under the winkingly libertarian name of “Galt Valley Ranch LLC.” It belongs to a multimillionaire who has almost single-handedly bankrolled the most significant challenge yet to Washington’s standing as a national climate leader.
Andrew Villeneuve, the founder of the Northwest Progressive Institute, a left-wing think tank also based in Redmond, told me he’s struggled to get voters to pay attention to ballot measures in the past. “I’ve had no such awareness issues this year,” he said. “Nobody’s like ‘Who’s Brian Heywood?’”
A hedge fund manager, multimillionaire, and recent California transplant, Heywood has in short order made himself the supervillain of Washington’s left. His Joker arc into politics involves fleeing the liberal dystopia of the Golden State in 2010 for the no-income-tax refuge of Washington, only to discover that Olympia was progressive, too. This year, he set out to personally “fix stupid things” in his adopted state by spending $6 million out of pocket on a signature-gathering campaign that ultimately landed four conservative initiatives on Washington’s general election ballot. (His campaign, Let’s Go Washington, is also allusively named, although Heywood toldThe Seattle Times that he is not a MAGA supporter.)
Two of the four ballot measures Heywood has willed before voters this November address standard small-government gripes: One would repeal the capital gains tax, and the other would allow workers to opt out of the state’s long-term care payroll tax. Others, however, will ask Washingtonians to vote directly on whether to repeal the state’s landmark cap-and-invest carbon-trading program (I-2117) or block its transition away from natural gas (I-2066).
“We’ve faced initiatives like these before,” Villeneuve told me, “but what is different is how many of them are coming at once.”
As in many Western states, it’s relatively easy for a motivated individual with means to collect the roughly 320,000 signatures needed for a petition to end up on the ballot in Washington. (Contract workers are paid up to $5 per signature, and they often descend on ferry lines, where bored motorists can be talked into putting down their names as they wait for the next boat.) But while rich activists have leveraged this system in the past — Washingtonians may remember the name Tim Eyman — the outcome of the ballot measures before voters this fall will be closely watched by other states and legislatures to gauge how directly popular bold climate progress really is.
“What happens in Washington will certainly have an impact on what happens around the rest of the country,” Leah Missik, the Washington deputy policy director at the clean energy nonprofit Climate Solutions, who also serves on the executive board of the No on 2066 campaign, told me. She added, “If these [laws] are in any way repealed or weakened, that is a sign to other states, and I think it would be incredibly damaging and incredibly unfortunate.”
Though politics in Washington have long been conservation-minded and, shall we say, crunchy (I grew up in Redmond), the state really began to stand out as a leader in progressive climate policy with Governor Jay Inslee’s election in 2013. During Inslee’s tenure, Washington committed to one of the most aggressive 100% clean energy pathways in the country, passed a wide-ranging building emissions law that RMI described as “significantly [raising] the level of ambition on what might be possible for other states,” and in 2023 enacted its landmark cap-and-invest program, called the Climate Commitment Act, which has generated over $2 billion in state revenue so far for transit projects, decarbonization initiatives, and clean air and water programs. Washington has even been credited with inspiring some of President Biden’s climate actions in office.
With Inslee, a Democrat, retiring at the end of this term, Let’s Go Washington’s campaign begins to appear designed to dismantle his legacy while proposing little in the way of alternatives. Hallie Balch, the communications director, denied this allegation in an emailed statement, telling me the initiatives “promote choice and affordability.” The cap-and-invest program, for example, “has not done what the governor said it would do,” she said, and “there are no metrics in place to track [its] success.”
Though the CCA’s cap covers about 75% of the state’s total greenhouse gas emissions, it’s true that we’re still a few years away from having a clear picture of the program’s results. (The law’s first compliance deadline for polluters isn’t until this November.) “The CCA has only been around for almost two years at this point, and so we haven’t yet seen the big emissions declines,” Emily Moore, the director of the climate and energy program at the Sightline Institute, a nonpartisan sustainability think tank that does not take an official position on initiatives, told me. “But what we are seeing,” she added, “is the money that it has generated for a whole suite of climate-friendly and community-friendly projects.”
There isn’t a revenue source remotely comparable to cap-and-invest available to fund the state’s transit, infrastructure, and community projects if the program goes away, meaning a repeal would have a dramatic impact on everything from bus service to salmon recovery projects to local heat pump and induction stove rebates, with most likely getting the axe. The program is also one of the main levers Washington has to reach its goal of reducing emissions 95% below 1990 levels by 2050. As one person involved in crafting the CCA described the upcoming vote on I-2117 to me, it’s “life or death for climate action in Washington.”
That’s partially because I-2117 wouldn’t only repeal the CCA; it would also bar the state and any municipality therein from implementing a new climate tax or cap-and-invest program at any point in the future. When asked what an alternative might be last week during a debate at Seattle University’s Department of Public Affairs and Nonprofit Leadership, Heywood vaguely proposed “something that works.”
“We always knew we were going to have to defend this program at the ballot box,” Joe Fitzgibbon, the majority leader of Washington’s House of Representatives and the chair of the House Environment and Energy Committee, who helped create the CCA, told me. He admitted that he’d expected such a defense to take the form of legislative elections, but 2022 came and went without a single backer of the CCA losing their seat. “I guess in hindsight, I thought we were out of the woods,” Fitzgibbon said.
Let’s Go Washington has labeled CCA a “hidden gas tax” and, bundled with its other initiatives, is running on the slogan “vote yes, pay less.” I-2117 is already the most expensive ballot measure campaign of this election cycle — and the most controversial, with Heywood campaigning at gas stations offering discounted gas, which opponents say violates vote-buying anti-bribery laws. But opposition to the initiative has also rallied a remarkable and unprecedented coalition of strange bedfellows in defense of the CCA, including over 500 businesses, environmental groups, health care organizations, faith leaders, tribes — as well as more than 30 breweries, “a very important coalition member in the state of Washington,” as No on I-2117’s communication director Kelsey Nyland quipped to me. Jane Fonda recently swung through the state to stump for I-2117; the ‘no’ campaign even has the support of the Green Jobs PAC, whose contributors include Shell and BP.
Almost all the advocates I spoke to about I-2117 were feeling optimistic ahead of Washington ballots going out at the end of this week, with the most recent Cascade PBS/Elway poll on the initiative showing support has dropped slightly since May; 46% now say they would vote no, over 30% who would vote yes. (Heywood has pointed optimistically to the number of undecided voters this leaves.) Still, it seems pretty unlikely that Washingtonians will repeal their cap-and-invest program.
I-2066 is a different story.
To the immense frustration of its opponents, Let’s Go Washington touts I-2066 as “Stop the Gas Ban.” The measure was only certified for the ballot in July, compared to January for 2117, meaning that organizers have had much less time to mobilize — several major national green groups, including Defenders of Wildlife and the Environmental Defense Action Fund, confirmed to me that they’d endorsed No on I-2117 but not considered a position on I-2066 — and are on the back foot to combat misinformation.
For one thing, there is no gas ban: I-2066, rather, would repeal parts of a Washington law directing its largest utility, Puget Sound Energy, to consider electrification alternatives before installing new gas pipes; scuttle a pilot effort to promote thermal energy networks as a gas alternative; and, most starkly, it would bar cities and towns, as well as Washington’s energy code, from “prohibiting, penalizing, or discouraging” gas appliances in buildings. “Discouraging” does a lot of work here. For example, Seattle’s building emissions performance standard, which doesn’t ban gas but nudges large developments toward a 2050 net-zero emissions target, could be in jeopardy.
Still, all of this is a lot to expect voters to sort through in the few minutes they might spend filling in the bubbles in their ballot, especially when Let’s Go Washington is making out its message to sound like one simply about energy choice. Add the opaque triple-negative climate campaigners have to sell (“vote no on a ban on banning gas”), and the messaging headaches grow more severe.
Earlier this month, the editorial board for the largest media outlet in Washington, The Seattle Times, endorsed a yes vote on I-2066, arguing for a slower transition away from fossil fuels that leans more heavily on natural gas. “Unfortunately, we are up against a network of fossil fuel corporations and their allies who have a lot of money and who are very invested in the status quo because it perpetuates their wealth and their influence,” Missik, who’s involved with the No on I-2066 campaign, told me, pointing to the Building Industry Association as well as Northwest Natural, National Propane Gas Association, and Koch Industries, who have backed the other side. I-2066 is also polling much better than I-2117; as of September, 47% of voters said they would vote yes, compared to 29% who said they’d vote no.
Rather than interpret those numbers as the electorate’s backlash to Washington’s climate progress, advocates argue they indicate how fossil fuel groups have successfully capitalized on the door propped open by Heywoods’s signature-gathering campaigns. It’s “because one guy opened his wallet; it is that simple,” Villeneuve, the founder of the Northwest Progressive Institute, said. “There is no grassroots movement to overturn these laws; it doesn’t exist. Brian Heywood brought this entire thing into being.” Or, as Missik put it: “Most Washingtons do believe in climate progress, whether or not this will be overridden by money. I sure hope not.”
All of this ultimately brings us back to the question of what Heywood’s whole deal is. With the singular exception of I-2066, his $6 million initiatives seem mostly doomed.
Some I spoke to floated the idea that Heywood and his allies are using Washington as a testing ground for dismantling climate action and seeing what sticks. “If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere: It can happen in California, it can happen in Colorado, it can happen in New York, it can happen in all these states that have passed really strong climate policies,” Caitlin Krenn, the climate and clean energy director of the nonprofit Washington Conservation Action, told me.
But there are other rumors, too. The Washington State Standard’s Jerry Cornfield recently quoted a local GOP chair calling Heywood’s initiatives “a powerful tool” that will “help get Republicans elected” — essentially, a turnout generator. (“We certainly want to see as many people as are eligible to vote exercise their right to make their voices heard, but our top priority is to educate voters about what's at stake with the initiatives this November,” Balch told me in response.) And then there is Heywood’s ranch. Republicans have long cosplayed as rural farmers and cowboys to tap into the masculine conservative fantasy of rugged individualism (what Texas Monthly once called “authenticity drag”). It’s essentially an image-building exercise — perhaps not so unlike positioning yourself as the guy who tried to rein in the state’s runaway Dems.
So far, Heywood has dodged questions about whether he plans to run for governor, and his campaign told me he “isn't using the initiatives as anything other than a way to bring broken policies directly to the people to vote on.” But with this year’s ballots going out to Washington voters today, it’s also a question for another time.
Regardless of what happens, many of the organizers I spoke to rejected the framing of Washington voters cooling on climate. One went as far as to tell me that the time, attention, and money Heywood has spent trying to roll back Washington’s progress is the highest compliment of all. “This is part of the process of doing big things,” Isaac Kastama, who was involved in enacting the CCA and now works for the advocacy group Clean and Prosperous Washington, told me. “If it’s not big and if it goes undetected, that probably means you’re not doing something serious enough.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify the scope of I-2117 and correct what Let’s Go Washington has termed a “hidden gas tax.”
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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.