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There’s a decent chance that whoever the Republican Party nominates for president in 2024 will eventually win the White House.
That means they will have a huge sway over how — and whether — the United States pursues its energy and climate goals during this decisive decade for decarbonization. So while some — but not all — Republican officials reject the reality of climate change, key differences exist in the way each GOP presidential candidate talks about the issue.
Ahead of the first Republican primary debate, here is a guide to each of the major candidates and where they stand on climate change and energy questions. We plan on updating it through the campaign.
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Who is he? The 45th — and maybe the 47th — president of the United States. A four-time criminal defendant.
What he says about climate change: That it’s a “hoax,” “a total hoax,” “an expensive hoax,” and “a total, and very expensive, hoax.” Then in 2018 he told “Sixty Minutes” that “it’s not a hoax.” But recently he’s been saying it’s a hoax again.
What he did about climate change: Oh, what didn’t he try to do? He rolled back more than 100 climate or environmental regulations, pulled America out of the Paris Agreement, and expanded oil drilling in Alaska. He declined to regulate toxic particulate air pollution and tried to subsidize the coal industry. That said, his rollbacks were rarely as effective as he hoped because the court system often blocked them for lack of paperwork.
What he wants to do next: More of the same. He has promised to end any support for electric vehicles, pull America out of the Paris Agreement again, and build more oil refineries and gas pipelines. “Nobody has more liquid gold under their feet than the United States of America. And we will use it and profit by it and live with it,” he said.
Who is he? The 46th governor of Florida.
What’s his deal? DeSantis hates the effects of climate change, but doesn’t want to touch the causes.
What he says about climate change: DeSantis would prefer not to use that phrase — it’s too left-wing. “This idea of, quote, ‘climate change’ has become politicized. My environmental policy is just to try to do things that benefit Floridians,” he said in 2019. A year earlier, he offered: “I am not a global warming person. I don’t want that label on me.”
But he sometimes brags about his green record, even if he never says climate or carbon. “In Florida, we’ve seen emissions go down dramatically in the last 10 years,” he told Trey Gowdy, the Fox News host, this spring. “But that’s through market and innovation, that’s not through mandates.”
What he’s done about climate change: Despite his personal reticence to use the c-word, he lifted an alleged state-level ban on saying climate change, appointed Florida’s first state resilience officer, and has signed millions of dollars into law to fight flooding and sea-level rise. He also ordered the state environmental agency to base its decisions on the best-available science.
Yet lately he’s declined hundreds of millions in federal energy-efficiency funding and vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have saved Florida $277 million by replacing some state-owned cars with electric vehicles.
What he wants to do as president: DeSantis has promised to “reverse the federal government's attempt to force people to buy electric vehicles.” He has also pledged to “unleash our domestic energy sector” and “modernize and protect our grid,” although he hasn’t said how he would do either.
You probably didn’t know: DeSantis implemented a fracking ban soon after becoming governor, but hasn’t gotten the legislature to enact it.
Who is he? The 48th vice president of the United States and a likely star witness at one of Donald Trump’s criminal trials.
What he says about climate change: Back when he was running for the House in 2000, he said climate change was “a myth.” More recently, he’s recognized that human activities have “some” impact on the climate, but rejected the idea that climate change is a threat to national security.
What he’s done about climate change: As vice president, he helped Trump repeal dozens of climate protections. He praised the president’s decision to leave the Paris Agreement, saying it was “so refreshing to have a presidents who stands without apology ... for America first.”
What he wants to do: Pence has proposed perhaps the most detailed energy policy of any GOP candidate. Although he has promised increasing production of “all forms of U.S. energy,” much of his policy would boost fossil fuels: He wants to open up oil-and-gas drilling on federal land, loosen permitting rules to speed pipeline construction, increase oil refining capacity, and repeal much of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Who is she? The former governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley was President Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations from 2017 to 2018.
What she says about climate change: That it’s real, man-made, and that it could present threats to the United States.
What she’s done about climate change: As Trump’s UN ambassador, she helped orchestrate America’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the nonbinding global climate treaty. Back when she was South Carolina’s governor, she allegedly suppressed a state-level climate report.
What she wants to do as president: Haley has been vague, although she has said most liberal climate policies would “cost trillions and destroy our economy.” She’s backed efforts to capture carbon dioxide from industrial facilities. She also wants to plant more trees.
Who is he? A former insurance salesman, Tim Scott has served as a senator from South Carolina since 2013. He is the first African-American senator to be elected from the South since Reconstruction.
What he says about climate change: He has recognized that human activities are having some influence on the climate. “I am not living under a rock,” he said.
What he’s done about climate change: Scott’s decade-long Senate record is notably unfriendly to the climate. He voted against the Kigali Amendment, a global climate treaty that phased out the use of hydrofluorocarbon pollutants, even though 19 of his GOP colleagues supported it. He also opposed the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which funded EV chargers, public transit, and carbon removal experiments. And he has opposed messaging bills that recognized that human activity is driving climate change, even when his colleague, Sen. Lindsey Graham, supported them.
What he wants to do about climate change: He’s been vague. A prominent Republican donor told Axios that he supports building out the next-generation nuclear-power industry. Scott has said it’s “ridiculous to talk about a climate emergency when we have a border emergency that is an existential threat right now.”
Who is he? Christie was the governor of New Jersey from 2010 to 2018.
What he says about climate change: That it’s real. “There’s undeniable data that CO2 levels and other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are increasing … When you have over 90 percent of the world’s scientists who have studied this stating that climate change is occurring and that humans play a contributing role, it’s time to defer to the experts,” he said more than a decade ago.
What he’s done about climate change: As governor, he pulled New Jersey out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade market for carbon emissions from the power sector. But he also fought to cut emissions from a Pennsylvania coal plant.
What he wants to do about climate change: Like many candidates, he supports an “all-of-the-above” energy plan, although he has been kinder to climate goals than other Republicans and shown a particular interest in nuclear power. “We can’t disarm ourselves economically while we convert to cleaner energy,” he told a New Hampshire crowd in August. He supports increasing domestic oil production to help Ukraine.
Who is he? The son of Indian immigrants, Ramaswamy is the former chief executive of Roivant Sciences, a biotech company. The 38-year-old billionaire rose to prominence in conservative circles by opposing ESG investing — that is, environment, sustainability, and governance.
What he says about climate change: A lot. He toldThe Washington Post that he is “not a climate denier” but that global warming will not be “entirely bad.” He has also claimed that fossil fuels are “essential to human flourishing,” seeming to reject the modern scientific consensus that carbon pollution is causing climate change.
What he’s done about climate change: Ramaswamy has never held elective office. But as an anti-ESG activist, he wrote letters to Chevron telling it to stop supporting a carbon tax or monitoring some of its emissions.
What he wants to do about climate change: He appears to support almost no restrictions on carbon pollution. He wants to “drill, frack, and burn coal.” He also wants to “abandon the climate cult and unshackle nuclear energy,” even though it generates zero-carbon electricity.
Who is he? Hutchinson, a lawyer, was the governor of Arkansas from 2015 to 2023.
What he says about climate change: He toldThe New York Times that climate change is real and that human activities are “a contributing factor” to it. He doesn’t see it as an existential threat to the United States.
What he’s done about climate change: When campaigning for governor, Hutchinson promised to fight President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which would have cut carbon pollution from power plants. He praised some of President Trump’s environmental rollbacks.
What he wants to do about climate change: Hutchinson supports “energy independence” and opposes any effort to restrict carbon emissions. He told the Times that he would pull America out of the Paris Agreement and loosen rules on pipelines and drilling.
Who is he? Burgum is a former software executive and the 33rd governor of North Dakota.
What he says about climate change: Burgum told the Sioux City Journal that climate change is real, but that he doesn’t want to talk about the role that humans are playing in causing it. “The debate we're having between the different edges is one where cancel culture is alive and well because if anybody questions any aspect of this, they're immediately ostracized,” he said.
What he’s done about climate change: North Dakota is one of the country’s leading fossil-fuel producers, but Burgum has pledged to achieve “carbon neutrality” by 2030 without losing that commanding position. He wants to use carbon-capture technology, which his government has helped subsidize, to meet that goal within the state.
He also created North Dakota’s first Department of Environmental Quality.
What he wants to do about climate change: He’s been vague. “Anyone who cares about the climate should want as much energy produced in America as possible and sold around the globe,” his spokesman toldThe Washington Post.
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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.