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They’ve become a stump speech punchline.
Donald Trump claims to be a “big fan” of electric vehicles despite making them a frequent target of derision on the campaign trail. He might be a bigger fan, though, if he got his facts straight. Here’s what Trump has gotten right and wrong about EVs since 2021.
“To China, if you’re listening — President Xi, you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal. Those big monster car manufacturing plants that you are building in Mexico right now, and you think you are going to get that, not hire Americans, and you’re going to sell the car to us — no. We are going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the lot.” [March 16, 2024]
Fact check: “There actually are no operating Chinese-owned EV factories in Mexico,” Ilaria Mazzocco, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an expert on Chinese climate policy, told me. “So this is very preemptive at this point.”
But it is also, probably, only a matter of time: BYD, which last year passed Tesla as the world’s No. 1 EV maker, is reportedly scouting plant locations in Mexico, and could confirm plans as soon as the second half of 2024. That has made U.S. automakers justifiably nervous. As Robinson Meyer previously wrote for Heatmap, “BYD recently advertised an $11,000 plug-in hybrid targeted at the Chinese market … Even doubling its price with tariffs would keep it firmly among [the United States’] most affordable new vehicles.”
In Mazzocco’s opinion, this isn’t wholly a bad thing — “there’s a point of value to competition that we shouldn’t forget” — and the threat of cheap Chinese EVs has already driven American automakers like Ford to pivot their electric lineups.
But “EVs have encapsulated everybody’s fears of competition with China,” Mazzocco said. The rude awakening has been that they are “actually better at something than the Americans are.” As a result, Biden and Trump are jostling to look tougher on Beijing ahead of the election, especially since big auto manufacturing states like Michigan and Ohio could potentially decide control of the White House. Biden has already ordered the Commerce Department to investigate the potential national security threat of Chinese-made EVs, which currently make up only about 2% of EV imports; Polestar became the first Chinese-owned EV company to make moves in the U.S. last year, but it’s hardly thriving. Meanwhile, Trump has warned that “it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the country” if he isn’t elected.
“If we build all the charging booths that are necessary, our country would go bankrupt. It would cost like $3 trillion. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.” [Feb. 17, 2024]
Fact check: $3 trillion is a huge number, and it is also very inaccurate in this case. While there are valid concerns about the Biden administration’s high-speed electric vehicle push, Trump almost certainly got his “$3 trillion” price tag from the total cost of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which aims to address significantly more than just the country’s EV-charging infrastructure.
In fact, the BIL earmarks a comparatively small $7.5 billion for the development of 500,000 public charging stations, although even this is a “generational-level investment,” Noah Barnes, the communications director of the Electrification Coalition, told me. With just a fraction of $3 trillion, the U.S. will be able to jumpstart the “national network of EV chargers that will be necessary to power the next generation of vehicles and end our dependence on oil from countries that don’t share our values.”
But what would it cost to build and operate all the charging booths necessary to meet the current federal target of zero-emission cars making up half of new vehicle sales by 2030? A 2022 report from McKinsey & Company estimated that the U.S. will need “1.2 million public EV chargers and 28 million private EV chargers” by 2030 to meet Biden’s zero-emission sales goals. Those public chargers would cost about $38 billion, including the hardware, planning, and installation. Wrap in the cost to residences, workplaces, and depots, and the total cost of public and private charging installation approaches $97 billion. In a separate analysis, AlixPartners, a consulting firm, found that it would take $50 billion to build the charging infrastructure to meet the 2030 zero-emission vehicle goal in the U.S., and $300 billion worldwide.
Needless to say, though, there are a thousand billions in a trillion, so whatever way you cut it, it certainly would not cost the U.S. $3 trillion to build enough charging stations to accommodate zero-emission vehicles.
“I will also rescue the ethanol industry by canceling crooked Joe Biden’s insane ethanol-killing electric vehicle mandate on day one.” [Dec. 20, 2023]
Fact check: It’s not wrong to say that Biden has tried to reduce the role of liquid fuel in vehicles. Trump has gunned for Iowa voters by claiming Biden’s goal (albeit not a binding mandate) of ramping up EV sales will kill the local ethanol industry. But Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack — Iowa’s former governor — has stressed that just because the administration is pushing for more EVs, “Does that mean we won’t have a need for E15 or E85” — gasoline blends that contain up to 15% and 85% ethanol content, respectively — “in the future? No.”
For example, new rules defining what qualifies as a “sustainable aviation fuel” — and thus for generous tax credits under the IRA — include ethanol and other plant-based fuels, despite opposition from environmental groups. “The Biden administration plans to invest $4.3 billion to support production of 35 billion gallons of sustainable aviation fuel annually by 2050,” presenting a significant opportunity for Iowa’s farmers, The Des Moines Register writes. As Vilsack added, “You have to think beyond cars and trucks.”
“They want to have electric trucks, so a truck — a big, beautiful truck like Peterbilt or one of them, with the big ones, 18 wheelers, they can go about 2,000 miles, they say, 2,000 on a big tank of diesel. An electric truck, comparable — which it can’t be comparable because you need so much room for the battery. Most of the area that you’re going to carry your goods, going to be battery. But assuming we take away that problem, which is not easy to take away, you’d have to stop approximately seven times to go 2,000 miles, right? You go about 300 miles, and they don’t want to change that.” [Dec. 20, 2023]
Fact check: There’s a lot to unpack here, but the gist is that most of these are the kind of early-stage problems you would find with any emerging technology. While the technology powering heavy-duty electric trucks is promising, there is still a long way to go when it comes to range and capacity.
Still, even a semi that goes only around 375 miles — longer than Trump’s estimate — on a single charge would ultimately be cheaper than a diesel truck, one 2021 study found. Because of the lower cost of ownership, electric semis have a net savings of $200,000 over a 15-year lifespan.
Battery size, and in particular battery weight, will be a major hurdle for long haul electric semis; shipping rates are often determined based on weight, among other factors, and since freight companies already operate on narrow margins, carrying less freight weight is a problem. But the technology is constantly improving. Plus, it’s pretty silly to claim electric truck developers “don’t want to change” their range per charge; electric truck manufacturers are constantly boasting about their new mileage numbers.
“This electric car thing is just crazy. If you want to drive, maybe, let’s say you are here. If you say, ‘Let’s take a drive to beautiful, safe Chicago. It’s so safe. Let’s drive there.’ How many times would you have to stop, about nine? It’s just crazy. They know it. They know it’s crazy.” [Dec. 20, 2023]
Fact check: The distance from Waterloo, Iowa — where Trump made these comments — to “beautiful, safe Chicago” is 269 miles. While the EVs with the worst range would have to charge one single time on a trip of that distance, in 2022, the average EV range was nearly 300 miles. Most cars would make it on a single charge.
“And now we are a nation that wants to make our revered and very powerful army tanks, the best in the world, all-electric, so that despite the fact they are also not able to go far, fewer pollutants will be released into the air as we blast our way through enemy territory, at least in an environmentally friendly way. And they also want to make our jet fighters with a green stamp of energy savings through losing 15% efficiency.” [Dec. 17, 2023]
Fact check: Trump has repeatedly slammed the Biden administration for supposedly wanting to switch to “all-electric” tanks. This is mostly false, though it has its roots in the Army’s first-ever climate strategy, released early last year. In it, the Army stated that it aims to electrify all noncombat vehicles by 2035 and some tactical vehicles by 2050.
The reason the Army wants to go electric isn’t because of some woke environmentalist agenda, though. “The primary reason the Army wants to electrify its fighting vehicles is to reduce wartime casualties,” Bloomberg writes. “An all-electric fleet would mean personnel wouldn’t have to go on dangerous refueling missions that draw combat forces away from fighting the enemy … [and] electric vehicles are also much quieter and harder to spot on enemy surveillance systems because they generate so little heat.”
Trump has also slammed the Air Force for its climate action plan, although the roots of his claim that Biden wants to make jet fighters green by “losing 15% efficiency” are much less clear. He may be referring to the Air Force’s exploration of alternative fuels — which again, it is doing primarily for strategic reasons, since the Air Force reports 30% of the casualties in Afghanistan came from attacks on fuel and water convoys. “We’re not doing the climate plan for climate’s sake … Everything is about increasing our combat capability,” Edwin Oshiba, assistant secretary of the Air Force for energy, installations, and the environment, told the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.
“The problem is you won’t find a charger. And if you do, it’s got lines.” [Dec. 16, 2023]
Fact check: Many EV drivers are dissatisfied with the state of charging infrastructure in the U.S., and lines are an issue. While more charging stations will continue to open up as EVs become more popular — the IRA allotted $7.5 billion to build out 500,000 public chargers by 2030, with another $623 million in EV charging grants awarded last week — this seems, at the moment, to be a fair criticism.
“We are a nation whose leaders are demanding all-electric cars despite the fact that they can’t go far, cost too much, and whose batteries are produced in China with materials only available in China when an unlimited amount of gasoline is available inexpensively in the United States but is not available in China.” [Dec. 17, 2023]
Fact check: China indeed dominates the EV battery market. The Inflation Reduction Act — which Trump has promised to gut — has tried to change this by restricting EV tax credits only to models with batteries and components sourced from the U.S. or its trading partners. The law also includes funding to help seed a domestic EV battery and mineral supply chain.
And it’s working. As my colleague Neel Dhanesha wrote last year, “Battery manufacturers around the country — many of them automakers themselves — have announced over 1,000 gigawatt hours of U.S. battery production that’s slated to come online by 2028, far outpacing projected demand,” according to estimates from the Environmental Defense Fund. All told, domestic battery production has been the greatest beneficiary of the IRA, reports RMI, a clean energy research group.
“Let’s say your [electric] boat goes down and I’m sitting on top of this big powerful battery and the boat’s going down. Do I get electrocuted?” [Oct. 1, 2023]
Fact check: Battery packs on electric boats are designed to be watertight because, believe it or not, it’s crossed the mind of electric boat manufacturers that their products could potentially end up underwater. All the electric boat makers I spoke to in my lengthy investigation into this question told me the battery packs they use have a waterproofing standard that is either at, or just below, what is required for a submarine. The high-voltage batteries are also kept in “puncture-resistant shells” so they won't be exposed to the water even if the boat somehow got mangled in an accident.
All this is a very long way of saying: No, you very likely won’t be electrocuted if your electric boat sinks. But you may get eaten by a shark!
“Hundreds of thousands of American jobs, your jobs, will be gone forever. By most estimates, under Biden’s electric vehicle mandate, 40% of all U.S. auto jobs will disappear.” [Sept. 27, 2023]
Fact check: As Heatmap has reported, there is little evidence to suggest that making electric vehicles will result in fewer jobs. “A number of analyses showed that electric vehicles could actually require more labor to build than gas-powered cars in the U.S., at least for the foreseeable future,” Emily Pontecorvo writes.
“The happiest moment for somebody in an electric car is the first 10 minutes. In other words, you get it charged, and now for 10 minutes. The unhappiest part is the next hour because you’re petrified that you’re not going to be finding another charger.” [August 24, 2023]
Fact check: We don’t know what every single EV driver thinks, but EV drivers as a group tend to be pretty satisfied; plug-in hybrids were level with internal combustion vehicles in J.D. Power’s annual survey of performance, execution, and layout-based consumer satisfaction, with fully battery-powered EVs just a few points behind on a 1,000-point scale. Some 90% of EV drivers say they hope to buy another EV as their next car, a 2022 Plug-In America survey found.
And while range anxiety is real, studies show that it declines the longer someone owns an EV and gets comfortable with charging. Only 8% of EV drivers told Escalent they’ve ever run out of juice while driving.
It’ll take more than an hour for you to start getting anxious, too. The average EV sold in the U.S. last year had a range of 291 miles, or a little over four hours of driving at 70mph.
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On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.
From Kansas to Brooklyn, the fire is turning battery skeptics into outright opponents.
The symbol of the American battery backlash can be found in the tiny town of Halstead, Kansas.
Angry residents protesting a large storage project proposed by Boston developer Concurrent LLC have begun brandishing flashy yard signs picturing the Moss Landing battery plant blaze, all while freaking out local officials with their intensity. The modern storage project bears little if any resemblance to the Moss Landing facility, which uses older technology,, but that hasn’t calmed down anxious locals or stopped news stations from replaying footage of the blaze in their coverage of the conflict.
The city of Halstead, under pressure from these locals, is now developing a battery storage zoning ordinance – and explicitly saying this will not mean a project “has been formally approved or can be built in the city.” The backlash is now so intense that Halstead’s mayor Dennis Travis has taken to fighting back against criticism on Facebook, writing in a series of posts about individuals in his community “trying to rule by MOB mentality, pushing out false information and intimidating” volunteers working for the city. “I’m exercising MY First Amendment Right and well, if you don’t like it you can kiss my grits,” he wrote. Other posts shared information on the financial benefits of building battery storage and facts to dispel worries about battery fires. “You might want to close your eyes and wish this technology away but that is not going to happen,” another post declared. “Isn’t it better to be able to regulate it in our community?”
What’s happening in Halstead is a sign of a slow-spreading public relations wildfire that’s nudging communities that were already skeptical of battery storage over the edge into outright opposition. We’re not seeing any evidence that communities are transforming from supportive to hostile – but we are seeing new areas that were predisposed to dislike battery storage grow more aggressive and aghast at the idea of new projects.
Heatmap Pro data actually tells the story quite neatly: Halstead is located in Harvey County, a high risk area for developers that already has a restrictive ordinance banning all large-scale solar and wind development. There’s nothing about battery storage on the books yet, but our own opinion poll modeling shows that individuals in this county are more likely to oppose battery storage than renewable energy.
We’re seeing this phenomenon play out elsewhere as well. Take Fannin County, Texas, where residents have begun brandishing the example of Moss Landing to rail against an Engie battery storage project, and our modeling similarly shows an intense hostility to battery projects. The same can be said about Brooklyn, New York, where anti-battery concerns are far higher in our polling forecasts – and opposition to battery storage on the ground is gaining steam.