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To the tune of more than half the models delivered in the first quarter.
Americans might remain tepid on electric vehicles. But they are snapping up conventional hybrids.
More than half of the Ford Maverick compact pickup trucks sold last quarter had conventional hybrid engines, the automaker said on Wednesday, a sign of how rapidly hybrids and plug-in hybrids are ascending in the American car market.
Ford sold nearly 20,000 Maverick hybrids during the first three months of 2024, 77% more than during the first quarter of 2023, the automaker said. Those Mavericks made up the majority of the 38,421 hybrids that Ford sold across its line-up last quarter.
“We listened to our customers and want to offer them freedom of choice,” Jim Baumbick, the vice president of product development and operations at Ford, told me in an exclusive interview. “Customers can do the math — a lot of Maverick customers are very focused on value for money.”
The sales success comes as Ford, the domestic automaker that has been most enthusiastic about EVs, has intensified its focus on conventional and plug-in hybrids. On Thursday, Ford announced that it plans to offer a hybrid version of each of its gasoline-burning vehicles by the end of the decade. The company recently added an additional shift at its Hermosillo, Mexico, factory that makes Maverick trucks, and it doubled the production of full-size F-150 hybrid pickups.
In the same announcement, however, Ford also said it would push back the launch of its next-generation electric vehicle, a new three-row electric SUV, from 2025 to 2027. That suggests that the automaker’s current EV offerings — the Ford Mustang Mach-E, F-150 Lightning, and Ford E-Transit delivery van — will remain its flagship electric vehicles for much of the rest of the decade.
“We know the destination: EVs are going to be a much bigger part of our product portfolio in the future,” Baumbick said a day before the announcement. “But we also know the tail on internal combustion-based products is going to be much longer.”
On the one hand, Ford’s sudden success with hybrids is unsurprising. Hybrids are a 20-year-old technology that cuts air pollution, saves on gas costs, and can improve a car’s performance. While hybrids aren’t nearly as good for the climate as purely electric vehicles, they can cut carbon emissions without forcing customers to seek out or install charging stations.
For those reasons, auto experts once predicted that hybrids would percolate across the marketplace like, say, automatic transmission or power steering — they were general-purpose features that would improve any car. But instead they are only now catching on, after the initial electric vehicle boom. Perhaps that’s because hybrids were long seen as the green or environmentally premium choice, and only the arrival of mainstream EVs has defanged hybrids as an option for more drivers.
In the interview, Baumbick noted that adding a hybrid powertrain to a Maverick or F-150 now adds only an extra $1,500 or so to a truck’s suggested retail price. “Our goal from the getgo on Maverick was to take a different approach, and it was all about the value. When we launched, we were really trying to lean into attracting more customers to hybrids, because we knew from all the research we had done that they were looking for value. It was a bit of a departure from how we approached it before as a premium offering.”
That idea of hybrids as premium persists elsewhere in the automaker’s line-up. A conventional gas-burning Ford Escape plug-in hybrid can be bought for as little as $29,495, for instance, while a plug-in hybrid Escape has a suggested retail price of $40,500.
For what it’s worth, Ford also reported strong EV growth in the year’s first quarter, but its raw EV sales totals are lower than its hybrid sales. The company sold 20,223 electric vehicles during the year’s first three months, an increase of 86% over the same period a year earlier.
The Mustang Mach-E, a family-friendly crossover that has emerged as the automaker’s best-performing EV, made up about half of those deliveries; its sales were up 77% over the year prior. The company also sold 7,743 F-150 Lightning models, 80% more than a year earlier. What’s not yet clear is whether these better sales translated into financial returns. The automaker lost tens of thousands of dollars for every EV that it sold last year, and it slashed the price of its most premium EVs further at the beginning of 2024. Ford will announce its quarterly earnings at the end of April.
Even as it has slowed its rollout of EVs, Ford has insisted that it believes they represent its future. The very first line of its press release on Thursday was: “Ford continues to invest in a broad set of EV programs as it works to build a full EV line-up.” But in our conversation, Baumbick compared the reasons a customer might buy a fully electric versus a hybrid full-size F-150 pickup. “If their usage is best suited to an EV, we’ve got an F-150 Lightning,” he said. But “if you’re towing for higher distances or longer weights, it increases demand on charging. That’s where a hybrid can be a perfect tool for the job.”
Here at Heatmap, we’ve argued that Ford should add a plug-in hybrid Maverick to its lineup, too — after all, the Maverick is built on the same underlying platform as the Escape. A semi-electric compact pickup could be the “forever truck” for many Millennials. So I asked Baumbick: With Ford now expanding its hybrid offerings, is there any chance we’ll see a plug-in hybrid Maverick anytime soon? He told me that the company doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation. Hey — that’s better than a straight-up “no.”
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SpaceX has also now been dragged into the fight.
The value of Tesla shares went into freefall Thursday as its chief executive Elon Musk traded insults with President Donald Trump. The war of tweets (and Truths) began with Musk’s criticism of the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives and has escalated to Musk accusing Trump of being “in the Epstein files,” a reference to the well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in federal detention in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The conflict had been escalating steadily in the week since Musk formally departed the Trump administration with what was essentially a goodbye party in the Oval Office, during which Musk was given a “key” to the White House.
Musk has since criticized the reconciliation bill for not cutting spending enough, and for slashing credits for electric vehicles and renewable energy while not touching subsidies for oil and gas. “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk wrote on X Thursday afternoon. He later posted a poll asking “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”
Tesla shares were down around 5% early in the day but recovered somewhat by noon, only to nosedive again when Trump criticized Musk during a media availability. The shares had fallen a total of 14% from the previous day’s close by the end of trading on Thursday, evaporating some $150 billion worth of Tesla’s market capitalization.
As Musk has criticized Trump’s bill, Trump and his allies have accused him of being sore over the removal of tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles. On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson described Musk’s criticism of the bill as “very disappointing,” and said the electric vehicle policies were “very important to him.”
“I know that has an effect on his business, and I lament that,” Johnson said.
Trump echoed that criticism Thursday afternoon on Truth Social, writing, “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” He added, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Musk replied, referring to the vehicles NASA uses to ferry personnel and supplies to and from the International Space Station.
The company will use the seed funding to bring on more engineers — and customers.
As extreme weather becomes the norm, utilities are scrambling to improve the grid’s resilience, aiming to prevent the types of outages and infrastructure damage that often magnify the impact of already disastrous weather events. Those events cost the U.S. $182 billion in damages last year alone.
With the intensity of storms, heat waves, droughts, and wildfires growing every year, some utilities are now turning to artificial intelligence in their quest to adapt to new climate realities. Rhizome, which just announced a $6.5 million seed round, uses AI to help assess and prevent climate change-induced grid infrastructure vulnerabilities. It’s already working with utilities such as Avangrid, Seattle City Light, and Vermont Electric Power Company to do so.
“With a combination of utility system data and historical weather and hazard information, and then climate projection information, we can build a full profile of likelihood and consequence of failure at a very high resolution,” Rhizome co-founder and CEO Mish Thadani told me.
While utilities often have lots of data about the history of their assets and the surrounding landscape, there’s no real holistic system to bring together these disparate datasets and provide a simple overview of systemic risk across a range of different scenarios. Utilities usually rely on historical data to make decisions about their assets — a practice that’s increasingly unhelpful as climate change makes previously rare extreme weather events more likely.
Rhizome aims to solve both problems, serving as an integrated platform for risk assessment and mitigation that incorporates forward-looking climate modeling into its projections. The company measures its success against modeled counterfactuals that determine avoided power outages and the economic losses associated with these hypothetical blackouts. “So we can say the anticipated failure rate across the system for a Category 1 hurricane was X, and after you invest in the system, it will be Y,” Thadani told me. “Or if you’ve made a bunch of investments in the system, and you do experience a Category 1 hurricane, what would have been the failure rate had those investments not been made?”
This allows utilities to provide regulators with much more robust data to back up their funding requests. So while Thadani expects electricity prices to continue to rise and ratepayers to bear the burden, he told me that Rhizome can ultimately help regulators and utilities keep costs in check by making sure that every dollar spent on risk mitigation goes as far as possible.
Rhizome’s seed round, which came in oversubscribed, was led by the early-stage tech-focused venture firm Base10 Partners, which aims to automate traditional sectors of the economy. Additional funders include climate investors MCJ and CLAI, as well as the wildfire-focused venture firm Convective Capital. In addition to its standard risk assessment system, Rhizome has also developed a wildfire-specific risk mitigation tool. This quantifies not only how likely a hazard is to occur and its potential impact on utility infrastructure, but also the probability that an equipment failure would spark a wildfire, based on the geography of the area and historical ignition data.
Thadani told me that he considers evaluating wildfire risk “to be the next step in a sequence” as a utility evaluates the threats to its system overall. So while customers can choose to adopt either the standard product or the wildfire-specific product, many could gain utility from both, he said. The company has also developed a third offering specifically tailored for municipal and cooperative utilities. This more affordable system doesn’t provide the same machine learning-powered cost-benefit metrics, but can still help these smaller entities evaluate their infrastructure’s vulnerability.
Right now, Rhizome has a “lean and mighty” team of just 11 people, Thadani told me. With this latest raise, he said that the company will immediately hire five or six engineers, primarily to do further research and development. As Rhizome looks to onboard more and larger customers, it’s planning to incorporate more advanced modeling features into its platform and operate it increasingly autonomously, such that the model can retrain itself as new weather, climate, and utility data becomes available.
The company is out of the pilot phase with most of its customers, Thadani said, having signed multiple enterprise software contracts. That’s big, as utilities have gained a reputation for showing an initial appetite for testing innovative technologies, only to balk at the cost of full-scale deployment. Thadani told me Rhizome has been able to avoid this so-called “pilot purgatory” by making a point to engage with senior-level stakeholders at utilities — not just the innovation teams — to “graduate from that pilot ecosystem more quickly.”
Add it to the evidence that China’s greenhouse gas emissions may be peaking, if they haven’t already.
Exactly where China is in its energy transition remains somewhat fuzzy. Has the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases already hit peak emissions? Will it in 2025? That remains to be seen. But its import data for this year suggests an economy that’s in a rapid transition.
According to government trade data, in the first fourth months of this year, China imported $12.1 billion of coal, $100.4 billion of crude oil, and $18 billion of natural gas. In terms of value, that’s a 27% year over year decline in coal, a 8.5% decline in oil, and a 15.7% decline in natural gas. In terms of volume, it was a 5.3% decline, a slight 0.5% increase, and a 9.2% decline, respectively.
“Fossil fuel demand still trends down,” Lauri Myllyvirta, the co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, wrote on X in response to the news.
Morgan Stanley analysts predicted Friday in a note to clients that this “weak downstream demand” for coal in China would “continue to hinder coal import volume.”
Another piece of China’s emissions and coal usage puzzle came from Indonesia, which is a major coal exporter. Citing data from trade data service Kpler, Reuters reported Friday that Indonesia’s thermal coal exports “have dropped to their lowest in three years” thanks to “weak demand in China and India,” the world’s two biggest coal importers. Indonesia’s thermal coal exports dropped 12% annually to 150 million tons in the first third of the year, Reuters reported.
China’s official goal is to hit peak emissions by 2030 and reach “carbon neutrality” by 2060. The country’s electricity grid is largely fueled by coal (with hydropower coming in at number two), as is its prolific production of steel and cement, which is energy and, specifically, coal-intensive. For a few years in the 2010s, more cement was poured in China than in the whole 20th century in the United States. China also accounts for about half of the world’s steel production.
At the same time, China’s electricity demand growth is being largely met by renewables, implying that China can expand its economy without its economy-wide, annual emissions going up. This is in part due to a massive deployment of renewables. In 2023, China installed enough non-carbon-emitting electricity generation to meet the total electricity demand of all of France.
China’s productive capacity has shifted in a way that’s less carbon intensive, experts on the Chinese energy system and economy have told Heatmap. The economy isshifting more toward manufacturing and away from the steel-and-cement intensive breakneck urbanization of the past few decades, thanks to a dramatically slowing homebuilding sector.
Chinese urban residential construction was using almost 300 million tons of steel per year at its peak in 2019, according to research by the Reserve Bank of Australia, about a third of the country’s total steel usage. (Steel consumption for residential construction would fall by about half by 2023.) By contrast, the whole United States economy consumes less than 100 million tons of steel per year.
To the extent the overall Chinese economy slows down due to the trade war with the United States, coal usage — and thus greenhouse gas emissions — would slow as well. Although that hasn’t happened yet — China also released export data on Friday that showed sustained growth, in spite of the tariff barriers thrown up by the Trump administration.