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Why the Volkswagen ID.2all and other small EVs don't make it to the U.S. market
It has an estimated 280 miles of range. It’s got a ton of space for groceries, strollers, and outdoor gear. It boasts an interior that looks simple yet modern and high-tech. It should be remarkably easy to park on city streets. Best of all, when it goes into production in 2025, it should start at under 25,000 euros, or about $26,500.
There’s just one problem: It’s not coming to America.
The U.S. is missing out on arguably the most exciting electric vehicle debut so far this year. It isn’t a supercar or a high-end luxury SUV, but the Volkswagen ID.2all Concept, unveiled Wednesday at an event in Hamburg, Germany. While the ID.2all is just a concept car for now — a kind of exciting preview of where a car company wants to go, sometimes realistically and sometimes fantastically — VW is making clear that it will produce such an EV and this one looks very ready for public consumption.
It also represents something frustratingly elusive in America's nascent EV market: an affordable, modern, small car. A Volkswagen U.S. spokesperson has confirmed that there are no plans to bring the production version of the ID.2all stateside. That’s disappointing, but sadly understandable given Americans’ car-buying habits and the economics of EVs.
But there may be light at the end of the tunnel from other sources.
To date, the “affordable” EV remains a massive white space in America’s EV market.
In the 2010s, a number of so-called “compliance cars” fit that bill, mostly smaller hatchbacks and sedans fitted with batteries offering limited range to meet California’s emissions rules. As a concept, very few of those exist anymore, and few of them were that great to begin with.
In modern times, the average American new car costs around $46,000. If you want to break up with gasoline and go electric, expect to pay much more — the average American EV cost about $65,000 last year. Supply chain disruptions were one of the main culprits, but car prices and loan terms had also been rising for years.
Those average prices have gone down thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax rules, which offer credits of up to $7,500 if the EV is built in North America. Right now, only a few are.
Today, the best solution to this problem is probably the Chevrolet Bolt, which is a stunningly good deal thanks to discounts and tax incentives. It’s also technologically outdated and probably due to be discontinued; it doesn’t fast-charge at the rate of many rivals.
There’s also the Nissan Leaf, an early pioneer in this space that can be had in the mid-$20,000 range after tax breaks. But it, too, has a charging system that’s basically obsolete and is thus slated to die soon.
Finally, there’s the venerable Tesla Model 3. The latter is finally rather affordable thanks to Tesla’s price cuts and tax incentives, starting at $31,290 only if you include those deals and cuts. (You may recall that Elon Musk promised the Model 3 would cost $35,000 for years, but it really didn’t until recently.)
The point is, America is a long way from having a market of truly affordable new EVs, especially small ones. If you want the electric equivalent of, say, a Honda Civic or a Toyota Corolla, you’re largely out of luck. Instead, our recent EV market is largely made up of high-end luxury sedans or crossovers, replete with wildly high-tech features and capable of stunning zero to 60 mph times.
But widespread EV adoption will be key to reducing vehicle emissions and achieving climate change mitigation goals. So far, especially in the U.S., the cost of these cars has been a gigantic barrier to making that happen.
Any new technology is expensive, and supply chain disruptions have made things worse. Automakers are working to scale electric car production, ramp up the homegrown battery industry with help from the IRA’s tax incentives, and to spread more EVs across their lineups at different price points.
But smaller, more affordable, and even city-focused EVs aren’t especially on their radar screens yet.
There’s another problem here: In recent years, we as a nation have bought a lot of trucks, crossovers, and SUVs.
As larger vehicles got better fuel economy than their gas-sucking predecessors from the 1990s, Americans started moving away from smaller cars. Automakers responded in kind. Ford killed off most of its sedans and small cars (except the Mustang) in 2018. General Motors offers almost no small cars anymore and only one sedan, the aging Malibu. Mostly, it’s the Japanese and Korean automakers who bother to make these anymore.
Instead, we’ve shifted to buying bigger vehicles, which are still less efficient and worse for the environment than small cars. Take the new GMC Hummer EV, for example. It’s huge, with an enormous battery that takes a ton of resources to make and uses a lot of electricity to charge, even if it generates no tailpipe emissions. It also starts at $108,700.
It’s a little crazy we can buy an electric Hummer, but not an electric Volkswagen Golf, isn’t it?
Speaking of, there’s reportedly a good chance the production ID.2all could simply be called the next Golf. But the Golf isn’t even sold in America anymore thanks to its dwindling sales; only its more expensive enthusiast-friendly versions the GTI and Golf R are available here.
It also helps to remember that automakers can charge more for bigger cars, even when they don’t cost that much more to make than smaller ones. The car business runs on profit margins. Right now, these are even worse for EVs as the “legacy” automakers fight to match Tesla’s low building costs and high margins. They have to charge a lot for EVs, and produce bigger ones, if they want to make any money from them. (Ironically, it also means the EV revolution is largely being financed through combustion-engine Suburban and Expedition sales.)
Plus, if Volkswagen wanted to sell this car here, it’d have to be built at one of its North American factories in Tennessee or Mexico, or else it can’t take advantage of the new tax credits. That won’t make sense if it can’t be sold at high volumes, and our poor track record buying Golfs basically rules that out.
So if you’re wondering why the Volkswagen ID.2all won’t be your next EV, remember it’s a perfect storm of American preferences for big cars, the high cost of batteries, the need to make EVs profitable, and now, new rules around tax breaks impacting production decisions.
But not all hope is lost — maybe.
Remember that “affordable” and “small” aren’t necessarily the same thing, although Americans often think they are. The new Chevrolet Equinox EV crossover looks extremely promising; it should start around $30,000 before any tax breaks. But it’s bigger than a Bolt.
There’s also the upcoming Fiat 500e, which is coming back to America and should get about 150 miles of range — not bad at all for a city car. No word yet on if this Italian compact will be produced on this continent, which would dictate its tax break eligibility.
Tesla is also apparently working on an even cheaper EV to slot in below the Model 3, possibly to cost around $25,000. If anyone can pull that off, it’s Tesla, which remains ahead of the competition on its ability to build EVs at scale. But Elon Musk indicated in January that this cheaper EV is not a priority, so we’ll see.
Another EV startup, Fisker Automotive, has admitted that affordable EVs are a huge market opening. It aiming for a $29,900 starting price, again before incentives. But Fisker is still in the long, challenging process of rolling out its first EV crossover, so that’s years away if it happens at all.
Finally, China has a new crop of affordable EVs that's taking Europe by storm, but given Washington's tensions with Beijing, we’re quite unlikely to see them stateside anytime soon.
So if Americans want an affordable, practical, city-friendly EV instead of an expensive truck or SUV, what are we to do?
I don’t want to get everyone’s hopes up, but I’ve seen the power of demand work before — especially in the enthusiast world. Cars like the Nissan GT-R, the original Subaru WRX, the Toyota GR Corolla, and Audi RS6 Avant came to the U.S. after enough consumers demanded them. This can, and does, happen from time to time.
The question is whether it could happen for, say, the Volkswagen ID.2all. Maybe if enough Americans demand it, Volkswagen will answer with supply. But then we’d have to do our part and actually buy it.
If Americans really want cheaper, smaller EVs, eventually we’ll have to put our money where our mouths are.
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Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.
A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.