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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 It’s also technologically outdated and probably due to be discontinued; it doesn’t fast-charge at the rate of many rivals.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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On EV investments hit the brakes, Google’s nuclear restart, and a new data center consensus
Current conditions: Cyclone Montha is poised to make landfall over the Andhra Pradesh coast in eastern India with winds of up to 62 miles per hour • South Africa’s Northern Cape faces extremely high fire risks • Southwest California is also facing high risk of wildfires amid Santa Ana winds and dry, warm conditions today and tomorrow.

Hurricane Melissa has strengthened into a major storm, threatening to make landfall over Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba as a Category 5 hurricane in the next few hours, with winds up to 180 miles per hour and more than four feet of rainfall. It’s likely to be the strongest storm to hit Jamaica since records started in 1851, with storm surge lapping the coast with waves of up to 15 feet. Already the storm has killed at least six people in the northern Caribbean. Evacuations started on Monday. “This can quickly escalate into a humanitarian crisis where a large number of people are in need of basic supplies such as food, safe drinking water, housing and medical care,” AccuWeather forecasters warned on Monday. “The prolonged nature of impacts can result in entire communities being cut off from aid and support for multiple days.”
The U.S. is just weeks away from reviving a shuttered nuclear plant for the first time, as Holtec International’s Palisades plant in Michigan nears its restart. Once that’s done, the Microsoft-backed project to revive the still-operable reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island facility is likely the next nuclear site to come back from permanent decommissioning. Add another to the list. On Monday, Google inked a deal to back the restart of NextEra’s Duane Arnold nuclear plant, Iowa’s only atomic power station. As I reported in this newsletter back in August, NextEra was already considering a restart of the station, which shut down in 2020. It is, as my colleague Katie Brigham wrote in August, the zenith of the "nuclear dealmaking boom.”
The move comes as the U.S. finally embraces large-scale reactors again after years of pegging all future hopes of new nuclear construction on as-yet-unbuilt small modular reactors. On Tuesday, the U.S. government announced an $80 billion deal with Westinghouse to build a fleet of at least eight new power plants with a mix of gigawatt-sized AP1000s and some smaller versions, the Financial Times reported.
Heatmap’s Jael Holzman has breaking news on New York’s energy future: Swiftsure, a 650-megawatt battery energy storage development planned for New York’s Staten Island, was quietly scuttled in August. Rather than make a public announcement, the developer, Fullmark Energy (formerly Hecate), instead wrote a letter to the New York State Department of Public Service withdrawing the proposal. As Jael wrote, “nobody in Staten Island seems to have known until late Friday afternoon when local publication SI Advance first reported the withdrawal.” The project faced heavy opposition, including from New York Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa. The campaigns of Democrat Zohran Mamdani and independent Andrew Cuomo did not respond to requests for comment.
In other local news, Heatmap’s Jeva Lange is out with a remarkable new series called The Aftermath, a look at surviving the infernos that are increasingly a fact of life in parts of the U.S., especially out West. The series includes stories on the challenges involved in evacuation, why relocation can be impossible, the stories of wildfires that don’t capture national attention, the limits of what the public knows and doesn’t know about wildfires, and the buffers towns such as the fire-scorched Paradise, California, are trying to establish.
Investments in electric vehicle-related infrastructure, including batteries factories, vehicle assembly plants, and charging stations, tumbled by nearly a third to $8.1 billion in the three months leading to September compared to the same period a year earlier, according to the Financial Times. The analysis, based on data from the U.S. Clean Investment Monitor, found that about $7 billion of planned EV investments were abandoned between April and September. The pullback could define the West’s place in the EV industry for years to come, widening China’s lead over production of battery-powered cars. “We need to … be quicker in development to compete with the Chinese,” Hakan Samuelsson, chief executive of Volvo Cars, told the newspaper. “As soon as you weaken these signals, everything will slow down,” he added, referring to the knock-on effect of policy changes emanating from the White House.
When Secretary of Energy Chris Wright last week directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to fast-track interconnection request for large new energy users, he also endorsed the somewhat controversial idea that big electricity users such as data centers should dial back their operations from time to time when the grid is stressed, Latitude Media’s Lisa Martine Jenkins reported last week. On Monday, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI threw its weight behind the idea. In a letter to the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, Christopher Lehane, OpenAI’s chief government affairs officer, called on regulators to “expand use of curtailable load resources and modernize interconnection policy.” Lehane said “we welcomed the news last week that” Wright had expressed support for the policy. “To strengthen grid reliability and expand capacity for AI and other flexible loads, FERC should allow more demand-side participation in wholesale markets and speed up interconnection for large loads that can curtail,” he added.
The idea has been gaining momentum since Duke Energy researcher Tyler Norris put out a landmark paper in February identifying up to 100 gigawatts of additional load the grid could absorb if data centers simply adopted a policy of reducing power consumption when there was a shortage of electrons. Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called it “one weird trick for getting more data centers on the grid.”
Carbon removal startup Rewind has launched DMS Georgia, the first commercial-scale carbon removal operation using deep mine storage. It’s the first time a certified carbon credit will be delivered by plant-based carbon in naturally oxygen-free underground environments. The project aims to bury carbon-emitting biomass in environments where the lack of oxygen makes decomposition impossible. By 2030, Rewind aims to remove one million metric tons of carbon per year.
Fullmark Energy quietly shuttered Swiftsure, a planned 650-megawatt energy storage system on Staten Island.
The biggest battery project in New York has been canceled in a major victory for the nascent nationwide grassroots movement against energy storage development.
It’s still a mystery why exactly the developer of Staten Island’s Swiftsure project, Fullmark Energy (formerly known as Hecate), pulled the plug. We do know a few key details: First, Fullmark did not announce publicly that it was killing the project, instead quietly submitting a short, one-page withdrawal letter to the New York State Department of Public Service. That letter, which is publicly available, is dated August 18 of this year, meaning that the move formally occurred two months ago. Still, nobody in Staten Island seems to have known until late Friday afternoon when local publication SI Advance first reported the withdrawal.
Second, Swiftsure was going to be massive. It was the largest planned battery storage project in New York State, according to public records, with the ability to store upwards of 650 megawatts of electricity — enough to power more than half a million homes. That makes Swiftsure likely one of the largest battery projects in the country, with more capacity than any other energy storage project currently facing opposition in the U.S., according to our very own Heatmap Pro database. This is the second Fullmark project to totally flop in recent months. We reported last week that one of the company’s projects outside of Los Angeles had its permits voided in a court ruling that also blocked battery storage development in unincorporated areas outside the city.
Third, and potentially most significant for energy developers in New York City: Swiftsure’s death will almost certainly embolden the anti-storage activist movement.
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee in next week’s New York mayoral election, was one of many local politicians who opposed Swiftsure and rallied with residents close to the proposed site in May. He’s part of a broader trend of Republican politicians becoming skeptical of battery storage sites near where people live and work, including in Democrat-ruled New York.
Putting batteries in the five boroughs has always been a challenge, but January’s Moss Landing battery fire in California created a PR frenzy in the city, as conservative figures seized on the online panic created by the blaze. Once-agnostic GOP members of Congress from New York City are now anti-battery storage in their backyards, including Anthony D’Esposito, Nicole Malliotakis and Mike Lawler. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin — a former NYC congressman — is now weighing in against individual battery projects on Long Island and Staten Island.
Swiftsure was proposed in 2023 and permitted by the state last year. Fullmark was given a deadline of this spring to submit routine paperwork demonstrating how it would comply with conditions of the site’s permit, including how the battery storage project would be decommissioned. In August, the New York Department of Public Service gave Fullmark an extension until October 11.
Instead of meeting that October deadline, it seems Fullmark quietly withdrew its Swiftsure proposal.
It’s unclear how Democrat Zohran Mamdani or independent Andrew Cuomo would handle the rise of the anti-battery movement if either of them wins the November 4 mayoral election. That’s partially because energy policy and climate change have been non-issues in the campaign, saving small mentions of nuclear power, heat pumps, or gas prices in one-off debate answers or social media posts.
Sliwa, who has referred to Swiftsure as a “mini Chernobyl,” told me that he anticipates this victory will lead to more protests at more battery sites, no matter who wins the mayoral election. “The cancellation of this lithium-ion battery warehouse will reverberate throughout the boroughs,” GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa told me Monday. “It’ll be a rallying cry [because] it’s not a fait accompli that these facilities will be complete and operational.”
The Mamdani and Cuomo campaigns did not respond to requests for comment on Swiftsure’s cancellation.
On China’s rare earths, Bill Gates’ nuclear dream, and Texas renewables
Current conditions: Hurricane Melissa exploded in intensity over the warm Caribbean waters and has now strengthened into a major storm, potentially slamming into Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica as a Category 5 in the coming days • The Northeast is bracing for a potential nor’easter, which will be followed by a plunge in temperatures of as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit lower than average • The northern Australian town of Julia Creek saw temperatures soar as high as 106 degrees.
Exxon Mobil filed a lawsuit against California late Friday on the grounds that two landmark new climate laws violate the oil giant’s free speech rights, The New York Times reported. The two laws would require thousands of large companies doing business in the state to calculate and report the greenhouse gas pollution created by the use of their products, so-called Scope 3 emissions. “The statutes compel Exxon Mobil to trumpet California’s preferred message even though Exxon Mobil believes the speech is misleading and misguided,” Exxon complained through its lawyers. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office said the statutes “have already been upheld in court and we continue to have confidence in them.” He condemned the lawsuit, calling it “truly shocking that one of the biggest polluters on the planet would be opposed to transparency.”
China will delay introducing export controls on rare earths, an unnamed U.S. official told the Financial Times following two days of talks in Malaysia. For years, Beijing has been ratcheting up trade restrictions on the global supply of metals its industry dominates. But this month, China slapped the harshest controls yet on rare earths. In response, stocks in rare earth mining and refining companies soared. Despite what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called the “paradox of Trump’s critical mineral crusade” to mine even as he reduced demand from electric vehicle factories, “everybody wants to invest in critical minerals startups,” Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote. That — as frequent readers of this newsletter will recall — includes the federal government, which under the Trump administration has been taking equity stakes in major projects as part of deals for federal funding.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission rewarded Bill Gates’ next-generation reactor company, TerraPower, with its final environment impact statement last week. The next step in the construction permit process is a final safety evaluation that the company expects to receive by the end of this year. If everything goes according to plan, TerraPower could end up winning the race to build the nation’s first commercial reactor to use a coolant other than water, and do so at a former coal-fired plant in the country’s top coal-producing state. “The Natrium plant in Wyoming, Kemmerer Unit 1, is now the first advanced reactor technology to successfully complete an environmental impact statement for the NRC, bringing us another step closer to delivering America’s next nuclear power plant,” said TerraPower president and CEO Chris Levesque.
A judge gave New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration until February 6 to issue rules for its long-delayed cap-and-invest program, the Albany Times-Union reported. The government was supposed to issue the guidelines that would launch the program as early as 2024, but continuously pushed back the release. “Early outlines of New York’s cap and invest program indicate that regulators were considering a relatively low price ceiling on pollution, making it easier for companies to buy their way out of compliance with the cap,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote in January.

The Texas data center boom is being powered primarily with new wind, solar, and batteries, according to new analysis by the Energy Information Administration. Since 2021, electricity demand on the independent statewide grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has soared. Over the past year, wind, solar, and batteries have been supplying that rising demand. Utility-scale solar generated 45 terawatt-hours of electricity in the first nine months of 2025. That’s 50% more than the same period in 2024 and nearly four times more than the same period in 2021. Wind generation, meanwhile, totaled 87 terawatt-hours for the first nine months of this year, up 4% from last year and 36% since 2021. “Together,” the analysis stated, “wind and solar generation met 36% of ERCOT’s electricity demand in the first nine months of 2025.”