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Despite record sales, America’s most affordable EV gets the axe.
The hottest new car debut of 2023 probably isn’t anything you’ve ever heard of. Unless you live in China, it’s not even something you can buy. It’s the BYD Seagull, a compact electric car from a rising giant in the EV space. And with a range of up to 252 miles and a price tag of 78,000 yuan (only $11,300), it’s expected to become China’s best-selling car within months.
If you want anything even close to that in the United States, good luck. Your outlook got a little dimmer this week when General Motors announced the Chevrolet Bolt EV and its slightly larger sibling, the Bolt EUV, would be discontinued. The decision brings an end to a massively successful line of smaller, affordable, high-range EVs from America’s largest automaker.
Granted, the Bolt’s demise had been expected for at least a year. GM is in the midst of launching a new generation of EVs with modern hardware, software, and batteries as it aims to become an all-electric car company by 2035. And the Bolt was becoming inferior to newer cars with quicker charging times.
But what doesn’t seem to be in the cards right now is anything that will directly replace the Bolt: something small and inexpensive, as well as great on electric range.
“When the Chevrolet Bolt EV launched, it was a huge technical achievement and the first affordable EV, which set in motion GM’s all-electric future,” Chevrolet spokesman Cody Williams told CNBC in a statement. “Chevrolet will launch several new EVs later this year based on the Ultium platform in key segments, including the Silverado EV, Blazer EV, and Equinox EV. ”
The problem is that all of those vehicles are bigger and more expensive than the Bolt. GM is hinging a lot of its entry-level hopes on the Equinox EV, which should start around $30,000 before any tax incentives. But it dwarfs the compact Bolt, and further proves that America is a truck and SUV market now — and that reality will carry over into the electric era too.
Sales of small cars and sedans have been on the decline for years, thanks in part to cheap gas, changing buyer tastes, loopholes that allow larger vehicles to face less-strict fuel economy and emissions regulations, and the thirst for profit margins among car companies.
Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to think the Bolt and Bolt EUV were failures. Very much the opposite, and GM CEO Mary Barra wrote as much in a letter to shareholders about Q1 2023 results.
“In addition, we delivered more than 20,000 EVs, thanks to the third consecutive quarter of record Chevrolet Bolt EV and Bolt EUV deliveries and rising Cadillac Lyriq sales,” Barra wrote. “We are now no. 2 in the U.S. market, and we increased our EV market share by 8 percentage points.”
If you’re asking, “Why kill a car like that?,” know that it is not a crazy question. One possible answer is GM thinks it can do even better with the bigger Equinox EV, much as Tesla’s Model Y crossover is its global best-seller.
Yet it brings me no pleasure to write the eulogy for the Chevrolet Bolt. With 259 miles of electric range and a starting price of just $26,500 (and that’s before any tax incentives, which in recent months made it an almost hilarious steal), it has long been one the best cars in GM’s portfolio.
The Bolt arrived in late 2016, right as the world was only barely starting to take EVs seriously. At the same time, Tesla, which had proven its ability to make high-speed, high-end luxury cars like the Model S, was trying to become a mainstream volume-selling manufacturer with the Model 3 sedan.
For a good couple of years, the modern electric market in the U.S. was essentially just the Bolt, the Model 3, and the Nissan Leaf, another compact EV stalwart set to be discontinued so its parent company can focus on crossovers. The Bolt and the Model 3 were unlikely competitors by virtue of arriving around the same time, having the same mass-appeal mission and running on electricity. I always thought that comparison was a bit unfair; the Model 3 is a sport sedan at heart, and nobody seriously compares a BMW 3 Series to a Toyota Corolla.
The Bolt had a few other marks against it as the Model 3 increasingly took the spotlight. Admittedly, the Chevy’s tall hatchback design just wasn’t very sexy. It screamed “economy car” right as Tesla was successfully changing the golf-cart image that had dogged EVs for too long. And the front-wheel-drive Bolt simply couldn’t match the Model 3 in sheer driving dynamics. It had no “Performance” version with supercar-crushing 0-60 mph times.
But none of that takes away from how good the Bolt actually was. The range was incredible for its time and still quite respectable today. GM initially promised 200 miles of range, but the end result did even better at 238 miles. Over its life, the range was upgraded even further. And while it wasn’t the barnstormer the Model 3 was, it was surprisingly quick and fun to drive, almost on par with a hot hatchback like a Volkswagen GTI.
I remember being deeply impressed after spending a week with a Bolt in 2018 when I was editor-in-chief of the automotive website Jalopnik. (More so than some members of my staff, in fact, who thought the Bolt was ugly and that I was crazy for liking it.) EVs were much more novel five years ago than they are now, but here was something affordable, highly practical, and with enough range that it could easily fit many people’s lifestyles.
Tesla’s cars felt like spaceships; to me, the Bolt felt like proof that normal, everyday electric driving could be possible for anyone.
Certainly, its nearly eight-year run hasn’t been perfect. Bolt sales went up and down over the years (although it’s been shattering records lately thanks to the tax incentives) and it was repeatedly hit with recalls over devastating lithium-ion battery fires. Still, it had its best year ever in 2022, with nearly 40,000 sold. Sure, Tesla sells more EVs in a month in the U.S., but again, the intense demand for the Bolt lately proved there’s a place for all kinds of electric cars in our landscape.
Over its lifespan, the Bolt spawned the bigger EUV version and also became incredibly popular in municipal fleets and as delivery vehicles. How could it not? It was a near-perfect car for any city dweller looking to go green and not take up a lot of space. It’s hard to imagine the longer, taller Equinox EV filling those needs the same way.
So with the concept proven by the Bolt, what comes next? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be bigger EVs. Chevrolet itself makes very few actual cars anymore; the Bolt was one of the remaining few. Ford has stopped making cars and sedans entirely, and even the popular Mustang Mach-E is a crossover. Hyundai offers an impressive lineup of EVs, but so far only one in that family is a sedan, the Ioniq 6. And EVs in America still averaged around $60,000 at the end of last year, a far cry from the Bolt — to say nothing of BYD’s Seagull.
For critics who say that the forthcoming EV revolution will repeat many of the auto industry’s sins by putting pedestrians, cyclists, and even parking garages further at risk with massive curb weights, the death of the Bolt gives them plenty of ammunition.
On one hand, it makes sense that new technology needs to be expensive at first in order to scale; in my lifetime alone, that’s happened with everything from VHS tapes to smartphones. Automakers need hefty profit margins to pay for this EV transition. But our own buying habits, what we’ve been offered so far, and our terrible approach to regulation has made us addicted to big cars. All of it feels like a far cry from the humble, cheap, get-stuff-done Bolt.
If the Model 3 proved electric cars could be sexy and built at scale, the Bolt proved what traditional, legacy automakers could do if they actually took EVs seriously. It should be remembered as such, a game-changer in its own way. It’s just a shame that nothing seems poised to step up and take its place.
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With the federal electric vehicle tax credit now gone, automakers like Ford and Hyundai have to find other ways to make their electric cars affordable.
We finally know what Tesla means by an “affordable” electric vehicle. On Tuesday, the electric automaker revealed the stripped-down, less-fancy “Standard” version of its best-selling Model Y crossover and Model 3 sedan. These EVs will sell for several thousand dollars less than the existing versions, which are now rebranded as “Premium.”
These slightly cheaper Ys and 3s aren’t exactly the $25,000 baby Tesla that many fans and investors have anticipated for years. But the announcement is an indication of where the electric vehicle market in the United States may be headed now that the $7,500 federal tax credit for purchasing an EV is dead and gone. Automakers have spent the past few months rejiggering their lineups and slashing prices as much as they can to make sure sales don’t crater without the federal incentive.
The impending end of the tax credit on September 30 helped propel Tesla to record sales numbers in the third quarter of 2025. It was a stark reversal from months of disappointing sales stemming from factors like increased competition and Elon Musk’s political antics that alienated potential buyers. Money talks, of course; Tesla sent me a blitz of emails to make sure I didn’t forget what a good deal I could get before September’s end. But now, with the deadline passed, Musk’s company needed a new shot in the arm to stop sales from falling off a cliff.
The budget Teslas are, indeed, lesser vehicles. They have simpler headlights, less power, and less range than the now-Premium versions. They even come in fewer colors. But the prices — $40,000 for a Model Y Standard and $37,000 for a Model 3 Standard — effectively mirror what those cars would have cost if the tax credit were still in place. In other words, you can still buy a Tesla in the $35,000 to $40,000 range. It just won’t be as good a Tesla as you used to be able to get for the money.
The tax credit deadline had looked like one that would demarcate two distinct EV eras, with October 1 acting as the beginning of new, less-affordable time. But it turns out things aren’t quite so black and white. Lots of automakers are experimenting with ways to soften the financial blow for those who still want to get into an EV. After all, there’s always a loophole.
For example, as the September tax credit deadline approached, Reuters reported on a scheme orchestrated by Ford and General Motors to allow the American car giants to keep the good times going by buying their own cars. It goes like this: Before the September 30 deadline, the financing arms of these big corporations began the process of purchasing a host of their own vehicles from their dealerships. By making the down payment before the end of September, Ford and GM qualified these vehicles for the federal tax benefit. (They even checked with the IRS to make sure this plot was legitimate, Reuters said.) They plan to pass on the savings by leasing those vehicles back to everyday Americans.
According to Car and Driver, a number of citizens did something similar to what the corporations devised — that is, some buyers made their first payments on EVs that won’t be delivered to them for weeks or months in order to qualify for the tax break. These shenanigans are for the short term, though. Ford and GM could pre-purchase only so many of their own vehicles, and Ford said this deal effectively extends the tax credit only another quarter, through the end of December.
The bigger question is whether the automakers can — or will — simply cut prices on their EVs to make the loss of federal incentives sting a little less.
That’s the plan at Hyundai. The Korean giant has announced an enormous price cut on its successful Ioniq 5, one that more than makes up for the vanishing federal incentive. The most basic version of that car will fall from $42,600 to $35,000, putting it on par with the Chevy Equinox EV that’s been a hit at that price. Fancier versions of the Ioniq 5 will fall by more than $9,000 for the 2026 model year. Hyundai and its partner Kia are offering some of the best October lease deals, too.
Other car companies have begun to follow suit. BMW will simply offer a $7,500 discount on its electric models for those who take delivery by the end of October. Stellantis, the parent company of Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, and others, will do the same for electric sales through the end of the year. No word yet on what happens after these deals expire.
Incentives like the federal tax credit for EVs aren’t meant to last forever, of course. In theory, their purpose is to lift up a new technology until it can compete at scale with the tech that has been around forever.
Whether electric cars have reached that point is a contentious question. Ford has only just announced a roadmap to overhaul its entire EV production system in order to stop losing billions on electric vehicles. Hyundai’s EVs are profitable — or, at least they were before the Trump administration began monkeying with tax incentives and tariffs. A batch of more affordable EVs are on the way, though the ever-changing map of tariffs makes it unclear exactly how much they’ll cost when they finally arrive.
The short-term picture may well be that electric cars continue to be a loss leader for some automakers still trying to find their footing in the space. Whether their shareholders will tolerate this long enough for the margins to become sustainable — well, that’s the real question.
Current conditions: In the Atlantic, the tropical storm that could, as it develops, take the name Jerry is making its way westward toward the U.S. • In the Pacific, Hurricane Priscilla strengthened into a Category 2 storm en route to Arizona and the Southwest • China broke an October temperature record with thermometers surging near 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the southeastern province of Fujian.
The Department of Energy appears poised to revoke awards to two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported Tuesday. She got her hands on an internal agency project list that designated nearly $24 billion worth of grants as “terminated,” including Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub and Louisiana's Project Cypress, a joint venture between the DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks. An Energy Department spokesperson told Emily that he was “unable to verify” the list of canceled grants and said that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,”referring to the canceled grants the department announced last week. Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.” Heirloom’s head of policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said the company wasn’t aware of any decision the Energy Department had yet made.
While the list floated last week showed the Trump administration’s plans to cancel the two regional hydrogen hubs on the West Coast, the new list indicated that the Energy Department planned to rescind grants for all seven hubs, Emily reported. “If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told her. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses.”
Remember the Tesla announcement I teased in yesterday’s newsletter? The predictions proved half right: The electric automaker did, indeed, release a cheaper version of its midsize SUV, the Model Y, with a starting price just $10 shy of $40,000. Rather than a new Roadster or potential vacuum cleaner, as the cryptic videos the company posted on CEO Elon Musk’s social media site hinted, the second announcement was a cheaper version of the Model 3, already the lower-end sedan offering. Starting at $36,990, InsideEVs called it “one of the most affordable cars Tesla has ever sold, and the cheapest in 2025.” But it’s still a far cry from Musk’s erstwhile promise to roll out a Tesla for less than $30,000.
That may be part of why the company is losing market share. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, Tesla’s slice of the U.S. electric vehicle sales sank to its lowest-ever level in August despite Americans’ record scramble to use the federal tax credits before the September 30 deadline President Donald Trump’s new tax law set. General Motors, which sold more electric vehicles in the third quarter of this year than in all of 2024, offers the cheapest battery-powered passenger vehicle on the market today, the Chevrolet Equinox, which starts at $35,100.
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Trump’s pledge to revive the United States’ declining coal industry was always a gamble — even though, as Matthew reported in July, global coal demand is rising. Three separate stories published Tuesday show just how stacked the odds are against a major resurgence:
As you may recall from two consecutive newsletters last month, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said “permitting reform” was “the biggest remaining thing” in the administration’s agenda. Yet Republican leaders in Congress expressed skepticism about tacking energy policy into the next reconciliation bill. This week, however, Utah Senator Mike Lee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, called for a legislative overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act. On Monday, the pro-development social media account Yimbyland — short for Yes In My Back Yard — posted on X: “Reminder that we built the Golden Gate Bridge in 4.5 years. Today, we wouldn’t even be able to finish the environmental review in 4.5 years.” In response, Lee said: “It’s time for NEPA reform. And permitting reform more broadly.”
Last month, a bipartisan permitting reform bill got a hearing in the House of Representatives. But that was before the government shutdown. And sources familiar with Democrats’ thinking have in recent months suggested to me that the administration’s gutting of so many clean energy policies has left Republicans with little to bargain with ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Soon-to-be Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi.Yuichi Yamazaki - Pool/Getty Images
On Saturday, Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party elected its former economic minister, Sanae Takaichi, as its new leader, putting her one step away from becoming the country’s first woman prime minister. Under previous administrations, Japan was already on track to restart the reactors idled after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. But Takaichi, a hardline conservative and nationalist who also vowed to re-militarize the nation, has pushed to speed up deployment of new reactors and technologies such as fusion in hopes of making the country 100% self-sufficient on energy.
“She wants energy security over climate ambition, nuclear over renewables, and national industry over global corporations,” Mika Ohbayashi, director at the pro-clean-energy Renewable Energy Institute, told Bloomberg. Shares of nuclear reactor operators surged by nearly 7% on Monday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, while renewable energy developers’ stock prices dropped by as much as 15%
Researchers at the United Arab Emirates’ University of Sharjah just outlined a new method to transform spent coffee grounds and a commonly used type of plastic used in packaging into a form of activated carbon that can be used for chemical engineering, food processing, and water and air treatments. By repurposing the waste, it avoids carbon emitting from landfills into the atmosphere and reduces the need for new sources of carbon for industrial processes. “What begins with a Starbucks coffee cup and a discarded plastic water bottle can become a powerful tool in the fight against climate change through the production of activated carbon,” Dr. Haif Aljomard, lead inventor of the newly patented technology, said in a press release.
Last week’s Energy Department grant cancellations included funding for a backup energy system at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, California
When the Department of Energy canceled more than 321 grants in an act of apparent retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown, Russ Vought, President Trump’s budget czar, declared that the money represented “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda.”
At least one of the grants zeroed out last week, however, was supposed to help keep the lights on at a children’s hospital.
The $29 million grant was intended to build a 3.3-megawatt long-duration energy storage system at Valley Children’s Hospital, a large pediatric hospital in Madera, California. The system would “power critical hospital operations during outage events,” such as when the California grid shuts down to avoid starting wildfires, according to project documents.
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s cancellation of funding for [the] long-duration energy storage demonstration grant is disappointing,” Zara Arboleda, a spokesperson for the hospital, told me.
Valley Children’s Hospital is a 358-bed hospital that says it serves more than 1.3 million children across California’s Central Valley. It has 116 neonatal intensive care unit beds and nationally ranked specialties in pediatric neurology, orthopedics, and lung surgery, among others.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has characterized the more than $7.5 billion in grants canceled last week as part of an ongoing review of financial awards made by the Biden administration. But the timing of the cancellations — and Vought’s gleeful tweets about them — suggests a more vindictive purpose. Republican lawmakers and President Trump himself threatened to unleash Vought as a kind of rogue budget cutter before the federal government shut down last week.
“We don’t control what he’s going to do,” Senator John Thune told Politico last week. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut,” Trump posted on the same day.
Up until this year, canceling funding that is already under contract with a private party would have been thought to be straightforwardly illegal under federal law. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has allowed the Trump administration to act with previously unimaginable freedom while it considers ruling on similar cases.
Faraday Microgrids, the contractor that was due to receive the funding, is already building a microgrid for the hospital. The proposed backup power system — which the grant stipulated should be “non-lithium-ion” — was supposed to be funded by the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, with the goal of finding new ways of storing electricity without using lithium-ion batteries, and was meant to work in concert with that new microgrid and snap on in times of high stress.
That microgrid project is still moving forward, Arboleda, the hospital’s spokesperson, told me. “Valley Children’s Hospital continues to build and soon will operate its microgrid announced in 2023 to ensure our facilities have access to reliable and sustainable energy every minute of every day for our patients and our care providers,” she added. That grid will contain some storage, but not the long-term storage system discussed in the official plan.
Faraday Microgrids, formerly known as Charge Bliss, didn’t respond to a request for comment, but its website touts its ability to secure grants and other government funding for energy projects.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Energy Department said that the grant was canceled because the project wasn’t feasible. “Following an in-depth review of the financial award, it was determined, among other reasons, that the viability of the project was not adequate to warrant further disbursements,” Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, told me.
The children’s hospital, at least, is in good company. On Tuesday, a Trump administration document obtained by Heatmap News suggested the Energy Department is moving to kill bipartisan-backed funding for two direct air capture hubs in Texas and Louisiana. And although California has lost the most grants of any state, the Energy Department has also sought to terminate funding for new factories and industrial facilities across Republican-governed states.
Editor’s note: This story initially misstated the number of neonatal intensive care unit beds at Valley Children’s Hospital. It has been corrected.