You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
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.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
It’s tough out there for an electric truck.
Rivian’s R1T was the showpiece that launched the company; I was blown away the moment I saw its concept version at a car show in the 2010s. But the truck’s sales are down 38% over last year as the R1S SUV becomes the brand’s signature vehicle. Ford has found some footing with the F-150 Lightning, but is lowering expectations for the vehicle as Detroit faces fierce headwinds trying to convince its legion of truck drivers to go electric — and backtracks toward plug-in hybrids. The category leader in sales, the Tesla Cybertruck, exists primarily to inspire TikTok derision, which would be easier to swallow if its sales, while rising, didn’t pale in comparison to the Model Y and 3.
There are practical reasons for sluggish truck sales — the SUV shape is more useful than a pickup truck for the kinds of people currently buying EVs. There are political reasons, of course. Even with Donald Trump’s softening his EV hatred thanks to support from Elon Musk, lots of pickup drivers remain electric-averse. There are financial reasons, since many of the electric truck offerings to date are staggeringly expensive. Above these concerns floats a broader, more all-consuming problem: Maybe it’s just not the right time to make an all-electric truck, at least not the monstrous kind America buys.
Lucid’s CEO recently remarked on this idea in response to drawings of a theoretical Lucid pickup circulating on the internet. Despite America’s insatiable appetite for pickups, the company is absolutely not making a truck right now, he said.
His rationale boils down to the conundrum for today’s EVs: Vehicles of all stripes have been getting bigger as American drivers choose crossovers, SUVs, and trucks. Since those are the shapes Americans want, and want to pay extra for, those are the kinds of EVs carmakers want to sell. But a larger EV is a less efficient one. It takes lots of energy to move a heavy vehicle, which means they need huge batteries just to achieve a normal driving range.
As I noted earlier this month, Lucid has been counterculturally hyper-focused on making efficient vehicles that can maximize range. Its Air sedans achieve an industry-leading 4 miles per kilowatt-hour of electricity, which lets the cars claim more than 400 miles per charge despite having a battery of average size. The excellent but heavyweight R1T is only about half as efficient. You can buy one with 420 miles of range, but doing so requires an enormous and expensive battery pack.
Weight alone is not the only issue. Pickup owners — even those who never stray from the smooth pavement of the suburbs — want their vehicles to be able to tow a boat or tackle the Rubicon trail. Towing with an EV dings the driving range that’s already low because of the vehicle’s heft. Knowing that, Lucid CTO and CEO Peter Rawlinson estimated the minimum battery size threshold for a workable electric pickup at 150 kilowatt-hours — nearly double the size of the 84-kilowatt hour battery that powers the simplest Lucid Air, and well past the 118-kilowatt hour pack in the long range Grand Touring edition. Given the cost of today’s batteries and their physical limitations, it’s simply difficult to make the math work for the kind of megavehicle that full-size pickups have become.
Downsizing the truck would help, of course. It’d be much easier, and cheaper, to fully electrify something the size and weight of the Chevy S-10. However, the chorus of car enthusiasts and compact truck fans calling for the pickup to return to its reasonably sized roots has been drowned out by all the money Detroit is making on monster trucks. Don’t pin your hopes there.
But just because the full-size EV pickup is in a tough spot now doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way. The battery calculus will change as technologies improve and economies of scale emerge. At some point, it might be possible to squeeze 150 or 200 kilowatt-hours of juice into a not-gargantuan battery pack, and to build it for less than a small fortune, at which point the fully electric F-150 or Silverado becomes a far more attractive proposition.
The more immediate solution, though, is the ongoing rise of the hybrid. Trucks make terrific hybrids. The hybrid version of the current Ford F-150 has plenty of power and driving range for serious work or play, and also gets 25 miles per gallon in the city compared to 18-20 mpg for combustion-only trucks. If that doesn’t sound like a lot, remember that when it comes to cutting fossil fuels consumption and emissions, improving gas-guzzlers by a little can be more powerful than improving already-efficient cars by a lot. (With mpg, it’s better to go from bad to decent than from good to great. It’s a bad statistic.)
Crucially for the potential to cut the carbon emissions of America’s truck fleet, conventional hybrids are less weighed down by a feeling of foreignness and political baggage. There was a time when vehicles like the Prius were the peak of conspicuous car consumption for lefty greens. Now a slew of vehicles, including trucks, come in hybrid configurations (and some cars, like the Toyota Camry, have ditched combustion-only models altogether). A hybrid is just a car, one you can pump gas into and drive without thinking too much about the partisan implications of its powertrain.
The idea of plug-in hybrid full-size trucks is alluring, too. Owners could live out the fantasy of driving a weekend warrior 4x4 — and enjoy the in-group signaling that comes with pickup ownership — all while using electricity for the local driving that makes up most of their actual transportation needs. Perhaps someday we could even get Heatmap’s dream vehicle, a plug-in hybrid version of the reasonably sized Ford Maverick.
Trucks are good candidates for unusual hybrid configurations, too. This week, some American reviewers tested, and loved, the BYD Shark, a Chinese-made pickup on sale in Mexico but not here. The Shark’s hybrid setup is a range extender, meaning that although the gas engine can drive the front wheels in some situations, it exists primarily to charge a generator that powers electric motors, and those motors push the vehicle. Its battery pack can hold enough energy for an estimated 60 miles of electric driving.
The Shark won’t swim to America, given the ongoing tariffs battle. But it doesn’t have to. For 2025, Ram has promised us the Ramcharger extended-range pickup that puts this tech into a truck Americans can buy. Heatmap’s Jesse Jenkins called it an “ideal near-term product to satisfy some of the trickiest American market segments to electrify: namely the uniquely American demand for full-size pickups and massive SUVs.”
Indeed, if truck shoppers give this new kind of electrified vehicle a chance, they’re going to like what they find.
How Equatic solved seawater’s toxic gas problem and delivered a two-for-one solution: removing carbon while producing green hydrogen
Since at least the 1970s, electrochemists have cast their gazes upon the world’s vast, briny seas and wondered how they could harness the endless supply of hydrogen locked within. Though it was technically possible to grab the hydrogen by running an electrical current through the water, the reaction turned the salt in the water into the toxic and corrosive gas chlorine, which made commercializing such a process challenging.
But last year, a startup called Equatic made a breakthrough that not only solves the chlorine problem, but has the potential to deliver a two-for-one solution: commercial hydrogen production and carbon removal. With funding from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, the company moved swiftly to scale its innovation, called an “oxygen-selective anode,” from the lab to the factory. On Thursday, it announced it had started manufacturing the anodes at a facility in San Diego.
“I want to emphasize how fast this has moved,” Doug Wicks, a program director at ARPA-E, told me. “They made some pretty large claims about what they could do, so we took it as a high risk project, and really within the first year, they were able to clearly demonstrate that they could make great progress.”
In 2021, Equatic’s co-founders Xin Chen and Gaurav Sant, who are researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, applied for an ARPA-E grant to work on their idea for a hybrid system that would use seawater electrolysis — sending an electrical current through seawater — to sequester carbon dioxide from the air in the ocean while also producing hydrogen.
Setting aside the chlorine issue for a moment, the process of getting hydrogen out of water is pretty established science. The carbon removal part was new. To achieve it, they would exploit another aspect of the electrolytic reaction: It could separate the seawater into two streams — one very acidic, the other very alkaline and able to easily absorb CO2. If they exposed the alkaline stream to air, it would suck up CO2 like a sponge and convert it into a more stable molecule that couldn’t easily return to the atmosphere. Then they could feed the water back into the sea, enhancing the ocean’s natural carbon pump.
This approach to carbon removal has two big things going for it. First, by driving this reaction through a closed system on land, Equatic can measure the carbon sequestered much more precisely than related methods that are deployed in the open ocean. “You can count what comes in, you can count what goes out, you just have greater control,” David Koweek, the chief scientist at Ocean Visions, a nonprofit that advocates for ocean-based climate solutions, told me. But with that control comes a trade-off, Koweek said. It requires more infrastructure, energy, and operational complexity than something like adding antacids directly to the water. That’s where Equatic’s second advantage could help. Its process produces clean hydrogen, a valuable commodity, which can help defray the cost of the carbon removal.
“We're not just a one way street, only energy in — you actually get some energy out,” Edward Sanders, the company’s chief operating officer, told me. He provided some numbers: For every 2.5 megawatt-hours of electricity Equatic’s system consumes, it can remove 1 metric ton of carbon from the air and produce 1 megawatt-hour worth of energy in the form of hydrogen. The company can either use the hydrogen to help power its operations or sell it. Therefore, the net energy use is more like 1.5 megawatts, he said, which is lower than what a direct air capture plant, for example, requires. (A direct air capture plant using a solid sorbent needs about 2.6 megawatts per ton of CO2 removed, according to the International Energy Agency.) Energy accounts for about 70% of costs, Sanders said.
Equatic was able to prove its concept out in two small pilot projects deployed in the Los Angeles harbor and in Singapore that each removed about 100 kilograms of carbon from the air, and produced just a few kilograms of hydrogen, per day. But because of the chlorine issue, the two plants were expensive, using bespoke, corrosion-resistant materials. Sanders told me it would cost on the order of millions of dollars to manage the chlorine gas at scale. The company would need to find a more economic solution.
The formation of chlorine in seawater electrolysis is a problem that has stumped scientists for so long that it has split the electrochemists into two camps — those who still believe it’s solvable, and those who think it makes more sense to just purify the water first.
When I asked Chen what the day-to-day work of trying to overcome this looked like, he said it was materials science research. He needed to find the right combination of catalysts to make an anode — a sheet of conductive, positively-charged metal — that, when used in electrolysis, would screen out the salt and not allow it to react. “It’s like Gandalf holding the way to tell chlorine, ‘you shall not pass.’” he said. “That’s essentially how it works. Only water molecules can pass through.”
Chen and Sant were awarded $1 million from ARPA-E for the research in 2022. About a year later, they felt they were on to something. As with most scientific “breakthroughs,” there was no single moment of discovery — Chen was not even the first to do what he did, which was to use manganese oxide. “There’s a lot of literature that indicates it’s doable,” he told me. “There’s pioneering work by other scientists from almost 30 years ago, but they didn’t pursue it far enough because I don’t think the opportunity was right at that time.”
What Chen did was push to find an iteration that was more effective, durable, and affordable. He ultimately landed on a design that produced less than one part per million of chlorine — lower than the amount in drinking water — and performed reliably for more than 20,000 hours of testing. When he showed his progress to Wicks at ARPA-E, the agency was impressed enough to grant the scientists an additional $2 million. That funding helped them get their first production line up and running.
The facility in San Diego will be able to produce 4,000 anodes per year to start, and is expected to operate at full capacity by the end of 2024. It will produce the anodes for Equatic’s first demonstration-scale project, a new plant in Singapore designed to remove 10 metric tons of CO2 and produce 300 kilograms of hydrogen per day — 100 times larger than the pilot version. Equatic also has plans to build an even bigger plant in Quebec that can remove 300 tons per day. That’s about three times the capacity of Climeworks’ Mammoth plant, the world’s largest direct air capture plant operating today.
The manufacturing line will also be able to refurbish the anodes after about three years of use, simply by applying a new layer of catalysts. Wicks of ARPA-E told me this was a “breakthrough coating technique” that will allow the company to really decrease costs.
When I asked Wicks what he sees as the next milestones for Equatic, what will determine whether it will be successful, he said a lot was riding on the scale up in Singapore and Canada. The company has already signed an agreement to deliver 2,100 metric tons of hydrogen to Boeing and remove 62,000 metric tons of CO2 from the air on the aerospace giant’s behalf. The companies have not made the price of the deal public.
One challenge ahead will also be navigating the permitting environment in the different countries. Koweek of Ocean Visions told me that this kind of seawater chemistry modification was “relatively benign,” but he said there were still risks that had to be characterized.
In the meantime, Chen isn’t done trying to optimize his anode in the lab. I asked him how he felt after his initial discovery — were you excited? Did you celebrate?
“Not really,” he replied. “So I’m very excited inside. But I was generally thinking about it, can we push it further?”
Current conditions: Shanghai, still recovering from the strongest storm to hit the city in 75 years, is bracing for Typhoon Pulasan • Extreme flooding in the north of Italy has forced some 1,000 people to evacuate • It’s looking unlikely that this month will break last year’s record for warmest September ever.
The explosive growth in solar power shows no signs of stopping this year. New analysis from energy think tank Ember forecasts the world is on track to add 593 gigawatts of solar power in 2024, nearly 30% more than last year’s installations and nearly 200 GW more than the International Energy Agency predicted at the start of the year. The report underscores how a handful of countries are responsible for most of the world’s new solar capacity. China leads, followed by the U.S., India, Germany, and Brazil. These five countries are on track to account for 75% of new global installations in 2024. And they are sustaining their growth year after year.
Ember
Here’s the most important takeaway from the Ember report: “This now puts ambitious climate pledges within reach.” It’s very possible – and indeed likely – that the world will triple solar capacity by 2030. In this scenario, solar power would generate a quarter of the world’s electricity. “Countries need to plan ahead to make the most of the high levels of solar capacity being built today and ensure the continued build-out of capacity in the coming years,” the report says.
The Federal Reserve announced yesterday that it would reduce the benchmark federal funds rate by half a percentage point, from just over 5% to just below. What does this mean for renewable energy? Well, it just became a much more enticing investment, wrote Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin. High interest rates have an outsize effect on renewable energy projects, because the cost of building and operating a renewable energy generator like a wind farm is highly concentrated in its construction. Wood Mackenzie estimates that a 2% increase in interest rates pushes up the cost of energy produced by a renewables project by around 20%, compared to just over 10% for conventional power plants. “As rates fall, projects become increasingly financially viable,” said Advait Arun, senior associate of energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise and Heatmap contributor.
The European Union’s head office has warned that the extreme weather devastating parts of the continent are proof that “climate breakdown” is “fast becoming the norm,” The Associated Pressreported. Parts of Europe are experiencing some of the worst flooding in at least two decades, while Portugal has declared a “state of calamity” as enormous wildfires rage out of control and threaten the homes of more than 200,000 people. “We face a Europe that is simultaneously flooding and burning. These extreme weather events ... are now an almost annual occurrence,” said EU Crisis Management Commissioner Janez Lenarcic. “The global reality of the climate breakdown has moved into the everyday lives of Europeans.” Europe is the fastest warming continent on Earth.
Today the startup Brightband emerged from stealth with $10 million in Series A funding and a unique plan to commercialize generative AI weather modeling. Instead of trying to go up against Weather.com, Brightband is tailoring models to specific industries such as insurance, finance, agriculture, energy, and transportation. The round was led by Prelude Ventures. AI models like Brightband’s are trained on decades worth of past weather data, and when fed a snapshot of current conditions, can predict what will come next, much like ChatGPT does with text. Brightband’s CEO Julian Green told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham that customizing forecasts for particular industries will also be as simple as querying a large language model. A wind farm operator could, for example, “just take an attached file of historical wind energy production, and throw it in there and say, hey, tell me what the wind energy is going to be like next week.” Brightband says it hopes to publish a paper by year’s end with an open-source version of its forecast model, alongside evaluation tools to assess its performance.
Truck drivers seem to really like Tesla’s Semi electric truck. PepsiCo is Tesla’s first customer for the trucks, and has 89 of them deployed across various fleets. Speaking at the IAA Transportation event, PepsiCo’s electrification program manager Dejan Antunović said some veteran drivers are reporting that they never want to go back to driving diesel after having handled the Tesla Semi. “Based on its history of delivering efficient electric vehicles in volume profitably, I think Tesla is the one to make commercial electric trucks happen at scale,” wroteElectrek’s Fred Lambert.
Researchers were pleasantly surprised to discover that 90% of young corals that were bred using in vitro fertilization and deposited in reefs across the Caribbean survived last year’s marine heatwave.