The primary reasons for China's EV market dominance are myriad and well-trod. China put serious government money behind EVs. It cut red tape, incentivized buyers, and provided cheap property. Homegrown companies with minimal or no experience building ICE vehicles saw the transition as an opportunity, not a chore, as many Western companies clearly perceive it. Yet one factor is as under-covered as it is important.

A far larger proportion of Chinese EV buyers are first-time car buyers. Many more had owned only one or two cars before. That's key for one main reason: In China, EVs were free from much of the baggage still weighing them down here. 

Ford's CEO recently called the economics of large SUV EVs "unresolvable." I agree, which is why EREVs and hybrids will stick around in those segments for a long time.

The average new-car buyer in the U.S., meanwhile, was around 51 years old in 2022, per Cox Automotive. Even the average used-car buyer was 49, and both groups had higher-than-average income. These are relatively wealthy people who grew up in a country dominated by cars. They were raised in internal-combustion cars. They were raised when air travel was far less affordable and popular, too, which means almost every one of them has a memory of a family road trip in a gas car. They've purchased gas cars for most of their adult lives, and relied on them for a vast majority of their travel.

Now, they are being told that EVs are here to replace them. But for the big, heavy vehicles most buyers are accustomed to, road-trip capability requires a huge upfront price premium, a suite of planning and charging apps and a longer, more arduous driving experience. They're being told to buy a product sold by the company that has long sold them gas cars, in the shape of the car they know, for more money and with, on average, worse reliability.

So of course they're pissed off.

I know I am. In seeking to replace a $2,500 Chevy Tahoe for camping duty, I leased a Chevy Blazer EV. I love driving it around town, but its eco tires limit its off-pavement capability. Its seats don't fold all the way flat, so I can't sleep in it when I camp, as I do in the Tahoe. When I took it on a 1,000-mile round trip to Utah, I lost hours of time charging.

I had to bail on the chance to see an awesome overlook in Bryce Canyon because of range anxiety, and because I had only one of the two necessary Tesla charger adapters. The one I did have allowed me to use Superchargers, but that required parking across two stalls, which made me look like a jerk. The real kicker: With prices ranging from $0.53 to $0.65 per kWh at many stations, I didn't save any money over doing the trip in a gas crossover.

The experience sucks.

I have not found a 1:1 EV replacement for this, because frankly the idea of a 27-year-old with no kids driving an SUV big enough to sleep in is absurd. It doesn't need an EV analog.

So if you're approaching this from a gas-car paradigm, I get it, I really do. You think about road trips. You think about driving into the backwoods. You think about summer trips to Hilton Head from Cleveland, 14 hours away. You think about screaming kids at rest stops, and all the hassle of learning a new way to do something your gas car solved decades ago.

But an EV isn't a gas car. It's entirely different. That means it comes with a fundamentally different trade-off, which is well-covered: The current versions are either too expensive or bad at road trips.  

I like my Blazer EV, but I would never have paid the $52,000 sticker price. I got it for $273 a month with $2,000 due at signing, with the dealer and GM taking a loss. That's a sign that these big, expensive EVs aren't really winning customers on merit.

Those two problems are linked. Because when you release EVs from the expectation of road trips, everything else fades away.

Take the Blazer. What I've described in vivid detail covers three total days in about eight months of ownership. They spanned the edge of my edge case. A 1,000-mile trip to rural America. That's the dream of the American road trip many of us share. Yet it's nothing near the primary utility of our car. I've lived in California for about three years now, and it's only the second time I've ever gone more than 500 miles on a trip. My far more frequent trips to Joshua Tree National Park and Anza Borrego Desert State Park are well within the Blazer's easy reach. Even these, though, are outliers. 

Despite all of the ads showing mountain trails, despite the marketing onslaught for towing, or performance, or "finding new roads" or conquering the Great West, that's maybe one-tenth of every mile your car drives. In reality, it takes you to work. Or school. To visit friends. The city next door. It shuttles you from one place to another, with no real heroic adventure involved. 

Listen, it would be sick if this is what day-to-day life was like. But in seeking to solve the absolute edge case—people who go off-roading in large luxury SUVs—the Hummer EV got more expensive, more absurd and way heavier. Maybe we can leave rock-crawling to hybrids and EREVs.

For all of those cases, an EV is a far better solution. Yet our focus on the alternative case—road trips—has dampened that advantage. EVs require almost no regular maintenance, with sealed motors and far simpler drivetrains. Yet when you force an EV to fit into the road-trip paradigm, it must be heavy, which means you spend more on tires. EV simplicity means they should be cheaper to produce, too. Except, you guessed it, that giant-ass battery makes it $15,000 more expensive than the gas version.  

I know, I know. You need to take that road trip. Though it happens once a year, it is vital, for whatever reason. Trust me, I am not coming for you. I'm making the opposite point: Let gasoline handle these duties for the time being. Offer extended-range EVs, and hybrids and even full gas powertrains to those who frequently travel long distances. Gas trucks are incredible machines, and it'll take a while before any EV can fully replace the Ford F-150 for the same price. Leave road trips to the fossil-burners. Lord knows they can handle it. 

The Lightning is a great truck, but it's a tough sell against a gas F-150 that's far cheaper and can tow anything, anywhere.

That'll free up EV designers to focus on the actual advantages of this transition. Automakers are already choosing to make range-extended EVs with small batteries and gas powertrains for further endurance. As an alternative, they'll offer a more expensive pure-EV play, with hundreds of miles of EV range. 

Flip that script. Offer the same, small battery pack on both options. Give the EV a 150-mile range and make road-trip capability the upsell. Hell, offer range-extender rentals, or the ability to rent more battery modules. Dealership service centers will surely be looking for new ways to stay busy as EVs quickly eclipse ICE reliability.

Offer us low-range EVs that are actually exciting, too. Buyers may have scorned the Nissan Leaf and Mini Cooper SE, but did planners ever consider that Americans won't buy hatchbacks regardless of propulsion? Offer a city SUV, with enough space and range to take your mountain bike to the woods, but a $30,000 asking price before credits. If Chevy can offer a 319-mile Equinox EV for $35,000, even greater savings seem possible. 

The Chevy Bolt could handle anyone's commute and even handle medium-length road trips. If someone can manage to build one with more sex appeal than a laser printer, that could be the electric people's car we need.

Make a luxury version, too. I'd be happy to keep my beat-up gas truck forever if my daily driver was a leather-wrapped electric pod with the best speakers and seats I've ever had. With small motors and a small battery, the simplicity of the design means luxury trimmings should be more accessible than ever. Make an electric Ford Ranger, too, and tell anyone who wants road-trip range to get the hybrid. The EV is the cheaper, simpler, smoother option, not a 1:1 replacement for a product that's already nearly perfected.

EVs are already taking off in the commercial van sector, because buyers in that segment focus on what they actually do day-to-day, rather than on the once-a-year trip they may eventually take.

This is an opportunity for reinvention. But it requires us to ditch the binary of EVs being better or worse than gas vehicles. It requires us to stop approaching these as cars with batteries, and instead as a new transportation option. It will not replace gasoline in every possible scenario, at least not yet. But for the lives we actually live, for 90% of the miles we actually drive, this is the ideal solution.  

EVs aren't gas cars. That's a good thing.

Contact the author: Mack.Hogan@insideevs.com. 

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If you’re in the market for a new or used Hyundai Ioniq 5, the most popular of the E-GMP-based EVs, there’s a high chance that you ran into the following acronym: ICCU. And those four letters may evoke dread.

The acronym stands for Integrated Charging Control Unit: a nifty piece of hardware that bundles all the charging controllers, current converters and power export bits into a single unit. 

It’s a powerful piece of equipment, but it can fail—specifically the part that charges the 12V battery. That alone isn’t a huge issue. The low-voltage battery can go bad in any car, including combustion cars, if the alternator doesn’t do its job properly. In the case of the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and other E-GMP-based EVs, the driver is made aware of things going south by a “Power Limited” warning that appears on the digital instrument cluster. Then, the car gradually loses power until it can no longer move, making it a tow-truck kind of situation.

While failures seem to be relatively rare as Hyundai, Kia and Genesis’ E-GMP sales have taken off, these high-profile incidents that have left often-new EVs “bricked” have caused extreme trepidation among owners. And while there have been recalls to fix the issue, some drivers have reported still experiencing ICCU failures after the repairs were done, too. 

According to the chronology report published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), drivers should be able to drive the vehicle for up to 45 minutes after the warning pops on the display. But here’s where things get complicated.

Hyundai has issued two recalls to fix the issue in the United States, with the most recent one in November. According to the NHTSA documents, a total of 145,351 EVs in the U.S. are part of the recall, including the 2023-2025 Genesis G80, 2022-2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5, 2023-2025 Genesis GV70, 2023-2025 Genesis GV60 and 2023-2025 Hyundai Ioniq 6. Additionally, there are 62,872 Kia EV6 vehicles from 2022-2024 included. Similar recalls have been issued in other parts of the world, too.

The ICCU is tasked with a lot. It handles DC fast charging and AC charging and it makes sure the 12-volt battery is up to spec. It’s also responsible for the vehicle-to-load feature, allowing owners to export power from the high-voltage battery to tools, or appliances or even their homes via an adapter that plugs into the charge port.

As per the recall report, the ICCU failure has two causes—overvoltage induced at the start and end of the 12V battery charging cycle and from thermal loading during charging and/or driving. When it fails, it’s because a transistor inside the ICCU goes kaput and pops the fuse that feeds energy into the 12V battery.

To fix the issue, a service bulletin states technicians will first scan the vehicle to check if the diagnostic trouble code (DTC) P1A9096 is stored in the car’s brain. If it’s not there, they’ll move on to updating the ICCU’s software and call it a day. If the code is stored, then the ICCU and the fuse—even if it has not blown—will be replaced, and the low-conductivity coolant will be flushed. The ICCU software will also be updated.

As spotted by MotorTrend, the software update changes the way the ICCU makes use of the high-voltage battery to charge the 12V battery, and, more importantly, it forces the low-voltage DC-to-DC converter to do a “soft start” when charging the low-voltage battery. This, according to Hyundai, reduces the overvoltage that’s mentioned as one of the causes of the failures. Furthermore, the new software changes the way the fans and water pumps operate to make sure temperatures don’t get too toasty inside the ICCU.

Statistically, just 1% of the roughly 200,000 vehicles involved in the recall can have their ICCUs fail, which is 2,000 cars. Out of all the cars that are part of the latest recall for the failing ICCU, 41,137 Hyundai and Genesis EVs have already been fixed by Jan. 22, while another 14,828 Kia EV6s have had the remedy applied. Motor Trend concurred in a recent look at the issue: “It’s a big deal, but not one that individual E-GMP owners are statistically likely to face.”

The Hyundai Ioniq 5 is just one of the EVs affected by the ICCU recall.

This doesn’t mean that all these cars have had their ICCUs replaced, though. As we mentioned earlier, if there’s no trouble code, then just a software update is needed.

However, if you ask owners who have had their cars die on the highway, things are not exactly rosy. Some drivers claim that they had the ICCU fail on their EV before having the recall work done. Then, after fixing the car and updating the software, a second failure occurred.

“Second ICCU failure, first one [was] replaced seven months ago,” said Reddit user beyondthetech. “Luckily I wasn't vacationing down at the Jersey Shore last time it happened. Nevertheless, knowing they're just replacing them with the same built, unimproved ICCUs meant that it could fail again just as easily, and seven months later, it did.”

Another member of the Ioniq5 subreddit had this to say about their experience: “I am taking my car into the dealership tomorrow, but it looks like I have a SECOND ICCU failure on my hands with my 2022 HI5. First one was June 2024 while 600 miles away from home. So less than a year ago. Absolute nightmare of an experience.”

For some owners, getting their cars fixed took weeks or even months.

More Stuff Like This

“I’m beyond fed up with Hyundai,” said Danki13. “My late 2021 IONIQ 5 has been in the shop more than it’s been on the road, and the latest fiasco has pushed me over the edge. I’ve been waiting FIVE MONTHS for them to replace the ICCU (Integrated Charging Control Unit). Five. Months.”

We got in touch with Hyundai to try and find out what owners can do to mitigate the chance of the ICCU failing on their vehicles, regardless of whether the recall was already done. A Hyundai Motor America representative said: “The best course of action is to have the remedy performed.” 

That’s a hard pill to swallow for people who have gone through Hyundai’s service department twice for the same problem, leading owners to question the quality of the fix and whether the 1% failure rate is even accurate.  

We asked Hyundai if there are statistics available regarding the actual number of EVs that had their ICCU fail after getting the recall, but we received no response. So the best information at hand is what has already been published by the NHTSA, which states the vast majority of affected vehicles will be fine.

Subjectively, people who have had bad experiences with cars tend to voice their woes loudly, whereas happy owners don’t go to the trouble of writing about their experience. “With the two recalls to address the ICCU and then the subsequent failure, I don’t have faith in the vehicle or faith Hyundai has a grasp of the situation,” one self-labeled “ICCU victim” said in a Reddit thread.

Have you had issues with this component on your Hyundai, Kia or Genesis EV? Get in touch: tips@insideevs.com.

Tesla's sales in Europe are tumbling like a kid at gymnastics camp. In February they were down 42% in Sweden, 48% in Norway and—wait for it—76% in Germany. This is not great news for the global EV transition or for Tesla, folks. 

Why the slump? It's complicated, but we can't rule out Elon Musk's meddling in politics as one huge factor. (There are parts of Europe where certain gestures don't go over too well, to put it gently.) Plus, Tesla's rather skimpy lineup is facing stiffer competition there than ever before, especially from the bargain-basement Chinese EVs we don't get here in the States due to massive tariffs. 

A generous read of the situation is that a lot of buyers are delaying their purchases until the refreshed Model Y hits Tesla stores. I think that could be a valid theory; the Model Y is still one of the most important new cars on sale, period, and some people are certainly waiting for it. But Model 3 sales have also taken a dive in Europe this year, suggesting deeper issues are at play. 

We cover all that and more on this week's episode of The Plugged-In Podcast. Patrick's on the road this week, so we fed all of his blogs into a large-language model and created a proprietary AI agent to co-host the show with me. That got super creepy, and also AI Patrick tried to fire everybody. So we asked my colleague Kevin Williams to fill in instead. 

On the show, Kevin and I get into a lot besides Tesla. We talk about Waymo's recent expansion into Austin on the Uber platform, and how it's running circles around Tesla's autonomy efforts. Plus, we discuss why you shouldn't sleep on Level 1 EV charging, and why the Mitsubishi i-MiEV is one of Kevin's favorite cars despite once being rated a 2/10 by Car & Driver. 

Our podcast is available on the InsideEVs YouTube channel and all major audio platforms: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and iHeart Radio. New episodes drop every Friday.

If you haven't already, please go subscribe and leave us a review. Hope you enjoy!

Got a topic or guest you'd like to see featured on the show? Contact the author: Tim.Levin@InsideEVs.com

Catch Up On Past Episodes

Detroit is the heart of American automaking, and the great state of Michigan is seeing almost $9 billion in private investments and 14,000 jobs to craft the new era of electrified vehicles. Yet last fall, Michigan's Elissa Slotkin—a Democrat and a supporter of Joe Biden and later Kamala Harris—had to run ads with an "I don't know about this whole EV thing" vibe in her run for the U.S. Senate.

Ultimately, for Slotkin, that approach worked. Or at least, it didn't hurt her successful election bid. But anyone who watches the car industry or is just a fan of EVs must be wondering how the hell we all got here. How did EVs become so politicized over the years, and as the entire global auto industry trends toward electrification, what can be done about it? 

That's one of the big topics of today's Plugged-In Podcast. In this episode, co-host Tim Levin and I interview Mike Murphy. He's a longtime GOP strategist who's worked with the likes of Mitt Romney and John McCain (he was actually the latter senator's lead strategist on his 2000 presidential run) and, believe it or not, a big EV guy. That's why he runs the EV Politics Project and the American EV Jobs Alliance, two related groups trying to de-politicize EVs across America.

Besides just liking the electric experience better than gas cars these days, Murphy, himself a Detroit native, is clear about what's at stake here. "It will not be the end of the world if we're all driving Chinese EVs that cost $27,000, but it will break my heart," he told us.

Yet in polling, his group has found that years of climate change-focused messaging has turned off many voters to EVs, and that angles like jobs and competing with China haven't broken through yet. He's working to try and fix that. 

In a wide-ranging chat, we talk about what turns many GOP voters off EVs (including the drawbacks that are justified, like costs and lack of a charging network); what role Elon Musk and President Donald Trump will play in the next few years of the EV transition; and what can be done to bring folks around.

Plus, we chat about some big extended-range electric vehicle (EREV) news from Scout and Ram, and the latest on solid-state battery prototypes from Mercedes-Benz. 

Our podcast is available on the InsideEVs YouTube channel later today and all major audio platforms: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio and Audioboom. New episodes drop every Friday.

If you haven't already, please go subscribe and leave us a review. Enjoy.

Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com

Previously On The Pod

“I don’t know,” I said to a friend.

My friend has a gas-powered car and they’re interested in making a switch to an electric vehicle. They know I write about EVs, and they had questions. I’d call them “Ohio comfortable,” making a wage above the median in this state with enough to have a house and a car or two, but chump change in any given top-five U.S. metropolitan area. 

Like many Americans, they had been watching in horror as the Trump Administration—either with or without Elon Musk’s help—slashed away so many key programs meant to support a fair chunk of American life. Within weeks of Trump taking office, century-long relationships of trust between us and our allies have crumbled. Economically and politically, the future feels very uncertain right now.

“Should I get something now, or should I wait until more models are on the market?” they asked, unsure if any forthcoming tariffs or incentives or tax credit programs would still be around by the time they figured out exactly what they wanted. 

They were stuck between a rock and a hard place. I know that the tax credit incentives are a real make-or-break factor for people like them, and me, and just about anybody else without big luxury money to burn. EVs are still expensive, and the tax credit (whether new or used) made electric motoring accessible to them. Right now, that’s still in play. 

But the whole program may soon be gutted, likely right in the middle of implementation, and probably with no way for dealers or buyers alike to get the monies they once thought owed. To these Ohio-comfortable people, that $4,000 to $7,500 represents months of income and that’s not something to just dismiss.

It’s especially true when vehicle selection is generally limited to higher-end crossover and truck options, with the addition of affordable EVs seemingly becoming more distant by the day. 

“Do you think there will be more models coming soon?” they asked. I didn’t have a good answer for them. Of course, I know that more EVs will be introduced in our market soon, but tariffs, cancellations, rising inflation, and an increase in anti-China sentiment mean that things do not look all that good for the U.S. auto industry, including EVs. And I’m not the only one who feels this way.

“I think everyone kind of just expected the U.S. to be this fallback,” said Tyson Jominy, Vice President of Data and Analytics at J.D Power. “Okay, fine, China's gone to [hell] and all the EV investments have gone to [hell], but at least we could fall back on selling SUVs in the U.S., right?” 

Jominy is referring to the fact that sales of non-Chinese brands have cratered in China, an endless headache for General Motors or the Volkswagen Group. So there was always an assumption that the U.S., the world’s second-biggest car market, could still be a fallback for consistent sales, especially higher-margin trucks, luxury cars, and SUVs. Volkswagen has even said that’s why it’s doing the Scout Motors brand here and bringing over Cupra from Europe.

But now, Jominy said, things are so inconsistent—every other day we’re staring down tariffs on vehicles and parts made by our allies. Whether it be the new 25% tariff on steel and aluminum from Canada, or the proposed tariffs on all goods from Canada, Mexico and now possibly Japan and all of the European Union, these heavy-handed tariffs would touch nearly every single part of the vehicle manufacturing process. 

Here’s the thing. These tariffs aren’t on new agreements. They’re hitting ones that every manufacturer would have rightfully called longstanding and reliable without a second thought. Before USMCA, we had NAFTA, which ignited Mexico’s car manufacturing scene 31 years ago. Canada has been a key supporter of the American auto industry for 100 years. These longstanding, reliable agreements improved the economies of all three places and gave us reasonably affordable cars. And it could all be dashed to pieces, on the belief that tariffs will either replace income tax revenue or instantly drive more car manufacturing stateside. 

Never mind the fact that setting up a car factory takes years and billions of dollars. Or the fact that the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act was actually driving car manufacturing here anyway. All of that could go away if the incentives do. And then EV batteries will never get cheaper, and cleaner, more high-tech cars that don’t use gas will always be out of reach. 

The Canadian counterparts to Honda’s EV hub or any Canadian EV production expansion are now in limbo. Add in the threat to EV tax credits, and it’s clear why so many brands are hanging in limbo. Honda certainly was when I asked about their plans to head off tariffs while visiting their Ohio EV hub in late January. GM finally got the secret sauce right on its EVs, but now the Mexican-made Blazer EV, Cadillac Optiq and Equinox EV are facing huge tariffs. That would seriously hurt one of the key things we need: affordable EVs.

Jominy explained that these tariffs put brands and buyers alike between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, J.D. Power estimated that if tariffs are implemented like the Trump administration says (the plan calls for 10% tariffs on Mexico and Canada, 25% everywhere else) the gross price increase on average for Americans would be around 2.5%. That doesn’t sound so bad, but the devil is in the details. The tariffs would hit harder on more affordable cars, further pushing buyers out and reducing demand, hurting every automaker’s bottom line.

Don’t think this is just for EVs; it hits everything. The Ford Maverick? It’s made in Hermosillo, Mexico. The Chevrolet Trax? Korean made. Ford Mustang Mach-E? That’s also Mexico. The Kia EV3 that Patrick George raved about? It’s made in Korea right now, and Kia clearly wants to take it elsewhere but doesn’t have a damn clue where, thanks to everything right now. If you thought you’d get a Chinese-made something or other, just go ahead and put that out of your mind right now. That 100% tariff likely won’t go away any time soon.

Jominy was clear about what would happen if the tariffs went through: Cars will get more expensive. “If the original proposed 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico go through, that would have added about 8% [increased costs],” he said. 

Now, the automaker is forced to do one of two things—eat those increased costs, or somehow spread that across the lineup and hope the reduced demand doesn’t kill them. If they eat the costs, that would essentially wipe out profit margins. If they pass it along to consumers, then prices go up in a country already weary of inflation. This is why Jominy described the auto industry as sitting in something of an existential crisis, unsure as to how exactly to move forward.

“There's almost no situation where anyone is better off, right? Neither consumer nor automaker. I mean, it hits everyone,” he said. 

And to add insult to injury, Trump could approve or renege on it at a moment’s notice. 

How do you plan for that type of uncertainty? Whether you’re a consumer or an automaker, things look grim. Sure, transaction prices and sales of some models did grow for 2024, but these existential threats to EVs that seemingly yo-yo every few hours are why “no one feels good right now,” according to Jominy. 

These are some of the reasons why J.D Power’s Electric Vehicle Experience (EVX) Ownership Study, found that EV adoption will likely stay flat this year, holding still at 9.1% for 2024. However, this survey was done before Elon Musk’s hard pivot right and the galvanization of anti-Tesla protests and mass sell-offs. The real numbers could end up being lower. 

Still, that doesn’t mean that EV investment should stop. On the contrary, It’s now imperative for automakers to push forward, because they can’t just go back. 

“So I think most automakers, if they're honest, are somewhat relieved if the EV requirements are lessened, that they can go back to ICE,” said Jominy. “But the challenge is, they haven't been investing in ICE. So now we're looking at the oldest ICE portfolio we've ever seen since [J.D. Power] has been collecting data. If you've owned a vehicle for six years, and you come back to the market, and you go there and it's the same one and now my payments have doubled, that doesn’t make sense.”

As a result, we get a Catch-22. Manufacturers would have to quickly spool up halfhearted freshenings of ICE cars, which takes money they don’t have to build bad cars that consumers can’t afford or don’t want. And this is also specific to the U.S. market. On a global scale, manufacturers would be wasting money on a band-aid product that only makes sense for the U.S. That’s not exactly wise in a global market that continues to electrify. 

In short, something’s got to give. When my friends ask me if they should buy an EV now or wait until something better comes along, I just don’t know. When people ask if the Kia EV3, or Hyundai Inster, or Mini Aceman, or any Chinese BYD would eventually come to the U.S., I don’t know. In fact, I think that all of those brands are on the same page here. It’s a bad idea to enter the U.S. market and it’s probably best to stay at home. 

Or, hope and pray that some consistency comes through soon. 

Contact the author: Kevin.Williams@InsideEVs.com

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The Hyundai Ioniq 5 has been near and dear to my heart since I reviewed it a few years back. It's got a retrofuturistic vibe I love, a comfy interior and outstanding specs. A used one of those is probably the next car I'll buy, once they get cheap enough or my 2010 Subaru craps out—whichever comes first. 

Now, after a 2025 model-year refresh, this trusty electric crossover is better than ever. On today's episode of the InsideEVs Plugged-In Podcast, I ask Patrick all about his experience driving the 2025 Ioniq 5 last week. We chat about what's new in the Ioniq 5, from bigger batteries in all trims to a North American Charging Standard port to—get this—more buttons. 

Plus, we get into his drive in the drool-worthy Ioniq 5 XRT, and wonder why Tesla never made something like that for the Model Y. 

Stick around for the back half of the show, when we discuss the upcoming Kia EV2, EV4 and PV5, along with the anti-Elon Musk demonstrations that hit Tesla showrooms across the country this past weekend. Will Tesla sales take a hit from the backlash against Musk and DOGE? We debate that and more on this week's episode. 

Our podcast is available on the InsideEVs YouTube channel and all major audio platforms: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio and Audioboom. New episodes drop every Friday.

If you haven't already, please go subscribe and leave us a review. Hope you enjoy!

Contact the author: Tim.Levin@InsideEVs.com

Catch Up On The Pod

Sony-Honda Mobility is serious about making an electric vehicle. It has a real product, that I’ve sat in. It has the full might of Honda’s EV hub in Marysville, Ohio behind it. There’s an AI assistant, PlayStation integration and a suite of driver-assistance systems. The Sony-Honda Afeela 1 has everything you’d expect from a modern electric sedan.

There’s just one thing missing: A reason to buy it.

(Welcome to another installment of Power Moves, a column on the winners and losers of the EV transition. I’ll break down what’s happening, why you should care and who’s going to come out on top.)

Try as I might, I couldn’t find one. After sitting down for a half-hour virtual interview with Sony-Honda Mobility (SHM) President and Chief Operating Officer Izumi Kawanishi, I have more concerns than ever about this project. 

The Sony-Honda Afeela 1

The luxury EV market is a gunfight these days. Instead of anteing up, Sony-Honda Mobility (SHM) is trying to explain why its pocket knife is the sharpest.

Specs That Don’t Stand Out

“From a strictly business point of view, it would have been a good idea to go with an SUV first,” SHM President Izumi Kawanishi admits via a translator.

I agree. The electric luxury full-size sedan segment is tiny in the U.S., and already has a whopping seven contenders, six of which come from household-name brands. The Afeela 1 arrives late to this segment, with specs that put it near the bottom of the class. 

The Afeela 1 will be powered by two 241-hp electric motors, one at each axle. But since you can’t just combine peak motor outputs to get the combined figure, we expect the final number to be somewhere in the low 400-hp range. It’ll go 300 miles on a charge, and fast-charge at up to 150 kW using a Tesla-style North American Charging Standard (NACS) port.

Hands-on Level 2 highway-driving assistance will be available, with conditional eyes-off Level 4 autonomy reportedly coming later. But if you want an electric sedan that can go further than 300 miles on a charge, offers Level 2 highway driving assistance, over 150 kW of charging power and more than 500 horsepower, take your pick. All seven competitors offer the same. Mercedes even has Level 3 conditional highway autonomy available today on the EQS Sedan (albeit in limited locations), and Lucid will sell you an electric sedan that goes over 500 miles on a charge. 

Sony-Honda Motors CEO Yasuhide Mizuno reveals the Afeela 1 at CES 2025.

The Afeela 1 comes from a brand no one knows, without an established distribution network, at a time when sedan sales are cratering and the original hype around EVs has subsided. It arrives long after the legacy automakers and upstarts have already come to market, with middling specs and a higher price tag than the Tesla or Lucid.

With all of that working against it, surely the Afeela 1 must have some killer selling point. Some reason that this isn’t a fool’s errand. The company must have some proof that Sony and Honda aren’t spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a road to nowhere.

Sony-Honda’s Justification

I noted to Kawanishi that the Afeela 1’s competitors are faster, more powerful, with quicker charging, more range and, in some cases, lower prices. When you have no established foothold in the market, that sounds like a losing argument. How do you compete?

Kawanishi noted that while the Afeela 1 isn’t cheap, it also includes many features as standard, which is a fair point against German manufacturers that tend to nickel and dime you on options. As for why you’d choose the Afeela, though, the argument was less compelling.   

“In comparison to Tesla, we did listen to some of our comments from users to get feedback. And one of the things we included in our model is access to Tesla’s charger network. So that does answer some of the criticism about charging speed,” Kawanishi said. “Specifically, one thing that we do provide compared to other rival automakers is the quality of our craftsmanship, specifically within the car.” 

Given that all competitors should have access to Tesla Superchargers by 2026, and that Sony’s claimed maximum charging speed is at the bottom of its class, I put no stock in that argument. The craftsmanship angle is more compelling, but after sitting in the Afeela it’s hard to argue that Sony-Honda has a slam dunk there. It felt well-built, but the sparse interior and screen-heavy design felt like a minimalist redux of, well, every other EV sedan on sale. A BMW, Mercedes, Audi or Porsche feels far nicer inside, and looks more impressive too. 

It also has to do this without an established retail network, as the Afeela 1 won't be sold through dealers, at least initially. Sony-Honda will only offer it in California at first, further shrinking the potential buyer pool. It won't sell on specs, and it won't sell on availability.

The Afeela's interior follows the standard segment formula: Giant screen front and center, little ornament around it. Pleasant enough, but hardly a standout feature.

So we arrive at Sony-Honda Mobility’s last line of defense: A lead in technology. Which the company may or may not have.

AI, Autonomy and Other Buzzwords

Core to Sony-Honda’s argument seems to be a real or perceived lead in automated driver assistance systems (ADAS). Representatives from the company noted that the car has 40 sensors. It’s the second thing mentioned on the pre-order site, too. I guess 40 is a lot. They tell me one is LiDAR, which, as sensors go, is a very good one. Yet SHM’s claimed advantage here seems mostly based on counting sensors.

Installing those sensors is easy. Creating a system that can integrate 40 sensors and make safe, confident driving decisions on the fly is much tougher. Multi-billion dollar companies exist to do only that. While no one should discount Honda’s manufacturing expertise when it comes to building the Afeela 1, it’s also no secret that building a great self-driving car is a very elusive proposition for nearly all automakers. Tesla has been promising autonomy “next year” for going on 10 years, three years longer than Sony and Honda have even been working together. China’s automakers are untested but are clearly advancing quickly in this field, and arguably more so than the rest of the world. It’s not clear whether Sony-Honda will get the benefits of Honda’s existing Level 3 experience in Japan—the line between the companies is murky—but even if it does, Honda is far from the top of its class in ADAS. Even Kawanishi can’t explain why Sony-Honda will be able to offer better ADAS than its more experienced competitors. 

That big bulge on top is where the LiDAR sensor lives.

“When it comes to the realm of [this] technology, it’s not something that any manufacturer can just jump in and succeed in,” Kawanishi admitted. He said that it’s true that companies like Tesla, or some Chinese manufacturers may be a little more advanced in terms of actual autonomous driving technology. Still, Sony’s experience gives them one benefit.

“One part where we have an advantage [over] other manufacturers is that when the driver is not actually handling the steering wheel” and they need something else to do, he said. “Specifically, entertainment[...] That’s something [where] we are very, very strong.”

Good news, then. The cart’s all finished. We’ll find a horse later. 

Let's hope Sony-Honda can make great in-car software.

Perhaps Sony-Honda does not have an advantage in driver assistance, then, or at least not one that will materialize until true autonomous driving is already available in the car. The Afeela’s support for PlayStation games and the Crunchyroll streaming service are certainly nice touches when you’re stuck at a charging spot or, in theory, driving autonomously. Sure, Tesla’s Netflix app may beat Ridevu handily, but PS5 game streaming crushes any glorified mobile game you can play on your Model 3.

I’m not convinced, however, that buyers who want to play Playstation 5 games and watch anime in their car and buyers who can spend $90,000 on a car are the same people. And since competitors are beating Sony-Honda to the punch on hands-free and even eyes-free driving, selling on ADAS features and stationary entertainment options alone seems unlikely. 

Sony’s primary tech advantage, then, can only be explained the way any hungry company in 2025 explains its own credibility: The mystical power of A.I. 

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“Users are able to carry out conversations with the voice agent using AI to customize for the individual user,” Kawanishi said. He added that the AI technology “makes the car more interactive,” and reiterated that it could customize the car as you go. It can recommend songs to you, too, he said. Though it will recommend a song to play via your streaming habits on the car’s Amazon Music or Spotify apps, both of which have their own, custom recommendation engines.

But Kawanishi’s broad description is essentially what everyone else is promising with in-car AI. Custom. Personalized. Adaptive. But pressed for details, no one seems to have a more compelling use case than suggesting navigation destinations, changing the car’s interior lighting or recommending entertainment. Mercedes has already implemented ChatGPT support, which is silly, given that you can’t exactly code or write while driving. But it’s also launching a Google Gemini-powered "Conversational Navigation," which can parse complicated routing directives like “Find me an Italian restaurant with gluten-free options and charging nearby.” That sounds quite useful. Volkswagen supports ChatGPT, too. The next generation of BMW iDrive will have similar AI-powered customization as well. Hell, even Honda’s own EV has an AI assistant that is “conversational,” and can, uh, change the lights.

Honda is incorporating its "Asimo" AI assistant into 0 Series EVs. So if you want a big, electric sedan with an AI assistant and built by Honda, the Afeela 1 isn't even your only choice.

In the short demo I got of the Afeela 1’s in-car AI system, the operator said “Hi Afeela,” to which it replied, “Ok, I’ll call you Ophelia.” Sony’s cutting-edge AI failed to recognize its own name, then continued calling the operator “Ophelia” for the rest of the demo. Then the very kind and enthusiastic Sony-Honda employee asked the car to “make the theme more Japanese,” and I was professional enough not to laugh.

The Afeela 1 took it seriously, too, and set the display background to an image from the PlayStation samurai game Ghost of Tsushima. He then mentioned he was at CES, and the car asked how he was enjoying it. So if you want a car that can make the cabin more Japanese on a whim, and feign interest in your life by asking banal follow-up questions, I suppose you’ve found your match. For the rest of us, Sony-Honda has few answers.

How Can Sony-Honda Fix This?

The people I talked to at Sony-Honda Mobility were smart, dedicated professionals. Kawanishi is a serious executive with a passion for this, and that came through in our conversation. The company is marketing the car. It’s listening to feedback. It wants to succeed. More importantly, neither company wants to get left behind by China’s automakers, which are absolutely smoking the rest of the world when it comes to EV technology and software integration. This feels like the plan to try and catch up.

But launching a whole new car company—even one that takes advantage of Honda’s own factory—is a punishing operation. The game is too crowded and capital-intensive for also-rans to get a foothold. Latecomers best come correct, with new ideas, better execution, lower prices or, ideally, all three. 

Sony's focus on entertainment may resonate with some buyers.

The Sony-Honda Mobility Afeela 1 is not a fresh concept. It does not appear to be better executed than its existing, established, trusted competitors. It does not move the ball forward on EV design, efficiency or value. Its sole raison d'etre seems to be its claimed leads in “craftsmanship” and “technology,” but we haven’t seen compelling evidence of either here.

Maybe its AI assistant will be a decade ahead of others, demonstrating unspeakable competency in a field where neither Sony nor Honda has had a major impact so far. Maybe Sony-Honda will solve autonomy and shock the world. But if the company cannot utterly trounce its competition in either metric, the rest of the Afeela 1 is simply not compelling enough.

At least in 2025’s prototype form, the car is good enough in a segment that demands greatness, arriving at a time when the easy money has been swept from the table.

Contact the author: Mack.hogan@insideevs.com. 

Correction: An earlier version of this story indicated Sony-Honda Mobility is aiming for Level 3 autonomy; the car will reportedly feature Level 4 autonomy instead. We regret the error.

We all know this person: “I’d love to own an EV, but I need to road trip/tow/visit Grandma in the dead of winter.” While the public charging network is improving every day, it’s not a silver bullet. Charging anxiety is still very real. At the same time, automakers are shying away from giant, costly batteries—which make EVs heavier, less efficient and downright unprofitable. So, what’s the solution?

Enter extended-range EVs—or EREVs. Think of them as electric cars with an onboard gas-powered generator. Yes, they have small gasoline engines, but those don’t drive the wheels. They’re just there to top up the battery. The Chevy Volt and range-extended BMW i3 were early examples, but the idea is seeing a resurgence now as car companies try to address EV hesitancy, particularly for buyers of larger SUVs and trucks.

Ram delayed its fully-electric pickup to focus on launching its Ramcharger as the U.S.’ first EREV pickup truck later this year. And Scout, Volkswagen's new EV brand, reported overwhelming demand for its ‘Harvester’ range-extender option in early orders. EREVs are already popular in China, which isn't surprising given how far ahead that country is on electrifying transportation generally.

On this episode of the Plugged-In Podcast, Patrick George and Tim Levin dive deep into the pros and cons of EREVs. They also cover President Trump's freeze on the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program—which set aside $5 billion for EV chargers—and what it means for EV owners across the country.

What do you think of EREVs? Are they the future for larger vehicles? A dead end or temporary stepping stone? Let us know in the comments.

Our podcast is available on the InsideEVs YouTube channel and all major audio platforms: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio and Audioboom. New episodes drop every Friday.

Please make sure to subscribe, leave us a review and send this to that EV-hesitant friend. You know the one I'm talking about. Enjoy!

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In my quest to find an electric vehicle that can truly replace my 230,000-mile gas truck as an adventure rig, I've been stymied by one persistent issue. It's not range; I can get into the backcountry with my Blazer EV. It's not capability. I've got all-wheel drive and eight inches of clearance to play with. It's not even charging.

It's that the Blazer, like almost every EV SUV, does not come with a spare tire.

Earlier this week, at the launch of the 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5, I had Editor-in-Chief Patrick George ask whether the off-road-oriented XRT model would buck this trend. No dice. Hyundai confirmed that it, too, would offer only a can of tire sealant and a portable air compressor. If that can't fix it, call roadside assistance.

Those of you who have never gone far from pavement may not understand why a self-service fix is vital. We tend to think about off-roading as primarily a business of capability above all. Yet like almost everyone else heading into the backcountry, I'm not doing serious rock-crawling or mud-slinging.

I'm not bounding over boulders or trudging through swamps. I'm just heading deep into forests or deserts, off-pavement, over beaten-down fire roads and unmaintained forest roads. Here, it's not about capability, but durability. 

These roads have bumps, divots and obstructions, but nothing that would kill my car. It's tough enough to handle these roads.

But they will massacre a tire. 

Off-road products have chunky tires for a reason. It's good to see that Scout will offer these 35s, and a spare, too. 

Why This Is A Problem

It's not hard to get a puncture when you're off-pavement. That's why every factory truck with off-road ambitions tends to offer a spare tire, usually full-size. My Tahoe has one. So does every full- and mid-size American truck. A Jeep Wrangler mounts it prominently.

But even far less ambitious rigs usually offer them. You can get a mini spare on a Subaru Outback or Crosstrek. The Mazda CX-50 offers one too. Automakers, it seems, understand that if you want to go to a rural trailhead, you may need a more robust solution than a tiny can of sealant, a cheap compressor and a prayer.  

Now, automakers know tire sealant (also known as fix-a-flat) is not a catch-all solution. The product is designed to patch holes in the tire by filling them with a gooey substance that sets, sealing off the leak. Yet even if it can patch a leak temporarily, its corrosive nature means the whole tire will have to be replaced shortly thereafter. That's tough, considering a tire that can be patched with fix-a-flat can probably be patched permanently at a tire shop, if only you had a spare to get you there. If there's damage to the sidewall—as there often is on rocky back-road blowouts—you're out of luck. It's time to call in your second line of defense: Roadside assistance.   

Most automakers include a few years of roadside assistance coverage with your new vehicle. Many insurance companies offer it, too. And even with those, I still recommend having AAA. This is honestly a better solution for most people. Many drivers today have never touched anything on their car, even opting to leave windshield-wiper installation to the professionals.

Of all of the EV drivers I have ever met, I would trust maybe 10% of them with jacking up a 5,000-lb vehicle. Yet this outsourcing of responsibility has not only eroded our individual skillsets, it also has one glaring issue. Most will not cover you if you are off the pavement. And getting a tow also requires cell service (or a satellite-capable iPhone and a AAA plan).  

So if we want to replace the gas-burning Subarus of the world, let alone the Wranglers and Tahoes, we're going to need a spare tire. That's especially true for EVs, which tend to wear out their tires up to twice as fast as gas vehicles do. A worn tire is one of the key risk factors for an unexpected failure.

Luckily, automakers recognize this for trucks. The Chevy Silverado EV, GMC Hummer EV, GMC Sierra EV, Ford F-150 Lightning, Rivian R1T and Rivian R1S all offer either compact or full-size spares. You can even get one for your Tesla Cybertruck, but you'll have to give up a lot of your bed space.

Why Spares Are Going Away

We know why they're important. So why are automakers ditching them?

First, there's an industry-wide movement away from them, regardless of powertrain. Consumer Reports says that since 2020, roughly 50% of cars tested have come with compact spare tires, while just 10% come with full-size spares. The organization rightly notes one of the reasons why this is happening: Spare tires are extra weight. Weight hurts fuel economy. And automakers have strict fuel economy targets to meet.

That also applies to EVs, where reducing weight can help companies advertise higher ranges. But there's more to the story here. EVs are also ditching spares due to space constraints, says Robby DeGraff, manager of product and consumer insights at research firm AutoPacific. 

"Skateboard" style platforms used in most EVs fill the floor with batteries, leaving little room for a spare tire below the cargo area. Shown: The Tesla Model X's battery setup. 

"I think the biggest reason we’re seeing more EVs lean away from spare tires is simply packaging," DeGraff told me via email. "With many of these skateboard-type platforms that EVs use [...] the below-floor cubby for spare tires (whether full size or donut) seems to be sacrificed in the name of more space for that battery pack to fit."

A spokesperson for General Motors echoed the note about using the space for batteries and motors, but noted added an interesting point. "Tire technology and roadside assistance are strong enough today that it allows us to prioritize everyday things our drivers want," Shad Balch, director of communications for Chevrolet, said via email. 

Pickup buyers have long insisted on spare tires, and EV trucks provide. That's a good sign that automakers are listening to what buyers need them most, and spare tire availability on EVs may improve as more rugged models launch.

He's right. Tire technology has improved remarkably over the last couple of decades. A large proportion of the overall increase in supercar acceleration, for instance, can be directly attributed to better tires providing more grip. Traction has long been the limit there. Off-road, the newest generation of products seem to be far more robust.

Anecdotally, I have seen far fewer cars on the side of the road with tire issues over the last five years than, say, 10 years ago. But reliable data on how much durability has improved is not available, with the majority of it coming from companies that want to sell you new tires. 

Where That Leaves Us

Maybe I'm an old man yelling at a cloud. I feel that way a lot, for someone who is 27. Most people won't ever take their EV off the pavement, and those that do probably won't experience tire failure. If they do, they can probably limp out on three tires, even if it kills their wheel in the process.

More likely, those like me who do this often will buy products more catered to our needs, once they come down in price. The Blazer EV was never marketed as an off-road adventure rig, and the Hyundai Ioniq 5 XRT's "EV Subaru Crosstrek" vibe is still a generation-one attempt.  

The XRT should still have plenty of capability to get you to hiking trails and camp sites, thanks in part to chunkier tires. Just never venture into the wilderness without a plan to address predictable emergencies, like tire failure.

Or maybe we just live in a world where tire failure is not a realistic issue for anyone who doesn't rock crawl, or spend most of every day on unmaintained roads. I'd like to believe that. Yet the cynic in me sees companies cutting costs, trading elegant, self-reliant solutions for roadside assistance subscriptions that leave you waiting alone for hours, or stuck altogether. 

The EV trucks give me both hope and an explanation. On a truck platform, there is easy room for a spare. For a compact SUV like the Ioniq 5, it's harder. There's nowhere else to put one. You could do a rear-mounted spare, but those require cumbersome swing-out rear doors, and often result in low-speed impacts crushing your tailgate rather than your bumper. In the long term, I'd like to think automakers will make frunks big enough for a space saver, selling it as an accessory for those who want to venture off-pavement. Third-party companies already offer such solutions, though they usually hog your whole cargo area.

Rivian, I figured, was our best hope here. The company already offers spare tires in its large R1T and R1S. Its smaller R2 and R3 SUVs are on the way, and clearly aimed at outdoorsy types who want a reasonably sized rig. I asked whether they'd have spares. 

Rivian has not confirmed a spare tire for the R2 and R3, and the frunk and under-floor storage areas do not appear large enough or shaped to support one. But that can change, and I'm hopeful.

"More to come on R2 and R3 as they get closer to production," Senior Manager of Product Communications Tanya Miller told me in a note. She added a sly ;)  to the end. I choose to believe that means the spare tire will live on.

Here's hoping.

Contact the author: Mack.hogan@insideevs.com.  

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It's 2022. I'm lumbering through a rock-crawling trail in Joshua Tree National Park, straddling the border of the Mojave Desert. It is a beautiful, stunning place to explore, and my tired old Lexus LX470 is leaving its mark. It's dripping black CV axle grease all over the rock upon which it's perched. I wipe as much as I can off, and press on. 

It's 2025. I'm in Anza Borrego State Park, a beautiful, open park twice the size of Joshua Tree, with open camping and little supervision. I see beautiful rock formations, feel crunchy desert sand under my boots. I smell anti-freeze. My 230,000-mile, $2,500 Chevy Tahoe has parted ways with all of its coolant. I'm stuck until I patch it, and the desert is now watered with the bright-orange, toxic soup that keeps my 5.3-liter V-8 from melting its heads. I'm averaging 13 mpg.  

It's 2025 again, two weeks later. I'm in Cleveland National Forest, heading up Bear Valley Trail in silence. The ground crunches under 6,801 of German steel. The Mercedes G 580 With EQ Technology, or the electric G-Wagen for short, is no hippie steed. Its tank turn mode still rips up the dirt. Its weight demolishes tires, leaving microplastics in the air. Its battery still takes coolant, and its axles are still greased. But with no tailpipe emissions, no fuel lines, no V-8 thunder, it treads more gently on this place.

That matters to me. If you really love off-roading, it should matter to you, too.  

Cognitive Dissonance

Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that "[t]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

If that's true, any off-roader possesses first-rate intelligence. Because to love wheeling, as I do, you have to love being outside. But to do it properly, you need a big, thirsty truck, one that's likely too beaten-up to have all of its emissions systems in functioning order. Or, in the case of my Tahoe—an extremely mild option, suitable only for basic forest roads—emissions equipment that works as intended, but still spits out CO2 like an 1800s steel mill.  

The G-Wagen is still an absurd way to interact with nature, but it's a lot better than any gas-burner it replaces on the trail

Evidence of this dissonance abounds. Go to any rock-crawling trail and you'll see evidence of fluid leaks, scrapes from trucks, trampled plant life and all the rest. Off-roaders try to be good stewards of the land, and most are, but there's no truly clean way to pilot a 5,000-lb gas-burner through a forest. 

This is not a moral judgment. The paradox extends beyond cars. The most sustainable thing you can do for the planet is to never go anywhere, yet not seeing any of its splendor up close seems gray to me. A virgin meadow can remain that way only if you don't hike through it, and yet I find it hard to resist the temptation. Quantum mechanics teaches us that you cannot observe something with affecting it, and that holds true in nature, too. 

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You have to draw your own line, then, and I've tried to. But it's messy business, not one that can be solved by tribal membership or political proclamations alone. My friends who spend the most time outdoors and care the most about public lands aren't EV owners.

I myself have struggled to part with my old Tahoe. While it destroys the Earth it also is my only way to reach some of my favorite places on Earth. Electric alternatives cost too much and rely on charging stations that often don't exist in the backcountry. I am not trying to tell you that this is a solved problem, or one that necessitates you spending $80,000 on a Rivian tomorrow. 

I'd love to do my adventures in a Rivian R1T with a GoFastCampers tent. But the Rivian's high starting price and difficult-to-repair body mean it's reserved only for the richest among us. Hardcore wheelers will stick with their beat-up old 4Runners and XJs until prices come way down. 

What I am telling you is a simple truth: It's better.

EV off-roading does not solve the core paradox of the hobby. Producing an EV is itself a nasty business, just like the nasty business of refining gasoline. But in a world where we won't give up our love of exploring to preserve it for the next generation, I argue we must work with the lesser of two evils. An EV does not affect the climate as much as a gas car. It relies on a simpler drivetrain, with fewer opportunities for leaks, spills and pollution. It does not belch poison. It does not disrupt the forest with the endless clatter of explosions from its engine.

It is not a good answer. But is a better one.

There's a payoff for you, too: It's more fun, too. 

The Experience You Want

There's the moral issue with that paradox I discussed. But there's a practical one, too. I come out to the desert to enjoy nature, and in my Tahoe there's always something in the way: noise. I want to hear the birds, or the rustling of the brush or the beautiful silence itself. And that's just not possible. The clatter of the truck drowns it out, leaving only your lunch stops or camp sites for true, perfect quiet.

An Electric G-Class or a Rivian does not solve this entirely, as their pedestrian-warning sounds cannot be disabled (Free idea: add a truly silent, off-road only mode). But it replaces the rickety clatter with a gentle hum, and stops altogether whenever the vehicle isn't moving forward. This means every time you slow down or stop, you can drink in the sound. Above 5 mph you won't hear the powertrain anyway, as the tire noise on a dirt trail drowns it out. So when I took my G-Wagen press loaner up Bear Valley, I didn't just see hawks, I heard them. 

Windows-down EV off-roading is the best way to experience this trail, short of hiking or biking it.

I also didn't have to listen to or feel the engine strain against gravity, fighting a torque curve better built for the highway. Be it a G-Wagen, F-150 Lightning or Rivian, any EV truck I've driven just hops right over obstacles without protest. There's no running through the rev range in low range. Just seamless crawling, beckoning me forward.

There's less slip in the G-Wagen, too, as its four individual motors can respond individually to changing conditions. That requires some clever software, surely to be refined over time, but even the first draft is exceptional. There was no protest from the truck over even the slickest rock, and any slip in one wheel was instantly overcome by the combined torque of the others. 

Seasoned off-roaders will debate over whether individual wheel motors or dual motors with locking differentials are actually better for smooth off-road operation. I've heard both arguments. Yet only an EV offers the flexibility of choice there. No gas truck ever offered this sort of precise control, and any wheel-specific torque usually relied on either brakes or complicated torque-vectoring setups, neither of which is the sort of simple, consistent solution you want in the backcountry. 

While I used very little range wheeling for over an hour, Scout's plan to offer gasoline range-extenders will help for those with range anxiety. Plus, mechanical lockers rock. 

Simplicity, really, is the key benefit. The truck needs a pattery ack and a motor to move. The rest is luxury. So EVs present incredible opportunities in terms of fault tolerance. Batteries may degrade, but they almost never fail in a way that'll leave you stuck. If you have four motors, there's no reason why the failure of one, two or even three needs to strand you. When your power split is managed by separate motors, there's no transfer case to worry about. There's no low-hanging oil pan either, and the battery pack shielding of even a road-going EV is strong enough to handle even the toughest impact. Plus a battery is far more capable of continuing on with a cooling issue than any engine. Most importantly: These systems are not as mechanically interconnected, meaning there's less opportunity for a cascading failure.

That's the future I see. Make no mistake, we're not there yet. Compared to the hundred-off years we've had refining internal-combustion products, it's no wonder that gas options are generally better-developed for niche applications. There's no EV Jeep Wrangler, no 4Runner equivalent that can compete on cost. 

The Jeep Recon is supposed to bring real off-road capability to the EV market with a more mainstream price tag, but we'll have to see how it stacks up to the Wrangler.

That's why I don't expect any hard-core off-roaders to switch over immediately. I'm not asking you to throw out your 3rd-gen 4Runner or Jeep XJ. But I want you to start thinking not just about the existing trade-offs of electric off-roading, but the unbelievable possibilities. Look at the way a four-motor G-Wagen can pirouette in place. Note how it can reverse an inside wheel during sharp corners, tightening your line. Think about how 1,000 lb-ft of torque would affect your crawling capabilities. Imagine actually listening to the forests you drive through.

This is all possible. Hell, it's already here. Once it comes down in price, and the charging network improves, the off-roading world will eventually realize one simple truth. EV off-roading isn't going to be as good as ICE off-roading. It's going to be much, much better.

Contact the author: Mack.Hogan@insideevs.com. 

I'm not sure you can talk about electric cars or the global transition to electrification without talking about Tesla. And you can't talk about Tesla without talking about Elon Musk.

That's been the case for well over a decade now. But I'd argue it's even more true as Tesla faces declining sales globally, is on the cusp of relaunching the world's best-selling car, and is making a gigantic, unproven artificial intelligence play—all while Musk sets up shop in Washington D.C. and starts to—illegally, according to attorneys and constitutional scholars—take apart bits of the federal government. 

What a sentence to write. What a moment to cover. And here at InsideEVs, asking what this all means for the world's longtime leader in EVs is a material question. 

It's one that we look into on today's episode of the Plugged-In Podcast. My co-host Tim Levin and I will examine Tesla's most recent earnings call and try to game out where things are going this year. 

But it's not all Elon, all the time around here—thankfully. We're also talking to Frank Reig. He's the CEO and co-founder of Revel, an electric rideshare company in New York City that's rapidly expanding into the DC fast-charging space and may be seen in your town soon enough.

Why do you care if you don't live in New York? Well, besides Revel's big expansion plans, it's no secret that the Big Apple is one of the hardest places in America to build anything. But to paraphrase Frank Sinatra and Jay-Z, if you can build it here, you can build it anywhere. And that includes EV infrastructure. We had a great chat and we hope you'll enjoy it too.

Our podcast is available on the InsideEVs YouTube channel (and it will be embedded here shortly) and all major audio platforms: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio and Audioboom. New episodes drop every Friday.

Make sure to subscribe on your favorite platform, leave us a review and tell a friend to tune in. Enjoy!

Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com

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Updating the world’s best-selling vehicle is a tall order, but Tesla may have just pulled it off.

The revised Model Y "Juniper" looks better, feels fancier inside and has more toys. The interior looks and feels better and more premium, and it keeps things conventional enough not to alienate more traditionalist car buyers. 

So does it have what it takes to keep its global best-seller title? We'll soon find out.

Tesla’s Romanian arm invited me to check out a pre-production Model Y Juniper they brought to the brand’s new headquarters in Bucharest. It was a long-range model, finished in Stealth Grey featuring the new base 19-inch “Crossflow” wheels. Inside, it had black faux leather upholstery, so it looks a bit dark in the photos. The lighting could have been better, especially given how dark the car, the wheels and the interior are. I had to crank up the ISO on my camera for the photos to be usable.

The car I checked out came from Tesla's factory in Germany, which will be the only source for Model Ys sold in Europe.

Walking into the backroom where the new Model Y was on display, I was struck by how different its presence is compared to the pre-facelift model. The front light bar and the more chiseled look of the front end work wonders with the rest of the design, and my first impression was that it looked way better than before.

The headlight projectors have been moved down to where the fog lights were on the older model, but you don’t notice them too much unless they’re on. This has to be one of the best applications of a two-tier front light design because you mostly look at the full-width light bar, which certainly grabs your attention.

From the side, not much is different aside from the wheels. The mirrors are the same size as before, but the plastic housing now has a horizontal crease that breaks up their height. The exterior highlight for me was the rear light bar, which is unlike any I’ve seen on a car. Before seeing the car in person, I didn’t understand why Tesla was so proud of this design feature, but now I do.

Unlike basically all other cars with a rear light bar, you don’t actually see it in the Juniper. It’s hidden, and the light you see is what shines on a silver panel; this doesn't always come across in photos, but in real life it's quite striking. 

It’s a unique look that helps the car stand out and makes the pre-refresh model look old-fashioned. The subtle, diffuse light from the rear light bar contrasts with the harsh outline of the boomerang-shaped brake lights when they light up—I took a photo of the car with the brake lights on to highlight this difference.

The interior of the Model Y Juniper is completely new, with nothing obvious being carried over. Just like with the Model 3 Highland, all the materials were nicer to the touch than before, and the assembly quality also seemed better. It feels a lot fancier than before, and it finally deserves to be called a “premium” interior, which was a bit of a stretch for its predecessor.

2025 Tesla Model Y

Tesla’s decision to remove the stalks behind the steering wheel in the updated Model 3 was almost unanimously disliked. The manufacturer listened and kept the indicator stalk in the new Model Y (so there's no need to stick on one of these aftermarket stalks) even though the rest of the interior makeover closely mirrors the Model 3 Highland. This includes the main screen that has a thinner bezel, as well as the addition of a second screen in the back.

The rear screen is still placed too low to serve a real entertainment purpose, so even though you can do a lot more through it, you’ll mainly just adjust climate settings here. While in the back, I noticed two new buttons on the side of the seat squab. These are used to electrically fold the rear seat and then put it back up again.

In the older Model Y, you couldn’t do this electrically, and you had to unlatch them and then put them back up manually. There are also buttons in the trunk, which serve the same purpose, and the little icons on the buttons show what they do when viewed from the exact perspective you have when operating the buttons—the ones on the sides of the seat show a lateral perspective while the ones in the trunk give you a three-quarter look at what the buttons do.

Also new for the Model Y Juniper is a drain plug in the floor of the frunk, similar to what you get in a Ford Mustang Mach-E. Some owners missed having a drain in their Tesla’s frunk, so they installed one themselves, but the revised model has one from the factory, and you can simply remove the plug, and all the liquid inside will drain under the car.

All these changes add up and make the revised Model Y feel more different from its predecessor than you may expect. We haven’t had a chance to drive it yet, but we should get one of these cars to review sometime in February.

Given that it features a softened suspension setup complete with frequency-selective dampers, dramatically improving ride comfort in the updated Model 3 (but affecting its sportiness somewhat) we expect the same from the refreshed Model Y.

More On The Tesla Model Y

"What now?" That's a question I've been hearing in auto industry circles (and, let's face it, pretty much everywhere) since President Trump was re-elected in November on a promise to reset nearly all aspects of the U.S. government. That certainly impacts cars as well, with a possible end to the electric vehicle tax credits on the horizon and potentially much higher tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico. 

For now, the tax credit system's fate is TBD. A more immediate concern for automakers big and small is the tariffs. General Motors is certainly worried about their effect on car prices; but how about a smaller upstart like Rivian? 

That's one of our topics of discussion for this week's Plugged-In Podcast. My co-host, Senior Reporter Tim Levin, sat in on a media roundtable with Rivian CEO R.J. Scaringe recently where he got debriefed on a whole range of topics including tariffs and why he thinks some rivals are at risk if they back off on EV investments. 

Rivian R2 R3 R3X

But we had lots to talk about this week. There's also GM's progress on the EV front, and how it's approaching profitability with its battery-powered cars while it's making a big bet on Super Cruise this year.

And on the more fun side of things, we chat about the Lucid Gravity and why it's a charging monster rated at 400 kW DC fast charging. How useful will that be in the short-term? We dig in and chat about where America's charging ecosystem is at in 2025. 

Our podcast is available on the InsideEVs YouTube channel (and it will be embedded here shortly) and all major audio platforms: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio and Audioboom. New episodes drop every Friday.

Make sure to subscribe on your favorite platform, leave us a review and tell a friend to tune in. Enjoy!

Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com

Past Plugged-In Podcast Episodes

Most car companies have not yet gotten the hang of software. Use the central stack in a modern Volkswagen, Honda, Audi or Mercedes and you’ll find it’s a far cry from smartphone-grade tech.

But these companies have learned that software leadership will be crucial in the next era of automotive features. So like every company terrified of being left behind, they’re all throwing money at the Next Big Thing: artificial intelligence. AI was everywhere at CES a few weeks ago, and a huge focus of the many companies at the show operating in the automotive space. They all made clear that one day, AI will be in your car.

There’s just one issue: Almost no one can explain why you’d want it. 

(Welcome to another installment of Power Moves, a column on the winners and losers of the EV transition. I’ll break down what’s happening, why you should care and who’s going to come out on top.)

AI Everywhere, Doing Nothing

Sure, they all have an idea of what it might do. Ask BMW, or Honda, Volkswagen or Sony-Honda Mobility what their AI features will do, and you’ll get the same basic answer. It’ll be conversational. It’ll be personalized. It’ll make recommendations about places to eat or charge or visit. Will any of this be worth your money? They’re still working on that.

You can now use ChatGPT in many VW models, though I'm still not sure what to use it for.

Mercedes and Volkswagen, for their part, have already put ChatGPT in their cars. ChatGPT is an undeniably useful tool, helpful for coding, for text summarization and as a jumping off point for learning about new topics. But its key feature is its ability to generate and synthesize large volumes of text, something that’s hard to enjoy from behind the wheel of a car, via voice. You can’t really draft emails or edit stats code while driving. It’ll do this via voice, enhancing the car’s speech recommendation. But the automakers themselves struggle to provide great examples of how this will help drivers.

“AI can provide information on tourist attractions, report on past football tournaments or help solve maths problems,” the Volkswagen press release read.

It’s surely fun for general trivia, but I can’t see the utility of working out complicated math problems via voice. If you do want to do that, for whatever reason, Google Assistant or Siri works perfectly fine. My colleague Tim Levin asked Mercedes CEO Ola Källenius what kind of queries company's new Google Gemini-based system could handle that the previous-generation system couldn’t. His answer was telling.

“I don’t even need to think about it, because whatever you want can be done,” Källenius said during the round-table interview. “Whatever the large language model provides can be done.”

He went on to explain how the company’s new Google -powered "conversational navigation" can find charging stations with specific criteria. I genuinely believe Mercedes’ Gemini integration is the best example yet of in-car voice-based AI, really the first good one. But I’ll get to that. For the others, the focus on “personalization” betrays a lack of better ideas.

Sony-Honda says AI will be key to selling the Afeela, but the demo they gave me wasn't impressive. Plus, the UI shows that even the basic software needs some work.

Sony-Honda Mobility’s Afeela demo showed how the AI could be used to—I swear I’m not joking—“make the theme more Japanese.” That verbal command caused the system to change its wallpaper and display theme to one based on the PlayStation samurai game Ghost of Tsushima, a hilarious choice for depicting Japan broadly. But the demo also showed how it was conversational. The Sony representative said he was at CES, and the AI assistant asked how he was enjoying it.

I can’t fathom a feature less useful than a robot interrupting my drive to feign curiosity about my day. In an interview, Sony Honda Mobility President Izumi Kawanishi offered a couple examples of what the in-car AI could do, neither of which sound compelling.  

“Number one, [the AI agent] can help change the internal appearance of the car,” SHM President Izumi Kawanishi told me through a translator. “We showed some examples where you change the lightning, and the general environment itself. Second, the car—specifically linked to the voice agent—can recommend specific items to the driver. For example, songs, based on what the AI agent knows of the driver’s preferences[...] So those are some specific examples of how they get customized to the user.”

I’ve never needed a robot to tell me what color I want my ambient lighting to be. And Kawanashi admitted that the car would recommend songs to play on Amazon Music or Spotify, its two supported streaming services. Both have their own robust recommendation algorithms, with far more information about your music preferences, but I suppose there’s some utility here.

BMW, for its part, says its next iDrive will use AI to personalize the experience. The company also showed a demo that was, well, mostly just customizing lighting and the mode of the car. These automakers say you’ll be able to personalize the driving experience, but there really are only so many settings for a damper or a throttle pedal. You’re not going to find much beyond what Normal, Sport and Eco already offer, in my view, and many cars have had “Adaptive” or “Auto” driving modes for far longer than their makers have been marketing them as “AI-powered.” 

BMW's Panoramic iDrive offers plenty of customizable screen real estate. But when the demo display features an Air Quality Index readout, it starts to look like they ran out of useful information to display.

It’s no surprise, then, to see German companies diving headfirst into a new technology before figuring out how to make it genuinely useful for the average driver. BMW did that with gesture control, Mercedes does it constantly and Audi’s never far behind. But even Honda is getting in on the AI hype. Its new Asimo OS for the 0 Series EVs is built around many AI functions.

"By constantly updating the in-vehicle software based on the ASIMO OS through over-the-air (OTA) updates, even after the purchase of the vehicle, functions and services will be continuously advanced in accordance with the preferences and needs of each individual user,” the press release said. “These OTA updates to both the digital UX and integrated dynamics controls will allow Honda to deliver a personalized ownership experience that will enhance the joy of driving.” 

That’s right: Customization. Preferences. A digital UX. Sounds familiar.

More and more, I get the impression that automakers are using “AI” language to show a general orientation toward technology, rather than focusing on any meaningful value add. I sat down with executives at Faraday Future, a company that says it is building the world’s first “AI EV” and “Range Extended Artificial Intelligence EV,” or “RE-AIEV for short. But when they showed me the RE-AIEV, they didn’t mention any AI-powered capabilities. I pressed a representative to explain what the AI features were.

"Well, it's a general term," he said. 

Related Stories

The Killer App

Don’t think that AI is irrelevant to the car market. While it’s quite fun to tease these companies for their confused, questionably useful ideas, AI proficiency will be crucial for automakers for one key application in particular: Autonomy. 

Autonomous and driver-assistance systems are the most natural place for AI to provide real value. 

Automakers are increasingly relying on AI to power their driver-assistance features, including “Level 2 plus” systems. That’s according to Ed Kim, President and Chief Analyst of automotive research firm AutoPacific. Systems like these are not autonomous—they still require constant driver supervision—but are the first steps toward autonomy. They take some of the burden out of highway driving, and better AI systems can make them smoother, safer and usable in a more diverse array of conditions. Tesla’s misleadingly named “Full Self-Driving” suite was likely the first time most people heard of AI powering a key feature, and these systems are the biggest area where AI is driving sales directly, per Kim. 

“People want active safety features. They may not necessarily know that these are powered by AI, but increasingly they are,” Kim told me. “So it’s not that [consumers] are necessarily asking for AI, but they’re asking for technology that has a direct benefit in their daily driving.”

A Bright, But Uncertain Road Ahead

ChatGPT integration probably doesn’t fit that criteria, at least not yet. Kim said that only 18% of consumers show interest in an AI-powered voice assistant, for instance.

But he’s right that this technology can drive real, marketable advantages. AI is already transforming parts of the auto industry, especially when it comes to car design and manufacturing. Scout Motors’ Chief Technology Officer Burkhard Huhnke told me that AI-powered aerodynamic simulation has drastically decreased the company’s iteration time, allowing them to adjust and re-analyze vehicle aerodynamics an order of magnitude quicker than in days past. 

AI can improve aerodynamic and crash-test simulations, allowing for rapid iterating.

It’ll no doubt drive manufacturing efficiencies, too, while helping companies design cheaper-to-produce vehicles that still pass crash tests. AI is a transformative advancement for most industries, and the car world will be no different.

Yet technological advancements require us to learn new paradigms. Asking AI to do the same voice assistant work you’ve already built is like asking ChatGPT to do arithmetic. It can do it, but it’s not going to drive meaningful improvements. Leveraging this technology will require companies to solve existing consumer problems, rather than inventing situations in which AI could theoretically help.

I don’t need to hear an AI summarize the Bolshevik Revolution while I drive to Chipotle. I need an AI that can find me a charging station with a good restaurant within walking distance, preferably with options that fit my passenger’s dietary restrictions.  

That’s where Mercedes’ Gemini tie-up comes in. The brand’s “Conversational Navigation” feature promises to solve those kinds of complex queries. You can ask it for Italian restaurants near a charging station with gluten-free options, and Mercedes says it’ll find you one. It’s a perfect use of AI: Gathering varied information from publicly available sources, analyzing it and using it to find a solution to a specific set of criteria. It’s a task that no existing navigation system can accomplish, and that any human would find annoying.

It is a perfect example of how this technology can be transformative. Its beauty is that it’s solving a real problem that cannot be reasonably solved without AI. You don’t have to care about AI to use it, you don’t have to buy into the marketing hype. You have a problem, and Mercedes will sell you a solution.

That is a recipe for success. But if all your AI can do is make the infotainment system look “more Japanese,” don’t expect customers to care—or pay up.

Contact the author: Mack.Hogan@insideevs.com.

More In-Vehicle AI Coverage

“Yeah, he doesn’t really like that car,” my friend Cory told me about the Kia EV6. Cory and I have this mutual friend, a Tesla Model 3 owner, who’s looking to dump it as soon as possible. But so far, nothing’s doing it for him, even that EV6. “He said it felt just too big and bulky behind the wheel.”

Our friend is an EV convert who went from a Golf hatchback to a Bolt EV, and now a Model 3. However, he, like the two of us, was mortified at Elon Musk’s not-a-sieg-heil-but-actually-was a-sieg-heil at President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Thus, he decided that it was time for his Model 3 sedan to go. He likes the Tesla, but this latest stunt crossed a line, and now he feels gross every time he drives his car.

He’s been having a hard time finding a suitable replacement. “Friends don’t let friends buy front-wheel-drive Polestars,” I said in response to a listing for a suspiciously cheap used early-generation Polestar 2. I guess it could have been okay, but I didn’t want him to end up with a weird and basic trim of the Polestar only be stuck with a car that no one wants if he decided somewhere down the line that he hated it.

The rest of the search went predictably bad. His search went both used and new; if it was new, it was going to be one of the competitive lease deals that turned ICE drivers into EV owners. Otherwise, it would have been a used car, since the pricing of used EVs is so low. His search wasn’t going well. The Nissan Ariya felt too middling to be a replacement for the Model 3. The Mustang Mach-E was too pricy. The Volkswagen ID.4 made sense as a lease deal, but the range on Volkwagen’s $149-a-month special was too low for him. Also, I had learned from a VW salesman the week prior on a personal visit, that it didn’t really exist on any dealership lots. Practically every eligible unit for the dirt cheap ID.4 lease was sold the weekend the special was announced.

My friend’s shopping woes, coupled with my own inability to find an EV I would like to spend money on, are why I’ve spent the past two weeks worried about the future of the market. Maybe I spent too much time in China last year, driving EVs that feel five to 10 years ahead of ours. But I think that EV drivers looking to move on from Tesla—and there seem to be a lot of them—face a conundrum about what to get next without compromising on range, charging or software. 

To be clear, there are certainly good EVs in the U.S. market right now. Even great ones. But many of those are crazy expensive. And as the American auto industry starts to waffle on EVs with the Trump administration’s rules coming in, it’s hard to see who’s advancing fast enough to keep ex-Tesla owners from going back to gas cars.

Tesla’s models make up the bulk of sales in the U.S. EV market, yet as drivers pivot away, I don’t know if they’ll find what they’re looking for elsewhere. If these folks leave Tesla, where the hell will they go? The Tesla Model 3 and Model Y have hit a real sweet spot among EV buyers and drivers. I don't think regular brands have done the same. Thus, I am worried that as buyers get fed up with Musk and want to jump ship, there won’t be a ship to jump to.

Now, I know the Model 3 and Model Y aren’t perfect. Both the ride quality and fit and finish on pre-facelift models are terrible. The two cars often get a lot of hype for their Autopilot and Full Self-Driving tech, to sometimes gristly consequences; it’s not even a true eyes-off, hands-off semi-autonomous driving system. There are no physical rear door handles for the interior, there is a shocking lack of buttons on the car’s interior, and they’re notoriously expensive to insure because of how they’re made and how annoying it is to get replacement parts or a mechanic that’s certified to repair the vehicle. 

And yet, it’s consistently sat at the top of the sales charts, despite being electric. The Model Y and Model 3 have sat on top 10 lists for a long time. Some would argue that it’s because of the Tesla Supercharger network, but I’d argue that it’s actually the cars themselves. (Or even how seamlessly they work with that charging network.) It’s easy to hate Tesla, but people get lost in the discourse over the CEO and forget why people buy these things to begin with.

The cars are kind of likable. And there’s still a lot they do better than other EVs out there. Try a Tesla smartphone app and then try the one for the Kia EV6. You’ll feel like you traveled back in time.

The Model 3 and Model Y clearly were meant to be somewhat premium entries, competitors to cars like the BMW 3-Series and X3. Whether or not you think they match that level of refinement (I don’t), I’d argue they dynamically match or better the BMWs. They accelerate as quickly as a sporty ICE premium compact and have direct and communicative steering up there with some of the best sports cars I’ve driven in recent memory. The two aren’t physically large cars, but they don’t feel dinky, either, slotting right in the perfect space between compact and midsized.

The central-mounted screen is responsive and feature-packed. They have integration with Apple Music and Spotify as well as AAA-level video games, all baked into the car itself. This is all sold through a no-haggle direct-to-consumer network for a reasonable monthly price. Some of these things may not be your or my cup of tea, but they are big reasons why consumers choose Tesla products. On the used market, the Model 3 and Model Y are some of the best deal-per-dollar things on the market. 

“I’m going to miss a lot about that car,” said a different friend of mine, Shane. This person, also outraged by Musk’s antics, dumped his Model 3 for a used gas-powered Porsche Macan. He liked the Tesla’s software. The Model 3’s generally brilliant route planning and seamless charging scheduling were ace. It drove great, and the car was quick and handled well. It handled so well, he struggled to find a replacement that matched the level of dynamic ability and convenience.

He tried a Honda Prologue. The price was right, but the driving experience was uninspiring. The Volvo XC40 Recharge was better, but he didn’t like that car’s older software or squishy brakes. Everything else was just too expensive. 

Sure, two anecdotes don’t necessarily make a trend. We’ve got a whole list of Tesla alternatives here at InsideEVs, and the EV market still continues to grow amongst non-Tesla competitors. But the truly better stuff is still in the ultra-luxury price bracket.

A Rivian R1 or Lucid Air may offer a similar software experience, but both cars are far larger and more expensive. They might be good Model S or Model X alternatives, but the $30,000 price delta won’t sway a Model 3 or Model Y owner.

Hyundai, Kia and General Motors do make solid alternatives, as evidenced by the three entities occupying second and third place in U.S. EV sales. But, right now, neither brand’s software stack can’t hold a candle to Tesla’s. For some, this will be a positive, but I suspect that the buyer who loves the hyperconnected tablet-style layout will feel like they’re going backward. 

Sales of other EVs in the segment are low-key a rounding error, or the products are just too expensive. I question if some are truly selling on desire for their EV experience, or a desire to get a reasonably priced car that isn’t even all that reasonably priced. 

In countries outside of the U.S., buyers are free to navigate to one of the many competitors that are at least cheaper. Or they can buy a Chinese brand like BYD, MG or Zeekr that follows the Tesla formula a little closer. If you’re in the U.S. or Canada, you can’t buy those cars. That’s really bad. 

Zeekr Mix

Perhaps I’m a pessimist, but things don’t feel great. Earlier this year, the market felt precarious, as everyone waited with bated breath as to what the Trump administration would bring. EV subsidies and investment on the federal level were on the chopping block, but there were still plans that more brands were on their way to introducing reasonably priced, affordable EV choices, namely to fight off global Chinese influence.

Now, everything’s up in the air. The Trump administration’s charging grant freeze and attack on EVs (and vehicle manufacturing in general) feels meaner, stronger and more nonsensical than anyone predicted; even brands that metaphorically kissed the ring at Mar-a-Lago are openly decrying these proposed tariffs and rollbacks that stand to hurt their entire business. 

On the other hand, other companies like Stellantis are plenty happy to throw down their EV ball and go right back to slinging not-so-good ICE cars. They’ll let the “market” sort out their slower jog to electrification now, at least until some more advanced startup or other company’s breakthrough renders them even more irrelevant. To assume that Trump’s reversal of Biden’s pro-EV policies won’t affect sales and car development at all is a fantasy. And it’s also a fantasy to think that a lot of people aren’t moving on from Tesla because of Musk. They may well just throw in the towel on EVs, period, and that’s not good for this sector as a whole. 

Polestar’s new CEO seems to get this. He’s openly targeting disgruntled ex-Tesla owners. While Polestar’s lineup isn’t exactly some one-to-one replacement for the Model 3 and Model Y—far from it, in fact—this is a smart move. If there’s a vacuum, you move in to fill it. You might even liken that to how people flocked to Bluesky and Threads after Musk took over X and flushed it down the tubes; where’s the EV equivalent of that? 

I suppose there is a glimmer of hope. Honda’s working on a self-developed EV platform and operating system that seems way more advanced than what’s being used in their current ICE or EV cars. Volkswagen is tapping into Rivian specifically for better software. Some experts say that the OGs of emulating and beating Tesla, the Chinese, could have a few models on sale in the U.S. in the near future, tariffs be damned. 

More models are coming, but if they’re looking to take up the disgruntled Tesla owners who loved their software-driven electric cars, then automakers need to hurry up and introduce something new, and fast. 

Contact the author: Kevin.Williams@InsideEVs.com

More EV News

BMW was one of the first car manufacturers to debut a mass-market EV, the i3, in 2013. Like every non-Tesla EV from that era, the i3 was a quirky, hatchback-type thing with a city car range. However, the i3 had some qualities that still make it feel fresh and interesting more than a decade later, like its carbon-fiber construction and its sophisticated, sustainably sourced interior.

BMW ended i3 production in 2021, making way for more modern EVs like the i4 sedan. But used versions can still be a compelling option for those looking for an affordable EV to travel relatively short distances. Almost every used BMW i3 can qualify for a $4,000 used EV federal tax credit (as of this writing), assuming you personally make less than the income cap.

Are you thinking about buying a used BMW i3? Here’s everything you need to know. 

Some of the last BMW i3 models produced.

Which BMW i3 Are You Buying?

There were two main trims of the BMW i3: the i3 and the i3s. The i3 was the standard EV, making 170 horsepower. The i3s, introduced in 2018, was the “sport” version. It received a performance bump to 181 hp and 199 lb-ft of torque over the standard 170 hp and 184 lb-ft. It also had some modifications like a sport mode, a lowered sport suspension and a wider track. The mods cost it a bit of range compared to the standard model.

BMW also sold REx range extender versions of both vehicles. Those vehicles came with a 647-cc two-cylinder gas motor (derived from a BMW scooter motor) and a 2.4 gallon (1.9 gallon before 2017) gas tank. The motor couldn’t power the wheels directly, but could help charge the battery for longer trips.  

The late-production BMW i3s.

Which Battery Size Are You Getting In Your i3?

The BMW i3 offered three different battery sizes during its production. The initial model from 2014-16 featured an 18.2-kWh pack offering 81 miles of EV range or up to 150 miles if you used the generator in the REx model. Note that BMW did not offer DC fast charging as standard on 2014 models.

2017-18 BMW i3s used a 27.2-kWh battery delivering 107-114 miles of EV range, or up to 180 miles with a REx. Final versions from 2019-21 had a 37.9-kWh pack, good for 153 miles of EV range and up to 200 total miles if you had a topped off range extender. 

The interior of a 2018 BMW i3.

How Much Does A Used BMW i3 Cost?

The BMW i3 is relatively affordable as used EVs go. Early 2014-16 models with the 18.2-kWh pack typically cost about $6,000 to $12,000. 2017-18 models with the larger 27.2-kWh pack run from $12,000 to $18,000. 2019-21 models with the largest 37.9-kWh pack tend to be listed between $18,000 and $25,000. Occasionally, an i3s model will be listed above $25,000.

Does The BMW i3 Come With Warranty Coverage?

The BMW i3 battery came with an 8-year or 100,000-mile battery warranty. That warranty is transferable to a new owner. It covers repair costs when the battery dips below 70 percent of its initial capacity. An i3 fit with a range extender may have additional coverage in CARB states: California, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont. Those states classify the i3 as a Partial Zero Emission Vehicle (PZEV), which mandates a 10-year or 150,000-mile warranty coverage on the battery.

BMW also provided the i3 with a four-year or 50,000-mile comprehensive warranty. That should be expired for almost every i3, which left production after the 2021 model year. However, BMW offers a one-year, unlimited mileage comprehensive warranty for certified pre-owned i3s. 

A BMW i3 on the production line in Leipzig.

Should You Worry About Battery Degradation With A Used BMW i3?

Broadly, yes. All lithium-ion batteries degrade over time. Every BMW i3 has been on the road for a substantial amount of time; the newest models are still four to five years old. The i3 isn’t an EV with much spare range to sacrifice when new. And an out-of-warranty battery repair may cost more than the vehicle itself. It’s worth pressing the dealer to do an independent range test before buying, or at least try to do a degradation test on the battery.

That said, BMW i3 batteries—particularly later models—should be relatively resilient. Unlike early Nissan Leafs, the i3 had an active thermal management system with liquid coolant to help maintain optimal battery temperatures. And there are anecdotal reports of i3 owners running up the miles with very little degradation. 

The battery setup in an early BMW i3.

Are There Any Known Issues With The BMW i3?

Yes, the BMW i3 can be susceptible to a problem known as “the Black Death” when the air conditioning compressor fails. The failure can send metal filings throughout the AC system, including the refrigerant that regulates the batteries. If that happens, you may need to replace the entire system, which can cost more than $10,000, often totaling the vehicle. We don’t know how common this failure is, and there’s usually not much warning. But if you hear any noise from the A/C compressor, get it fixed before it goes bad.

The BMW i3 is also known for being particularly hard on its tires. Early owners reported having to replace their i3’s all-season tires on the i3 after less than 20,000 miles.  

Later production BMW i3s are largely considered the best ones to get. 

Conclusion

The BMW i3 is a relatively solid option for people who want a cool, fun city car. Like all used cars, there are a few trouble spots to look out for. The Black Death—though seemingly rare—is a more serious and expensive problem than most, and range degradation on early models seems to be higher. If you can avoid those issues, though, the i3 is by all accounts a fun car to daily drive, and a good EV. 

More Used EV And PHEV Buyer's Guides

Over this past week, I've had a lot of people reach out to ask about electric vehicles. Not which one to buy, exactly (though there's always that question) but to ask about where the space is going now that President Trump is in office. He seems poised to end or reverse many of the Biden-era policies that were driving EV growth. "Is this whole 'EV thing' over now?", I keep getting asked.

It's a fair question if you don't view the automotive world through a microscope every day like we do. But the answer is clear: Not at all.

The global race toward electrification will continue, no matter who's in the White House. Too much has happened already, too many plans have been made, too many factories have been built and the playing field is much bigger than just America.

On this week's Plugged-In Podcast, my co-host Tim Levin and I explain why we—and a lot of the rest of the industry—feel this way. 

We've been covering this issue as extensively as our small but dedicated team can this past week, and we've got a lot more coming, including a look at how EV charger funding could take a hit if Trump pulls the plug on federal funding. But there are signs that even the new administration may have to hedge its bets on the anti-EV rhetoric we saw during the campaign.

2025 Polestar Lineup

On a more positive note, Tim and I also dive into Polestar's latest news and why things may just be looking up for the promising but troubled EV startup. After all, a new Polestar 7 compact/midsize electric crossover is coming, and that's something the brand really needs—and the staff-favorite Polestar 2 sedan will now live to fight another day, too. That's something to look forward to. And we cap it all off with a chat about one of the most divisive topics in the EV space: winter range, and whether that's really a dealbreaker or not. 

Our podcast is available on the InsideEVs YouTube channel (and it will be embedded here shortly) and all major audio platforms: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio and Audioboom. New episodes drop every Friday. Make sure to subscribe on your favorite platform, leave us a review and tell a friend to tune in. Enjoy!

Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com

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It’s the auto industry’s weirdest market. There are six EV trucks on sale in the U.S., made by more brands than the blockbuster half-ton gas truck market. Yet no one is selling big-truck volumes. It is a more expensive version of what is typically an automaker’s most profitable vehicle. Yet almost no one is making money.

It is the intersection of two vehicle types Americans are buying in droves. But many of them sit on lots for weeks. It’s the EV truck market in 2025, and nobody’s winning.

Not yet, at least.

(Welcome to Power Moves, a column on the winners and losers of the EV transition. I’ll break down what’s happening, why you should care and who’s going to come out on top.)

A Stilted Start

Rivian and Ford were the first movers in this segment, for what good it did them. Rivian has built a successful business out of selling high-end, lifestyle, electric off-roaders. But the business is weighted heavily toward R1S SUV sales. The R1T—which arrived first—is a slower seller, and has been far eclipsed by trucks like the Ford F-150 Lightning and Tesla Cybertruck.

Despite that, the picture isn’t so rosy at Ford. The company made a huge deal out of launching the all-electric version of its most valuable nameplate. And the F-150 Lightning is selling well now, but not F-150 well—which was what Ford had hoped for. 

Its history has seen price hikes, massive production cuts, price cuts, production pauses and heavy incentive schemes.

When Ford announced an electric F-150, it felt like a watershed moment in the EV revolution. But dreams of massive sales numbers never quite materialized.

A year ago, things looked especially bleak. 

“[Ford] was doing horrendous, admittedly very poorly at the beginning of 2024,” Ivan Drury, head of insights at car-buying website Edmunds, told InsideEVs. “They’ve right-sided that. You know, they brought production in line with what consumers actually want.”

By the end of 2025, Ford put some juice back into the Lightning. David Greene, an analyst with Cars.com, compiled a list of the hottest EVs in December 2024, based on demand relative to inventory and average “turn rate,” or the time that the average vehicle sits on a dealer lot.

To my surprise, the F-150 Lightning was on there. Greene and Drury both noted that right-sizing production and including free charger installation had helped Ford get some momentum behind the Lightning.

But the fundamentals are still tough. CEO Jim Farley noted earlier this year that large, heavy vehicles may have been the moneymakers in the internal-combustion era, but the opposite will be true for the electric era.

I buy it. It’s simply too expensive to make a vehicle that large with the range and capability consumers demand right now. Modern battery technology means full-size trucks with acceptable ranges will be heavy, inefficient and pricey. 

Rivian was the real first mover in this segment, but the company's limited retail network, still-growing brand awareness and aspirational pricing mean that the R1T isn't a high-volume product.

When they’re sold alongside gas trucks that can often provide similar capability for less, it’s a tough sell. After road-tripping a Lightning across the Midwest this summer, I definitely would not pay a $10,000 premium for that experience over a gas truck.

GM’s Gambit

If Ford’s strategy is based on providing a good enough experience at an acceptable price, General Motors’ gambit is that consumers will pay a premium for an electric truck that exceeds their capability expectations. The Sierra and Silverado EVs offer up to 450 miles of range—beating everything but the Lucid Air for the most miles available in a production vehicle.

They boast blazing-fast charging speeds thanks to 350-kW split-pack charging support. They are the only trucks that offer a significant range while towing.

Existing versions also cost $100,000. 

Next.

The Silverado EV RST has plenty of range and capability, but it's expensive.

I kid. There are new, cheaper models arriving this year, like the $75,195 LT. That model offers 408 miles of range and typically serves as the volume model for Chevy trucks. Plus, after over a year of Chevy only offering "Work Truck" models to fleet customers, regular consumers can now buy a Work Truck with a 422-mile range. The catch is it costs $69,495, and still comes with the relatively spartan WT interior. It's unclear what demand will be like for that model, but early WTs have already been offloaded by Hertz at cut-rate prices. That's not a great sign. 

“It’s not very confidence-inspiring to see this. Suddenly you’re getting these trucks dumped back on the market at pretty significant discounts,” Drury said. 

The Work Truck trims of the Silverado EV are cheaper and come with Apple CarPlay, but they're only available to fleet customers at the moment.

Analysts agree that it’s too early to see whether GM’s truck strategy will pay off. David Greene, the analyst from Cars.com, noted that the GMC Sierra EV was one of the hottest EVs in December. Our own Patrick George seemed to like it, even if he wasn’t a fan of the Silverado. But it’s not clear how wide the reach will be. While the trucks are capable, they’re also far more expensive than internal-combustion alternatives. That makes it pretty unlikely, in my view, that they’ll represent a large proportion of overall GM truck sales in the short to medium term. Still, it's only the start for GM.

“I think it’s almost too soon to tell,” Drury said.

The Cybertruck Factor

One entrant demands attention. It beckons with shining trapezoids. It dominates every newsfeed. It is the Tesla Cybertruck, the best-selling electric pickup truck by quite a large margin. It cannot easily be compared to its “competitors,” if you can even call them that. But it did happily dunk on them on the sales charts, with 38,965 deliveries per Cox Automotive data, smashing the segment record.

Still, there are cracks in the stainless steel armor. 

The Cyertruck is the most popular EV pickup by a long shot, but sales have already started slowing down.

“I think there was a lot of pent-up demand, so they started off the year really strong. But then we started to see a sales decline in Q4” Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive, told me.

Cybertruck sales fell 22% from the third quarter to the fourth, as my colleague Tim Levin explained in his excellent piece on Cybertruck demand. That’s brutal when you consider that consumer spending is cyclical, with far more spending toward the end of the year. Plus, Tesla tried to juice numbers by introducing a non-Foundation Series truck for $20,000 less, then offering free lifetime Supercharging on top of it. The company is pulling every demand lever, and yet sales fell. 

A Rocky Road Ahead

Nobody knows how this is going to shake out. Existing trucks are already leveraging tax credits and heavy lease subsidization to drive sales. Leasing a Lightning is often the cheapest way into an F-150 of any stripe. Plus, automakers are juicing residual values to provide even more competitive leases. Still, though, EV trucks represent a tiny proportion of overall truck sales.

Ford sold 33,500 F-150 Lightnings last year, up 38% from 2023. A serious number. But the company moved 765,649 F-Series trucks over the same period. GM’s EV trucks represented an even smaller share of its truck business. Ram doesn’t even have an electric truck for sale.

Clearly, these products have not found a winning formula. Certain tech-conscious buyers who want a truck for home improvement or for adventures seem interested, but many traditional truck buyers have not shown interest. Few are excited about dealing with America’s patchwork EV infrastructure—a bigger problem for trucks, which often take longer to charge, require higher-power chargers to hit their advertised charging speeds and which may not be able to use any charger without first disconnecting their trailers.

The Scout Terra offers a gasoline-powered range extender for customers who don't want a full EV.

Ram and Scout provide perhaps the most direct answer to these problems. Both companies plan to offer Extended Range Electric Vehicle (EREV) trucks. EREVs have gas-powered generators to provide road-trip and towing endurance without the cost and weight of a 200-kWh battery, which sounds like a solid solution for the truck segment. Ram has already learned some lesson's from GM's truck strategy, killing its own 200-kWh behemoth before it left the cradle. Scout's pricing suggests it, too, is banking on the EREV option to provide capability parity without a crazy price premium.

Scout CEO Scott Keogh told me recently that he expects the take rate for the range extender to be far higher for the truck than the SUV, as it’ll solve the towing and hauling concerns people have about electric trucks. In the future, though, he argues that making a compelling product is more important than powertrain alone.

“I think this debate of ICE truck vs. EV truck for Scout is irrelevant. I think the debate is going to be about, like ‘I got a cool truck,’” Keogh told me. “Yeah, we got a cool truck all day.”

Contact the author: Mack.Hogan@insideevs.com. 

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Comparing the Leapmotor T03 to its main rival, the Dacia Spring, it’s like the two cars are the inverse of each other. The former is a Chinese car assembled in Europe, while the latter is a European car made in China. We’re driving a Leapmotor T03 this weekend, and we want to know what you would like us to do with it and what you would like to know about it.

The Leapmotor T03 is a few years old, having launched in China in 2020, but it only debuted in Europe last year. It also began rolling off the production line at the Stellantis plant in Tychy, Poland, as part of a Stellantis-Leapmotor joint venture agreement. Assembling the car in the European Union should allow Leapmotor to bypass the high import tariffs imposed on Chinese EVs, helping keep the price of its little city runabout low.

In Romania, where I’m based and testing the T03, it starts at €19,900 ($20,700 at current exchange rates), and a fully loaded example like my tester is just over €23,000 ($23,930). That’s about double what it costs in China. The government here does help out with a €5,000 incentive—which used to be up to €10,000 before 2024, when it was halved. EV incentives still exist in many European Union countries, but they are, on average, lower than they used to be.

It’s, therefore, around €3,000 more expensive than the Dacia Spring, which was given a major overhaul in 2024. But the Leapmotor also feels nicer inside and has more toys, like a panoramic glass roof. It’s quite a bit more powerful and quicker than the Dacia, which does seem to run out of puff when accelerating from higher speeds.

Leapmotor says around 60% of the components that go into the T03 are designed in-house, including the platform it’s based on. It features a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery, and unlike the Dacia Spring, it has an active thermal management system. It also comes with DC fast-charging as standard, while it’s an optional extra in the Dacia.

The T03 is a bit shorter and wider than the Dacia Spring, and it has a 30% smaller trunk. Sitting in the back seat is a bit of a squeeze for adults, but four people can travel in this car without feeling like torture for rear occupants. The materials inside are pretty good for a vehicle in this class, although don’t expect to find any soft-touch plastics anywhere in the cabin.

My tester had not only a digital gauge cluster and a central infotainment display but also a third aftermarket head unit bolted to the dashboard, which gives the T03 Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, which its built-in infotainment doesn’t have.

I plan to drive this car mostly around the crowded streets of Bucharest (where it should shine), but I’ll also take it outside of town to see what it feels like on more open roads. Small cars like this are usually designed with urban driving in mind, and they tend to feel out of their depth if you do anything else with them. So far, I’ve been pretty impressed with the T03’s road manners, but more testing is required for a definitive answer. What else do you want to know about it?

More On Chinese EVs In Europe

I don’t know what the hell a “Roman salute” is. But I do know what I saw from the leader of the biggest EV company in the world. Perhaps it was an awkward turn of body movement done thrice on camera in the heat of the moment, but I—along with a lot of the general American public and even several European leaders—am not buying it. We all watched Musk perform what looked like a “Sieg Heil” salute, during an era of historic spikes in antisemitism, in front of a whole Capital One stadium full of people in Washington D.C. 

Some Trump or Musk loyalists have rationalized it away, but it’s impossible for anyone with integrity to do that without considering the man’s history. Like when he changed his handle on X to evoke a meme used by far-right groups.

Or the fact he’s been following, and promoting, tons of white supremacist culture warriors on his own platform. Or the fact he’s espoused comments that line up with the Great Replacement theory: The idea that population collapse in “civilized” nations is nigh, so (white) families must have (white) children, lest they get “replaced” by people from nations where the people are a little bit browner. 

But the salute was a new low. It has since been exuberantly embraced by far-right groups across the world. Whether this was a poorly done inside joke on his part to appeal to an incredibly online select group of manosphere influencers and reply guys, or a new interpretation of a forced meme (like naming a para-government agency after a joke from 2010), Musk’s terminally online behavior bled into real life in a way that’s impossible for normal people to ignore. For millions of Tesla drivers in America and beyond, reconciling the bad actions of the CEO with his electric cars feels every bit as impossible.

On a human, societal level, this has a lot of implications that fall well outside of the scope of what InsideEVs covers. But Musk’s latest fiasco has the potential to do a lot of damage to the EV market. Much of its future in the United States is still very much tied to the hip with Tesla and Elon Musk. This act is fresh, and new, and it’s hard to say where things will go. But I fear this stunt is a hard line for how consumers view Tesla and how the company itself is led. And the man who any investor will admit is the “heart and lungs” of Tesla’s sky-high stock price doing what everyone thinks is a Nazi salute on national television while his company slides into decline cannot bode well for that company. If Tesla goes down, it potentially puts the whole EV market in trouble.

“There hasn’t been a scenario like this before,” said E.W Niedermeyer, the author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors and a journalist who writes about the EV and autonomous vehicle sector.

Even before this incident, Tesla’s sales were already shaping up to be either flat or down in most markets where it competes. In Europe, Tesla sold 10.8% fewer cars in 2024 compared to 2023. It’s also lost some market share, only capturing 16% of all BEV sales compared to 18% the year before. In the U.S., it’s still the EV sales leader by a huge margin, but there are some troubles on the horizon.

The Cybertruck’s polarizing appearance and growing reputation as a poorly-made meme truck driven by clout chasers have started to catch up to it in the form of idled production facilities. The Model S and X sales have stayed flat and they are no longer on sale in many markets. There’s a new Model Y on the horizon, but it’s not clear if it’ll have what it needs to keep the momentum that saw it rocket to the top of the sales charts. Tesla’s lineup is old, and some have opted out of Tesla’s brand because of the things that Musk did online well before the Jan. 20 inauguration. These are all things we know.

When considered in one light, it seems like Tesla consumers have officially become fed-up. EV sales of non-Tesla models are indeed continuing to grow. There have been some standouts in the segment, like the Honda Prolgoue, or Chevrolet Equinox EV. 

Yet the U.S. EV industry is very much intertwined with Tesla.

Tesla still accounts for the lion's share of EV sales in the U.S. Hyundai Motor Group finished second last year in EV sales, but a distant second; Tesla sold about five times as many EVs. America’s entire fast-charging infrastructure has hinged its hopes on Tesla’s charging standard and access to its network. And every automaker got into the EV space in the first place not just to meet tough emissions regulations—which they can and do fight all of the time—but to be “viewed more as a tech company” and get the Tesla-grade stock price that every shareholder dreams of. Hell, it’s not inconceivable to think that many people may not even know that other brands make EVs.

“At a high level, it seems like people are not just buying EVs because they’re just wanting a car that’s better for their needs,” Niedermeyer said. Stunts like this could cause Tesla buyers and existing owners to stop and ask, “Do I really need an EV?” 

But Tesla’s overall vibe has been seeing a pronounced shift for some time now.

Niedermeyer said that Tesla’s marketing and ethos (and in turn, the whole EV sector) has evolved from helping to stop climate change, and now emphasizes slick, high-tech devices where the electric part is almost secondary to tech and connectivity.

People wanted to be associated with Tesla because it’s a cool car that represented a very particular view of the future. That view of the future has changed quite a bit. Niedermeyer says that this is why Tesla’s sales, despite recent decline, have still remained strong and somewhat insulated by both Musk’s brush with white supremacy and his pivot toward anti-EV policies, like increased off-shore drilling.

“The reason to buy a Tesla had already transitioned from something altruistic,” said Niedermeyer. Sure, some right-wingers may co-sign Musk’s worldview, but they aren’t really buying many EVs in the first place. Many of his largely center-left buyers have been ignorant of or willing to ignore Musk’s shenanigans, because of what the car represents. 

That wall has been cracking, especially during the last year. 

“I suspect that many would-be left-of-center EV buyers in the U.S. (and other countries) may shun Tesla if there are other options, as there increasingly are. That may show up in vehicle sales, but I think the more important place it will show up is in policies that may curtail Tesla's ability to be rewarded for its zero carbon vehicles,” said Josh Busby, a Former Senior Climate Advisor for the U.S. Department of Defense, in a Bluesky direct message to InsideEVs.

Musk has been open about his desire to remove the EV tax credit incentives, both on the purchase level and manufacturing side. But, if he does that, that could seriously harm electric demand.  

“I know battery and automakers want the manufacturing tax credits to continue, but if you kick out the EV tax credits, who is going to buy the batteries/EVs that they produce?” Busby said. “It seems like Trump is determined to get rid of those. Musk may be influencing that decision, but Trump's own views seem solidly anti-EV broadly.”

That’s one part of this, for sure. But the salute feels different. 

As Niedermeyer said, this is kind of an unprecedented act, mixing caustic social issues and vehicle manufacturing together in ways we’ve not seen, likely ever. Plenty of uninformed people may be able to rationalize away Musk’s Twitter posts, or maybe they don’t pay attention to the news very much at all. There are a surprising amount of Cybertruck buyers who just really do think the truck is a cool-looking device. Hell, even Musk himself is cryptically countering the claims (not directly to the media) on X. Some backup from the Anti-Defamation League helped his cause as well. 

Yet the salute had been interpreted by many as an unambiguous, unignorable signal to the world that he stood on the side of white supremacy during a very, very dark time in world history. It’s shaken Tesla owners, some of who want to get rid of their cars but can’t because the financial implications are too dire. 

It’s rippled through younger generations, too; even some Fortnite players have requested Epic Games remove the Cybertruck from the game. Heck, check Reddit lately; quite a few Subreddits, including apolitical ones, are calling for a ban on posting X links. I’m already seeing TikTok videos and social media posts of people who feel gross about their cars. I’ve even received text messages from friends who just want out of their Model 3s and need a replacement, pronto. 

All of this stuff is now associated with Tesla—it arguably had been over the past year or so, but feels incredibly unambiguous now—and in turn, associated in the minds of some with electric cars. As of publication, Musk has not apologized or directly clarified what he meant by his arm gestures. 

Maybe Musk will continue turn everyone off to the kinds of products he, and his company, got the world to embrace. Or maybe it’s just the most irrefutable evidence that white supremacy is a hell of a drug – it’ll make even the most powerful give up on reversing climate change just to make sure brown people don’t get a seat at any table. I know what I saw on Jan 20. I know what it stands for. The EV space in America really can’t take this kind of fallout.

Contact the author: Kevin.Williams@InsideEVs.com

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