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When the new Chevy Bolt arrives early next year, it will start at $29,995, making it one of the most affordable new EVs in the U.S. Its thousands of dollars cheaper than Teslas “affordable” new versions of its Model 3 and Model Y. It’s also significantly less expensive than the average gas car, and like other EVs, it’s cheaper to operate. GM faces major headwinds with the loss of the $7,500 tax credit for electric cars, and it’s scaled back production plans and cut jobs in response. But the new Bolt is so affordable that it could win over consumers even without the incentive. We wanted to get that under-$30,000 number, says Jeremy Short, chief engineer on GMs Bolt team. For Short and his team at GM, achieving that price required some creativity under constraint. Below, Short details how GM kept the price low. [Photo: Chevrolet] A new battery Instead of using standard lithium-ion chemistry, GM turned to a different type of battery that eliminates expensive materials like cobalt and nickel. Called lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, theyre cheaper, longer-lasting, and safer than other lithium-ion batteries, though they dont store as much energy. Its the first time that GM has used this type of battery. We had to develop this because we had an aggressive target to get to for price, says Short. And this is one of those things that balanced price and performance. The company also engineered a new low-cost, low-weight battery pack. The battery can also charge more quickly than the battery in the previous version of the Bolt. When the original Bolt was developed as the first affordable EV with long range, fast-charging infrastructure was limited. Many EV drivers also charge at home most of the time. But the engineers knew that faster charging is a priority for customers. The new Bolt can charge from 10% to 80% in 26 minutes, with a peak speed of around 2.5 times faster than the older model. [Photo: Chevrolet] We were really in tune with things in 22 that customers thought there was some potential to improve, Short says. Top of that list was the charging rate. The range is also slightly better than the previous version, at 255 miles versus 247 miles per charge. The new Bolt is also now compatible with Teslas Supercharger network. Now, Short says, a vehicle that had a reputation as a commuter car is “a bonafide road trip car.” When the company held a launch event in Los Angeles earlier this month, the engineering team drove four of the cars from Detroit to California. “At two of our lunch stops, we fully charged to 100%,” he says. “We had to start limiting our charges because we couldn’t even eat lunch fast enough.” The company is temporarily importing the batteries from China, subject to steep tariffs. But its also ramping up production at one of its U.S. factories, which will begin in 2027. (The company has said that it plans to absorb some of the costs of tariffs across all of its vehicles, with an estimated $3.5 billion and $4 billion hit on its bottom line in 2026.) [Photo: Chevrolet] Economies of scale The new Bolt also adds other new features, including around 20 safety and driver assist features that the last model didn’t have. Features like adaptive cruise used to be optional, Short says, but now are standard. That meant adding hardware like sensors. Extra features made staying on budget more of a challenge, but it was possible, he says, because of the new battery and economies of scale on other parts. To make those economy of scale happen, GM borrowed components from its other EVs to help keep the new Bolts price down. When the original Bolt came out, it was a bespoke architecture, says Short. It had a unique battery, a unique motor, unique everything. Now, after GMs heavy investment in electric vehicles, it had more resources to work with. [Photo: Chevrolet] The Bolt uses the same front drive motor as the Equinox EV, the same integrated power electronics, the same drive mounts, and other parts, including a heat pump that helps make the car run efficiently when the heat is on. The center screen in the vehicle, with the ability toscreen YouTube and HBO Maxsomething that drivers can use when theyre sitting at a public chargeris borrowed from the brands mid-size trucks. Adapting the parts meant redesigning them, in many cases, for the much smaller Bolt, but it helped make a significant difference on cost. By teaming up with other programs, we were able to get some economies of scale for what are truly better parts than we had before, Short says. “Between ourselves and the Equinox EV, we’re going to be the volume players for Chevy in EVs.”
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E-Commerce
Elon Musk is the kind of entrepreneur who likes to have an enemy as motivationtraditional carmakers, the mainstream media, the deep state. His newest undertaking, launched October 27, is no exception: Grokipedia is positioned as an alternative to Wikipedia, which Musk claims is biased and woke. A product of Musks artificial intelligence company xAI, Grokipedias inner workings are unclear, but the pitch is that its an AI-generated compendium of what Musk calls truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. One major factor that makes Grokipedia different from Musks other rival-fueled enterprises is that Wikipedia is quite popular, well-liked, and widely trusted. Theres no substantial burgeoning dissatisfaction with or opposition to Wikipedia fueling demand for an alternative. To the contrary, in the world of mass-market information, its one of the strongest brands out there. [Screenshot: Grokipedia] This wasnt always the case. Founded in 2001, Wikipedias crowdsourced alternative to a traditional encyclopedia was treated with skepticism for its first decade or so, as consumers weighed the merits of formal expertise against what came to be called crowdsourcing. But by the mid-2010s, its trust grew even as long-established information brands struggled. For example, in a YouGov survey in the U.K., 64% of respondents said they trust Wikipedia a great deal or a fair amount, beating out the likes of the BBC and The Times; a five-country survey in 2019 found trust of Wikipedia at 78% or better. For techno-optimists, Wikipedia was touted as a portent of the internets utopian work-together future. In a world where top-down information gatekeepers were no longer trusted, Wikipedia attained a Web-era version of gravitas, a crowdsourced Walter Cronkite. That vision was replaced by the divisive realities of social media, but Wikipedia has hung on, remaining one of the worlds most popular sites, recognized as one of the great collective efforts of humanity, built on a robust internal debate structure from thousands upon thousands of individual contributors all around the world. Prior to Grokipedias launch, Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales spoke to The New York Times about his new book, which tries to apply the lessons of Wikipedias success to our increasingly partisan, trust-depleted world. On the subject of Musk, Wales shrugged: Well be here in a hundred years and he wont. As long as we stay Wikipedia, people will still love us. The truth is that the rise of AI more generally could pose a threat to Wikipedia: AI summaries in Google searches are already said to be cutting into Wikipedia traffic, and that could impact the combination of donations and volunteers that keep the effort afloat. But as for Grokipedia itself, the site is off to a rocky start. Wired found that it pushes far-right talking points on gender and other issues. The Atlantic noted that the entry for Musk himself left out reference to his apparently pro-apartheid grandfather, but did note that hed lost 20 pounds. Some found that Grokipedia had, in multiple cases, simply rehashed its rivals entries, and others just saw it as a bland knockoff, the exact opposite of Wikipedias human touch and originality. (Musks xAI has not been transparent about exactly how entries are chosen or assembled, but reports suggest they appear to be generated by some iteration of its Grok chatbot, seemingly working off Wikipedia entries in at least some cases.) But even Cronkite had skeptics, so of course Wikipedia does, too. Musks complaints about the online encyclopedia (specifically his own entry) fall in line with a wider conservative line of attack. These critics insist that Wikipedia has systemic ideological biasesparticularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics. (Or at least thats what Grokipedia says.) In a war of credibility, Wikipedia has become a formidable opponent, maybe especially to Musk. For many people, their level of trust in Elon Musk is extremely low because he says wild things all the time, Wales told The Times. When he attacks us, people donate more money.
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E-Commerce
A year ago, direct air capturetechnology that pulls CO2 from the airseemed ready to quickly scale in the U.S. Project Cypress, a massive undertaking in Louisiana designed to capture more than a million tons of CO2 each year, won $50 million in funding from the Department of Energy in early 2024. In Texas, another major direct air capture hub also won funding. Together, the projects were eligible for as much as $1.1 billion from the DOE, part of $3.5 billion Congress set aside for DAC hubs in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Climeworks, a pioneer in the industry and one of the partners on the Louisiana project, was hiring a U.S. team, scaling up a new plant in Iceland, and signing large deals to sell carbon removal to companies like British Airways and Morgan Stanley. Heirloom, another tech company working on the Louisiana hub, closed a $150 million Series B round of funding. CarbonCapture, another startup in the space, raised $80 million. Multiple other DAC projects also won DOE grants. The situation is different now. In one round of cuts, according to a leaked list, the DOE might revoke around $50 million in grants to 10 different direct air capture projects. (The cuts are part of more than $7.5 billion in cancellations for what the administration calls Green New Scam” funding.) A second leaked spreadsheet suggests that the flagship hubs in Louisiana and Texas might also be at risk. Earlier this year, Heirloom laid off some workers and reportedly canceled a planned project. Climeworks also had a round of layoffs. At the same time, a few projects are moving forward, and one key tax credit is still in place. Government support isn’t the only thing keeping the industry afloat. But the technology is still in the so-called valley of deaththe stage when it still hasn’t reached large-scale commercial deploymentand funding cuts would be a major blow. Even as other countries offer incentives, it could slow down the industry globally. “I think it could slow down substantially,” says Eric O’Rear, associate director at the economic and policy research firm the Rhodium Group. “If you look at it from a policy perspective, the U.S. was really dominating this space.” From boom to uncertainty As an industry, direct air capture is still in its infancy. The technology was proven in a lab 26 years ago, but the first commercial plant, run by Climeworks in Iceland, didnt open until 2021. It was a milestone, but tiny compared to what’s needed: It captures 4,000 tons of CO2 a year, or roughly as much as driving 930 gas cars over the same period. To deal with climate change, the world may need to capture 10 billion tons of CO2 a year by the middle of the century, according to one National Academy of Sciences estimate. (Thats on top of radically cutting emissions, not as a replacement.) Critics have argued that the technology is too expensive to be a realistic solution. But the companies developing it say that scaling up will bring costs down, both because of economies of scale and because engineers can learn by doing, improving materials and processes as they go. Climeworks Mammoth plant in Iceland, 2024 [Photo: John Moore/Getty Images] Our approach, deployment-led innovation, involves running DAC plants in the field for rapid, real-world learning, Climeworks CEO Christoph Gebald told Fast Company in 2024. Now the company says that one key component of its tech, the sorbent, lasts 10 times longer than before, and its working on cutting its energy use in half, which would also cut costs in half. The company aims for a cost of $250 to $350 per ton captured by 2030. Ultimately, the industry aims to achieve $100 per tona tipping point that would make it affordable enough to be deployed at a very large scale. The first corporate buyers are early-stage adopters willing to pay much higher prices to help the technology grow. The two large planned DAC plants in Louisiana and Texas could help accelerate that process. But the future of those projects is still not clear. In a statement after a leaked spreadsheet listed the projects, the Department of Energy said that no additional projects have been terminated, and that the DOE continues to conduct an individualized and thorough review of financial awards made by the previous administration. Both projects have bipartisan support from state leaders, and when they were on a DOE “hit list” earlier in 2025, Republican leaders helped keep Project Cypress alive, at least temporarily. But it’s possible neither project will continue. CarbonCapture subsidiary True North Carbons Deep Sky installation under construction in Alberta, Canada, 2025 [Photo: CarbonCapture Inc.] Smaller direct air capture hubs that had planned on DOE funding may also struggle to continueor possibly move. CarbonCapture, a startup that planned to install its tech in Arizona this year, has already relocated that project to Canada, to a site called Deep Sky that’s designed to help multiple companies scale up their technology in one place. Deep Sky announced last week that it plans to build a second large facility in Canada. The Canadian government offers strong incentives for DAC companies to build new plants. Some other countries, from Denmark to Japan, also have incentives for DAC projects. “Globally, we are seeing carbon removal continuing to scale,” says Ben Rubin, executive director of the Carbon Business Council. “I think the big question is, who will be home to those economic benefits and who will be home to those jobs?” Project Cypress, for example, was expected to create 2,300 jobs and bring billions of dollars to Louisiana’s economy. For the climate, it doesn’t matter if direct air capture happens in the U.S. or Iceland or Kenya. But the U.S. government, under President Joe Biden, started to take a leadership role in helping the tech grow faster. The political changes could slow global progress. What’s moving forward Some DAC projects are still underway, with or without government support. In Texas, 1PointFive, a subsidiary of the oil giant Occidental, is building a sprawling facility that could capture up to 500,000 tons of CO2 a year. 1PointFive told Fast Company that the facility is on track to start running this yearat which point it will be the largest direct air capture operation in the world. Some of the captured CO2 could be injected underground to help get more oil out of old oil wells, a controversial move from a climate perspective. But some of it will also be permanently stored in deep rock formations or depleted oil or gas wells. Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency granted the company permits to inject millions of tons of CO2 in storage wells over the next 12 years. The captured CO2 could also be used to make everything from plastic to jet fuel. The Stratos facility under construction, 2025 [Photo: 1PointFive] The project, called Stratos, doesn’t have any DOE funding. Microsoft, one of the project’s customers, agreed in 2024 to buy 500,000 tons of CO2 removal over the next six years, with the caveat that the CO2 won’t be used in oil production. BlackRock invested $550 million; the total cost may be more than $1.3 billion. Others are moving forward with smaller pilots. Avnos, a California-based startup, is nearing completion on a pilot called Project Brighton that was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, and plans to begin operation before the end of the year. The company has an unusual hybrid approach that could potentially reach low costs earlier than others like Climeworks. Along with capturing CO2, it also captures water. The tech’s design means that it can cut energy use in half or more, dramatically cutting the overall expense. (At its first large project, it expects to capture CO2 for less than $250 per ton; as it scales up, CEO Will Kain says, it has a “good line of sight” to $100 per ton.) Because the technology produces water from the air, it also has the opportunity to potentially be used at water-hungry data centers, or at facilities that want to use CO2 to make products like chemicals and need water for those processes as well. Avnos is involved in DAC hub projects with DOE funding, and hasn’t yet heard what the ultimate fate of those projects will be. But it also has deliberately looked for a variety of sources of funding for other projects. “We’re diversifying our sources of funding,” Kain says. How the industry could keep growing Kain is still optimistic about the industry. “The global momentum for carbon removal is very strong,” he says. Even in the U.S., when most of the clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act were axed by Congress this summer, a tax credit for direct air capture stayed in place and was actually expanded. (Now projects that use CO2 to make other products can get the same incentive as projects that permanently store CO2 underground.) If federal support for new projects wanes, as expected, “it certainly makes it harder for us to deploy first-of-a-kind pilots in the U.S.,” Kain says. “So companies like us have to get a little bit creative in how you fund.” Some companies are also working on new ways to lower the cost of direct air capture and work without government grants, including a Denver-based startup called Heimdal. The company has an unusual approach: Instead of using large fans to pull in air and extract CO2, it uses calcium oxide, a mineral that naturally reacts with the gas to capture it. “It’s very simple,” says Marcus Lima, cofounder and CEO. “Its literally just spraying rocks on the ground.” The rocks are later heated up in a kiln to release the CO2 for storage or use. The cost is already low, at around $200 per ton. The launch ceremony for Heimdals Bantam facility in Oklahoma, 2024. [Screenshot: Heimdal/CapturePoint] The startup opened a facility in Oklahoma in August 2024 that can capture up to 5,000 tons of CO2 per year. To help with costs, it makes some compromises that some competitors wouldn’tselling the CO2 for use in oil production, and using natural gas as an energy source. But Lima argues that those are stepping stones toward an ideal for future operation. He also believes that companies should focus on bringing costs down without relying on grants. “My view is, at least for capital projects, federal funding should serve as an accelerant, as an enabler,” he says. “What we’re seeing now with the chnge of administration and the general cooling in the climate-tech capital markets is kind of a return to earth. Reality now starts to matter a lot more, because you don’t have hundreds of millions of dollars in the venture markets that you can just have like that. Projects need to make money.” Even companies with lower costs may face more challenges in getting investment now. “With this pullback in federal support, there is going to be increased uncertainty as it relates to how healthy the environment is for investing in the U.S.,” says Rhodium Groups O’Rear. It still isn’t clear what will happen in the U.S. But more federal support would also help companies test a bigger variety of approaches to the technology. “We don’t know which of these technologies is going to be best at scalebest economic performance, best technical performance, the right kind of projects that communities want to host,” says Erin Burns, executive director of the carbon removal nonprofit Carbon180. As the world blows past 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, it makes sense to test as many solutions as possible. Without support, some nascent technologies may be lost completely.
Category:
E-Commerce
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