Jacob Hunka July 20, 2026 · 5 min read
Car and Driver drove 25 electric cars and gave its top award to the cheapest one in the building. That's the Chevy Bolt story leading this week, and it sets up a theme that keeps coming back: price is doing the talking. A Chinese crossover undercutting VW in its home market, a $150,000 Porsche that has to justify every dollar, and the ugly end of the story nobody keynotes, what happens when an old EV battery is worth less than nothing. Let's go.
THE WEEK'S BEST STORIES
Car and Driver Names the Chevrolet Bolt Its EV of the Year
Car and Driver
Car and Driver gathered 25 new and updated EVs, drove them all over the same roads, ran its instrumented testing, and handed the EV of the Year award to the cheapest car there. The 2027 Chevrolet Bolt starts around $29,000, against an average new-car price near $50,000. A Bolt being good value was never news. What's new is what came with it: a 65 kWh LFP pack, peak charging of 150 kW (nearly triple the old car's), a 10 to 80 percent charge in about 31 minutes, and 262 miles of EPA range. The chemistry is quietly doing the work. Iron phosphate cells are cheaper to build than the nickel-based ones in most long-range EVs, and they're more relaxed about being charged to 100 percent every night. The usual tradeoff is cold weather, where LFP gives up more range and charges slower until it warms, so anyone shopping this in a northern state should read the winter numbers, not just the award copy. The editors argue the 6.7-second zero to sixty undersells the car in traffic, pointing to a 30-to-50 time of 2.5 seconds. On their 75 mph highway loop it went 230 miles, beating the old Bolt EUV by 40. Most of their praise, though, lands on something dull and welcome: physical buttons for climate, the shifter, and the wipers, and a menu that responds quickly. Their point is that a lot of EVs reinvent the wiper stalk for no reason, and the Bolt is usable the second you sit down. One asterisk on the headline price, GM's hands-free Super Cruise requires stepping up to around a $35,000 Bolt, so the cheap sticker and the tech sticker aren't the same window. Buy the cheap one and skip the trim walk. The real question isn't whether the Bolt is good. It's whether anyone else will build a $29,000 EV to fight it.
XPENG picked its moment. Just as Volkswagen revealed the ID. Cross, the Chinese brand showed the L03 for Europe at a German entry price just under 36,000 euros, and Autogefühl's Thomas argues that number is most of the story. For the money you get a 4.65 metre crossover, a 56 kWh net LFP battery, around 450 km of claimed WLTP range, and standard kit that includes ventilated front seats, a head-up display, and a heated steering wheel. Step up to the 69 kWh pack and the claim becomes 520 km for just under 39,000 euros. The comparison that stings: fully specced, VW's ID. Polo and ID. Cross cost more than this, and the L03 is a bigger car with more range. Charging is where Thomas keeps circling back. The L03 runs a 400-volt architecture, not the 800-volt system of the larger G6, and peak DC charging is quoted at almost 240 kW on the bigger battery, yet every version does 10 to 80 percent in about 20 minutes thanks to the shape of the charging curve rather than the peak. There's also a range-extender version that always drives electrically on a 37 kWh pack, with a 1.5 litre engine acting purely as a generator, for a claimed 1,000 km total. The caveat a buyer should hold onto is that the L03 is new to Europe, and a car is more than a spec sheet. Dealer coverage, servicing, and how the software behaves in year three are what decide whether a cheap EV stays cheap. XPENG's exposure here is trust, not product. If the driving impressions land and the software holds up, VW's problem isn't that the L03 is cheap. It's that it isn't obviously worse.
Rivian's Founder Lays Out the Bet Beyond Building Cars
Behind the Business
RJ Scaringe sat down with Behind the Business for a long conversation that ran well past cars. The R2, the mass-market SUV starting around $45,000 and just over $57,000 at the top, is about to start deliveries, and Scaringe frames it as the vehicle aimed at the five-passenger SUV segment the Model Y has owned. The part worth your time is the chip. Rivian revealed an in-house 800 TOPS AI inference part in December, with two per vehicle, which Scaringe describes as capable of processing five billion pixels per second and tuned for vision-based robotics. His argument is that the expensive part of self-driving isn't the cameras or sensors, it's the compute, which is why Rivian wanted it in-house. He sorts autonomy into levels: today's consumer systems like Tesla FSD are Level 2, where you still watch the road, while a Waymo is Level 4 and can run empty. Rivian's view is that most vehicles will need Level 4 capability by the early 2030s. On supply risk he flags that a large share of the world's nickel comes from Indonesia, which makes trade policy a real exposure. He also describes a separate robotics venture called Mind, aimed first at repetitive plant tasks, plus a micromobility spinout for form factors smaller than a car. The plan is coherent, but it only works if two things land on time: R2 volume and Level 4 autonomy. The R&D makes sense at millions of units a year and looks heavy at Rivian's current scale, which Scaringe more or less concedes. Watch whether Rivian becomes a technology supplier as much as a carmaker. The Volkswagen deal suggests that's the real hedge.
The electric Macan Turbo has a spec sheet that reads like a sports car and a price that reads like a statement. Auto Focus lists the dual-motor version at 630 horsepower, zero to sixty in about 3.1 seconds, and roughly 280 miles of range from a battery near 100 kWh. Base price is around $112,000, and the test car came in close to $150,000. That figure is the whole review. The Macan shares a segment with the Model Y Performance and the Ioniq 5N but asks two to three times what they do. What helps Porsche justify it is thin competition: the AMG EQE SUV didn't win the channel over, and BMW pulled its iX M60 from the US, leaving the Macan Turbo nearly alone as a high-performance luxury electric crossover. Most of the praise is about the cabin, the materials, the triple-screen layout, and a head-up display with augmented-reality hazard markers the host rates among the best he's used. The complaints are specific. There's no true one-pedal driving mode no matter how far you dig, only a bit of lift-off regen on a shortcut. The car is rated for 270 kW charging but the host saw closer to 100 kW on his session, with real-world range around 250 to 275 miles. And in a market standardizing on the Tesla-style NACS connector, the Macan still ships with a CCS port, which shapes which fast chargers are convenient on a long trip. Auto Focus frames it as a premium daily driver more than a road-tripper, which softens that for some buyers. The smart move they suggest is waiting for depreciation to pull one under $100,000, or looking hard at the cheaper GTS.
Recycling an EV battery is supposed to be the responsible, even profitable, end of a car's life. NPR reports the reality is often the reverse: salvage yards are stuck with old batteries nobody wants, sometimes paying to get rid of them. The piece opens at a Massachusetts parts yard shipping out two Chevy Volt batteries and glad to make nothing, because at least the recycler takes them free. Elsewhere in the state, a yard has a working Tesla battery it can't sell, and the only recycling quote it got was negative $1,800, meaning it would pay to dispose of it. Part of the problem is chemistry. Manufacturers are shifting to LFP, which lasts longer and costs less but holds little value to recyclers because it lacks the pricey nickel and cobalt that make recycling pay. That's the sharp counterpoint to the usual story, where LFP is the hero bringing prices down. The same trait that helps buyers up front creates a disposal headache years later, and nobody mentions it at the point of sale. An analyst quotes a gate fee of roughly $1.50 to $2 per kilogram to accept LFP scrap in North America, which can run to hundreds of dollars per battery before shipping. Big recyclers like Redwood Materials sound more optimistic, and GM says recycling its factory scrap now makes money, but small yards lack the volume to strike good deals. Colorado's response is a law putting responsibility for recycling unwanted EV batteries on the automakers that sold them, a producer-responsibility approach recyclers told NPR they support. This is the part of the EV transition nobody puts in a keynote, and it deserves more attention than it gets.
The week is yours. See you next Monday.
Jacob Hunka, Founder nexusEVnews.com
P.S. Know someone who follows the auto industry and ignores the electric side of it? Now is a good time to fix that.