Jacob Hunka
June 15, 2026 · 5 min read
A man who helped write household electrification into US climate law watched an election freeze the funding, so he went home to Australia and started wiring up his own postcode instead. That is the story leading this week, and it sets the tone for the rest of it: real things getting built by people who decided not to wait. A grid battery that cools itself with no fans. A charger any EV can use that installs without a grid upgrade. And the Rivian R2 finally in the wild, driven hard, reviewed honestly. Less waiting, more doing.
THE WEEK'S BEST STORIES
Saul Griffith Lost His US Climate Funding. So He Wired Up One Australian Postcode Instead.
ABC News In-depth
Saul Griffith helped put household electrification at the center of America's biggest climate law, and this Australian Story profile catches him as that work comes apart. The federal funding behind Rewiring America, the group he co-founded in 2019, has been frozen, and a large electrification contract evaporated after the 2024 US election. His response was to shrink the scale and move closer to home. Near Wollongong, south of Sydney, he and a group of neighbors started Electrify 2515, named for their postcode, to convert hundreds of homes to electric appliances powered by rooftop solar. His case was never about sacrifice but about arithmetic: by his count, roughly 42 percent of US emissions trace back to decisions made inside ordinary homes, the furnace, the water heater, the stove, and the car in the driveway. Replace those machines with efficient electric ones as they wear out, power them with renewables, and emissions fall without anyone living worse. Electrify 2515 secured funding from the national renewable energy agency ARENA to help 500 local homes drop their three biggest gas users, with a subsidy of up to 1,000 dollars per appliance. The project started with about 10 homes and has climbed past 140 on the way to 500, with households reporting savings of roughly 2,000 dollars a year. Griffith is candid that the pace is still too slow to hit a two-degree target and that the program ended up narrower than he wanted, without the EVs and batteries he originally pitched. The lesson is that policy is fragile and a working neighborhood is not. He says 100-plus copycat groups now exist across Australia.
Rivian is shipping the R2 now, its first vehicle built for real volume, and in this Masters of Scale interview RJ Scaringe revisits the decision that shaped the company: building its own electronics and writing its own software when Rivian had almost no money and a board that called it a bad idea. That bet became a $5.8 billion licensing agreement with Volkswagen Group, whose first Rivian-software car, the VW ID1, lands in Europe next year as that market's cheapest EV. Scaringe pegs the average new US car at around $50,000 and notes that until the R2, that price band held essentially one compelling EV in the Tesla Model Y and Model 3, which together take 55 to 60 percent of US EV sales. He frames that as a market starved for choice rather than Tesla being unbeatable, arguing the largest automaker on earth holds only about 10 percent of global demand, leaving room for many winners. Volkswagen had poured money into its own in-house software effort, the Cariad division, widely reported to run over budget and behind schedule, before licensing Rivian's stack instead. Scaringe waves off the worry that the cheap ID1 could cannibalize the R2, noting Rivian licensed the software but not its vehicle designs or self-driving system. He estimates a single vehicle takes around 40 million decisions and, at full size, roughly 5,500 to 6,000 engineers working in parallel. Rivian now caps the first six months of any program at no more than 50 people, a lesson from when the full R1 team swarmed the R2 and progress stalled. A partnership with Uber will put 50,000 robotaxi versions of the R2 on the road from 2028.
At a GM event, Munro Live walks the floor with a GM battery engineer to look at a grid-scale sodium-ion storage system that needs no liquid cooling at all. The system is built by Peak Energy, with GM developing the next-generation cell that goes inside it, made at GM's campus in Warren, Michigan. The mechanical design is the clever part: nine large battery modules stack with air gaps between them, and the whole stack sits on a tilt. As cells warm, heat rises and pulls cool air through the gaps on its own, the same chimney effect that draws air up a flue. No pumps, no coolant loop, no parasitic cooling load. A typical lithium or LFP grid battery spends a slice of its own stored power running a cooling system to keep cells in a safe temperature window. Sodium-ion tolerates a wider temperature range and ages more slowly, which lets Peak delete the cooling hardware entirely. The chemistry also allows aluminum foil on both electrodes, where lithium-ion needs heavier, pricier copper on the anode, dropping the bill of materials. The raw material is sodium, effectively table salt, abundant across Michigan though it still needs refining to battery grade. These packs are designed to run 20 years or more, somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 full cycles, roughly three to four times the cycle life of the chemistries GM uses in its EVs. Sodium-ion will never give 300 miles of range, and nobody here pretends otherwise. For stationary storage, the open question is scale: a couple thousand cells a day in Michigan is a start, but grid storage is won on gigawatt-hours, and that is where the Chinese suppliers already live.
BYD showed its flash charging system at its UK headquarters alongside the Denza Z9 GT and confirmed the network is heading to Europe. The first station opens in Bologna, Italy this week, with around 300 sites planned for the UK and thousands more across Europe, building on more than 6,000 already installed in China. The claim is a 10 to 70 percent charge in roughly five minutes, and up to 97 percent in about nine, against the 25 to 30 minutes most current rapid chargers take. The detail that matters most: it uses a standard CCS connector, so any compatible EV can plug in, not just BYD cars. Each unit is buffered by its own blade batteries, so it can drop into a site without the high-voltage grid upgrade that normally gates fast-charging rollouts. That is the difference between a network that takes years to permit and one that can appear almost anywhere there is already a connection. BYD's director of EV charging, Diego, confirmed the charger output is uncapped, so a car that maxes at 50 kW or 250 kW simply takes what it can. The system was tested down to minus 30 degrees Celsius, adding only around three minutes of charge time. On safety, BYD says it ran a nail penetration test while charging at full rate with no thermal runaway. The Denza Z9 GT is the first car to support it and launches in the UK at Goodwood in July. The catch is that these claims come from a demo unit at a company event, so independent testing in the wild is the thing to wait for. The five-minute number will rarely be your number, and that is fine, because a CCS, grid-friendly, battery-buffered charger any EV can use moves adoption more than any single fast car does.
Rivian R2 First Drive: Kyle Conner Spends Two Hours Finding Out How Good It Really Is
Out of Spec Reviews
Kyle Conner drove the Rivian R2 in Utah and came back with an unusually direct opinion for a launch video. The headline is that Rivian mostly nailed the powertrain. The R2 drops the R1's front-primary bias for a rear-primary setup with a disconnecting front axle, and the result drives like it was designed that way rather than a car that happens to have four-wheel drive. At 656 horsepower with a 3.6-second zero-to-60 claim for the launch Performance trim, the numbers are strong, and the experience backs them up above 50 mph where the R2 builds power progressively rather than peaking early. The R2 competes most directly with the Tesla Model Y. Rivian's Performance launch edition starts at $57,990 before the $1,495 destination charge, making it price-comparable to the Model Y Performance. The R2 runs MacPherson struts and passive sway bars instead of air suspension, though the Performance trim gets single-valve semi-active dampers. A base-spec R2 without those dampers is a different car in the corners, so buyers shopping below $57,990 should drive both configurations first. The brake-by-wire system drew the most nuanced commentary: in moderate braking on coarser pavement, the rear axle carried too much load, producing a drag Conner later softened as surface-dependent. Off-road, the one-pedal drive was precise and progressive, better than anything the R1 manages at low speed. A charging session showed 187 kW at 44 percent state of charge, peaking near 190 kW, ahead of Rivian's 175 kW figure for the Gen 2 R1 in warm conditions. HVAC tuning, missing camp mode, and sound quality were flagged as work in progress, the kind of things Rivian fixes over the air. Conner is buying one and disclosed it, which keeps the review honest.
FRESH FROM THE SITE
If you are following R2 production and delivery timelines, the tracker is live on the site. One place, updated as deliveries progress. Worth bookmarking if you have a reservation or are watching the ramp.
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.