Fwd: The cheap EVs are coming

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Loretta Lohman

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Jan 17, 2026, 12:36:50 PM (2 days ago) Jan 17

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Affordability. It’s on seemingly everyone’s mind, including (especially?) US car buyers. For bargain shoppers looking, buyers have traditionally had to turn to gas-powered vehicles, especially with the death of federal tax credits last year.

But that may be changing. A handful of automakers are planning to churn out electric SUVs that cost less than $35,000 this year. Today’s newsletter shows you some of the models on the horizon. Plus, your weekend listen about climate finance and weekend read about a Noah’s ark for glaciers in Antarctica.

Start your engines

By Kyle Stock

The sweet spot of the US auto market isn’t hard to find. Millions of American drivers only want one thing: a small- to medium-sized SUV, with a small- to medium-sized price tag.

It’s a huge, lucrative market — comprising around half of new-car sales in the US — but one that few electric vehicles have managed to enter. In 2026, however, that will change. Carmakers are planning to roll out at least six new electric SUVs in the US this year with price tags at or below $35,000, products that could help ease a slowdown in EV sales.

“EVs have to move more into the mass market and there are launches that are now squarely hitting that,” said Nathan Niese, Boston Consulting Group’s global lead for electric vehicles. “It’s what’s going to prop up what otherwise would be a down year.”

Of the roughly 60 electric cars and trucks for sale in the US last year, only three could be had for less than $35,000; the median starting sticker price was $59,100, nearly $10,000 higher than the average price for all vehicles.

“Anything you can do to make a customer feel you’ve given them a more affordable product is an advantage to them right now,” said Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy.

The good news for auto executives: a steady drop in battery prices has improved the economics of EVs, opening a lane for small new models. Here’s a look at the EVs that will likely find plenty of interest in 2026.

A 2026 Nissan LeafPhoto courtesy of Nissan

Nissan Leaf

Nissan has long known the sales magic of an affordable EV. Since its debut 15 years ago, the Leaf has parked itself in nearly 1 million households’ driveways and garages, despite its modest range and quirky, hatchback design. For the 2026 iteration, Nissan overhauled the car for the first time in nearly eight years, upsizing it to the SUV category.

The new Leaf no longer looks “cartoonish”, according to reviewers, and its upgraded to modern charging options. It does retain one important feature of past Leafs: The new model still slips under the $30,000 threshold.

Chevrolet Bolt

General Motors has a similar overhaul in the works for its Chevrolet Bolt, another affordable machine that won a crowd of buyers right up until the company pulled the plug on the model in 2023.

The revamped Bolt is powered by a new battery that will cost far less and charge far more quickly than the previous version. It also has GM’s hands-free driving system — dubbed Super Cruise — and is now capable of bidirectional charging, which means it can provide power in a blackout or whenever else you need it.

Toyota C-HR BEV

The company calls the coming C-HR a “coupe-like SUV.” While the description reads like an oxymoron, it’s one that plays well with US tastes in car design. The machine is big enough for a hefty Costco run, but small enough to park in a compact space. Toyota teamed up with Subaru to develop the platform for this new small electric SUV, a bit of cost-sharing that will help keep the sticker price around $35,000.

A 2026 Subaru Uncharted Photo courtesy of Subaru

Subaru Uncharted

The Subaru side of the Toyota partnership is the Uncharted, an SUV that will be a little smaller than the brand’s other electric offering, the Solterra. Among SUV owners, Subaru ranks second in brand loyalty, meaning Crosstrek and Outback drivers waiting to go electric will finally have more than one option.

Kia EV3

Kia has already checked the “medium” and “large” boxes in its EV product line; now, it’s steering for small. The EV3, which is expected to sell for about $35,000, will slide just behind the brand’s EV6 size-wise even as its boxy design echoes the EV9, a bulky, three-row SUV. Kia is also planning to give buyers some unique color choices, from “shale grey” to “frost clue.”

Slate

Cheap EVs aren’t just the realm of incumbents. Startup Slate is swooping in with plans to deliver its first machine by year-end. The company’s first vehicle can be converted from a pickup to SUV. The base version — the company calls it “the blank Slate” — is best described by what it isn’t. It lacks a touchscreen, cooled seats, all-wheel drive and a stereo. What Slate promises in return is a sticker price in the mid-$20,000s.

Get the full story about how these models will fit into the US market. For weekly news about the future of transportation, subscribe to the Hyperdrive newsletter.

EV winter hits

41%

The year-over-year percentage drop in EV sales in the US for November, reflecting the impact of disappearing federal tax credits.

Red lights everywhere

"Definitely, there is a slowdown, there’s no question about it."

Marc Winterhoff

Interim CEO, Lucid Group Inc.

Despite operating in the luxury segment of the EV market, Lucid is also feeling the impact of shifting dynamics in the US and EU.

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Your weekend listen

Ever since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, governments have been trying to nudge big financial players to move more money into climate solutions. The idea was to drive action through data disclosure and net-zero goals, but that hasn’t yielded the results they hoped for. Have they got their approach to climate finance wrong? Lisa Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Center on Sustainable Investment, makes the case this week on the Zero podcast.

Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.

Your weekend read

The world’s ice is melting at an alarming rate. So it may seem a fool’s errand to store ice cores drilled from locations around the world in a vault made of ice. But that’s exactly what researchers are doing in Antarctica. While ice on the continent’s edges is slipping into the sea, undercut by warming ocean currents and higher air temperatures, the interior remains a frigid landscape. There, researchers have built a vault designed to keep samples drilled from glaciers — which contain clues about the climate over the past million years — frozen for decades.

The repository is the subject of this weekend’s read from Lou Del Bello, who spoke with the researchers about how they built a vault in one of the remotest places on Earth — and why Antarctica was the perfect place. (Spoiler: It isn’t just because of the sub-zero temperatures.) For more stories from all corners of the world, please subscribe to Bloomberg News.

Ice cores stored in the vault will be available to scientists for centuries to come. Photographer: Gaetano Massimo Macri

Carlo Barbante’s voice carries a touch of pride as he recalls his first steps into the frozen cave nine meters beneath Antarctica’s ice. “It’s a very evocative place, and very, very cold,” he says, “which is exactly what we need.”

The chamber — designed to maintain a steady temperature of around -50C (-58F) — will be used to store ice cores extracted from glaciers around the world, preserving the chemical record of past climates trapped inside them. Known as the Ice Memory project, the collaboration between French and Italian glaciologists aims to ensure the cores will be available to scientists worldwide for centuries to come.

For Barbante, a project founder and paleoclimatologist at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the vault represents the culmination of a decade of work that initially struck some as fanciful. With the first cores arriving for storage this month, “we have demonstrated that the idea is feasible and that others can replicate it,” he says.

Since 2016, Ice Memory researchers and collaborating universities have extracted cores from sites across the Alps, Bolivia, Russia, Norway and most recently Tajikistan. Many of these samples have been stored in laboratories in preparation for the journey to Antarctica. The frozen continent, which is open to all countries through the Antarctic Treaty, is the only region fully devoted to scientific endeavors — a place where an eternal ice sanctuary will be protected by international law.

The vault — which has an expected lifespan of about 80 years — is a naturally stable, passive cold storage system, with walls made of solid snow. The team first used a snowplow to excavate a 35-meter-long, 5-meter-wide trench in the frozen ground near Concordia Station, a permanent research base jointly run by Italy and France. They then inflated a balloon inside and allowed a snow cover to form and harden. Once the structure solidified, the balloon was deflated and removed.

The site is extraordinarily remote — requiring scientists to fly via New Zealand to the Mario Zucchelli Station on the Antarctic coast before another three-hour flight to Concordia, which consists of two cylindrical multi-story buildings that house laboratories, living quarters and medical facilities. It is one of the coldest places on Earth; prior to leaving, travelers must undergo special medical checks because the atmosphere is highly compressed, similar to conditions at high altitude.

Thirty-four containers carrying the first ice cores, extracted from the Alpine peaks Mont Blanc and Grand Combin, arrived at Mario Zucchelli Station in December and special aircraft carried them the remaining 1,200 kilometers to Concordia for storage in the vault, Barbante says.

Their arrival means no more worries about a possible failure of the cold chain and it’s an emotional moment for the team. While Alpine glaciers will disappear in a matter of decades, “we will be able to come back here in a hundred years,” says Barbante. “The cores are safe.”