First drive: Honda says its CR-V e:FCEV plug-in fuel cell hybrid is the future. Is it?
Honda invited us out to its US R&D Center in Torrance, California to drive the new fuel cell plug-in hybrid version of the CR-V, which gets released later this year. Is this first-ever hybrid between a battery EV and fuel cell EV the future of electric cars?
Honda’s CR-V e:FCEV (say that ten times fast) is the first in a new generation of Honda’s fuel cell technology, much improved over the hydrogen fuel cells in its earlier fuel cell vehicles, the FCX and Clarity (the Clarity’s fuel cells are now being used for stationary power generation applications).
The new generation reduces cost and increases durability, using fewer rare elements and giving better cold weather performance, among other improvements.
This fuel cell stack has been paired with a 17.7kWh battery, much larger than that on most fuel cell vehicles, good for about 29 miles of battery-electric range, and 270 miles of total range. Most FCEVs have a small battery to act as a buffer between the fuel cell stack and the electric drive units, but the e:FCEV expands on that to offer an actual traction battery that can be recharged by plugging the car in.
It’s a novel solution, which we haven’t seen in any other vehicles yet. And there are some ways that this works – a FCEV is an EV anyway, and has a buffer battery regardless, so you’re not changing much in terms of complexity by just making that battery big enough to drive the vehicle on its own. And you are certainly adding more practicality, potentially allowing daily driving to be done on electric and keeping hydrogen fillups less frequent.
But a novel solution may or may not be the right solution. So, is this e:FCEV the next big thing, or just an interesting one-shot?
Honda CR-V e:FCEV First Drive
I’m going to try to keep the drive segment short (update: whoops, I didn’t), because I think there’s more interesting discussion to be had around the philosophy of this vehicle, rather than the actual implementation of it. We’ll get to that.
At its core, the drive experience of the e:FCEV is quite similar to that of Honda’s regular gasoline-powered hybrid CR-V. The CR-V is Honda’s most popular vehicle and one of the best-selling cars in its segment (behind the RAV4 and Model Y), so it’s a pretty known quantity here.
The exterior looks extremely similar to the gas CR-V, though if you know what you’re looking for you’ll be able to see differences. These are mainly in the longer front overhang, different grille (larger on the FCEV than hybrid – for more cooling, oddly enough), and different taillights. Plus the lack of exhaust pipes, of course.
The interior is very close to the existing CR-V, but uses some upgraded more-sustainable materials, which should be attractive to the likely more-sustainably-minded customer base that Honda is looking for with this car (though this leaves one to wonder: if these materials are more sustainable, why can’t Honda just use them on the gas versions of the car, where much higher volume will have a bigger effect on overall sustainability?)
I do quite like the “honeycomb” dash pattern, where the air conditioning vents live. It’s a cool-looking design feature, and reasonably functional as well. Though it seems like it could be tough to clean or repair.
The screen is 9 inches, and has wireless CarPlay and Android Auto, which you’ll probably stay in most of the time unless you want to look at the “energy flow” display to get a sense of whether the battery or fuel cell is currently powering the vehicle.
The biggest interior change is in the rear, where the hydrogen tanks have been placed behind the seats, meaning a significant chunk has been taken out of the rear cargo area.
Honda’s solution to this is pretty clever, turning the rear into a two-tier cargo area. By lifting a shelf from the loading floor and placing it on rails behind the tank area, the upper cargo area is made flat with an additional storage cubby underneath. Rear seats can be folded down to make a longer flat cargo area, which Honda said is plenty enough to hold a bike (and then, you’ve still got room under the shelf for a bag, or groceries, or whatever).
Otherwise, the interior is comfortable, functional, and nice. You get what you think you would get out of the third-best selling car in America’s most popular segment – nothing funky like a drop-down 27″ TV or “taco trays.” just the sort of workmanlike effort one would expect out of Honda.
But this familiarity also means the experience is similar to gas Hondas, which is something that we, the EV faithful, have mostly moved beyond. To start up the car, you need a key (gasp), you need to put your foot on the brake (okay), you need to press a start button (gasp), and you even need to turn it off when you get out (riot!!).
When you do press that “power on” button, you can hear the car “start up” with a distinctive (and honestly pretty cool) “whoosh” sound, more audible outside than inside, which is the sound of the fuel cell stack sucking in air to be used in the fuel cell reaction. This reaction combines hydrogen gas stored in an onboard tank (H2) with oxygen (O) extracted from the air to form H2O, plain water. This water exhausts (drips) from a small pipe near the tire.
The car’s accelerator pedal is responsive, but power is not that strong (and despite that, it’s still pretty easy to chirp the tires with the front-wheel drive powertrain). Peak power is 174hp (130kW), about 80kW of which comes from the hydrogen fuel cell stack (after accounting for system losses). The remainder comes from the battery, though this is also dependent on battery state of charge, so you’re going to end up somewhere in the mid-100s in terms of peak horsepower.
So it’s not that much oomph, especially given the ~500 extra pounds the e:FCEV weighs over the hybrid CR-V (Honda didn’t have a final curb weight number for us, but it sounds like it’s somewhere in the ~4,300-4,400lb range).
If you’re looking for a punchy, sporty, electric acceleration experience, you won’t get it here. But if you’re looking for something a little more responsive than your midsize gas SUV, and that can get up to speed without as much choking drama from a gas engine, then the e:FCEV could offer a pleasant change.
Modes upon modes
The car has four drive modes: Sport, Normal, Econ, and Snow. These modes change throttle mapping and “smooth out” accelerator inputs, with some modes reducing the power used by the HVAC system. Sport mode also comes with “Active Sound Control.” We’ll get to that in a moment.
In practice, like with most vehicles, I found that I liked sport mode the best. This is not because it’s the fastest, but because I want control of my vehicle. I do not want my throttle inputs artificially slowed down (if I wanted that, I’d drive a slow gas car), I don’t want to be missing the full power at full throttle, and I don’t need a car to force me to drive economically because if I wanted to do that, I can just lift my foot a little and get the same results as if I was in “Econ” mode.
But the problem with this is that sport mode’s “Active Sound Control” makes it sound like there’s a gas engine in the car. It’s not as loud, rumbly and disruptive as the actual gas engine in the hybrid, and it doesn’t sound exactly like a gas engine, but the pitch is closer to a gas engine than most “fake EV noises” we’ve heard, and doesn’t sound very “futuristic” (for the record: those noises are also dumb).
There is no way to turn off this sound in sport mode, but at least it’s only present in sport mode. If you want to drive in the most responsive drive mode, you have to listen to an MP3 file of motor noise whenever you accelerate or decelerate.
Regenerative braking: no one-pedal
Deceleration comes in the form of a blended brake pedal, which activates regen or friction brakes depending on how far down you’re pressing it, or in the form of regenerative braking which is accessible through paddles behind the steering wheel.
Though unlike many EVs where these paddles allow you to set a regen level and then forget about it (whether for that drive, or permanently), the regen level on the e:FCEV resets a few seconds after you stop using it. So this means that every time you stop the car, you need to press the paddle for the car to remember your regen settings.
This method, again, is a carryover from the hybrid CR-V, which has similar paddle operation. You could think of it more like paddle shifters on a manual transmission vehicle, controlling the amount of engine braking you’re getting.
But any setting isn’t particularly strong in the regen department, and even in the maximum “D with four down-arrows next to it” regen mode, the car is not really meant for one pedal operation. And it has a creep which can’t be turned off (though there is a brake hold button).
EV vs. fuel cell mode
So that’s two separate modes, drive mode and regen mode. But there’s another mode selection, e-mode, allowing you control over which powertrain you’re using. This lets you either drive fully on “EV”, to “Save” your battery level, to “Charge” your battery, or to let the car figure it out on “Auto.”
In practice, we tried to start in EV mode and immediately dropped out of it and were unable to switch back into it. The car only has limited power in EV mode, because the battery doesn’t put out as much power as the fuel cell stack. So if you ever call for more power than EV mode can provide (which car journalists are obviously going to do during a test drive), the car kicks into Auto mode. And since fuel cell stacks don’t like to be turned on and off all the time, once you’ve turned it on, it stays on for that whole drive, until the car is powered down.
When you’re not in EV mode, the car won’t tell you how much electric-only range you have left, but it will idle the fuel cell stack and use only battery when fuel cell power is no longer required.
So we were having trouble thinking of how these modes would be useful, since it seems like the car will usually be in Auto mode. Honda mentioned that owners would likely get used to the light-foot requirement for staying in EV mode over the course of ownership. One employee said that, with practice, he can easily keep his hybrid CR-V from turning on the engine when he’s just driving a few blocks. I’m willing to believe this.
Honda also said that “save” or “charge” modes could be useful, for example, when you know you’re heading to fuel up at a hydrogen station during a trip, so you can be sure to leave the station with full charge and a full tank.
Wait, a tank?
Okay, so now we’ve described the drive experience, which was… fine. It’s clear that the car is influenced mainly by the gas/hybrid side of things, rather than the EV side of things, and it’s not nearly as punchy as the best-selling vehicle in its class (and the world). But it’s got a nice interior and it gets you around town without trouble.
But the big gray elephant in the room is how you get that energy into the vehicle to begin with, and for the e:FCEV, most of that energy is going to come from hydrogen. And most of that gas comes from another gas, methane (also greenwashingly known as “natural” gas, also known as a greenhouse gas 28x more potent than CO2 that tends to escape when we frack for it) which produces 95% of the hydrogen we get in the US through a process called steam reforming.
So in practice, a hydrogen car is a methane car, at least right now. Well-to-wheel, it offers greater total thermal efficiency (turning fossil fuel energy into forward motion) than a gas vehicle would, but lower efficiency than if that methane gas were used to generate electricity and charge a BEV.
But hydrogen can also be produced through electrolysis of water, where electricity, preferably generated via surplus renewable energy, is run through water to break it down into hydrogen and oxygen. This is the reverse of the reaction that makes a fuel cell work – put electricity into water to break it into hydrogen and oxygen, put hydrogen and oxygen back together to make electricity and water.
This has been called “green hydrogen,” as opposed to the “gray hydrogen” which is the vast majority of current hydrogen production (see more about the confusingly-named “colors” of hydrogen here).
If fuel cell vehicles were fueled by green hydrogen, they would suddenly become a lot cleaner – just like how BEVs get cleaner when fueled by solar rather than coal.
But it’s not as easy to build a hydrogen electrolysis machine in your garage as it is to put up solar panels on your roof. It’s easy enough to make hydrogen through electrolysis, it’s harder to capture it, and it takes a lot of effort to pressurize and store it in the amounts needed to fuel a car. None of these are impossible steps, but there are thousands of solar installers, and not much in the way of home hydrogen pumps (Honda tried it before, using a home’s methane gas lines to produce hydrogen rather than electrolysis, but it didn’t get anywhere – we spied the defunct demo unit in the corner of the parking lot).
So to fill up this car, you’re going to go to hydrogen stations, which so far are getting 95% of their hydrogen from methane. Compare this to ~36% of California’s electricity coming from methane, and dropping.
And why are we comparing to California specifically? Because that’s the only place the e:FCEV will be available. Honda says the reason for this is because California is the only state with a robust network of retail hydrogen stations.
This is true, but California is also the state that requires Honda and other manufacturers to comply with selling a certain percentage of zero emission vehicles or face penalties. This has influenced automakers, including Honda, to release EVs as California-only vehicles in the past (often paired with emphasis on the vehicle’s qualification for a carpool sticker – the e:FCEV qualifies, by the way).
California’s hydrogen stations are largely centered around its two major population centers, Los Angeles and San Francisco, with sparse coverage in The Lands Between.
These stations will fill your hydrogen vehicle quicker than an EV on a DC fast charger. Fuel cell advocates say that it only takes about 5 minutes for a fill-up.
In practice, it often takes longer, depending on ambient temperatures, how recently the station has been used by another car, and whether or not there’s a months-long supply disruption which meant half the stations in the state were shut down.
That disruption seems to be over now, but just one month ago Shell decided to shut down its hydrogen fueling stations in the state, which probably doesn’t feel great if your local filling station is suddenly gone and the next one is potentially miles away.
Honda’s philosophy – don’t put all eggs in one basket
Despite these challenges with hydrogen, Honda reminds us that that’s why this vehicle is a plug-in hybrid – in the event that something like this happens, it can still be powered with the battery, and most people can still use it for their daily tasks with 29 miles of battery-electric range, which can be easily charged at any level 2 charger, or even level 1 in a pinch.
This keeps with a philosophy the company repeated several times – that it doesn’t want to commit everything to BEV, like the rest of the industry seems to be doing, thinking that there are applications to which fuel cells would be more suited than BEV.
To be frank, this is a correct statement. There are applications where hydrogen would be a better fuel. Heavy duty and/or long haul applications especially would benefit from higher energy density and faster refueling, and the downside of sparse hydrogen infrastructure wouldn’t be as bad for vehicles with more-fixed routes and planned depot stops (plus, the federal government just laid out a plan to support this). In this vein, Honda is working on bringing hydrogen to commercial trucks, which is a worthwhile effort.
But it is commonly thought that one of the applications where hydrogen is not a better fuel is in consumer vehicles. That is a thought that we here at Electrek tend to share. And in fact, Honda’s CEO Toshihiro Mibe shares it too.
Honda stated to us repeatedly that the case for hydrogen would get better in the long term, even in consumer vehicles, but I don’t see this being the case. Hydrogen infrastructure is sparse yet, is not cheaper or faster to build than plugs, there isn’t as much effort being put into it, there isn’t as much demand for it, and while the cost of a fuel cell stack is likely to come down quite rapidly (Honda has brought costs down 2/3 in this generation alone, an impressive feat), the trend lines just don’t look like they will reach the point where FCEV is the right choice.
In fact, we journalists asked several different ways, and Honda declined to comment each time, about what the price of this vehicle would be, what it costs to produce, when or whether Honda plans to make a profit on it, and so on. All we got was that it would be lease-only and some amount of free hydrogen – which costs ~$36/kg right now, which is a fuel cost of 47c/mi, approx. equivalent energy cost to a 10mpg gas vehicle in CA right now – would be included in the lease.
While the question of Honda’s cost to produce these doesn’t really matter (for consumers, price is what matters, and for Honda there can be other considerations too), the underlying implication of our questions was: are you serious about this program? Is it going to last long-term? Is it really part of your business plan? Will it grow fast enough? Or is all of this just a science project?
After all, Honda told us it has been working on hydrogen vehicles for 40 years now, and yet that progress has yielded a vehicle program which plans to sell around 300 vehicles in California per year.
300 vehicles.
In California.
In a year.
Last year, Tesla, a company which has existed for 20 years and been selling volume-produced vehicles for 12, sold 230,589 vehicles in California – one out of every eight cars sold in the state. It sold the best-selling vehicle in the state and the second-best-selling vehicle in the state. All of these vehicles were battery-electric vehicles.
In the same year, Honda sold zero battery-electric vehicles in CA. That will change this year with the Ultium-based Prologue, which Honda plans to start selling in big volume numbers, but the e:FCEV will remain hand-built, in the same Ohio facility that made the hybrid NSX.
We don’t doubt that Honda will find 300 customers for this vehicle, but in a state with over 30 million cars, it’s a rounding error on a rounding error. Honda wants this program to help create demand for hydrogen, so that people will build filling stations. It has invested in First Element, a hydrogen fueling startup, to this end. But it did not commit to building its own hydrogen stations, unlike we’ve seen some other companies do when pushing a new fuel type (that seems to have turned out pretty ok).
Worse yet, I’ve written a similar paragraph before, about the Mazda MX-30. That was a small-production EV from a Japanese company that was only available in California (though a PHEV version of it was available in Europe) and didn’t meet the moment for the market it was entering. I can’t help but see the comparisons.
Honda says that it wants to be carbon neutral by 2050, with 100% of its new vehicle sales being electric by 2040 (though that will have to be sooner in California, and other states, and Europe). By 2030, it plans to offer 30 new BEVs globally and 15 new BEVs in North America.
But the climate crisis is happening now, and Honda mentioned multiple times to us that it is the largest internal combustion engine manufacturer in the world. This means that it can make the biggest positive impact by changing rapidly, and has a high responsibility to do so, given its products’ outsize fraction of global emissions.
So it’s really not the time for testing the market, for attempting to build demand, for pushing a technology that is clearly not the path forward in consumer vehicles. Everyone else has moved on, and BEVs are selling in the millions, monthly, and Honda is still futzing around with science projects.
The industry, and the world, need bigger efforts than this. California-only, lease-only vehicles available in the hundreds are so 2012.
But at least the Prologue exists, an EV that will be sold in significant numbers, and with a more EV-focused philosophy behind it – less of a direct translation from a gas hybrid vehicle. Honda (along with Nissan) does seem more realistic about EVs than some of its Japanese counterparts, particularly under Mibe’s leadership.
And so, all of this means that we struggle to find the importance of the e:FCEV program. While a plug-in fuel cell vehicle is a neat first that does offer better synergies than a gasoline plug-in hybrid (and frankly, we’re amazed nobody thought of this before, it seems obvious in retrospect), the e:FCEV is still steeped in the philosophy of gas vehicles, and of dipping one’s toe in the water, when everyone else at the pool party has been having a great time for a decade now.
The Honda CR-V e:FCEV will be available later this year as a lease-only vehicle, in California only. Pricing has not yet been announced.
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Tesla, a company that prides itself on not advertising, is in the midst of a serious marketing effort. In doing so it’s exploiting employees, attacking shareholders, and retaining outside strategy firms to help it advertise.
It’s running these ads not to boost its falling sales, but rather to advocate for another unprecedented award for its CEO, which would keep the company stuck with him for years even as earnings drop precipitously under his direction.
In September, Tesla’s board proposed a stock award worth up to $1 trillion for CEO Elon Musk. It includes several milestones regarding Tesla stock and product performance, each of which unlocks tens of billions of dollars for Musk.
It’s the largest award proposed for any CEO of any company by multiple orders of magnitude – with previous proposed Musk awards holding the second and third place positions as well. The proposal will be voted on by TSLA shareholders at Tesla’s shareholder meeting on November 6.
Previously, Tesla’s board has attempted to propose smaller, but still absurd, stock awards. A previous proposal to give Musk a ~$55 billion pay package was ruled illegal after the board misled shareholders and was found to be too closely tied to Musk. Tesla then put that same pay package up to another vote, using the same dishonest tactics, where it passed again.
Unsurprisingly, given that the same Elon-tied board engaged in the same misleading behavior as it had before, the pay package was again voided, saving Tesla shareholders $55 billion. That award is now in court again, with another decision soon to come.
The decisions were made by Delaware’s Court of Chancery, a famously pro-corporate court, and this resulted in Musk recommending a knee-jerk move of Tesla’s incorporation to Texas, a state with little established corporate law but where Musk thought he could exercise greater control over shareholders.
But the story has continued. Tesla’s board moved in August to give Musk an “Interim Award” worth ~$26 billion, which would still be the largest pay package for any CEO in history. It’s also more than the total profit Tesla has made over its lifetime (Tesla’s quarterly profits have been dropping for the last couple years, under Musk’s leadership).
Despite all of this, and Musk currently holding position as the richest man in the world, the company he runs has been engaging in underhanded marketing efforts to push its new proposed trillion-dollar reward, which would have tangible harms for shareholders and for the company they’re invested in.
Tesla ‘doesn’t do ads,’ but that’s changing for Musk’s $1T
Tesla has long prided itself on not relying on traditional paid advertisements. Instead, it has relied on word of mouth marketing, social media posts, and press coverage of the company’s ambitious promises in order to stay forefront in the public eye. Musk has stated that he “hates advertising” and that running ads is the equivalent of lying (even as he runs ads with lies in them).
But that’s changing. Tesla hired then quickly fired an ad team, but continues to do social media marketing largely on Twitter, the platform that Musk overpaid billions of dollars for and then turned into a white supremacist haven, causing advertisers to flee (who Musk told to leave and then sued to try to force them back).
After chasing away advertisers, Musk resorted to a common tactic of his – channeling money from one of his public companies into one of his private companies, in the form of paid Tesla advertisements.
Most recently, those advertisements have been focused not on marketing Tesla’s products to twitter users, but rather on marketing Musk’s stock award.
In fact, Tesla even recently broke the last bastion of its reluctance towards certain marketing efforts, and started running paid TV ads, but it wasn’t to market the company’s products, rather just to market Musk’s $1 trillion pay package.
Running any ads in the first place for a shareholder vote seems odd – shareholder proposals usually do come alongside a board recommendation, and that’s usually enough to convince shareholders to vote alongside the board (at least, if the board has proven itself to be working in the best interests of the company, which may not apply here).
But it’s exceptionally rare to see a company undertake a whole advertising campaign, with produced videos, paid ads, and an outside strategy firm to help, especially when those ads don’t just target shareholders, but are on platforms for the general public (though this is perhaps a recognition that a huge percentage of Americans own TSLA stock via their retirement plans, whether they purchased the stock themselves or not).
And the ads are… questionable.
Tesla’s marketing effort has been exploitive to say the least
Just about every day, Tesla has filed a new document with the Securities and Exchange Commission detailing another solicitation it has made regarding the upcoming shareholder vote.
Often these are just tweets by the company or by Musk related to the shareholder vote. Musk has made several statements supporting the vote to his millions of followers on the social media app that he purchased so that he could control narratives and quash free speech on it.
Tesla has also purchased several ads on Google, moving beyond just Musk-owned properties.
But these solicitations also include produced videos by the company telling shareholders to vote on it. Two of these ads include testimonials by Tesla employees, stating how Tesla stock improved their lives.
In the videos, the two Tesla employees state that they wouldn’t have been able to own a home if it weren’t for Tesla stock.
One, Kiyoko, invokes her dead father, who would have been proud to see her owning a home.
Another employee, Sarah, invokes her daughter, who couldn’t have had a quinceañera if not for Tesla stock (notably, Musk is also the largest individual funder of a group that is racially profiling Mexican-Americans, staking out high school graduations to break up families and putting pressure on local businesses, including quinceañera dress-sellers).
Put aside for a moment the nightmare scenario where housing is so unaffordable that workers need to feel lucky to be able to afford a place to live after having held a job for 12 years (and apparently are unable afford that house through salary alone, instead needing to rely on a highly overvalued stock to get them there), these emotional statements seem designed to distract from the rational case against this stock award, and to pull on heart strings instead.
They also conflate stock options for the employees that keep Tesla running, and who are counting on those options to help pay for their housing, with an unprecedented stock award for its part-time CEO so he can, uh… bribe more political candidates?
And if you’re wondering how giving the world’s richest man a trillion dollars will help Kiyoko afford a home or Sarah afford a quinceañera, you’re not wrong to wonder. These ought to be two different concepts, but because of the nefarious structure of the shareholder vote, they’re not.
Tesla stock helped employees. Now it can’t, since Elon took it all
One of the questions being asked is whether or not to refill Tesla’s “general share reserve” of shares set aside to be granted to employees as compensation.
Proposal 3 not only fills the general share reserve with 60 million shares as compensation for Tesla’s current and future employees (of which the company currently numbers ~120,000 strong), but also fills a “special share reserve” with nearly 208 million shares for one single part-time employee, Elon Musk, who spends most of his time working for companies other than Tesla (and whose interests can be directly opposed to Tesla’s). The board would be able to give these shares, currently worth around $91 billion, to Musk at their discretion without further shareholder approval.
This is one of many issues brought up by several pension funds who named their concerns with the shareholder proposals. Normally, it would seem reasonable to split up the “general” and “special” share reserve votes, but Tesla has seen it fit to combine the two – such that if you want Tesla to be able to compensate employees with shares, you must also accept that Musk will have 3.5x as many shares set aside for him personally as will be set aside for every other employee at the company combined.
It must feel incredibly insulting for the engineers who actually design the cars, the manufacturing associates who build them, the software team that continues to improve the best software out there, the best-in-the-biz charging team, et cetera, to see a guy who spends most of his time working for other companies (or pretending to be good at video games on his private jet) and be told that he’s worth hundreds of thousands of times more than you are.
Even worse, the reason this vote is necessary is because the share reserve was recently drained… to pay Elon Musk.
When Musk’s friends on the Tesla board decided to hand him an “Interim Award” of $26 billion without a shareholder vote, the process through which they did this was to simply award shares to Musk that had previously been set aside in Tesla’s share reserve.
Those shares had been intended to be available for years to come, as compensation for employees, to help Tesla attract and compensate talent (as the heartstring-tugging videos above suggest). But instead, almost the entire reserve was drained to give to Musk, with only one stipulation: that he continue working at Tesla for two years.
But that’s only part of the shares that Musk would get if these shareholder votes pass, because those 208 million shares aren’t even associated with the separate $1 trillion award in Proposal 4, which would include over 423 million shares. So now we’re up to 630+ million shares for Musk (~276B at current TSLA valuation), and only 60 million for every other employee at Tesla combined, being voted on at this shareholder meeting.
And even if proposal 4 is voted down, the board could still give Musk $91 billion worth of stock, and it’s holding employees’ compensation hostage to ensure that it be able to do so.
Musk gets largest payday ever for being a bad employee
The Interim Award was given with the rationale that it might “focus and energize” the CEO, who has been distracted with his running of several other companies and his world famous social media addiction as Tesla earnings and sales have been dropping in an otherwise rising market.
Tesla’s sales drops are largely due to the brand damage Musk himself is doing, and also its lack of innovation under his direction – but at least he can sell some cars to himself to try to hide this failure.
Tesla got saved in Q3 by a pull-forward in demand due to the end of US tax credits (which Musk himself backed, despite that his actions have hurt Tesla in more ways than one), but otherwise its earnings have been trending dangerously close to unprofitability.
Thus, this marks not only the largest payday in the history of the world, but the largest payday given with explicit acknowledgement that the payee is an underperforming and distracted employee, leading the company in a worse direction.
And yet, the board wants shareholders to approve even more pay for that bad employee, and has attached no strings to require he stop distracting himself with other companies, merely hoping that the promise of a large payday will coax Musk into being less terrible at his job than he has recently.
But it has to be an exceptionally large payday if Musk is to complete his goals (and to be clear, they are Musk’s goal, not the company’s), given the inflated nature of TSLA stock.
This is about power… and money
Musk wants this award because he wants more control over Tesla. He has stated clearly many times that he “doesn’t feel comfortable” with his current ownership percentage, even though it’s the result of him continually selling Tesla stock to fund his white supremacist, anti-free-speech project on twitter.
After his many stock sales, his ownership percentage has diluted from around a quarter of the company in 2021 to around 13% today. Musk has threatened Tesla shareholders, saying that that “the future of the world” relies on him getting $1 trillion and that if he doesn’t get 25% of the company he will take AI and robots elsewhere (nevermind that he already has sent Tesla resources to his private company in multiple ways, and wants Tesla shareholders to bail twitter/xAI out, another proposal on the current slate of votes).
Musk having more voting power would protect him from shareholder proposals that seek to improve Tesla’s corporate governance, as several proposals in front of shareholders right now would do. These include modifications to Tesla’s bylaws enabling changes through majority vote rather than supermajority vote, and repealing the threshold requirement to bring derivative actions against the company.
If Musk had 25% of the company, that makes it a lot easier for him to vote a chunk of his shares towards consolidating his power, and makes him less accountable to shareholders who are rightly concerned about Tesla’s current dropping sales and earnings under his direction.
And given that the vote on the current pay package somehow allows Musk to vote his own shares in support of it (unlike the last one, where he was recused), there’s no reason he couldn’t continue to do the same in the future, and have even more opportunity to enrich himself and consolidate power at the cost of all other Tesla shareholders.
But beyond the power, it’s also about money (as Fred here at Electrek pointed out). If Musk wanted to increase his ownership percentage, he could have Tesla engage in stock buybacks, which would not only decrease dilution for him but also for other shareholders who hold long term. This would also increase share prices, something shareholders might like to see (but then again, it would also require profits, which have tanked recently under Musk’s direction).
Instead, the plan increases dilution for everyone by printing hundreds of millions of shares – dilution for everyone except Musk, who gets far more shares than everyone else combined.
But you better not bring that up, because if so, Tesla might put out a mean tweet about you.
Tesla pays for PR to attack its own shareholders
We covered a group of pension funds who brought up many of these legitimate concerns in a dispassionate letter sent to Tesla investors, including the draining of the share reserve to pay Musk, the negative effect of dilution on current shareholders, and others. The concerns are well-argued and the letter is signed by several public pension funds, whose interest is generally in stable long-term returns, rather than volatility or speculation.
Many public funds are required to invest significantly in funds like the S&P 500, of which TSLA is an outsized member. They are also interested in a generally less volatile economy overall, and thus, it makes sense that they would argue in favor of stability.
The funds also stated that the requirements for various tranches of Musk’s share reward are somewhat arbitrary, and that many could be met easily with creative interpretations. Others have pointed out the same, recognizing even meeting the easiest targets would pay Musk more than the lifetime pay of the next 8 highest-paid CEOs combined.
But after these valid criticisms were lodged, Tesla responded in a way that should not be a surprise for longtime watchers of the company – by doubling down and firing back.
Tesla put out a tweet titled “setting the record straight,” essentially just making the same argument it has already made. It claims that there is no way to creatively interpret product goals, that the board is “disinterested” (that is, they do not hold a personal financial interest in the outcome, which is an odd thing to say about the personal friends and family of Musk on Tesla’s board), and that this plan, which will dilute current shareholders’ holdings in order to retain a bad CEO for the next decade, is “in the interest of shareholders.”
It also claims that none of the operational milestones are “easy” and that previously-cited creative interpretations would not be possible. However, even with only below-average share growth and flat vehicle delivery growth, Tesla is on course to easily reach some of the simpler milestones (well, perhaps this is hard with a CEO who is seemingly doing his best to ruin company performance…), which would still result in a record payday many times over.
And it ends the tweet with a slight against the performance of the various public funds who signed on to the letter. Tesla claims that it has provided much better returns than each of the funds, which have had 6.51%-13.3% annualized returns since 2018. Notably, these are in line with the expected returns that a public fund counts on (with S&P averaging ~8%), who typically invest in stable companies rather than speculating on high-risk investments or tech companies with unheard-of 250:1 P/E ratios (which only gets higher as price goes up and earnings go down).
Sending this tweet about an active shareholder vote is already a rare move as far as public companies go, but Tesla, who does not advertise, also seems to have retained an outside firm to further publicize its rebuttal. Due to our previous article on this matter, we got an email from FGS Global, which bills itself as “the world’s leading stakeholder strategy firm,” directing our attention to the tweet. We asked FGS why it thought diluting shareholders by $1 trillion was truly the optimal strategy for stakeholders, and did not receive an answer.
Since then, proxy advisory group ISS, the largest independent advisor for institutional investors which offers disinterested insight into shareholder proposals, has also recommended against voting for the proposals. Tesla responded by attacking ISS in a tweet.
Even if you think Musk is necessary, this isn’t Tesla’s best option
Defenders of the plan will argue that shareholders will benefit if share targets are met. But that’s a big “if,” and even if they are met, how much of that can we attribute to the direction of a distracted CEO (with no requirement to not be distracted), and is it really necessary to give that CEO a full trillion dollars worth of dilution in order to get the performance requested?
Again, Musk has already been given the largest payday in history out of shares that were earmarked for employees, and now a payday that’s over thirty times larger than that has been proposed. Even at the inflated share prices that would be necessary to meet milestone targets for the award, shareholders would still have their voting rights and share appreciation diluted by about 12%.
Could a similar goal not be achieved with much smaller dilution, say around 1%, which would still be the largest payday ever proposed for a CEO? And is Musk even worth that much to begin with, given his poor recent performance and his behavior that has proven to be hostile to his own company’s interests? (via lobbying for anti-EV policy, doing Tesla brand damage, self-dealing to benefit his own private companies with Tesla’s public assets, firing Tesla’s best teams on an ego trip, and so on)
Heck, even the option of buying xAI in an all-stock deal, at its absurd $200B valuation, would cost Tesla less than these two proposals would (~$276B, at current TSLA valuation). This idea would also do more to ensure Musk’s focus as then he would no longer split his time between his private companies which have his current interest and his public one, since all would be under the same umbrella.
To be clear, that would also be a terrible idea, due to ethical concerns that are currently subject to a lawsuit over Musk conflicts of interest (and surprise surprise, that terrible idea is also up for a shareholder vote). But the fact that there are potential legal problems with each of the options the board did consider is perhaps an indication that another individual, one without such a history of working in his own interests rather than the company’s, would be a better fit for Tesla.
Bad for employees, shareholders, and Tesla’s mission/ethics… so why is Tesla pushing it?
It seems quite clear that the option given to shareholders is not the optimal solution, but due to Tesla’s captured board, it’s the option that’s been put on the table. And since it benefits them (in fact, so much that the board had to return nearly $1 billion in excessive compensation) and their personal friend Elon Musk, it’s the only option shareholders get to vote on.
Were the board interested in Tesla’s best interests, some other options might be on the table. But they aren’t; they’re interested in their friend Elon’s best interests. The driving factor isn’t the goals of Tesla or its shareholders, but the goals of Elon.
If the board were independent and truly interested in Tesla’s best performance, it wouldn’t saddle the company with a hostile CEO for a decade, it wouldn’t overpay that CEO, it would be more sensitive to dilution, it would engage in options that are less likely to result in legal challenges, it would at least ensure that CEO work in the company’s interests, and it would use a more deliberative process than having a few of that CEO’s friends propose a comically large payday just so he can get himself out of the hole he dug for himself with a social media addiction so bad that he overpaid for his favorite app (twice).
The only concessions the board has made to any idea of reasonable governance is that it made the adoption of a succession plan a prerequisite for the last 2 (out of 12) tranches of stock. So Musk can still get ~558 million shares of stock without even giving a thought to what future the company might have with competent corporate governance.
Will shareholders finally reject this ridiculousness?
And yet, shareholders may vote for it, just like last time. That last vote had about the same downsides as this one, but TSLA shareholders voted for it anyway (twice, even after it was revealed they were lied to on the first vote).
But shareholders must currently feel trapped by Musk’s rhetoric. Even though he’s a bad CEO in terms of company performance, his constant overpromising has led to high appreciation of Tesla stock, with the market seeming much more interested in Musk’s constantly-delayed fantasies than in Tesla’s current performance. Essentially, Musk is saying “give me $1 trillion or I won’t lie for you anymore.”
Shareholders are worried that if Musk is gone, the market will no longer overvalue its future performance, and there might be a correction towards more realistic share price levels. Even though a competent CEO might benefit Tesla’s financial performance as a company, it may harm TSLA’s status as a meme stock.
And that’s what this particularly frothy market has become. Rather than investing in a company to focus on its products or even its future, “investors” have become consumers of the stock first, and focused on maintaining whatever illusions have resulted in these absurd price levels. TSLA shareholders have made the wrong decision before on an intrinsically similar issue, so it wouldn’t be a big surprise if they do the same here, only even dumber and ~20x bigger.
It is perhaps heartening that Tesla has seen it necessary to market the award so heavily, as Tesla can see results as they come in.
The more Tesla markets, the more it may suggest that the company may not like the numbers its seeing, and is desperate to swing the vote in its favor. (Either that, or the whole thing is engineered to give Musk something to act victimized about after the fact, when inevitably the award sees legal challenges again.)
For Tesla’s sake, for the EV transition as a whole, and perhaps for the future of the world, let’s hope it’s the former.
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New York City just brought another EV fast-charging station online, this time in the Bronx, one of the city’s most underserved areas for clean transportation.
The New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) has opened a new public fast-charging station at its White Plains Road Municipal Parking Field in the Bronx Park East section of the borough, at 2071 White Plains Road.
The site includes four DC fast chargers, three 50 kW units, and one 175 kW unit, which can give most EVs an 80% charge in about 20 minutes. Four additional Level 2 chargers can fully charge most vehicles in six to eight hours.
This new Bronx hub sits in a community with one of the city’s highest concentrations of Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) drivers. Nearly 1,000 TLC-licensed drivers live nearby, and another 1,500 live in adjacent neighborhoods. TLC drivers can sign up through the EV Connect app for a 15% discount on charging fees.
“Achieving a greener transportation future means investing in electric vehicle chargers that will help us say goodbye to fossil fuels,” said NYC DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez, a former cab driver himself. “East Bronxites will benefit significantly from these new EV chargers, and we look forward to continuing this critical work to fulfill the Adams administration’s ambitious goals.”
Those goals include the Green Rides Initiative, which aims to make all high-volume for-hire vehicle trips zero-emission or wheelchair-accessible by 2030. The new Bronx station also moves the city closer to Mayor Adams’ PlaNYC target of ensuring that every New Yorker lives within 2.5 miles of a fast charger by 2035. With this latest installation, the share of New Yorkers who live near a fast charger jumps from 81% to 88%.
The Bronx currently has the fewest fast chargers of any borough, and most of the city’s existing stations are concentrated in higher-income areas of Manhattan and inner Brooklyn and Queens. NYC DOT says this new location is part of a push to make EV charging more equitable and accessible.
As of September 2025, 79,036 EVs are registered in New York City – about 25% of New York State’s EVs.
Read more: NYC’s newest EV charger hangs 10 feet high on a lamppost
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The 2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5 was one of the most affordable EVs you could lease in the US. Although the $7,500 EV credit has now expired, Hyundai is keeping the savings going with the 2026 model.
Hyundai extends EV deals for the 2026 IONIQ 5
Hyundai reduced prices on the 2026 IONIQ 5 by up to $9,800 earlier this month compared to the outgoing model. Starting at under $35,000, it’s now one of the most affordable EVs, putting it on par with the Chevy Equinox EV.
The Hyundai IONIQ 5 remains a top-selling EV in the US, and may still be your best bet if you’re looking to go electric.
You can still lease the new 2026 Hyundai IONIQ 5 SE Standard Range for as low as $289 per month. That’s only $10 more per month than before the $7,500 federal EV tax credit expired at the end of September. The offer is for a 24-month lease with $3,999 due at signing.
However, upgrading to the longer-range SE trim might be an even better option. The 2026 IONIQ 5 SE is listed at just $299 per month, even though it costs $2,500 more than the base model at $37,500.
The standard range model has an EPA-estimated driving range of 245 miles, while the SE trim offers considerably more, at up to 318 miles. For just 10$ more per month, a 30% improvement in range is a pretty sweet deal.
Hyundai is offering $4,500 in lease cash on the longer range 2026 IONIQ 5 SE, compared to just $750 for the base model.
| Hyundai IONIQ 5 Trim | Driving Range (miles) | 2025 Starting Price | 2026 Starting Price* | Price Reduction |
| IONIQ 5 SE RWD Standard Range | 245 | $42,600 | $35,000 | ($7,600) |
| IONIQ 5 SE RWD | 318 | $46,650 | $37,500 | ($9,150) |
| IONIQ 5 SEL RWD | 318 | $49,600 | $39,800 | ($9,800) |
| IONIQ 5 Limited RWD | 318 | $54,300 | $45,075 | ($9,225) |
| IONIQ 5 SE Dual Motor AWD | 290 | $50,150 | $41,000 | ($9,150) |
| IONIQ 5 SEL Dual Motor AWD | 290 | $53,100 | $43,300 | ($9,800) |
| IONIQ 5 XRT Dual Motor AWD | 259 | $55,500 | $46,275 | ($9,225) |
| IONIQ 5 Limited Dual Motor AWD | 269 | $58,200 | $48,975 | ($9,225) |
For those looking to save a little extra, Hyundai is still offering $11,000 in retail cash on 2025 IONIQ 5 models and 0% APR financing for 72 months. The 2025 IONIQ 5 can be leased from $189 per month until November 3. The offer is also for 36 months with $3,999 due at signing.
Interested in test-driving Hyundai’s electric SUV? You can use our link to find Hyundai IONIQ 5 models at a dealership near you.
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