In a sudden reversal, Hyundai’s new IONIQ 5 and IONIQ 9 EVs no longer qualify for the $7,500 US tax credit. Although this is a major blow to one of the top-selling EV brands in the US, there is still a way you can get the credit. Here’s how.
Hyundai EVs lose US federal tax credit in 2025
After setting another new US retail sales record last year, its fourth straight, Hyundai expected 2025 could be even bigger.
“With exciting new models like the IONIQ 9 and increased US production ramping up at our new Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America in Georgia, I’m confident this momentum will continue,” Hyundai Motor North America CEO Randy Parker said.
Earlier this month, Hyundai announced its new 2025 IONIQ 5 and IONIQ 9, both made in the US, qualified for the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.
This was significant news because it was the first time Hyundai qualified since the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed in 2022.
The upgraded 2025 IONIQ 5 and Hyundai’s three-row IONIQ 9 were among 25 EVs that qualified for the credit in early January.
2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5 XRT (Source: Hyundai)
According to the updated list from the Department of Energy (DOE) last week, Hyundai no longer has eligible EV models. The only Hyundai Motor Group (including Kia and Genesis) electric cars that qualify are the 2025 Kia EV6 and 2026 Kia EV9. Genesis, Hyundai’s luxury brand, also lost eligibility.
Hyundai began production at its new $7.6 billion EV plant in Georgia in October. The new 2025 IONIQ 5 was the first to roll off the assembly line, which will be joined by Hyundai’s three-row IONIQ 9.
2026 Hyundai IONIQ 9 (Source: Hyundai)
Last year, Hyundai said it expected US-built models would qualify for a partial $3,750 credit until its battery unit with SK On came online, which was expected sometime in 2025.
Kia builds the new 2025 EV6 and three-row EV9 at its West Point, GA plant, enabling it to still qualify for the credit.
Meanwhile, Hyundai is still passing the $7,500 EV tax credit on through leasing. With leases starting as low as $199 per month, the new 2025 IONIQ 5 is still cheaper than a new Toyota RAV4.
2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5 (Source: Hyundai)
With a bigger 84 kWh battery, the 2025 IONIQ 5 has a driving range of up to 328 miles, up from 303 miles in the outgoing model, which had a 77.4 kWh battery. It also gains noticeable design upgrades and now includes an NACS port for charging at Tesla Superchargers.
The IONIQ 5 was already the fourth-top-selling electric vehicle in the US last year. With more range, an upgraded design, and a Tesla NACS port, it will be even more attractive in 2025.
2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5 Trim
EV Powertrain
Driving Range (miles)
Starting Price*
IONIQ 5 SE RWD Standard Range
168-horsepower rear motor
245
$42,500
IONIQ 5 SE RWD
225-horsepower rear motor
318
$46,550
IONIQ 5 SEL RWD
225-horsepower rear motor
318
$49,500
IONIQ 5 Limited RWD
225-horsepower rear motor
318
$54,200
IONIQ 5 SE Dual Motor AWD
320-horsepower dual motor
290
$50,050
IONIQ 5 SEL Dual Motor AWD
320-horsepower dual motor
290
$53,000
IONIQ 5 XRT Dual Motor AWD
320 horsepower dual motor
259
$55,400
IONIQ 5 Limited Dual Motor AWD
320-horsepower dual motor
269
$58,100
2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5 prices and range by trim (*includes $1,475 destination fee)
Hyundai launched a new promo last week. It offers those who buy or lease the new 2025 IONIQ 5 a free ChargePoint Level 2 EV charger. Alternatively, you can choose a $400 charging credit.
Are you ready to test Hyundai’s new electric vehicles for yourself? We can help you get started. Check out our links below to find deals on Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis EVs at a dealer near you today.
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A new study by the Pembina Institute shows that a third of the commercial trucks and vans on Toronto’s roads are ready to electrify today – while nearly half could be electrified by 2030.
A new analysis by the Pembina Institute titled Electrifying Fleet Trucks: A case study estimating potential in the GTHA finds that as many as a third of trucks in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) could go electric today, rising to more than half by early 2030s — insulating businesses from rising fuel costs and reducing harmful air pollution that drives up health care costs. What’s more, the report found that battery range and charging access are less of a barrier than expected.
“Real-world travel data from Canadian trucks, collected over summer and winter months, shows that electrification is possible today,” says Chandan Bhardwaj, Senior Analyst at the Pembina Institute. “In fact, with a staggered approach, the GTHA — home to over half the province’s vehicle stock — could reach 50% sales for lighter trucks by 2030, helping offset lower adoption rates for heavier trucks.”
So, what’s holding back electric vehicle adoption? According to the study’s authors, it’s a matter of public policy. But without the right policies in place, the study argues, businesses face unnecessary hurdles in making the switch.
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“Our analysis shows that Ontario has a clear path to accelerating the transition to zero-emission trucks — unlocking economic opportunities, improving public health and positioning itself as a leader in clean transportation,” says Adam Thorn, Transportation Director at the Pembina Institute. “With the right policies in place, businesses can reap the benefits of lower costs while the province strengthens its manufacturing sector and energy security.”
We already knew this
Schneider electric semis charging in El Monte, CA; via NACFE.
CARB staff believe that several heavy-duty ZE vocational trucks are ready to be electrified because of their low daily mileage demands (<100 mi). Long-haul Class 8 trucks continue to be a challenge to fully electrify because of the long operation range (300+ mi) and on-demand charging need.
In fact, the California study came to almost the exact conclusion that the Toronto study did when examining the heavy-duty Class 7 and 8 EV market. Which is to say: it’s not a question of capability, but a question of availability.
“The availability of on-road heavy-duty ZE trucks has increased in recent years,” reads the report. “But their numbers remain significantly lower than their diesel and natural gas counterparts. As of 2022, an estimated 2,300 on-road ZE medium- and heavy-duty vehicles are operating in California, with the vast majority located in South Coast Air Bassin (Figure 1). On-road heavy-duty ZE transit buses account for the majority of all on-road heavy-duty ZEVs in California, but, as of 2023, sales of ZE heavy-duty trucks and medium-duty step vans have outpaced other vocations, indicating that these vehicles will be more prevalent in fleets in the near future.”
Businesses can save up to 40% of fuel and maintenance costs by switching to electric trucks.
Electric trucks eliminate tailpipe emissions, cutting harmful air pollution and improve public health.
Traffic related air pollution in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area leads to 700 premature deaths and 2,800 hospitalizations every year, costing health care system $4.6 billion annually.
Ontario’s Driving Prosperity plan highlights the need for increased electrification, while the City of Toronto is targeting 30% of all registered vehicles to be electric by 2030.
Governments worldwide are embracing electrification, setting ambitious sales targets for zero-emission vans and trucks.
By 2030, jurisdictions like Europe, China, California, British Columbia and Quebec aim for about 35% of new truck sales to be zero-emission, ramping up to nearly 100% by 2040.
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Tesla’s former head of artificial intelligence, Andrej Karpathy, who worked on the automaker’s self-driving effort until 2022, warns against believing that self-driving is solved, and fully autonomous vehicles are happening soon.
Karpathy is a very respected leader in the field of artificial intelligence.
In 2017, Musk poached him from OpenAI and he quickly became the head of Tesla’s AI effort, including leading neural nets for Autopilot and Full Self-Driving.
He left Tesla in 2022 and return briefly to OpenAI in 2023 before starting his own in AI education company, Eureka Labs.
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The Slovak-Canadian computer scientist is widely regarded as one of the top computer vision experts and he pioneered Tesla’s vision-only approach to self-driving.
Karpathy gave a talk at Y Combinator’s AI Startup School event this week and made some interesting comments about self-driving.
He recounted when a friend working at then Google self-driving company, now Waymo, gave him a ride in a self-driving car in 2013:
We got into this car and we went for an about 30-minute drive around Palo Alto, highways, streets and so on, and that drive was perfect. Zero intervention. And this was 2013. It was about 12 years ago.It kind of struck me because at the time when I had this perfect drive, this perfect demo, I thought “well, self-driving is imminent because this just work. This is incredible.” But here we are, 12 years later, and we are still working on autonomy. We are still working on driving (AI) agents. Even now, we haven’t actually solved the problem.
12 years later, Waymo currently operates over 1,000 vehicles in California, Arizona, and Texas where it completes hundreds of thousands of autonomous rides with paying customers every week, but Karpathy explains that this doesn’t mean autonomy is solved.
He continues:
You may sees Waymos going around and they look driverless, but there’s still a lot of teleoperation and lot of humans in the loop in this driving.
Waymo has confirmed that it uses some teleopeartion, but it’s not clear to what level. It’s clear that it at least communicates commands to the vehicles remotely when they get stuck.
Kaparthy adds:
We still haven’t declared success, but I think it’s definitely going to succeed at this point, but it just took a long time.
The engineer added that “software is tricky” and that he believes that “AI agents”, which is a term often use to describe AIs that can perform tasks for humans, like driving a vehicle, are going to take time. He believes this is not the year of AI agents, but the decade of AI agents.
Here’s the full presentation:
Electrek’s Take
While Kaparthy didn’t name Tesla, the timing of his comments as Tesla is launching its “Robotaxi” service this weekend is interesting.
It certainly contracdits what his former boss, Elon Musk, is saying: that self-driving is solved.
As we have often highlighted in recent weeks, Tesla’s Robotaxi launch is simply a game of optics for Tesla to be able to claim a win in self-driving after years of broken promises and missed deadlines just as Waymo is rapidly expanding its own self-driving services.
Tesla Robotaxi launch a game of optics?
Electrek’s @fredlambert94: “Tesla is trying to get a win and say that it ‘launched its robotaxi on time in June’ when this is basically Tesla’s public FSD with the supervising driver being moved to the passenger seat.” pic.twitter.com/o3eSyqKxlJ
I think Kaparthy, who led Tesla’s computer vision effort behind self-driving, knows that has yet to solve the problem and will require human supervision for a while longer.
Based on the best data available, Tesla currently achieves a few hundred miles between critical disengagement with FSD and it needs to get into tends of thousands of miles to achieve a true level 4 autonomous systems.
We are still a few years away from that at best.
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Senior Israeli officials said this week that their military campaign against Iran could trigger the fall of the regime, an event that would have enormous implications for the global oil market.
The oil market has reacted with remarkable restraint as Israel has bombed the third-largest crude producer in OPEC for eight straight days, with no clear sign the conflict will end anytime soon.
Oil prices are up about 10% since Israel launched its attack on Iran a week ago, but with oil supplies so far undisturbed, both U.S. crude oil and the global benchmark Brent remain below $80 per barrel.
Rising risk
Still, the risk of a supply disruption that triggers a big spike in prices is growing the longer the conflict rages on, according to energy analysts.
President Donald Trump has threatened the life of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and is considering helping Israel destroy the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. For its part, Iran’s leadership is more likely to target regional oil facilities if it feels its very existence is at stake, the analysts said.
Israel’s primary aim is to degrade Iran’s nuclear program, said Scott Modell, CEO of the consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group. But Jerusalem also appears to have a secondary goal of damaging Iran’s security establishment to such an extent that the country’s domestic opposition can rise up against the regime, Modell said.
“They’re not calling it regime change from without, they’re calling it regime change from within,” said Modell, a former CIA officer and Iran expert who served in the Middle East.
Official denial
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denies that regime change is Israel’s official goal, telling a public broadcaster on Thursday that domestic governance is an internal Iranian decision. But the prime minister ascknowledged Khamenei’s regime could fall as a consequence of the conflict.
There are no signs that the regime in Iran is on the verge of collapse, Modell said.
But further political destabilization in Iran “could lead to significantly higher oil prices sustained over extended periods,” said Natasha Kaneva, head of global commodities research at JPMorgan, in a note to clients this week.
There have been eight cases of regime change in major oil producing countries since 1979, according to JPMorgan. Oil prices spiked 76% on average at their peak in the wake of these changes, before pulling back to stabilize at a price about 30% higher compared to pre-crisis levels, according to the bank.
For example, oil prices nearly tripled from mid-1979 to mid-1980 after the Iranian revolution deposed the Shah and brought the Islamic Republic to power, according to JPMorgan. That triggered a worldwide economic recession.
More recently, the revolution in Libya that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi jolted oil prices from $93 per barrel in January 2011 to $130 per barrel by April that year, according to JPMorgan. That price spike coincided with the European debt crisis and nearly caused a global recession, according to the bank.
Bigger than Libya
Regime change in Iran would have a much bigger impact on the global oil market than the 2011 revolution in Libya because Iran is far bigger producer, Modell said.
“We would need to see some strong indicators that the state is coming to a halt, that regime change is starting to look real before the market would really start pricing in three plus million barrels a day going offline,” Modell said.
If the regime in Iran believes it is facing an existential crisis, it could use its stockpile of short-range missiles to target energy facilities in the region and oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, said Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets.
Tehran could also try to mine the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow body of water between Iran and Oman through which about 20% of the world’s oil flows, Croft said.
“We’re already getting reports that Iran is jamming ship transponders very, very aggressively,” Croft told CNBC’s “Fast Money” on Wednesday. QatarEnergy and the Greek Shipping Ministry have already warned their vessels to avoid the strait as much as possible, Croft said.
“These are not calm waters even though we have not had missiles flying in the straits,” she said.
Greater than even odds
Rapidan sees a 70% chance the U.S. will join Israeli airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Oil prices would probably rally $4 to $6 per barrel if Iran’s key uranium enrichment facility at Fordow is hit, Modell said. Iran will likely respond in a limited fashion to ensure the regime’s survival, he said.
But there is also a 30% risk of Iran disrupting energy supplies by retaliating against infrastructure in the Gulf or vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, according to Rapidan. Oil prices could surge above $100 per barrel if Iran fully mobilizes to disrupt shipping in the strait, according to the firm.
“They could disrupt, in our view, shipping through Hormuz by a lot longer than the market thinks,” said Bob Bob McNally, Rapidan’s founder and former energy advisor to President George W. Bush.
Shipping could be interrupted for weeks or months, McNally said, rather than the oil market’s view that the United States Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, would resolve the situation in hours or days.