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Rad Power Bikes, one of the most well-known electric bike brands in the US, has just announced the launch of three new RadRunner models. The updates bring new hardware and software to the popular line of compact utility e-bikes and introduce a brand new RadRunner trim known as the RadRunner Max.

Since its launch in 2019, the RadRunner has defined a new category short tail cargo e-bikes, often referred to as utility e-bikes. Combining aspects of agile mopeds, compact folding bikes, and heavy duty cargo e-bikes, the RadRunner line has become a do-anything style of bike designed for folks tackling many jobs with a single e-bike.

Today’s unveiling of the new RadRunner, RadRunner Plus, and RadRunner Max marks the latest evolution in that lineup.

The new RadRunner Plus offers upgraded features and hardware

The three models share a similar frame and much of the same hardware, offering Rad’s SafeShield UL-listed batteries with thermal-resistant technology, hydraulic brakes, higher payloads, all-terrain tires in standard sizes for ease of replacement, IPX6 water-resistance, and new passcode protection for anti-theft.

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But despite their similarities, the three models carry unique features and loadouts.

The new RadRunner is a Class 2 e-bike, meaning speeds limited to 20 mph (32 km/h) and a motor power limit of 750W. It has an upgrade 320 lb total payload, a 65 Nm torque rating, and a range of 55 miles (88 km).

While it has the option to mount a number of interesting accessories, the new RadRunner Plus comes standard with many of those add-ons. The RadRunner Plus maintains the Class 2 performance but includes passenger carrying gear like foot pegs, a rear bench seat, and protective wheel skirt. A higher torque 70 Nm motor offers more strength for multiple riders and the inclusion of a suspension fork helps smooth out the ride.

The RadRunner Plus is also compatible with a new RangeExtender accessory offered by Rad, which adds more battery capacity to the bike and enables longer rides or fewer recharges each week for regular riders.

The new RadRunner Max is now the company’s top-of-the-line RadRunner and ups the ante with Class 3 performance. The bike’s top speed of 28 mph (45 km/h) provides faster riding, though the speed limit can of course be adjusted by the owner if higher speeds aren’t desired. The RadRunner Max’s torque sensor provides a smoother and more natural feeling pedal assist experience, and the company says that it has been tuned to “replicate the smooth, responsive feel of accelerating in a car, minus the emissions.”

The RadRunner Max also includes Apple FindMy location tracking built into the e-bike and a digital key that lets riders unlock the bike simply by approaching it with their phone in their pocket. A new radar feature even alerts riders to approaching vehicles with a warning directly on the bike’s display.

“Since joining Rad, I’ve been energized by the opportunity to build on the company’s strong foundation and connect even more people to the power of e-bikes,” said Kathi Lentzsch, who came on board as the new CEO of Rad Power Bikes last month. “The new RadRunner lineup is all about giving riders more versatility, more comfort, and more confidence. Just like these new models offer options to match different riding needs, we’re continuing to provide riders with flexible ways to find the right ebike for them, whether that’s online, in one of our RadRetail stores, or through our growing network of retail partners across the country.”

Priced at US $1,499 and $1,799, the RadRunner and RadRunner Plus provide a more budget-minded entry point into Rad’s most popular utility-style e-bike. Carrying a heftier US $2,299 pricetag, the RadRunner Max’s flagship price speaks to its upgraded hardware and software features that provide riders with even more features, though at a price.

All three new models are available to order today, though the RadRunner Max requires a pre-order ahead of shipping early next month.

Oh, and for those who would like a steal on Rad’s previous version, the RadRunner 2, the company is now selling them on super discount at just $999.

Rad Power Bikes RadRunner marks the entry-level model in the RadRunner lineup

Electrek’s Take

It’s no secret that Rad has taken its fair share of knocks over the last few years, but that apparently hasn’t stopped the company from continuing to develop and roll out new models of e-bikes each year. The RadRunner is likely my favorite platform from Rad, so to see it get the attention it deserves with a wide range of new options is great news.

The Max’s 28 mph Class 3 speed option is music to my ears. The RadRunner has always offered a combination of a moped-style frame and delightfully rounded moped-style tires just begging for faster speeds, so I’m glad to see Rad finally give everyone what they really wanted.

The pricing might have seemed a bit high a few months ago, but now that e-bike companies are staring down the still-smoking barrel of a tariff gun wielded by someone with an itchy trigger finger, the prices suddenly don’t seem as high as they could have been. There’s a lot of uncertainty left in the e-bike market, regardless of where e-bikes are produced, and so I don’t envy anyone trying to strategize pricing at a time like this.

Financials aside, the bikes look great and the features add a lot of value on top of an already highly utilitarian platform. Now I’m excited to ride one – and you better believe it’s the RadRunner Max that I have my eye on.

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Tesla launches Oasis Supercharger with solar farm and off-grid batteries

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Tesla launches Oasis Supercharger with solar farm and off-grid batteries

Tesla has launched its new Oasis Supercharger, the long-promised EV charging station of the future, with a solar farm and off-grid batteries.

Early in the deployment of the Supercharger network, Tesla promised to add solar arrays and batteries to the Supercharger stations, and CEO Elon Musk even said that most stations would be able to operate off-grid.

While Tesla did add solar and batteries to a few stations, the vast majority of them don’t have their own power system or have only minimal solar canopies.

Back in 2016, I asked Musk about this, and he said that it would now happen as Tesla had the “pieces now in place” with Supercharger V3, Powerpack V2, and SolarCity:

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All of these pieces have been in place for years, and Tesla has now discontinued the Powerpack in favor of the Megapack. The Supercharger network is also transitioning to V4 stations.

Yet, solar and battery deployment haven’t accelerated much in the decade since Musk made that comment, but it is finally happening.

Last year, Tesla announced a new project called ‘Oasis’, which consists of a new model Supercharger station with a solar farm and battery storage enabling off-grid operations in Lost Hills, California.

Tesla has now unveiled the project and turned on most of the Supercharger stalls:

The project consists of 168 chargers, with half of them currently operational, making it one of the largest Supercharger stations in the world. However, that’s not even the most notable aspect of it.

The station is equipped with 11 MW of ground-mounted solar panels and canopies, spanning 30 acres of land, and 10 Tesla Megapacks with a total energy storage capacity of 39 MWh.

It can be operated off-grid, which is the case right now, according to Tesla.

With off-grid operations, Tesla was about to bring 84 stalls online just in time for the Fourth of July travel weekend. The rest of the stalls and a lounge are going to open later this year.

Electrek’s Take

This is awesome. A bit late, but awesome. This is what charging stations should be like: fully powered by renewable energy.

Unfortunately, it will be much harder to open those stations in the future due to legislation that Trump and the Republican Party have just passed, which removes incentives for solar and energy storage, adds taxes on them, and removes incentives to build batteries – all things that have helped Tesla considerably over the last few years.

The US is likely going to have a few tough years for EV adoption and renewable energy deployment.

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Trump megabill gives the oil industry everything it wants and ends key support for solar and wind

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Trump megabill gives the oil industry everything it wants and ends key support for solar and wind

Electricity prices will continue to climb as Senate tax bill routs solar stocks: Oppenheimer's Rusch

President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act ends long-standing federal support for solar and wind power, while creating a friendly environment for oil, gas and coal production.

The House of Representatives passed Trump’s megabill Thursday ahead of a White House-imposed deadline, after the Senate narrowly approved the controversial legislation Tuesday.

Trump has made his priorities on energy production clear. The U.S. will rely on oil, gas, coal and nuclear to meet its growing energy needs, the president said last weekend, bashing wind and solar power.

“I don’t want windmills destroying our place,” Trump told Fox News in an interview that aired June 29. “I don’t want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up a half a mountain that are ugly as hell.”

The president’s embrace of fossil fuels and hostility to renewable energy is reflected in his signature domestic policy law. It delivers most of the oil and gas sector’s top priorities, according to the industry’s lobby group, while ending tax credits that have played a crucial role in the growth of solar and wind power.

Oil, gas and coal are winners

The law opens up federal lands and waters to oil and gas drilling after the Biden administration enacted curbs, mandating 30 lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico over 15 years, more than 30 every year on lands across nine states and giving the industry access to Alaska.

The law also slashes the royalties that producers pay the government for pumping oil and gas on federal lands, encouraging higher output.

“This bill will be the most transformational legislation that we’ve seen in decades in terms of access to both federal lands and federal waters,” Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute, n industry lobbying group, told CNBC. “It includes almost all of our priorities.”

Watch CNBC's full interview with Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods

The law also spurs oil companies to use a carbon capture tax credit to produce more crude. The tax credit was designed to support nascent technology that captures carbon emissions and stores them underground. Under Trump’s bill, producers would receive an increased tax benefit for injecting those emissions into wells to produce more oil.

The law ends the hydrogen tax credit in 2028, later than previous versions of the bill. Chevron, Exxon and others are investing in projects to produce hydrogen fuel.

“I have a number of members who plan on investing significantly in hydrogen and so the extension to the end of 2028 was a welcome priority that was fulfilled,” Sommers said.

The coal industry is also a big winner from the law, which mandates at least 4 million additional acres of federal land be made available for mining. The law also cuts the royalties that coal companies pay the government for mining on federal land, and allows the use of an advanced manufacturing tax credit for mining metallurgical coal used to make steel.

Solar and wind are losers

The law phases out clean electricity investment and production tax credits for wind and solar that have played a crucial role in the growth of the renewable energy industry. The investment credit has been in place since 2005 and the production credit since 1992. The Inflation Reduction Act extended the life of both until at least 2032.

Solar and wind farms that enter service after 2027 would no longer be eligible for the credits. There is an exception, however, for projects that start construction within 12 months of the bill becoming law.

Rooftop solar industry is “toast,” Clean Energy Transition CEO says

The phaseout is more gradual than previous versions of the legislation, which had a hard deadline of December 31, 2027. That gave all solar and wind projects just 2.5 years to come online in order to take advantage of the credits.

“Despite limited improvements, this legislation undermines the very foundation of America’s manufacturing comeback and global energy leadership,” Abigail Ross Hopper, CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in a statement when the bill passed the Senate.

A related tax credit for using U.S.-made components in solar and wind farms ends for projects that enter service after 2027. A carveout allows projects that start construction within one year of the law’s enactment to claim the credit. The credit was designed to spur demand at U.S. factories in order to break the nation’s dependence on equipment from China.

“If nothing changes, factories start to close,” Michael Carr, executive director of the Solar Energy Manufacturers Association, told CNBC. “Factories that are on the drawing board that probably penciled [favorably] two weeks ago, maybe don’t pencil now. We’ll see investment slow down in the sector going forward.”

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Congress votes to send 2 million US jobs to China, increase deficit, energy costs

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Congress votes to send 2 million US jobs to China, increase deficit, energy costs

Congressional republicans have passed the republican tax bill that kills a slew of tax credits to help working families become more energy efficient, improve US air quality, and boost US manufacturing – instead channeling that money to wealthy elites, increasing the deficit by $3.3 trillion dollars along the way.

(Update, July 3 – this article has been updated to reflect the House passage of the reconciliation bill)

The bill as passed retains much of the draft language killing off energy efficiency credits and credits responsible for green manufacturing growth in the US.

The credits were largely established under President Biden as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, which raised hundreds of billions of dollars through tax enforcement on wealthy individuals and corporations and channeled that into energy efficiency credits for American families. It was also the most significant single climate action by any country in the history of the world, in terms of the amount of investment it put towards energy efficiency.

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We’ve covered how families could save thousands of dollars on upgrades to lower their energy costs through these credits.

But these credits aren’t just money-saving for Americans, they also work to boost American manufacturing, due to various provisions in the bill, particularly around the $7,500 EV tax credit which was limited to cars that undergo final assembly in North America.

While loopholes exist, nevertheless the IRA resulted in a massive expansion of American manufacturing, driving hundreds of billions of dollars of investment and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.

So of course, republicans want to repeal this good thing. The republican tax plan that just passed Congress repeals most of the credits established in the IRA which were responsible for this boom in investment. It also attempts to make fuel economy standards unenforceable, which will further increase fuel costs for Americans (by at least $23 billion).

Republicans in the House narrowly passed their version of the bill in May, which then went to the Senate and was modified. The Senate mostly kept the job-killing language of the House bill, eliminating consumer and business tax credits that helped to spur investment in US manufacturing – specifically the 30D and 25E credits for new & used clean vehicles, the commercial clean vehicle credit, the EV charger credit, and funding to reduce pollution from heavy duty vehicles. Many of these credits have domestic sourcing provisions which encouraged companies to establish US manufacturing facilities.

It’s estimated that the elimination of these credits will kill 2 million jobs by nipping a nascent US EV manufacturing boom in the bud before it really gets started. Many of those jobs will be lost in states whose Senators voted for the bill, like Tennessee and South Carolina which will lose 140k and 135k jobs respectively. All four Senators from those states – Marsha Blackburn, Bill Hagerty, Lindsey Graham, and Tim Scott – voted to put their constituents out on the street.

All told, every Democrat in both houses voted against the job-killing, deficit-increasing measure – which is also estimated to increase the average home’s energy costs by $400 annually. Just the bill’s repeal of the home solar credit will account for $110 worth of increased electricity costs for all Americans, and it also threatens US AI/Energy dominance that republicans claim to care about but are actively working against.

Only three Senate republicans had the good sense to oppose the bill – or, perhaps more accurately, were allowed to vote against it in order to maintain the illusion of their independence from this anti-American party which they continue to consider themselves a member of. But it managed to pass with a 50-50 vote with tiebreaker from J.D. Vance, the runningmate of the convicted felon currently squatting in the White House.

In the House, the original version of the bill passed by the slimmest of margins, 215-214 (with one abstention… which meant it got exactly 50% of the cast votes), again with only a few republican dissenters. The reconciliation bill ended up passing with a vote of 218-214, with only 2 republican dissenters, Fitzpatrick (R-PA) and Massie (R-KY), gaining votes even though some republicans had claimed to regret voting for it (or didn’t read it) the first time it hit the House.

Originally, there were additional measures in the bill that seemed to have been included just out of spite. For example, republicans wanted to sell off USPS’ awesome new EVs for scrap, losing billions of dollars in the process and killing the American jobs building them. And republicans wanted to add a punitive tax on EVs while subsidizing gas vehicles even more, increasing the budget shortfall for highways.

Thankfully, neither the USPS or registration tax measures seem to have made it into the final reconciliation bill, but the main measures killing American jobs have remained.

But the reconciliation bill is, in some ways, worse than the original House bill. For example, it eliminates the consumer EV credit 3 months earlier, thus increasing inflation faster for one of the most costly items that a consumer owns – their car. And that won’t just affect EVs – by making EVs $7,500 more expensive, competing gas vehicles will feel less downward pressure on price from the competition of cleaner, cheaper-to-own EVs, and manufacturers could well increase prices.

All of this occurs in the context of a global automotive industry which is rapidly shifting to electrification, currently led by China. China is the number one EV making country in the world, and is rapidly transforming its manufacturing industry to meet the needs of the future.

Domestic EV sales in China have ballooned in recent years. China got a slower start than some countries, having low EV penetration until around 2020, but has gone exponential in recent years. In 2023, ICE car values began to plummet and these cars became unsellable in China, acting as a canary in the coal mine for what will happen to the global auto industry if other automaking countries don’t take EVs seriously.

It’s estimated that this year, China will sell more EVs than the US sells cars overall.

But China is not just the number one EV maker, it’s also the number one car maker. As of last year, China is the top auto exporter in the world, eclipsing Japan which had been the primary holder of that title for decades.

Japan came to international prominence in automotive manufacturing in the 1970s, led primarily by the adoption of technologies that better confronted the environmental challenges of the day, while Western automakers continued to try to sell unpopular, inefficient gas guzzlers. Western governments failed to recognize the threat of growing overseas competition, and responded fecklessly with tariffs that didn’t work. Sound familiar?

And so, this republican budget bill, which would strangle the attempt to catch US EV manufacturing up to China’s long-planned dominance of the field, will only serve to reduce potential international competition to the rise of China. China is taking EVs seriously, and the US could have, if it weren’t for the spiteful actions of the republicans.

They’re trying to kill off these manufacturing investments likely to snub one of President Biden’s biggest accomplishments, with the largest positive effect on America, and as a giveaway to the fossil fuel industry that bribes them disproportionately.

But all this will do is harm US manufacturing and make Americans sicker and poorer – and help the US’ geopolitical rivals step into the vacuum left by America’s abdication of the auto industry.

The bill now moves to the White House, where it will be placed on the desk of a convicted felon who is Constitutionally barred from holding office in the US. It will inevitably be signed, as the bill is bad for America, and the felon in question has repeatedly proven that he is an enemy of America. Thus killing millions of American jobs, which will inevitably be shifted to China, as that country does not have a similar political faction actively trying to kill its own global competitiveness.

So, enjoy your higher costs, America – on energy, vehicles, and healthcare due to increased pollution (and the healthcare cuts the bill also includes). You voted for inflation, and you’re getting inflation.


Republicans also killed a number of home energy efficiency credits today, including the rooftop solar credit. That means you could have only until the end of this year to upgrade your home before republicans raise the cost of doing so by an average of ~$10,000. So if you want to go solar, get started TODAY, because these things take time and the system needs to be active before you file for the credit.

To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.

Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here. – ad*

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