Cynics will point at big rebates and claim they mean the vehicle isn’t selling, but that just exposes them as auto industry noobs. A rebate is a powerful finance tool that helps dealers overcome obstacles like negative equity, poor credit, down payment requirements, and interest rate objections – and, ultimately, get a deal done.
If you’re dealing with any of the above, pay attention: these plug-in cars could get you behind the wheel of a new ride sooner than you think!
As I was putting this list together, I realized there were plenty of ways for me to present this information. “Biggest EV incentive deals ..?” Not everyone qualifies for those. “Most stackable EV rebates ..?” Too much research. In the end, I went with national cash back offers and chose to present them in alphabetical order, by make. And, as for which deals are new this month? You’re just gonna have to read the article. Enjoy!
Audi Q4 E-Tron SUV | $5,000
2024 Audi Q4 E-Tron; via Audi.
Audi’s entry-level Q4 has long been a popular entry-luxe option for upwardly-mobile young adults looking step up from VW, and the latest Q4 E-Tron is no exception, offering a stylish upgrade from the more pedestrian ID.4. Through March 3rd, Audi will give buyers $5,000 to help the get into a new Q4 50 e-tron, Q4 55 e-tron, or Q4 Sportback e-tron.
Chrysler Pacifica | $7,500
2024 Chrysler Pacifica Plug-In Hybrid Pinnacle; via Stellantis.
The VW ID.Buzz may have raised the bar when it comes to electrification, the OG plug-in hybrid Chrysler Pacifica minivan is still the king when it comes to cupholders, stow n’ go seating, and all the other practical, clever details that add up to remind you Chrysler invented these things.
Through March 3rd, you can get a $7,500 cash allowance plus up to $7,500 in Federal income tax credits on Pacific Plug-in Hybrid Select, S, and Pinnacle trim level vans – and that’s before any negotiations with your dealer.
Dodge Charger | $3,000
Next-gen Dodge Charger; via Stellantis.
Wherever you find an Army recruiter slinging enlistment bonuses, you can almost bet your house there will be a salesman slinging high-powered Mopars nearby. As the auto industry transitions to electric, Dodge is hoping that some of those young new recruits, flush with cash, will find their way to a Dodge store and ask for the meanest, loudest, tire-shreddingest thing on the lot.
Jeep buyers who are stretching into a new vehicle will find incredible deals on a capable new Jeep Wrangler 4xe plug-in hybrid. With its 17.3 kWh battery, the Wrangler offers up to 22 miles of all-electric driving on a full charge for emissions-free driving in town and 49 MPGe with supreme off-road capabilities outside of town.
Now through March 3rd, Jeep is helping you get behind the wheel of a new Jeep Wrangler 4xe with $8,000 Total Cash Allowance. That’s enough to meet even a relatively high 20% down payment requirement and those score those snazzy blue tow hooks, too!
Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xe | $7,000
JGC 4xe; via Stellantis.
Looking for something a little more refined than that Wrangler? The deals are almost as good on the Grand Cherokee 4xe just a few feet away. Jeep dealers have $7,000 to help you get behind the wheel of one of those, too, and (again) that’s before the negotiations begin.
Kia EV6 | $19,500
2024 Kia EV6 GT; source: Kia.
Peter Johnson already did a great job covering this incredible cash back deal on Kia’s lickety-quick EV6, calling it a steal with nearly $20,000 off the MSRP. And, remember, the Kia EV6 was already a great deal – consider the context: a 2024 Kia EV6 GT starts at $61,600 (before discounts and incentives). A 2024 Ferrari Roma will run you about $245,000, while a new 2024 Lamborghini Huracan EVO Spyder starts at just over $300,000.
Of the three cars I just mentioned, the Kia is the quickest. Bet.
Kia EV9 | $11,000
Kia EV9; via Kia.
Young families shopping for a high-value three-row SUV that won’t break the bank when it’s time to top it off will appreciate the Kia EV9 for being a three-row EV from a mainstream brand with a great warranty, normal doors, and minimal ties to fascism.
If that sounds like you, you’ve probably already checked out the Kia EV9. You’re not alone. Kia keeps setting EV sales records. This month, you can get $11,000 cash back on GT-Line, Land, Light Long Range, Light Short Range, and Wind trim levels, which won’t do much to slow down sales!
Mercedes EQS | up to $15,000
Mercedes AMG EQS; via Mercedes.
Mercedes-Benz is globally renowned for its incredibly engineered Teutonic cruise missiles, and the AMG EQS is the company’s all-electric flagship, offering supercar levels of performance, industry-leading self driving capabilities, and a level of fit and finish matched only by Rolls-Royce, Lucid, and the cars at Riddler.
Unfortunately they styled their EVs to look more like suppositories that super sedans, and no amount of engineering can overcome ugly. As such, Mercedes’ electric engineering marvels have just been dying on dealer lots. To help turn the tide, Mercedes is offering huge discounts, subsidized interest rates, and loyalty cash in a bid to make something – anything – convince a curious MB buyer to take a flyer on an EQE or EQS.
The inspiration for this article was a hypothetical $9,140 Nissan LEAF deal. It’s less a deal for everyone and more a deal I hastily concocted while walking the floor of the 2025 Chicago Auto Show, but the fact remains that even with “just” $7,500 cash back, the $28,140 $20,640 Nissan LEAF is one of the most affordable new cars you can buy in the US. If you can score some additional local incentives and dealer discounts, so much the better.
Disclaimer: the vehicle models and rebate deals above were sourced from CarsDirect, CarEdge, and (where mentioned) the OEM websites – and were current as of 13FEB2025. Despite my best efforts to filter these, some deals may not be available in your market, or be stackable with every other discount, or to every buyer (the standard “with approved credit” fine print should be considered implied). Check with your local dealer(s) for more information.
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The BYD Atto 3 goes on sale in Japan (Source: BYD Japan)
China set a new record for clean tech exports in August 2025, hitting $20 billion, according to new data analyzed using Ember’s China Cleantech Exports Data Explorer. The country remains the world’s largest exporter of electrotech, with surging demand for EVs and batteries leading the charge.
EV exports jumped 26% from January through August compared to the same period in 2024, while battery exports rose 23%. Other sectors saw more modest growth – grid technology up 22%, wind up 16%, and heating and cooling systems up 4% – but those gains were offset by a 19% drop in solar PV export value. EVs and batteries are now worth more than double the value of China’s solar PV exports.
This milestone is remarkable because it comes even as technology prices have fallen sharply. Solar panel prices, for example, have plunged more than 80% over the past decade, making them more affordable and driving up global demand. In August alone, China exported 46 gigawatts (GW) of solar PV – more than Australia’s entire installed solar capacity – setting a record in capacity terms. However, their dollar value remains 47% below their March 2023 peak.
Falling prices have fueled growth in new regions. Over half of the increase in China’s EV exports this year came from outside the OECD, with the ASEAN region emerging as a major growth engine. EV exports to ASEAN surged 75% in the first eight months of 2025, mainly driven by Indonesia. The country saw the biggest rise in Chinese EV imports globally this year, becoming the world’s ninth-largest EV market. Battery electric vehicles made up 14% of new car sales in Indonesia in August 2025, up from 9% a year earlier.
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Africa is also rapidly adopting Chinese clean tech. From January to August, EV exports to the continent nearly tripled year-over-year (+287%), albeit from a very low base, with Morocco leading growth and Nigeria’s imports soaring sixfold. Latin America and the Caribbean saw an 11% rise, while the Middle East climbed 72%.
Domestically, China’s own adoption of clean tech is accelerating even faster. EVs accounted for 52% of new car sales in August, and in the first half of 2025, China installed more than twice as many solar panels as the rest of the world combined. Ember’s recent China Energy Transition Review attributes this momentum to consistent policy support that’s reshaping the country’s economy and energy system around electrified technologies.
“Demand for clean technologies continues to skyrocket as more and more countries seek their benefits, from low-cost power to cheaper vehicles,” said Ember analyst Euan Graham. “China’s electrotech is becoming the basis of the new energy system, with continued cost reductions driving faster growth than ever, especially in emerging economies.”
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Keith Heyde stands on site in Abilene, Texas, where OpenAI’s Stargate infrastructure buildout is underway. Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, is now leading OpenAI’s physical expansion push.
OpenAI
It wasn’t how Keith Heyde envisioned celebrating the holidays. Rather than hanging out with his wife back home in Oregon, Heyde spent late December visiting potential data center sites across the U.S.
Two months earlier, Heyde left Meta to join OpenAI as the head of infrastructure. His job was to turn CEO Sam Altman’s ambitious compute dreams into reality, seeking out vast swaths of land suitable for expansive facilities that will eventually be packed with powerful graphics processing units for building large language models.
“My in-between Christmas and New Year’s last year was actually mostly spent looking at sites,” Heyde, 36, told CNBC in an interview. “So my family loved that, trust me.”
His life in 2025 has only gotten more intense.
Since January, OpenAI has been quietly soliciting and reviewing proposals from around 800 applicants hoping to host the next wave of its Stargate data centers, AI supercomputing hubs designed to train increasingly powerful models.
Roughly 20 sites are now in advanced stages of diligence, with massive tracts of land under review across the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast. Heyde said tax incentives are “a relatively small part of the decision matrix.”
The most important factors are access to power, ability to scale, and buy-in from local communities.
“Can we build quickly, is the power ramp there fast, and is this something where it makes sense from a community perspective?” he said.
Heyde leads site development within OpenAI’s industrial compute team, a division that’s swiftly become one of the most important groups inside the company. Infrastructure, once a supporting function, has now been elevated to a strategic pillar on par with product and model development.
With traditional data centers nearly at max capacity, OpenAI is betting that owning the next generation of physical infrastructure is central to controlling the future of AI.
The energy needs are hard to fathom. A gigawatt data center requires the amount of power needed for some entire cities. Late last month, OpenAI announced plans for a 17-gigawatt buildout in partnership with Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank.
New sites will have to include all sorts of energy options, including battery-backed solar installations, legacy gas turbine refurbishments and even small modular nuclear reactors, Heyde said. Each site looks different, but together they form the industrial backbone OpenAI needs to scale.
“We’ve done this wonderful piece of bottleneck analysis to see what types of energy sources actually allow us to unlock the journey that we want to be on,” Heyde said.
A good chunk of the capital is coming from Nvidia. The chipmaker agreed to invest up to $100 billion to fuel OpenAI’s expansion, which will involve purchasing millions of Nvidia’s GPUs.
‘Perfect wasn’t the goal’
Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, helped oversee the buildout of Meta’s first 100,000 GPU cluster.
In addition to power, OpenAI is assessing how quickly it can build on a site, the availability of labor and proximity to supportive local governments, according to Stargate’s request for proposal.
Heyde said the team has made around 100 site visits and has a short list of sites in late-stage review. Some will be brand new builds, and others will require conversions and refurbishments of existing facilities. Flexibility will be key.
“The perfect parcels are largely taken,” Heyde said. “But we knew that perfect wasn’t the goal — the goal for us was, number one, a compelling power ramp.”
Competition is fierce.
Meta is building what may be the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere — a $10 billion project in Northeast Louisiana, fueled by billions in state incentives. CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised the top end of the company’s annual capital expenditure spending range to $72 billion in July.
The steel frame of data centers under construction during a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.
Shelby Tauber | Reuters
Amazon and Anthropic are teaming up on a 1,200-acre AI campus in Indiana. And across the country, states are rolling out tax breaks, power guarantees, and expedited zoning approvals to attract the next big AI cluster.
OpenAI is a relative upstart, having been around for just a decade and only known to the mainstream since launching ChatGPT less than three years ago. But it’s raised mounds of cash from the likes of Microsoft and SoftBank, in addition to Nvidia, on its way to a $500 billion valuation.
And OpenAI is showing it’s not afraid to lead the way in AI. A self-built solar campus in Abiliene, Texas, is already live.
While OpenAI still leans on partners like Oracle, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC last week in Abilene that owning first-party infrastructure provides a differentiated approach. It curbs vendor markups, safeguards key intellectual property, and follows the same strategic logic that once drove Amazon to build Amazon Web Services rather than rely on existing infrastructure.
However, Heyde indicated that there’s no real playbook when it comes to AI, particularly as companies pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can potentially meet or exceed human capabilities.
“It’s a very different order of magnitude when we think about the type of delivery that has to happen at those locations,” he said.
Some applicants, including former bitcoin mining operators, offered existing power infrastructure, like substations and modular buildouts, but Heyde said those don’t always fit.
“Sometimes we found that it’s almost nice to be the first interaction in a community,” he said. “It’s a very nice narrative that we’re bringing the data center and the infrastructure there on behalf of OpenAI.”
The 20 finalist sites represent phase one of a much larger buildout. OpenAI ultimately plans to scale from single-gigawatt projects to massive campuses.
“Any place or any site we’re moving forward with, we’ve really considered the viability and our own belief that we can deliver the power story and the infrastructure story associated with those sites,” Heyde said.
He understands why many people are skeptical.
“It’s hard. There’s no doubt about it,” Heyde said. “The numbers we’re talking about are very challenging, but it’s certainly possible.”
There’s a quiet revolution underway in Cadillac showrooms across America. The brand’s renewed “Standard of the World” ambitions are now matched by sleek, statement-making electric vehicles. And, thanks to a little help from Federal tax credit FOMO, more than 40% of new Cadillacs sold in Q3 were 100% electric.
GM’s overall EV sales numbers were up 110% last quarter, climbing to 66,501 units in the US alone on the back of the affordable, 300+ mile Chevy Equinox and 1,000-mile capable (sort of) Silverado EV – but it was Cadillac dealers that saw the biggest growth in EV sales.
As buyers poured into Cadillac dealerships in the last days of the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit, GM’s luxury arm was ready with stylish, new-for-2025 electric vehicles like the Optiq, Vistiq, and Escalade IQ* waiting for them alongside the Lyriq. The result wasn’t just Cadillac’s best third quarter in more than a decade – Cadillac (and GM) is having one of its best sales year, period.
Here’s what the quarter looked like, by the recently-released GM sales numbers.
That asterisk up there next to the high-rolling Escalade IQ that sold more than 3,900 examples is because, at well over $80,000 even for the most basic model it never qualified for the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit to begin with (nor did the people destined to buy it, who almost certainly make too much to qualify).
It’ll be interesting to see if the loss of that tax credit will do much to negatively impact EV sales in Q4. And that’ll get doubly interesting thanks to the creative accounting team at GM that figured out how to extend that $7,500 tax credit for existing dealer inventory (for a few more months) and that its biggest EV rivals at Hyundai are slashing prices on popular IONIQ models.
You can check out our EIC Fred Lambert’s full review of the new electric Cadillac Escalade in the video, below, and use the following links to find great Cadillac deals near you while that cleverly extended tax credit is still a thing.
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