In May, Ferrari introduced its first entry into the electric vehicle market: the Luce. With an exterior like a Nissan Leaf, and an interior designed by the guy who designed the iPhone, it received a lot of hate. So, if Ferrari can’t make a cool EV, who can? 

Enter the Slate truck. It’s a Jeff Bezos-backed, American-made compact truck with no bells, whistles, or even AC — the antithesis of the Tesla Cybertruck. It’s kind of cute. And it might just get more Americans to drive an electric car.

At a time when American manufacturers have fallen far behind countries like China in the automotive industry, companies are still trying to get Americans excited about electric. 

Andrew Hawkins is a transportation editor at The Verge who has been following the EV industry in the US. He tells Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about the problems stopping American drivers from fully adopting EVs and discusses whether this bare-bones truck can fix them. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

There’s another electric truck that we have to talk about.

Oh, yes, indeed. The Slate truck. 

This to me represents the dichotomy in the EV market today, right? On the one hand, you’ve got your Ferrari Luce. That is a $640,000 car that no one you will ever meet will probably buy. And on the other hand, you’ve got this Slate Truck that is the most bare-bones two-seater that you could possibly imagine. There’s no radio, there’s no touchscreen, there’s no central screen inside the vehicle. There’s no paint. You even have to opt in to get power windows; otherwise, they will just give you the [window crank]. 

I love the idea of an electric truck that has manual roll-’em-down windows.

When I heard that, that blew my mind. This is a new startup. They’ve got a lot of investment cash from Jeff Bezos and some other people. This is their first vehicle. And the theory behind it is that we will make this thing as stripped-down as we possibly can. Take out all the bells and whistles. People can add a bunch of stuff. They could turn it into a small SUV by adding a back section to it if they want. They could add wrapping decals. You could personalize it and make it look however you want it to look. Or, you could just buy the bare-bones version. 

The idea being that electric vehicles, as they stand today, are above the average cost of a new gas-powered vehicle. So, we need to bring this price down. How are we going to do that? Well, still the most expensive part about any electric vehicle is the battery. So, in order to have a good battery while still having a decent car, you need to take out everything else. 

That’s how they’re saying that they’re going to sell this thing for under $30,000 when it eventually comes out at the end of this year.

So, unlike the [Ferrari] Luce, people responded well to this Slate truck. Why is it a truck? Why not a sedan?

Trucks are very popular in the US. They’re amongst the best-selling vehicles, typically. The Ford F-150, for example, was the best-selling vehicle in America for a long time. 

But, this is America. We love our trucks. We love our big trucks. This is not a big truck. This is a small truck. And a lot of people have been saying trucks have gotten too big. They’re oversized behemoths out on the road that are dangerous to pedestrians that are out walking around. They don’t offer enough safety protections. And so, maybe we need to come back to more of a midsize or compact.

And then, obviously, gas prices are soaring. People are looking for something that’s a little bit more downsized in general. So, I think the truck prospect is an interesting one. Then again, trucks aren’t for everybody. If you want to turn this thing into a four-seater compact SUV, that’s something that will be an option to you, as well.

Okay, so this reason to make a little truck seems based on market research. People want a truck, and here’s a very different truck that we can offer them. What about this decision to literally strip away every single feature, including the paint, including the power windows, including the radio? 

It’s a real risky bet from Slate. I think what they’re trying to say is that maybe cars have become too bloated, right? We’re starting to see a pullback from too many convenience features, especially in the car market with people feeling a lot of pressure on their pocketbooks and how expensive new cars have become. They’re looking for something that is a little bit more downmarket. 

But also, I think it’s a reflection of where the expenses are in building a new car and a realization that you can’t just put out a car, especially an electric vehicle today, without some plan to make it profitable. One of the original mistakes of the auto industry, and especially the American auto industry, was that they could take a lot of their most popular cars, retrofit them to be electric, and that people would respond to them. 

That was, I think, a pretty understandable bet from a lot of these companies. But, I don’t think they were really taking costs into effect for a lot of that. And what we ended up with was a lot of cars that were indistinguishable from their gas counterparts, but were 20 to 30 percent more expensive than those gas cars.

In so many ways, the automotive industry is a stand-in for our whole economy. We hold up the auto industry as being this kind of beacon which represents our innovativeness and our leadership on the global stage. And I think that we’ve ceded that leadership now to China. 

China is now leading. They sell the most cars, they export the most cars, and they have the best technology. They’ve cracked the code on cheap EVs. I feel like America is always going to have an outsized reputation, but whether that reputation is actually earned anymore, I think is a very open question right now.

Do the people want EVs in this country yet, or do they still have range anxiety and a preference for the combustion engine? Does the war in Iran factor into how the people feel right now?

People vote with their pocketbooks, right? That’s where their preferences are today. And I think when electric vehicles were first gaining popularity, you heard a lot about charging anxiety. You heard a lot about range anxiety. 

I think those are still considerations, but I feel, right now, the number one consideration for most people is, “I’m living paycheck to paycheck, and it’s costing me $80, $90 to fill up my F-150.” The used EV market right now is extremely attractive to a lot of people. You can get a very good electric vehicle for around $20,000. You take it home, you set up a home charger, you charge that thing overnight. You never have to go to a gas station again. That’s a pretty attractive proposition to a lot of people.

Before Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy took his great big American road trip, Mikah Meyer did it first. 

Meyer is a travel writer and blogger. In 2019, he became the first person to visit all of the National Park Service sites in a single journey — over 400 in total. The full list includes national monuments, battlefields, and rivers — and the 63 national parks that most of us think of when we plan our summer trips. 

Now, with ultra-high gas prices, park staffing shortages, and funding cuts to the NPS, Meyer has some guidance for how to enjoy the outdoors responsibly this summer. He told Today, Explained that Americans should start with exploring their own backyard this summer — and think outside the box. 

Meyer talked with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about the hidden outdoor gems in each region of the US and what his number one spot in the country is. Hint: It’s not one of the heavy hitters. 

Below are some of Meyer’s favorites, divided by region and edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

The Northwest

One of my favorites in the northwest is the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument [in Oregon]. There’s a unit called the Painted Hills Unit, which has these incredible red stripes that cut through the earth. And whether you live in Seattle or Portland, you can access it within a day’s drive and you’re not going to have any of the crowds that you’ll experience at Mount Rainier or at Olympic [National Park]. It’s just one of the most otherworldly places I’ve seen up there.

The Southwest

For the Southwest, I would not go to Saguaro National Park. If you go a few more hours away to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the cactuses are way cooler looking.

There are way more epic hikes. There are way more epic vistas and views. It’s on the border with Mexico. If it’s between just Saguaro or Organ Pipe, I would go to Organ Pipe.

The Southeast

If you are in the Southeast, I would skip the crowds of the Everglades and hop a short flight over to the Virgin Islands, where there is an island off the island of St. Croix, which is called Buck Island Reef National Monument. 

It’s a natural turtle nesting ground that you can actually snorkel underwater down a trail that the Park Service has made. It’s incredible. It’s not going to be crowded because most people, when they go to the Virgin Islands, go to Virgin Islands National Park, which is the majority of the island of St. John. And so St. Croix is like the forgotten kid, [which] is amazing. You just have to take a little boat over there.

The Midwest

Through the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, there is a 72-mile river corridor called the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, and it is a federally protected riverfront that is full of places to fish and hike and run and see amazing wildlife. And it’s one that I actually go to on a daily run every day. 

The Northeast

Acadia is a really popular one, but really close to there and far from the crowds is the end of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, which starts in Georgia and runs all the way up to the center of Maine. You don’t have to do the whole thing, but in just one day you could go hike the final few miles to the center of Maine and you can actually see people finishing their months-long trek. 

It’s this super cool experience just as a day tripper to get to meet these folks, to talk to them. You get to the top of this mountain, and you get to witness people complete a historic National Park Service trail and feel just a little bit of that for yourself. 

His all-time favorite

My favorite National Park Service site in the whole system is in Utah. And when I wrote a blog ranking all of Utah’s Park Service sites, I got a lot of flack because my number one was not Zion, it was not Bryce, it was not Arches. It was Dinosaur National Monument. 

Because it’s a national monument and not a national park, most people haven’t heard of this site. If tomorrow Congress upgraded it to Dinosaur National Park, it would get millions of visitors. But that’s just because most people think America’s park system is only the 63 parks. They don’t realize that it’s over 400 sites. 

Dinosaur National Monument only gets 7 percent as many visitors as nearby Rocky Mountain National Park or Zion National Park, but I think it’s the best that the entire National Park Service system has to offer, all in one less-visited site where you, for example, can touch a dinosaur bone if you would like.

With a little over five months until the midterm elections, Democrats in Washington and on the campaign trail are trying to show voters they care about cost-of-living issues. 

To make that pitch, some parts of the party’s usual message may be going by the wayside. That includes the conversation about combating climate change. Once a pillar of the Democratic agenda, it may now be fading into the background. According to Matt Huber, a professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University and the author of Climate Change as Class War, Democrats, and the climate, might be better off for it. 

Huber, who recently wrote an essay for the New York Times titled “Democrats Don’t Have to Campaign on Climate Change Anymore,” spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about why Democratic candidates can and should de-center climate change from their platforms and streamline their campaigns on affordability issues. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What made you want to write this appeal to Democrats to essentially shut up about climate change right now?

I try to argue that it’s the end of a 20-year period in Democratic Party politics where a lot of Democrats were thinking that climate would be this urgent issue that could galvanize this mass majoritarian coalition around green jobs. 

What I’ve come to in the last few years is that I’m just not sure that rhetorically centering the climate crisis as the impetus of this kind of politics is actually going to be effective in building that power, building that majority. Most Americans don’t really prioritize this as an urgent issue, and they prioritize other cost-of-living issues much more.

When did fighting climate change become such a core issue for the Democratic Party? 

2006, which was 20 years ago, was a big flashpoint where Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released. And that did coalesce in the zeitgeist with a massive financial crisis a couple of years later. 

There was a lot of feeling, just like in the Great Depression, that there had to be this mass jobs program, public investment program, and that climate change actually provided the urgency and impetus to center around that kind of large scale investment program and it could create jobs and appeal to these more economic concerns.

When the Green New Deal became a big deal, spread by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others, I think they too were thinking it would actually be a more effective politics in the context of a large-scale economic crisis like the original New Deal was. 

Unfortunately for them, I think we never really entered that kind of crisis since the Green New Deal politics took off. We did have a recession, but it was this Covid recession that was a strange kind of economic shutdown and not the kind of crisis that called for this big jobs program.

That label,“Green New Deal,” became so polarizing. And it was a strategy to make it so, obviously. Do you think anything like that kind of messaging is just bunk now?

I’m really sad [about it]. I was a big Green New Deal stan, if I can use that word. I really loved this broad vision and a positive vision. I think a lot of climate politics can be pretty doomer-ist. 

It did go wrong, though. I think when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced the House resolution on a Green New Deal in 2019, she did this media blitz around it and she released this FAQ document — or her office released this very bizarre FAQ document — with the sort of media blitz about the Green New Deal. And in the document it had some very stream of consciousness language about how we’re not quite ready to ban farting cows and airplanes.  

Of course, as you would expect, that language got taken up by the Fox News culture war machine and almost immediately the Green New Deal became “We’re going to ban hamburgers. We’re going to ban air travel.”

What was supposed to be this broad-based majoritarian politics that could appeal to working-class people became yet another kind of polarized culture war issue, unfortunately.

Biden clearly realizes he can’t use this Green New Deal marketing to get this kind of legislation through Congress. But he does get this kind of legislation through Congress, weirdly called the Inflation Reduction Act.

Here we are in 2026 and no one ever talks about [the IRA], even though when they were doing it, they said it was the most consequential environmental legislation in American history. How did that happen?

In many ways the Inflation Reduction Act was based on this Green New Deal idea that jobs and investments in the green economy will lead to material benefits and help win back some of these working-class voters who had been shifting to Trumpism. 

Of course, a lot of these investments were very long term. The style of policymaking that has been in vogue for a while in the Democratic Party is to incentivize these investments through tax credits, which means you’re incentivizing the private sector to do a lot of the building of these projects. I cite a study in the piece that found, basically, when you survey communities where these investments are going, they actually didn’t identify it with a political project coming from Biden. They just associated it with the private firm that is investing. 

Meanwhile, inflation is really hammering the working class and the cost of living is skyrocketing as the number one issue voters care about. The Biden administration was saying that the economy was actually really good. If you look at unemployment, if you look at GDP numbers, everything’s going great. And so you really had no answer for the core material cost-of-living concerns that really shaped the 2024 election. 

Of course, with Trump in office, they’ve repealed a good portion of that legislation. Emissions in 2025 in the United States went up, which is very depressing. It was a real disaster on a number of fronts.

You write in your opinion piece in the Times about how we’re already seeing Democrats shift away from climate change. Where do you see it specifically?

You can see a lot of working-class candidates that are union members that are fighting for this progressive agenda of taxing the rich, public investments, Medicare-for-All. But they are steering clear from the climate issue. And if they are talking about climate change, they’re linking it directly to cost-of-living issues like energy affordability. To win and to campaign, they’re realizing that talking about the apocalyptic existential nature of the climate crisis is not going to really inspire and motivate people to support them. 

I profiled someone named Sam Forstag in Montana. And he is a smoke jumper — someone that literally parachutes out of planes to fight forest fires in the west. Because he’s a government employee, he is a union member too, and he is fighting on this kind of working-class agenda. Bernie Sanders and AOC have endorsed him. I profile an iron worker in Oklahoma. A flight attendant in Minnesota. Some of their websites literally don’t mention climate change at all, and if they do, it’s just very brief and links it to energy affordability jobs, things like this. 

That’s a real shift. These are exactly the types of candidates that I would say five or six years ago would’ve been the central messengers of this kind of Green New Deal message of unions, jobs, blue-collar workers that are going to kind of build the energy transition. These would be the kind of workers that’d be front and center, but they’re not, and I think that’s telling. 

One thing I mention in the piece is Zohran Mamdani, who ran a very successful campaign. But there’s been reporting showing that he barely talked about climate change in his campaign. And that’s after he had really been a climate activist in the Democratic Socialists of America and ran on climate change and public power in his assembly campaign in 2020. The whole affordability message, I think, came out of his campaign and people realizing that’s a way to build a mass coalition. And that’s a way to win. 

As someone who’s written the books, who’s done the research, who’s a college professor talking about these issues, how much does it break your heart that this is where we’re at, that you have to write an opinion piece in the New York Times that tells politicians that they need to Trojan horse climate issues into their platforms?

It doesn’t really break my heart. It actually reinforces what the Climate Change as Class War book was arguing, which is that the climate challenge is really a question of power.

I mentioned in the book four years ago that it’s convenient that the sectors we need to decarbonize are energy, transport, things like housing. These are end-of-month concerns for working-class people. So if we can kind of build a decarbonization agenda around those sectors, we can link climate to those working-class needs. 

Since the book, I’ve become less convinced that shouting about the climate crisis as this existential threat is going to be the central motivating impetus of that kind of politics. Why not just focus directly on those material needs? Once you build the power, you figure out how to really make those investments and build towards decarbonization.

Summer travel is just ramping up, but our country’s pride and joy is being put through the wringer. 

Since President Donald Trump took office in 2025, the National Park Service has been gutted. Staff have left or been laid off, historical signage has been removed, and funding to maintain and operate the parks has been slashed.

Still, Trump doesn’t seem to be slowing down. The administration’s proposed 2027 budget would cut more than a fourth of the remaining annual budget for national parks.

Despite this, Trump still wants Americans to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday by visiting the underfunded parks system (and he’s stamped his face on the annual national parks pass). 

He’s hoping Americans follow the example of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, the former reality TV star whose new YouTube show, The Great American Road Trip, captures Duffy’s travels around the US.  

But the parks aren’t ready for it, experts warn. A funding shortfall could further damage the experience and preservation of America’s most visited parks, but journalist Stephanie Pearson tells Today, Explained that she’s most worried about the damage visitors can’t see. 

Pearson has written for Outside Magazine for decades and authored two books on our national parks. Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram asked her how the parks are doing in light of big cuts from the Trump administration. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

How are our parks doing? Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy is encouraging Americans to hit the road. I think a place Americans tend to go when they hit the road is to the national parks, especially in the summertime. What will they find when they go?

It’s a moving target. There’s a lot happening in parks right now. There is almost a quarter of full-time National Park staff have lost their jobs. That’s more than 4,000 positions. 

When you lose a quarter of your park staff, what do you end up losing?

A lot of the public-facing people will still be there. People may not necessarily notice that. They’re still going to be greeted at visitor kiosks. They’re still going to have information people. 

Where they’re really diminishing is in scientists, biologists who are studying the flora and the fauna or the wildlife, people who are critical pieces of these parks who are trying to balance visitation with wildlife, for example. Infrastructure people who are taking care of the parks and maintaining them. The way that’s translating is that people who are left have a lot of hats, and they have to do a lot of different things.

And can they? Do they?

It’s amazing what the National Park Service staff is continuing to do. Anyone who sees someone in a National Park Service uniform should probably go up and give them a hug or, you know, a high five or something.

You have to ask before you give them a hug, though. You don’t wanna make their lives even worse.

Yes, very true. But I would say that I think their jobs are really hard right now. And so just to keep that in mind. However you want to do that, send them good vibes.

I don’t know if you watched the trailer for Sean Duffy’s Great American Road Trip, but he really seems to be emphasizing that this country has so much to offer, and especially its natural beauty, its parks. 

I imagine the maintenance and the infrastructure of our national park system is included in that marketing campaign that they’re on right now. And you’re telling me that the parks are struggling in that regard.

Yes, they are struggling in that regard, and it’s all documented. You can do your own research and see where these cuts are being made. And I do agree with Duffy. I think it’s an amazing, amazing park system, but it is being drastically reduced in terms of the budget that is going toward it and the workforce that they have. 

They are hiring seasonal employees, but what they’re doing is they’re increasing “seasonal employee” to mean a nine-month position. So they’ll get maybe health insurance, but they won’t get other benefits. But what that means is they’re just not a full-time workforce and so a lot of them are also being shifted to different positions.

Can you give us some specifics on what conditions might be like at some of these parks that are really struggling and understaffed? I mean, are you not able to use a porta-potty in a park? Are there no facilities to speak of at this point?

There are facilities, and these parks are not closing down. But, for example, at Yosemite National Park, the first weekend of May, it took an hour and a half to get to the entrance for people. When they got in the park, what is also happening is they’ve lifted all the reservation systems.

[At] some of these iconic parks — Yosemite, Glacier National Park, Acadia National Park — you used to have to make a reservation to drive your car, for example, on Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park. They have lifted those, and so it’s sort of a free-for-all. 

It all depends on which park you’re going to. There are parks that are in the system that are a lot less visited; for these iconic parks where everyone seems to want to go all the time, there’s going to be a lot of people who want to see the same things that you do.

Beyond budgetary cuts to these parks, there’s also a bit of an agenda here to sort of reshape the culture and historical educational programming at our national parks. How’s that going?

It’s being implemented as we speak. In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. And what that does is, as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum put it, is to eliminate depictions at the Park Service that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living, including in colonial times.

What that means is Acadia National Park climate change signs have been taken down. The [Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail] had to do a big review, and the Park Service staff identified, which was the mandate, I think something like 80 things that they needed to take out of that park.

It’s happening in places, in parks all across the country. For example, Stonewall in New York City — they pulled down the [pride] flag, but it went back up because New York City officials wanted it to go back up.

Do you think this could be an added incentive to get out there this summer and see these parks despite the gas prices, because it’s America 250 and the parks are being ruined, so you may as well see ’em before they’re trashed? 

It almost breaks my heart to even think that. I still have some hope. I have hope that they will not be trashed. I have hope that people on both sides of the aisle understand the value of these parks. I am a proponent of understanding our American history because there’s so much to offer through these parks. You’re going to gain some understanding when you visit Ancestral Puebloan land in New Mexico or you see the geology of Big Bend National Park. 

I am really hopeful that people understand the value of these places. In Big Bend National Park, people are rallying around the fact that they’re trying to build a border wall through it. People have rallied, on both sides of the aisle, to say, We do not want a border wall in Big Bend National Park.“ And so I think that there is hope that people will rise to this occasion.

What you’re saying in Big Bend is that you can only push people so far, and they will eventually stand up if you go too far.

Absolutely. I think Teddy Roosevelt is a perfect example of this. Teddy Roosevelt is the conservation president. Teddy Roosevelt was changed, fundamentally changed, by the Badlands landscape. And that’s my hope that people go to these landscapes and are fundamentally changed and understand what we have to lose here.