The Jeep Wrangler was built to drive out past where the power lines end. Watch any ad for the car, and you’ll surely see it surmounting boulders and conquering muck in places far from the beaten freeway. Electric-vehicle chargers may be scarce in the wilderness, but even a military-derived four-by-four must keep with the times. To the delight of Earth-loving off-roaders, Jeep has announced that the first all-electric Wrangler is in the works. The icons of combustion are going electric, if they haven’t already. Over the next few years, a battery-powered Chevy Silverado, GMC Sierra, and Ram 1500 will join the Ford F-150 Lightning as electric pickup trucks, adding to the several dozen other EVs that are now for sale in the United States. Even the Corvette, America’s paragon of V-8 bombast, will soon plug in to power up.

Things are very different from just a few years ago, when Tesla dominated EV sales. Now these zippy, battery-powered cars don’t seem quite as special. GM used a Super Bowl ad starring Lebron James to hype its new $100,000 Hummer EV; Elon Musk’s car company hasn’t released an entirely new model in three years. Publicly, at least, this stretch has been rough for Tesla: The company has been beset by production delays with its War Rig–like pickup truck, and its self-driving mode has been linked to hundreds of crashes, some fatal. Then there is Musk’s erratic behavior: According to a recent Bloomberg survey, the biggest reason Tesla Model 3 owners got rid of their car was “disapproval of Elon Musk.”

The legacy carmakers would be salivating if they didn’t have bigger problems. Nearly a week in, the strike launched by members of the United Auto Workers against Ford, GM, and Stellantis (the parent company of Chrysler, Dodge, and Jeep) does not seem to be close to a resolution. Just three plants—which collectively produce just one hybrid car and no fully electric ones—are currently affected by the stoppage, but the workers’ legitimate gripes are closely tied to electrification. It has become something of an existential crisis for companies built around the gas engine, a transition that’s more onerous than anyone in Detroit may have bargained for. Regardless of how this strike ends, the EV world is still Tesla’s until the car-buying public says otherwise.

The autoworkers’ demands are not a screed against the climate-saving potential of EVs. In fact, there is no explicit mention of electric vehicles at all. “We support a green economy,” UAW president Shawn Fain said this past weekend. “You know, we have to get behind this. We have to have a planet that we can live on.” Rather, the strike is mostly about bedrock union fare: Workers are asking for a 40 percent raise to match what the union says their CEOs have received over the past four years, as well as benefits such as more paid time off. (The car companies have countered by offering raises of roughly 20 percent.)

Yet beneath the surface of the strike lies a sinking feeling that the EV is not good news for autoworkers. They have good reason to be reluctant: The electrified age has redefined the task of building a car. Batteries are complex and difficult to manufacture, so the big carmakers source many of their EV batteries from plants run cooperatively with tech companies. GM and LG, for example, together operate or are building three battery factories nationwide. Once you have the battery in hand, assembling an electric car is a simpler task than building its gasoline counterpart, says Jeremy Michalek, an engineer at Carnegie Mellon University who runs its Vehicle Electrification Group. EVs still need to be welded together and painted, but they don’t need the spark plugs and engine cylinders and hoses and belts found under the hood of a typical vehicle.

Just how many jobs are at risk is hard to pin down, but “jobs at gasoline engine manufacturing plants will shift to jobs at electric motor and battery plants,” Michalek said in an email. To the consternation of unionized plant workers, most battery factories are not unionized, and the workers there make less, on average, than unionized autoworkers. In other words, EV production looks less like Henry Ford’s assembly line and more like the way the tech industry builds gadgets. That puts Detroit in a bind. The Big Three automakers don’t want to grant major wage hikes when they are already struggling to break even on electric cars. This year, Ford’s EV division will lose $4.5 billion, which from April to June meant about $32,000 for every EV it sold. (The company still plans to post $11 billion to $12 billion in profits this year due to sales of gas cars.) The sheer size of the losses points to how difficult it will be for the big firms to reinvent the way they’ve always done things.

Tesla, which only sells EVs, is already profitable, even as it has slashed vehicle prices multiple times this year. In the decade-plus since it launched the Model S, Tesla has cemented that advantage with a business model that Detroit still struggles to match. The company has defined the now-standard EV paradigm of cars that are seemingly little more than a battery, a few motors, and an enormous touchscreen controlled by sophisticated, walled-off software. The design points to Tesla’s Silicon Valley roots, as does its combustible figurehead and nonunionized employees. It relies on the tech industry’s signature obsession for efficiency, with Tesla’s giant new “gigacasting” machines able to stamp out bigger aluminum parts than was previously possible, lowering production costs for the Model Y by 40 percent, the company says. Crucially, the firm also pays less for labor: $45 an hour including wages and benefits, compared with $66 dollars an hour for the Detroit automakers, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In spite of its real struggles, Tesla remains surprisingly dominant. Earlier this year, its Model Y became the world’s best-selling car, only months after breaking into the top 10 in U.S. sales—both firsts for an EV. Even as everything turns electric, Tesla’s four core vehicles account for 60 percent of the EVs sold in America; Tesla sold 336,000 EVs in the first half of the year—nearly 10 times the sales of its nearest competitors, Hyundai-Kia and GM.

The company’s future looks bright too, and not only because the strike could stymie Detroit while Tesla forges ahead. (The union is threatening to expand the stoppage if no deal is reached by Friday.) Tesla also might be the car company best positioned to take advantage of President Joe Biden’s big climate bill. Before the Inflation Reduction Act, Tesla had maxed out on the tax credits it could offer to buyers. Now it can once again promise them a $7,500 price cut on most of its cars, a huge win as EVs remain more expensive than gas cars. And car companies qualify for the IRA tax credit only if they do much of their battery and vehicle manufacturing in North America—which includes the likes of Ford and GM but cuts off major Tesla competitors such as Hyundai and its popular Ioniq series.

Tesla is winning the charging war too. Until very recently, its sprawling Supercharger network served Teslas only, and its proprietary plug was locked in a VHS-versus-Betamax standoff against the standard used by everyone else. Last November, Musk rebranded his tech as the open North American Charging Standard, inviting his rivals to use his system. One by one, they did. The drivers of future Ford, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, GM, Rivian, Polestar, Nissan, and Volvo EVs that use Tesla’s plug will be able to charge at some Tesla-owned Superchargers—and send Musk their money.

No matter how the UAW strike ends, for now and probably for years to come, all electrified roads lead to Tesla. It faces unprecedented competition, but the legacy carmakers are stuck in neutral. No, its huge lead won’t last forever; the competitors still are catching up. And this is Elon Musk, after all. It’s always possible that he will pursue some unrelated grievance that threatens to distract him, like the several times his tweets about Tesla got him into legal trouble.

If Tesla drags the entire car industry toward the Silicon Valley business model, that may not be a cause for celebration. It could lead to streamlined EV production and cheaper electric cars, certainly a good thing for the automotive pivot away from fossil fuels. But efficiency comes at a cost. Tesla itself has been dogged by accusations of overworked employees suffering fainting spells and dizziness; workers have relayed stories about factories that resemble a “modern-day sweatshop.” (Tesla has repeatedly denied wrongdoing.) The tech industry prides itself on moving fast and breaking things—not the kind of culture that values the wages and job security that auto unions exist to protect. Big Tech has already devoured much of the American economy, and it seemingly dominates every corner of our lives. Now even the car industry can’t escape.

Yesterday was not a good day for House Republicans or for their struggling leader, Speaker Kevin McCarthy. In the morning, McCarthy was forced to scrap a procedural vote on a GOP proposal to avert a government shutdown that will commence at the end of this month if Congress doesn’t act. In the afternoon, a handful of conservatives tanked McCarthy’s bid to advance legislation funding the Pentagon.

The failure of the proposal to prevent a shutdown was the more ominous defeat, both for Republicans and for the country. Yet even if McCarthy manages to pass a version of this, it will almost certainly be an exercise in futility. For starters, it would fund the government for a mere 30 additional days. And its basic provisions—cutting spending by 8 percent for all but the Defense and Veterans Affairs Departments, restarting construction of the southern border wall, cutting off pathways for asylum seekers—will likely be stripped out by Senate Democrats.

Despite the GOP’s evident dysfunction, Representative Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota was in a chipper mood when he called me from the Capitol. The McCarthy ally was scurrying between meetings in an effort to help resolve the latest crisis threatening the speaker. “We’re a long way from landing the plane, but there are really productive conversations going on,” Armstrong told me. If the plane represents, in Armstrong’s metaphor, a functioning federal government, then House Republicans are still hovering at about 30,000 feet, with the runway coming rapidly into view.

[Watch: The Republicans threatening to shut down the government]

The Democrats who run the Senate aren’t involved in the “productive conversations” Armstrong was referencing. If they were, McCarthy might already have lost his job. Before he can negotiate with the Democrats, the speaker must broker a peace among the warring factions of his own party, who cannot even agree on an opening offer. Groups representing the conservative Freedom Caucus and the more pragmatic Main Street Caucus announced a deal on Sunday to support the 30-day extension, with spending cuts and border restrictions attached. But almost immediately, hard-liners rejected the proposal as insufficiently austere. Led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, several of these Republicans are threatening to oust McCarthy if he caves to Democrats on spending, and a few of them are openly itching for a government shutdown.

Any five Republicans can torpedo proposals that don’t have Democratic support—as five GOP lawmakers did yesterday in blocking the defense bill—and any five could topple McCarthy by voting along with Democrats for a procedural tool known as a motion to vacate the chair. This has effectively made him a hostage of his caucus, with precious little room to maneuver.

Even the relatively optimistic Armstrong acknowledged the difficulty of McCarthy’s position. “It’s a pretty untenable argument to say you don’t have enough Republican votes to pass anything and you can’t negotiate with Democrats on anything,” Armstrong told me.

McCarthy has tried many times to shake off threats to his speakership, alternately daring members like Gaetz to make a bid to oust him and pointing out that with such a narrow majority, any other Republican replacement would find themselves in the same unenviable position. I asked Armstrong whether McCarthy should simply ignore the hard-liners in his conference and strike a deal with Democrats to keep the government open, come what may. “I’m not sure he should yet,” he said.

House Republicans have received hardly any backing from their brethren in the Senate, who have shown no appetite for a shutdown fight and have been more willing to uphold the budget deal that McCarthy struck with President Joe Biden in the spring. By bowing to conservative demands for deeper spending cuts, the speaker is reneging on the same agreement, which allowed Congress to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a catastrophic default. “I’m not a fan of government shutdowns,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters yesterday. “I’ve seen a few of them over the years. They have never produced a policy change, and they’ve always been a loser for Republicans.”

For now, McCarthy allies such as Armstrong are adamant that this spending battle must result in a change in administration policy. They have zeroed in on the border, seeing an opportunity to force Biden’s hand and take advantage of an issue on which even some Democrats, such as New York City Mayor Eric Adams, have been critical of the president. “If we can’t use this fight to deal with the single most pressing national-security issue and humanitarian issue of our time, then shame on us,” Armstrong said.

[Read: Kevin McCarthy is a hostage]

Yet House Republicans have found themselves isolated, and bickering over legislation that—like most of their proposals this year—stands no chance of becoming law. A bipartisan majority in the Senate is likely to simply return a temporary spending bill to the House without the conservative priorities, perhaps with additional funding to aid Ukraine in its war with Russia. What then? I asked Armstrong. “I would shut it down,” he replied.

Democrats in the House, meanwhile, have watched the unfolding GOP drama with a mix of schadenfreude and growing horror. The Republican infighting could help Democrats win back a House majority next year. But a shutdown would not reflect well on either party, and voters could end up blaming Biden as well as the GOP for the fallout. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers would be furloughed, and millions of Americans might have to wait longer for Social Security checks and other needed benefits. “The rest of the world looks at us like we’re incompetent and dysfunctional,” Representative Gerry Connolly, a Democrat whose Northern Virginia district includes thousands of federal workers, told me. “How do you explain to our European allies that we can’t fund our government?”

Connolly is in his eighth term and, like America’s allies, has seen this brinkmanship play out several times before. He told me that whereas earlier in the month he thought Congress had a 50–50 chance of keeping the government open, he now puts the odds of a shutdown at 90 percent. “Sometimes you feel like we’re going to avert this cliff, and then there are times that you go, ‘No, we’re going off this cliff,’” Connolly said. “This one feels like we’re going off the cliff.”