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Jameson Dow

Jameson is based in Southern California and has been driving electric vehicles since 2009 and writing about EVs, sustainability and policy for Electrek since 2016.

You can contact him at jamie@electrek.co, or on his bluesky account that he just set up and maybe will never use at https://blskyl.ink/jamesondow

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How US automakers lobbied themselves into a $70B loss – and let China win

BYD's-largest-car-transport-ship

Perhaps you’ve heard the news – automakers across the industry are canceling EV investments, taking tens of billions in losses in response to a claimed lack in customer demand for EVs (even as EV sales in fact continue to rise globally and gas car sales have peaked).

A new analysis by InfluenceMap shows how automakers actually made their own bed, by flip-flopping on their own lobbying efforts and contributing to the regulatory instability that currently plagues an industry with long planning timelines and global competitors that have not hamstrung themselves with such uncertainty.

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This Tesla owner won $10k in court for Tesla’s FSD lies. Tesla is still fighting him.

For over a decade now, Tesla has sold a promise of vehicles that can drive themselves, even stating that every car it produced had all the hardware for self-driving.

But after years of the company being unable to deliver, some owners want their money back. Ben Gawiser is one of those owners, who recently won a $10,600 judgment due to Tesla’s failure to deliver. But Tesla is still fighting to delay payment, even just a few days at a time.

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Tesla will build factories just to retrofit millions of HW3 cars it said could do FSD

Tesla FSD advertising

There are millions of Tesla vehicles on the road today which were sold on the promise of full autonomy, but without hardware capable of doing so.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk just proposed the company could build “microfactories” in urban areas in order to upgrade the computers and cameras in those videos, adding high costs for a company that is already running thin on profitability – but we’ll see if it actually happens.

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In the UK, EVs are cheaper than petrol cars, thanks to Chinese competition

Electric Cab London

It’s long been cheaper to own an electric car, due to lower fueling costs. But the upfront cost is now lower, according to UK’s largest auto-buying website Autotrader, and reported by The Guardian. And a large part of it is because of the availability of low-cost Chinese EVs, which are unavailable or subject to tariffs in many other countries.

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Donut Lab’s ‘miracle’ solid-state battery is fraud, says insider, Donut Lab denies

On today's extraordinary episode of Quick Charge, we reflect on the fact that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and both Donut Labs AND Tesla are a long way from turning everyone into believers.

Donut Lab’s miraculous solid state battery, promising energy density, charging and durability numbers unseen by the industry, has been subject to a criminal complaint in Finland from an insider who says it doesn’t live up to the public promises Donut Lab has made.

But the company says that the insider didn’t work on the battery project, and denies any fraudulent behavior.

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VW replaces US ID.4 production with 18mpg Atlas SUV as gas prices spike

VW says it will stop building the ID.4 in the US, and instead shift focus to production of a gas-guzzling, pollution-spewing, 18mpg three row land yacht.

The change comes just as gas prices have risen dramatically and after republicans inflated the price of every EV by $7,500, ensuring Americans have even fewer affordable choices during an affordability crisis.

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Dept. of Interior bribes oil company $1B from taxpayer coffers to stop wind power

The Department of the Interior, headed by a man who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from oil companies, just declared it will spend $1 billion of your dollars to convince a French oil company, TotalEnergies, to stop development of affordable, reliable offshore wind and instead shift to expensive, unreliable liquified methane gas.

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The last domino falls: Stellantis EVs now have Tesla Supercharger access

As of today, Jeep, Dodge and Stellantis EVs can plug in and charge on Tesla’s Supercharger network, the largest DC charging network in North America. Stellantis was the last brand set to gain access, so now just about every EV in America can use Superchargers, with the right adapters.

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