Jameson Dow

Nissan has announced a new electrification plan intending to bring the company into the electric age with four new concepts, $17 billion in investment over five years (including solid state batteries), and 15 fully electric models by 2030.

Hummer EV deliveries are imminent, slated to begin next month as confirmed today by GMC brand chief Duncan Aldred. While the truck will not be EPA rated, GM says it will have an all-electric range of 329 miles.

Rivian sent out emails to Launch Edition reservation holders today with two-month delivery windows for their vehicles. The windows start as early as March 2022, but some vehicles will be delivered as late as September 2022 (or possibly later).

Dodge will end gas-powered Charger and Challenger production in 2024, to be replaced by electric models, according to Dodge brand CEO Tim Kuniskis as reported by Motor Trend.

Ford is going hard on electrification, with a solid showing at this year’s LA Auto Show and big reservation numbers for the F-150 Lightning. Ford has declared its intent to be the biggest EV maker in the world with a big increase in production in the next few years.

But even with all of that, it’s still not enough. By our estimates, with Ford’s planned production ramp, F-150s won’t be readily available without a wait for the better part of the decade.

In October 2017, GM announced that it would release 20 new EVs by 2023 – just over five years from then, and just over one year from now. How’s that going?

If GM’s booth at the LA Auto Show is any indication (and it is): Not very well.

COP26, the 26th meeting of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change’s Conference of Parties has ended with the successful negotiation of the Glasgow Climate Pact, which updates the landmark Paris Agreement with new climate goals (full text here). The new Pact moves forward timelines for updating national goals for carbon reduction and for the first time explicitly calls for a “phase-down” of coal globally.

But experts warn that the new commitments are not strong enough and will still need to be updated, as soon and as strongly as possible, if we want to keep warming below 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels.

A number of new Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles have been delivered in the last few days with missing USB ports, often without any warning before the owners get their new cars home and notice that the car’s phone charger isn’t working.

The automaker blames the missing parts on the global chip shortage.

This week at COP26, a number of nations and automakers agreed to target 100% zero-emission new car and van sales globally by 2040.

But 2040 is not only too late to reach our climate goals based on scientific consensus, it’s also a pathetic, low-effort commitment based on simple math.

Hagerty took the Tesla Model S Plaid out to Willow Springs International Raceway in California and pitted it against two of the fastest gas sedans out there – the BMW M5 CS and Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing – and you’ll never guess what happened next (unless you read the title or looked at the featured image).

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin – whose state’s banner industry, coal mining, has been largely unionized and been central to the US labor movement since soon after its inception – today called the proposed $4,500 union-made EV tax credit “wrong” and “not American.”

The $4,500 union-made EV credit is a portion of the proposed $12,500 federal EV tax credit, part of the pending Build Back Better act, which updates and expands on the current $7,500 federal EV tax credit available to EV purchasers.

(The following article was sent to us by a concerned Japanese resident who wishes to remain anonymous.)

Remember the first electric Toyota RAV4? Probably not. The early attempt at an EV barely had a range of 100 miles and Toyota sold very few of them. Back in 2010, Toyota and Tesla jointly worked on a second RAV4 EV project and Toyota had invested $50 million in Tesla, which it sold in 2017 (and which would now be worth $20 billion had they not sold it).

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) unveiled a hydrogen-powered zero emission ambulance this week at Glasgow’s COP26 climate change conference. The vehicle will help the NHS reduce its contribution to UK road emissions and improve air quality and therefore health – thus making health workers’ jobs a little easier to boot.

Extreme E continues its debut season at the Island X Prix in Sardinia this weekend, racing in Europe for the first time.

Each Extreme E venue is picked to bring awareness to one aspect of environmental damage humans are doing to the Earth. In the case of the Island X Prix, the focus is on recent wildfires that tore through Italy this summer, which are exacerbated by rising global temperatures, and on conserving oceanic carbon stores like the ocean seagrass that grows off the coast of Sardinia.

VW, the world’s largest producer of fossil-powered vehicles (by revenue), has produced a graphic comparing its diesel offerings to its electric ones, showing how across several model lines, the electric models come out way ahead in terms of total cost savings.

Herbert Diess, CEO of VW, invited Tesla CEO Elon Musk to call in to an internal conference with 200 VW executives in an effort to spur further innovation from his company. The two auto execs continue to have a beyond cordial relationship after Musk tried to hire Diess to become Tesla’s CEO.

California will ban “small off-road engines” (SORE) primarily used in gas-powered lawn equipment, such as leaf blowers and lawnmowers, in a law signed by Governor Gavin Newsom this weekend.

The province of Saskatchewan in Canada has joined a growing number of regions around the world in levying punitive taxes against electric cars while letting gas cars continue to get away with murder. But a local group has come up with a creative way to show just how dumb their EV tax is: by demanding a tax on people who use sidewalks.

Mazda invited us out for a drive of its upcoming MX-30 electric compact SUV, and some conversations with Mazda’s Irvine R&D folks. We have a lot of thoughts to share about the car and the future of Mazda’s EV programs.

Drive Electric Week kicks off this Saturday with over 200 online and in-person events celebrating electric vehicles. Events will be held for the next two weekends, from September 25 through October 3.

Drive Electric Week is an annual event organized by Plug In America, Electric Auto Association, EVHybridNoire, and Sierra Club. This is the event’s 11th year. It started in the US as National Drive Electric Week, but for the last few years, events have been hosted in various other parts of the globe. This year, there are some events in Canada, Mexico, and New Zealand.

Norway is ahead of the game in EV sales, with gasoline’s share of the new car market vanishing more and more every month, faster than almost anyone outside of Electrek‘s Slack channel could have predicted. This has led Norway to have the earliest target for the phaseout of new gas vehicle sales in the world – 2025.

But gas cars might not even last that long. According to an analysis printed by the Norwegian Automobile Federation’s magazine, Motor, the downward trend in sales for gas cars has been so consistent and steep that the last new gas car sale in Norway could happen just seven months from now, in April 2022.

Cadillac opened reservations for their upcoming 2023 Lyriq electric vehicle at 1 p.m. today, and, in a completely unsurprising turn for our readers, the car sold out almost immediately. By 1:19 p.m., Cadillac stated that all 2023 Lyriq “Debut Edition” vehicles had been reserved.

Other 2023 model year Lyriq trim levels will still be available, but so far, Debut Edition reservations are the only ones that have opened (and 19 minutes later, closed).

This weekend, a Tesla Roadster will make the journey from Lands End to John O’ Groates, an 870-mile drive spanning the full length of the island of Great Britain. This drive has been done by EVs many times before, but in this case, it’s in a special vehicle: the very first car that ever did the drive, the same 2010 Tesla Roadster, still on its original battery, to make a point about EV battery longevity.

The drive also serves as a fundraiser for Zero Carbon World, a UK charity pushing for carbon reduction and EV adoption. Zero Carbon World is chaired by Formula E driver Alexander Sims, who has done a similar drive before in a Model 3. If you’d like to toss in some coins, you can donate to the cause through JustGiving (for £30 you can get your name on the car).