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
An 83-minute-long video of a dinner attended by Donald Trump in April 2018 was released today by Lev Parnas.
The video touches on many subjects, many of which been covered elsewhere. But here on Electrek, we are particularly interested in the part starting around minute 57, where there is approximately 15 minutes’ worth of discussion about electric vehicles, alternative fuels, shipping, and autonomous driving.
And almost all of it is nonsense.
Tesla announced the Cybertruck to much fanfare two months ago, and the internet was immediately flooded with reactions. The news about the truck reached far and wide, but people were polarized over its looks. It even disrupted the holiday season with these ugly sweaters.
The Cybertruck’s strange appearance hasn’t stopped the do-it-yourself crowd, though, as it seems to have inspired a lot of knockoffs, likely in part thanks to its easy-to-replicate angular form. We’ve collected some of the best ones from around the world below.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has announced that Tesla intends to open a product design center in Europe. The design center would likely be built at the same site as Tesla’s Gigafactory 4 project outside Berlin.
Earlier this month, Musk also announced that Tesla wants to open a design center in China to design cars for the global market.
Tesla is gearing up to build their next factory, Gigafactory 4, on the outskirts of Berlin. Here’s a rundown of the latest news on the company’s next big project.
Model Y sightings are picking up ahead of the car’s seemingly imminent launch, but one question remains: What do the third-row seats look like? Previously we’ve seen just a glimpse of the third row through the side windows, but couldn’t really get a feel for the legroom available.
Now we have well-lit photos from the inside of the car, showing what kind of legroom third-row passengers might expect.
Tesla has responded to local protests at the site of their next factory near Berlin by opening a community office to hear local concerns, according to Der Spiegel. The office opens Thursday, just a few days after site protests began.
The EPA rating for the new Porsche Taycan Turbo S has been posted to fueleconomy.gov, and the results aren’t all that pretty. The Taycan is rated at just 68 MPGe with 192 miles of range, despite the car’s large 93 kWh battery.
While not a big drop from the Taycan Turbo, the Taycan Turbo S and its higher power delivery resulted in 1 less MPGe, and 9 miles less range than the Turbo’s 69 MPGe and 201 miles.
Exactly a year after breaking ground on Gigafactory 3 in China, Tesla has just held its first public delivery event for Model 3s made in China.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk was in the country for the event, and gave some short comments. Among those comments, he stated that Tesla is thinking about hiring a team of designers to build an original model in China, which Tesla would then sell worldwide.
Sony surprised the CES audience today with a new concept electric car, the VISION-S prototype.
Sony shared a few details of the prototype, which is meant as a showcase for Sony’s technologies for the automotive industry.
Fisker is publicly showing their upcoming Ocean for the first time at CES, but held a private unveiling event today in LA.
At the event, they went over various details of the car and announced its starting price. The car will start at $37,499, which after the federal tax credit means it will be under $30,000 in the US, and even lower in some areas with state or local incentives.
Previously Fisker announced they will offer the car with a “flexible lease” for $379/month, which includes all maintenance. Cars ordered today are expected to ship in 2022.
Electric cars continue to dominate in Norway, as 2019 saw EV sales rise to 42.4%, up from 31.2% in 2018, according to OFV. This represents almost a 1/3 increase in EV sales from year to year.
Adding in plug-in hybrid sales, about 56% of Norway’s new car sales in 2019 had a plug.
Sales numbers were buoyed by a record year for Tesla, whose Model 3 was the most popular car in Norway in 2019.
The Porsche Taycan has just hit the roads in the US, and Porsche Club of America had a chance to do a video walkaround of Porsche’s new electric sports car. The video features Vu Nguyen, Executive Director of the Porsche Club of America interviewing Lukas Kraemer, Porsche’s Complete Vehicle Manager for Taycan.
The video covers a lot of topics and has some interesting insights and specs about the car, which we’ll get to point by point.
Rivian gave us a little Christmas present today by releasing real video of an awesome feature they’re calling “tank turn.”
This feature allows the Rivian to turn literally on a dime – it can do a full 360º turn without moving at all.
Porsche has started deliveries of the Taycan in the US, just in time for Christmas. And the first US Taycan owner has given his first “drive report,” and it’s pretty much all positive.
Of particular note, he states that the car’s 201-mile estimated EPA range, and commensurate low efficiency, is “conservative.”
Tesla has been working on a Trans-Canada Supercharger route for more than a year now, and today it finally went live, all at the same time.
Even better, most of the locations have Tesla’s new 250 kW V3 Supercharger. These allow a Model 3 to add about 100 miles in seven minutes.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted tonight that Tesla has a “holiday update” with a few special gifts in store. The update includes a Tesla full self-driving “sneak preview” and popular indie video game Stardew Valley, among other things.
The update should be out to Tesla’s early access system in “a few more days.”
Tesla’s “Acceleration Boost” upgrade for Dual Motor Model 3s went live yesterday, and we’ve already seen the results of one test showing that Tesla’s promised half-second improvement to 0-60 times seems roughly accurate.
The results of this first test were posted to Reddit by user Wugz. Wugz also previously tested Tesla’s “5% performance boost” that went live in November.
Lucid Motors, an EV startup headed by former Tesla engineer Peter Rawlinson, has reduced the reservation price of its upcoming Lucid Air to $1,000. Lucid had previously started taking $2,500 deposits for the Air in 2017. Lucid also reiterated that production of the Air is on track for “late 2020.”
Pre-orders are currently available in the US and Canada, and the reservation fee is fully refundable. Customers from elsewhere in the world can join Lucid’s “international interest” list.
NVIDIA has unveiled what they call the “world’s most advanced processor” for use in autonomous vehicles and robots. The new NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin chip can perform 200 trillion operations per second, which is almost seven times as many as NVIDIA’s previous Xavier chip (30 trillion operations) and more than Tesla’s FSD Computer (144 trillion).
While his company spiraled into bankruptcy, Robert Murray spent tens of millions from the company coffers to pay himself, his successor, and several anti-science and anti-environment lobby groups, according to new court filings.
This money was spent at the same time as Murray is asking courts to excuse his debts to his workers, in the form of pensions and healthcare plans.
The US spending bill just agreed to last night includes extension of tax credits for home EV charger installations, electric motorcycles, and fuel-cell vehicles.
These credits were previously extended through the end of 2017, though that time the extension was retroactive, as taxpayers didn’t know about the incentive during the incentive period. Now, those credits have been extended retroactively again — covering the last two years, since 2017. They’ve also been extended forward through the end of 2020.
We’ve learned a lot about the Tesla Cybertruck, but there are still a number of open questions. Tesla CEO Elon Musk went to Twitter to answer a few tonight, showing several ways that the Cybertruck could become an ultimate camping machine.
In response to a fan, Musk stated that the Cybertruck’s heating and air conditioning system will work in the truck’s bed area when the cover is closed, that the bed should be accessible from second-row seating, and that the Cybertruck will likely have Tesla’s “bioweapon defense mode” air filtering system.
One of the standout features of the Porsche Taycan is its incredible promised 350kW charge rate. Tesla has updated its Model 3 to have a 250kW charge rate, which is available on Tesla’s V3 superchargers.
At first glance, this looks like a loss for Tesla. But it’s not. Because of Porsche’s low efficiency, it turns out that almost every Tesla adds more range per minute at peak charge rate than the Taycan does – and some by a significant margin.
Mercedes-Benz has once again delayed EQC deliveries, pushing them back by another year in the US, as a “strategic decision to first support the growing customer demand for the EQC in Europe.”
Mercedes last delayed the EQC this February. It has just started deliveries in Europe in the last couple months.