A few weeks ago, Fully Charged’s Elliot Richards had a go in the Wuling Mini, the cheapest EV currently available. Today he’ll be driving not only the most expensive EV ever built at $3.48 million, but also the fastest, at 217 mph – the Nio EP9.
In DK Kim’s first report from Korea, he gets a sneak peek at Hyundai’s incredible Ioniq 6, the production version of the Hyundai Prophecy Concept that was revealed in 2020.
Could geothermal power be the future of electricity generation? Fully Charged‘s Robert Llewellyn visits Cornwall to find out how Eden Geothermal is unlocking geothermal energy in the granite beneath the ground.
In his debut episode for Fully Charged, Jack Scarlett joins Robert Llewellyn in rural Wales to see which of two popular electric cars — the Tesla Model 3 Long Range or the Polestar 2 Long Range — is best suited for a road trip.
BMW has been making cars for decades and got off to a strong electric start with the i3 and i8, but since then, they’ve been a little quiet. Until now.
As the demand for EV batteries increases, could lithium be the vital element we need for our electric future? British physicist, oceanographer, and TV presenter Helen Czerski heads to Cornwall, which is rich with lithium, to find out why it’s so important and how it can be more ethically sourced.
Is the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV the most exciting electric car on the market? Probably not. But what is it about this little box on wheels that has led to it outselling Tesla?
What Arrival is doing is revolutionary, and since our visit last July, we have been desperate to return to its R&D centre in Banbury to see how the EV startup’s electric van and bus designs have developed.
At a top secret location, Fully Charged were lucky enough drive something really special – the Hyundai Ioniq 5 – and this hotly anticipated electric car certainly didn’t disappoint…
When it comes to every part of the automotive industry, it seems that the switch to electric vehicles is set to leave no corner untouched. Until Tesla permanently disrupted the status quo, the world has been building cars for more or less the same way for a century.
When, as people who work, live, and breathe electrification, we think about the future of transport, it’s all too simple to slip into linear logic – an assumption that over the next decade, car owners will switch from gas cars to electric vehicles. But if one of the principal drivers of electrification is environmental, shouldn’t we be taking a long, hard look at the billions of vehicles that have already been built?
In the European electric car scene, things are getting competitive. The last 12 months have seen an explosion in a previously under-served segment of the market, electric SUVs.
General Motors gave Norway and its electric car success story the best possible promotion this week with their ‘No Way, Norway’ advertisement ahead of this Sunday’s Super Bowl LV. While Will Ferrell’s rallying cry has amused many and left others less impressed, in the absence of any actual electric cars to sell, it’s a conversational icebreaker at least. But there’s also a city in China with the biggest electric public transportation system in the world.
When Winston Churchill described “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” he could have easily been talking about one of the many electric vehicle startups around the world. If Tesla has cracked the code, what about the numerous others that are looking to solve the EV puzzle? In China, we have heard that it is “Blue Sky Coming” from Shanghai’s NIO for several years now, but until last year, there were clouds gathering on the horizon.
Great Britain is arguably better known as a bleak little island on the edge of Europe, rather than as a renewable powerhouse, but ‘the times they are a-changin’. It won’t be surprising that Britain with its considerable coastline is ‘blowing in the wind’, but what is less well known is that occasionally there is sunshine too. GRIDSERVE has made its name in recent years by building out solar farms across the UK. As such, the team there, led by CEO Toddington Harper, has approached the electric vehicle charging challenge from the perspective of primarily serving the grid and electric car drivers, and free from any fossil fuel legacy, not its shareholders. And it shows.
It’s fair to say that Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) hasn’t been the fastest off the mark when it comes to electric cars. With the lead-footedness displayed across all its brands — Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep, Lancia, Maserati, and Ram — you could be forgiven for thinking that the Italian-American multinational simply isn’t interested in having an electric future. Or a future at all.
From time to time, Fully Charged receives an offer that is too good to refuse, and when a long-term friend of the show offered us his electrified Ferrari 308, we didn’t hesitate.
We’re very lucky in Europe, as there are now nearly 40 electric vehicles to choose from. With changing attitudes to air pollution and climate change, allied to various government deadlines (a ban on new gas car sales from 2030 in the UK is expected imminently), next year looks set to be big for the European electric car market.
There was a time when the station wagon was a fixture of American family life, and frequently featured in popular culture. The fashion for bigger, taller vehicles has seen them all but disappear in the US, at around 1-2% of new car sales. In Europe, meanwhile, the “estate car,” as it’s known, remains a competitive segment, and in several Western European companies represents more than a fifth of new cars sold. In Sweden, the home of Volvo, around a third of the market share there belongs to the station wagon. In the US, the inexorable rise of “cool” crossovers — typically depicted devouring rugged terrain — means that almost half of the new car sales there are SUVs.
In the late summer, we were given the keys to Audi’s second all-electric car, the E-Tron Sportback, and while there is much to admire, it has taken us a little longer than usual to broadcast. Why? Well, there has always seemed to be more affordable, and in turn more accessible, electric cars to talk about to the public, including the VW ID.4, VW ID.3, Honda e, Tesla Model Y, and most recently the Mazda MX-30.
Slowly but surely, car companies are offering increasingly cost-competitive vehicles, but Audi is going against that grain by offering an even more expensive EV at the second time of asking. We understand that Audi is a luxury carmaker, but we feel compelled to ask, does this strategy stack up? Or could this short-sightedness potentially cost them in the long run? Let’s take a closer look.