Seth Weintraub

I had the pleasure of joining the Trek team in New York City this morning for a small briefing and a ride over the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn on the new Trek Super Commuter 8S which due for consumers in the US later this Spring. What got us interested in this event wasn’t so much the Bosch 350W motor/500Wh battery technology but the marketing Trek was using in its campaign to sell this $5000 bike…

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We all know the direct benefits of owning an electric vehicle – cleaner, cheaper, smoother  travel, getting to drive in carpool lanes, tax rebates, not being a douchebag to the environment, etc.

But after owning EVs for 5 years now, I’ve run into some 10 benefits that people probably don’t think of when deciding between purchasing and EV, hybrid or internal combustion engine. Drumroll please:
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BMW of North America and the US National Parks Services had a lovely event at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, site of Edison’s West Orange, N.J., laboratory and home yesterday and Electrek was on the scene. The event was the announcement that BMW would be partnering with the National Park Foundation, National Park Service and Department of Energy to bring 100 EV charging stations to National Parks like this one. BMW will also be footing the electric bill for the first 6 months of use, making it free for customers. I have just one little complaint…
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Last month I had the opportunity to travel to beautiful Durham, North Carolina on Hyundai’s dime to check out the new IONIQ EV and hybrids. The IONIQ, you’ll recall, is a 3 car strategy from Hyundai aimed at the high-efficiency vehicle market traditionally dominated by Toyota’s Prius line.

Though the Prius-beating 58 mpg and nifty new 12V battery replacement technology in the IONIQ Hybrid was impressive, it’s the IONIQ Electric we’re all here to talk about. I spent the bulk of my time driving the EV – and boy was I pleasantly surprised…

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Solar viability at Google’s Googleplex HQ

Today Google updated its Project Sunroof with some pretty striking data on approximately 60 million buildings and the viability for Solar Panels to power them. According to the search giant, almost 4 in 5 US homes are viable for solar panels with over 90% of homes in sunny states like Florida and California being viable. But even for houses in “not so sunny states” like Maine and Minnesota, over 60% of the homes surveyed were eligible to benefit from solar panels.

That’s a huge, untapped market for solar companies like Tesla’s SolarCity subsidiary… 
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It’s not all bad news for US state governments in their dealing with electric vehicles. Today New York State, headed by Democrat Andrew Cuomo announced a new up to $2,000 rebate program for all-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicle buyers. That means the Model 3 New Yorkers reserved just got significantly cheaper.

The rebate will help make EVs more cost competitive with gas-powered cars at purchase (they are often already much cheaper to own when accounting for gas savings) and will go into effect on April 1st…
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TL;DR – The 2017 Prius Prime doesn’t deserve coverage on Electrek. While a significant improvement over its predecessor the Prius Plug-in, the Prime’s internal combustion engine continues to turn on unpredictably and it cannot function as a complete car without gasoline.

Background:

I’ve been a Toyota Prius owner for almost 8 years. I loved my 2008 Prius so much that I decided to step up my game and get a 2012 Prius Plug-in. I regret that now because we had also looked at the Chevy Volt but the rear seat room vs. the Volt’s 4 seat option won out.

The local Toyota dealership sold me on the Plug-in version of the Prius getting 12 miles of range before the ICE motor kicked in. For me, that would have taken care of my commute and my wife could have gotten to work, charged up and gotten home without ever using a drop of gasoline. For long trips we’d use the gasoline and still get the great 50+mpg mileage of a Prius. Perfect! I don’t need the 2012 Volt’s 43 miles of range. Except one thing: The Prius Plug-in doesn’t go 12 miles on electricity or, in my case, often even get out of the driveway on electricity…

And I found out this week that Toyota’s new Prius Prime, while certainly an improvement in many areas over the Plug-in it replaces, still doesn’t function like the EV it pretends to be…
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Even we were surprised when we heard the news that the Chevy Bolt EV would get 238 miles on a charge according to the EPA on a 60kWh battery. The “SubCompact Crossover”, as Chevy likes to call it, gets about 30 more miles of EPA range than Tesla’s huge, 7 seat Model S on the same battery capacity but without the low drag coefficient that the Tesla enjoys.

Read our Chevy Bolt EV review

But some new Bolt EV drivers are finding they can really stretch out that mileage, especially in California where the weather is in the 60s or higher year round.

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Earlier today, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick dropped off of US President Donald Trump’s advisory council. The reasons cited were because of immigration reform but Kalanick was also targeted for his previous support for Trump, Uber continuing to serve JFK airport during the recent taxi strike and the subsequent #DeleteUber campaign which caused 200,000 people to flee the service and boosted its competitor Lyft to the top of the app charts.

On Thursday, Mr. Kalanick gave his answer, stepping down from Mr. Trump’s economic advisory council. “There are many ways we will continue to advocate for just change on immigration, but staying on the council was going to get in the way of that,” Mr. Kalanick wrote in an email to employees obtained by The New York Times.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also on that economic advisory council which has similarly hurt his reputation among some– I’d wager far fewer– and has also caused some Tesla Model 3 reservation holders to refund their deposits.

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GM invited us to come to San Francisco for a new round of test drives of their new flagship all-electric vehicle: the Chevy Bolt EV. Note: The lovely folks at Chevy paid for our travel, hotel and fed us quite nicely. You can find significant discounts on the Chevy Bolt here.

I had mixed feelings when I first got inside the 2017 Chevy Bolt EV more than a year ago at CES 2016 and those mixed feelings persist today. My concerns aren’t about the engineering, technology or even the implementation of the vehicle. The Bolt is unequivocally the best $30,000 EV you can buy today (in some states + Canada) and for my money, the best car of any kind on the roads right now at its price point.  GM/Chevrolet deserve a mountain of praise for delivering the first affordable EV with more range than anyone could hope to use on a daily basis.

But there are still some concerns…

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(Also on 9to5mac)

Chris Lattner isn’t the only high profile Apple executive who departed for Tesla over the past month, rather than sticking around to work on Titan. Electrek has learned that Matt Casebolt, a high-profile Senior Director of Design for Apple’s Mac lineup left the company last month for a role at Tesla as Sr. Director Engineering, Closures & Mechanisms. A job meant for a man named Casebolt…
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Earlier today, Chargepoint announced that they would have a new liquid-cooled 400kW charging station available this summer. In a subsequent video, Chargepoint also showed a Tesla charging handle in one of their stations which was quite a surprise, to us, anyway.

We went straight to the source and got an interview at CES with CEO Pasquale Romano to get all of the details…
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Update: We got to the bottom of the mystery with an interview with Chargepoint’s CEO

Today, Chargepoint announced a new 400kW charging capabilities that they say would add 100 miles of range per 15 minutes of charge.  While high-end Tesla’s can get that kind of mileage gains (and more) with current 145kW chargers, this could be a big boon for the industry if it were applied to trucks and busses, for instance where the 400kW = 100 miles in 15 minutes math works.

Charging the Model S at a rate if 440miles of range per hour. God bless the @TeslaMotors Supercharger! pic.twitter.com/YKa4Iw5TWa

— Mat Watson (@matwatsoncars) October 28, 2014

However, this morning Chargepoint published a YouTube video with something far more interesting for Tesla owners and prospective owners.

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nice Bolt parking job Woz

In the comment section of a long winded Facebook rant on the trials and tribulations of driving through Arizona’s pothole-laden roads and staying at pet-friendly hotels in Vegas, Apple’s Co-Founder and flip flopping EV enthusiast Steve Wozniak noted that he is now expecting his Chevy Bolt to become his main car.  It will arrive next week as Chevy slowly ramps up deliveries in compliance car states – currently California and Oregon only.

We’ve, for some reason, documented Woz’s plight from Swarming his Supercharger station odysseys and his on again off again love affair with the Chevy Bolt…
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US President-elect and environmental foil Donald Trump set up a Strategic and Policy Team on December 2nd made up of business leaders and chaired by Stephen Schwarzman Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder of Blackstone Financial Services. Most of the people on the original board were folks from traditional American “Blue Chip” companies including Mary Barra, Chairman and CEO of General Motors.

Today, Along with Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi, untraditional transportation leaders were added to the list: Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Travis Kalanick, CEO and Co-Founder of Uber were announced via press release.
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So there’s been a very important question about the Chevy Bolt that we’ve been following closely since its specs started trickling out earlier this year. How fast can it charge? We’re not talking about Level 2/Home charging which was clarified this week at 7.68 kW.

The Chevy Bolt Owner’s Manual which is now online (PDF) confirms that the Bolt will charge at 32 amps at 240 volts = 7.68 kW – giving the car 25 miles of charge per hour. This week, AeroVironment also announced that they would be providing the optional Chevy-branded home charging stations (vs. the included 110V plug adapter) to Chevy by upping their 30A EVSE-RS Charging stations 2 more amps to reach this level. As we’ve discussed before, this is a solid speed for home and destination charging but trails Tesla’s 48A chargers. The real world difference here in charging 100 miles is 3 hours for Tesla and 4 hours for the Bolt. Not a huge difference really when most of this will be done overnight.

But the real question when we are talking about charging speed is DC fast-charging for long distance travel. There are a bunch of differing statements out there which say Chevy is going to include either 50kW or 80kW depending who and when you ask.

While this might seem trivial on the surface, it is actually quite a big deal. The difference between 50kW and 80kW is a significant 60% increase. To put that into a real world scenario, imagine you want to fill up 2/3rds (40 kWh or 158 miles range) of the Bolt’s 60 kWh, 238-mile battery pack:

• 80kW, that takes 30 minutes
• 50kW, that takes 48 minutes

So we’re getting mixed messages from Chevy. Let’s run down the data points.

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If you want a minivan and don’t want to burn fossil fuels to get around, your options are extremely limited currently. You could obviously buy a very expensive Tesla Model X which ticks off a lot of the minivan features and adds a bunch of sports sedan goodies. But that sticker price of $75K is going to eliminate a broad swath of the population. From there, your options are all but nothing. You could squeeze into a Kia Soul EV which seats 5 and is a little higher off the ground than a typical car but at this point, you’d be better served to (head to the West Coast) and buy a Chevy Bolt with its 238-mile range.

This is where the Chrysler Pacifica steps in. Introduced almost a year ago from the inventor of the minivan comes a Plug-in Hybrid version of the popular Pacifica high end mini-van. This hybrid was touted as having 30 miles of range on electric only before its 500+ mile range with ICE kicked in.

Some good news on that front…
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The Chevy Bolt assembly line began putting together customer cars today in Orion Township, Michigan according to the AP.  Unfortunately for most of us, the cars will only reach California and Oregon in 2016 before a wider rollout next year…
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With the release of the Tesla Model S P100D in August, and deliveries last month I knew it was time to RIP combustion engines on the supercar circuit. The P100D hits 60mph in 2.5 seconds and hits a quarter mile in just over 10 seconds. The Model S also seats as many people (7) as a minivan, is very street smart and it part of a large and growing production line vs. the typical supercar which are only hand made in batches of 100 or so. Imagine if you built a limited production electric car optimized just for speed and not carrying a whole family.

Enter the Rimac Concept One.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter this afternoon to announce an unexpected product launch event on October 17th, just a week away. He further noted that the expected Tesla/SolarCity announcement, which he previously hoped to hold at the end of the month, would indeed be on October 28th…
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