Seth Weintraub

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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After my initial pickup/intro of the Kia Soul EV, I’ve spent the last week driving the vehicle as my daily driver. I normally drive a 2012 Prius Plug-in or a 2013 Tesla Model S so I know my way around EVs but this was the first time I’ve had the opportunity to really dig deep into both a Kia branded vehicle and a 100-mile range Chademo electric vehicle. I’ll spoil it a little saying that I was pleasantly surprised …

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It has been a few months since our last in depth EV review with the 2016 Chevy Volt so we’re excited to jump into another in-depth review: The 2016 Kia Soul EV.

I got the Soul EV yesterday driven from New Jersey about 52 miles away. With most other sub-100 mile commuter EVs this would mean it was pretty much useless to me upon delivery before charging. But the Kia Soul has a 115 mile city range (93 on the highway), the biggest non-Tesla range currently available in the US, so I had about 60 miles to play with.

That’s great because my first test, the nearest CHAdeMO station, is around 20 miles from my house, and I want to make sure I can get back if this is a failed mission…

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We don’t know much about the SolarCity solar panels that are coming out of the South Buffalo plant but Chairman and likely soon CEO of the combined Tesla/Solar City entity Elon Musk told investors last month:

“It’s a solar roof, as opposed to modules on a roof.”

Musk continued:
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When you send a vehicle which can hold 7 passengers comfortably with their luggage along the road from 0-60mph in 2.5 seconds, you are turning the supercar world upside down. When you do it in an EV, you know the world has changed.

DragTimes raced a Lamborghini Huracan, a $200,000 2-seat supercar that is basically a combustion engine on wheels, along a stretch of Florida roadway this weekend. When the Tesla Model S P100D and the Huracan both took off at the same time, the production Tesla quietly jumped out in front of the exotic supercar which was belching hydrocarbons as fast as it could. It stayed there well beyond 60mph and 100mph…
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…You’ve done the first 240 miles of California highway with relative ease. But how do you do the second 240 miles? And 3rd…? In short, can you drive cross country?

I’m more than impressed with the Chevy Bolt so far – it has exceeded my expectations by at least 20 miles of range and during my test drive at CES earlier this year in Las Vegas I found it to be very roomy and sporty and frankly a lot of fun to drive. Chevy should absolutely be applauded. We covered the recent reviews here.

But as an EV buyer, I’m not yet satisfied with Chevy’s solution to cross country driving…you know: the quintessential American Road Trip…
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Chevy today teased on its Facebook Page that it would be announcing the Bolt’s EV range tomorrow but asked readers to guess the range today. I don’t think you’ll get a free Bolt or anything but it’s a fun game to play…and we have a poll below for your guesses…
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Apple’s car plans appear to have hit yet another snag. Tonight the NYTimes is reporting that Apple is again rebooting the now infamous car project.

In a retrenchment of one of its most ambitious initiatives, Apple has shuttered parts of its self-driving car project and laid off dozens of employees, according to three people briefed on the move who were not allowed to speak about it publicly.

2016 has been an abysmal year for Apple’s car project if you believe the various reports from top news agencies. A timeline of Apple Car developments this year:
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According to a report from the Information, and confirmed by Tesla, Maps/Navigation Senior Engineering Manager Bill Chen has departed from the company. The report didn’t discuss the terms of the departure nor which party instigated the termination, but Mr. Chen’s department was under increasing pressure to develop its own Maps software including its Autopilot-focussed high precision maps.
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Nissan today in Rio unveiled its BladeGlider “working prototype” which combines electric powertrain with a futuristic design and moderate 268 horsepower split between two rear 130kW electric motors. Max speed is quoted as nearly 200km/h (125 miles/hour), with 0-100km/h (0-62) taking less than five seconds.  No information was given on the battery pack size but as this is a two model exhibition car, it is likely to differ in a big way from any possible related production car.

The system features torque vectoring, controlling the torque delivered to the driven wheels, improving the handling even further. With torque vectoring, if the car starts to understeer, it automatically sends more torque to the outside wheel to restore the handling balance. Designed to add to the driving experience rather than govern it, the torque vectoring system has three settings: off, agile and drift mode. Power is supplied by a high performance, five module lithium-ion 220kW battery. Bespoke cooling systems have been developed for both the battery and the motors.

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Yesterday was quite a day in Reno. While we weren’t able to fire off our livestream as we’d hoped, we were able to gather a ton of information on the “Coolest Factory in the world” I’ll break down the new info, videos and imagery below:
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The Reno, Nevada Gigafactory is a key differentiator in both the energy storage and EV space and therefore, one of the big keys to Tesla’s future and it opens officially this week.

The good news is we’ll be on hand and will be broadcasting live throughout the events this week. Stay tuned to Electrek where the first news should be coming tonight and extend to tomorrow’s press-only show.
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