Earlier this year – not long after the Dieselgate scandal – the Volkswagen Group announced a new direction for its lineup of vehicles with a plan to introduce 20 new electric vehicles through the group’s brands by the end of the decade.
Today, the automaker extended the timeline to 2025 and said that it will introduce “more than 30 new electric vehicles during the next 10 years”. Earlier this year, CEO Matthias Müller was talking about both all-electric and plug-in hybrids, but now he is making a statement to go all-electric and confirmed that the “more than 30 new models” will all be “purely battery-powered electric vehicles (BEVs)”. Expand Expanding Close
But while the Netherlands and Norway are fighting over the technicalities, a senior government official in Germany confirmed they will impose a mandate for all new cars registered in the country to be emissions free by 2030. Expand Expanding Close
Yesterday, 9to5Mac.com reported that Apple Inc has founded a new, fully owned, subsidiary known as Apple Energy and that this entity had applied to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC regulates power companies) to be able to sell electricity and other power grid services to anyone that is not a public utility. Does this mean that you can now buy clean electricity made on the roof of the Apple Spaceship? Unless you are a large corporate electricity user within 10-30 miles, probably not. However if we step back and take a broader view, something interesting is happening – the likes of Apple, Google, Ikeaand others including even Walmart are showing us a small piece of the future of much smarter electricity grid owned by many instead of the few.
I managed to come into a lease of a Ford Focus Electric starting in August 2013, and this is my review of my time with it. For a little bit more background on me, and my newest primary car, please check out my review of my Cadillac ELR here.
The Ford Focus Electric (FFE) is an excellent first all-electric car to market. Coming out starting in 2012, there was not much competition, and in my opinion it was the best all-electric on the market at the time.
I think we are witnessing the start of a new (but long overdue) trend this year. The few established automakers still pushing fuel cell hydrogen vehicles appear to be warming up to battery-powered electric vehicles instead. Honda, Toyota and Hyundai, arguably the automakers most stuck on hydrogen, all announced new electric vehicle programs in the past few weeks. Expand Expanding Close
India’s Power Minister Piyush Goyal recently announced plans for an interesting program that could see the nation’s whole car fleet becoming 100% electric by 2030. It represents one of the most ambitious goal for the electrification of transport in a large country.
The program would let people buy electric vehicles with zero down payment financed by the state and drivers can then pay for the vehicle at the rate they are saving on gas. Expand Expanding Close
Subaru and its parent company Fuji unveiled a new car platform this week. All of its future models will be built on it with the first one being the next Impreza, which will go on sale later this year.
Interestingly, the automaker also confirmed that the new platform is built to support hybrid and all-electric vehicles for future models. Expand Expanding Close
According to a report from Silicon Valley Business Journal, Apple has recently leased a 96,000-square-foot industrial property in Sunnyvale, California. The property was originally home to a Pepsi bottling plant, but Apple now occupies the entire space. It has widely been reported in the past that Apple is testing its Project Titan electric car initiative in Sunnyvale, with the company reportedly operating a shell company called Sixty Eight Research out of the city.
GULF OF MEXICO – APRIL 21: U.S. Coast Guard fire boat response crews battle the blazing remnants of offshore oil rig
The Bloomberg New Energy Finance report that came out last week (press release at bottom) says that in 25 years, electric vehicles will make up just 35% of new car sales. That means that in a generation from now, 65% of people will still be buying petroleum-based cars. It is hard to imagine a world where this few EVs makes any sense, even given BNEF’s own data.
The report and the numbers it presents are much too conservative for any reasonable circumstance. Take its own lede for instance:
“Continuing reductions in battery prices will bring the total cost of ownership of EVs below that for conventional-fuel vehicles by 2025, even with low oil prices.”.
Why would anyone buy a gasoline car when an electric or even a plug-in hybrid costs less than a gas car? Electric cars are cleaner, quieter, faster and safer than equivalent oil cars. Keep in mind that 2040 is 15 years after the cost of an electric car passes parity with oil in their scenario. Furthermore, by Bloomberg’s own estimates, batteries will reach less than one-third of today’s break-even prices.
At the core of this forecast is the work we have done on EV battery prices. Lithium-ion battery costs have already dropped by 65% since 2010, reaching $350 per kWh last year. We expect EV battery costs to be well below $120 per kWh by 2030, and to fall further after that as new chemistries come in.”
The US department of energy has a handy calculator (above, current prices) which shows that in every state in the union, even with insanely cheap gas prices, it is still on average 50% cheaper to run on electricity than on gasoline. That means once battery/electric engine powertrains reach parity with combustion, it is really game over for oil.
So somehow 65% of people in the year 2040 will want to pay a huge premium for a fossil fuel engine car? Even if the world weren’t heating up this makes no sense at all… Expand Expanding Close
Last year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and 38 company and environmental group leaders signed a letter proposing that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) lets VW off the hook in California for having cheated on reporting emissions in its diesel cars and in return, VW would be forced to significantly invest in electric vehicles or other zero-emission vehicles manufacturing in the state.
According to German newspaper Welt am Sonntag (via Reuters), the EPA, potentially inspired by the proposal, asked Volkswagen to manufacture electric vehicles at its Tennessee plant as part of the current negotiation over the fix of the more than 500,000 diesel vehicles in violation of pollution limits in the US. Expand Expanding Close
Brace yourself for some misinformation in the coming months.
Gandhi said: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
It looks like electric vehicles are still in the “fighting phase” as we learn today that billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are planning to back a new group of lobbyists with a focus on “boosting petroleum-based transportation fuels and attacking government subsidies for electric vehicles”, according to refining industry sources talking to the Huffington Post. Expand Expanding Close
SK Innovation, a battery cell maker part of the South Korea-based chemical and energy conglomerate SK, confirmed (via GreenCarCongress) that it has been selected as the supplier of battery cells for Mercedes’ upcoming line of electric vehicles.
While announcing the renaming of its GM Powertrain to GM Global Propulsion Systems this week, the automaker gave us a glimpse at the structure of the division and disclosed that almost half of its engineers are now working on electric and alternative propulsion systems. Expand Expanding Close
Today, the company announced the creation of a partnership with Faraday Future backer LeTV, or LeEco or Leshi (the group goes by many brand names), to develop and manufacture the RapidE. The group says they are now focused on bringing the vehicle to market in 2018. Expand Expanding Close
Only two months ago, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval approved a $335 million incentive package in a deal to secure that Faraday Future will build a $1 billion electric car factory in the state, more specifically in North Las Vegas. Now after the company reportedly broke ground at the site just a few weeks ago, we learn that Nevada Treasurer Dan Schwartzis questioning Faraday’s financial health after inquiries and a visit to China.
It looks like Faraday is subject to its fair share of scrutiny, especially after both Nevada and Tesla were criticized over the size of the incentive package the state agreed to give Tesla to build its Gigafactory near Reno. The package has been widely reported to be worth $1.3 billion and contributed to Tesla’s image as been dependent on government subsidies, but it’s important to understand that the incentives are spread out on 20 years and contingent on Tesla spending close to $100 billion at the factory during the same period. Expand Expanding Close
As part of a Reutersreport that Porsche wouldn’t be quite as profitable in the short-term, it was revealed that the German luxury automaker and part of the Volkswagon g Group will spend a whopping $1B Euros to retrofit its factories to produce Mission E and theoretically other electric cars and variants… Expand Expanding Close
Autocar is out with a new report today claiming inside information on Volkswagen’s first electric car to be built on the new MEB platform. MEB is the platform unveiled at CES last month and showcased in the company’s microbus concept: BUDD-e.
The platform will allow VW to bring to market electric vehicles made to be electric from the ground up. It is based on the now familiar concept of a large battery pack extending flat between the axles. Expand Expanding Close
Dragtimes has its first P90D Ludicrous 0-60/100 MPH video up and the numbers they got beat Tesla’s already impressive estimates… Expand Expanding Close
According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, the Apple veteran employee who has been overseeing the company’s “Project Titan” electric car initiative is leaving the company. The report, citing “people familiar with the matter,” says Steve Zadesky, who has been with Apple for 16 years, is leaving the company for “personal reasons.”
Tesla had an incredible year for sales and deliveries in 2015. The California-based automaker delivered 50,580 vehicles last year, which represents a 60% increase over the previous year. It’s hard to find any weaknesses with such an incredible sales performance. Yet the company increased its deliveries in almost all markets but Norway, where according to registration data, Tesla delivered the exact same number of Model S’s in 2014 and 2015: 4,039 units. Expand Expanding Close
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