Electric cars

With the upcoming inauguration of Donald Trump as President, automakers, or at least the important lobbying groups representing them, see an opportunity to lower the EPA’s fuel emission standards in order to reduce the number of electric cars they have to produce. We reported that an important automaker lobbying group sent a letter to Trump’s transition team just two days after his election claiming that automakers cannot produce zero-emission cars at a competitive price and requesting more lenient requirements.

Now the EPA is rushing to file its midterm review of the standard early in order to put in place the fleet fuel consumption requirement of 54.5 mpg by 2025 before Trump takes over – though the agency claims it’s not what motivated them. While not impossible, it will be much more difficult for Trump’s administration to change the mandate once it’s put in place, and automakers are already expressing concerns.
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As we reported this morning, Finland’s government announced its most recent climate goals this week and became the latest of a series of countries announcing their plans for an imminent phase-out of coal-fired power plants, but the country also announced its ambition to dramatically increase the number of electric vehicles on its roads.
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We were excited a few weeks ago when reports came out that Toyota was going to put together a team to develop long-range electric cars and bring them to market by 2020. Today, the Japanese automaker officially confirmed this effort, but not without throwing some cold water on it.
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Not even two days after Donald Trump’s election, automakers have started their lobbying effort to weaken the requirements for fuel consumption reduction. The current goal is for a fleet average of more than 50 mpg by 2025, which would require automakers to produce more electric vehicles in their fleet to compensate for popular gas-guzzling pickup trucks and SUVs.

In a letter sent to Trump’s transition team yesterday, a powerful automaker lobbying group claims automakers cannot produce zero-emission cars at a competitive price and asks to lower the requirements for them to comply.
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The general benefits of all-electric vehicles have been fairly understood for a while now. It’s why there are several federal and state incentives for consumers to buy them and automakers to make them, but now a new study is giving us a more detailed look at the health and climate costs associated with gas-powered cars in the US, and the impact of a transition to a mostly all-electric fleet.
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In heavily populated cities, there is often a problem with cars overcrowding and congesting the roads because the demand, usually, outweighs the supply. Many companies have presented their solutions for the dilemma, such as Uber, Lyft, and Tesla’s shared fleet idea. Now, a Danish startup, Spiri, seeks to provide their own twist on how to alleviate the strain in metropolitan areas.

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The International Energy Agency (IEA) is out with its Energy Technology Perspectives report (via Carbon Brief). The agency compiled data from the automotive industry and determined that the world’s electric vehicle fleet surpassed the 1 million cars mark last year. Out of the 15 technology sectors to combat carbon emissions followed by IEA, the agency says that the EV sector is the only one on track for deployment.
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This week, Daimler announced its plan to transition to greener technologies over the next few years. The company laid out release schedules for several new hybrids, plug-in hybrids, fuel cell vehicles, and all-electric vehicles across all its brands.

The plan is a little all over the place but we try to summarize it below and if that’s not enough for you, you can dive into the full press package further down.
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The PSA group, which includes the French automotive brands Peugeot, Citroën and DS, announced this week 2 new electric vehicle platforms on which the company will build 4 new all-electric vehicles and 7 new plug-in hybrids by 2021. The company says that the first models will hit the market in 2019
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In the above image in 1900, we see that there is a single car out of many horse drawn carriages in New York City. Within thirteen years it transformed into one of many cars and one horse. Technology disruptions made this happen – and the evidence from the past several decades seems to show that battery pricing, electric car design, autonomous technologies and solar power are all about to hit their thirteen year strides.

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Swedish automaker Volvo unveiled today two new concepts based on its Compact Modular Architecture (CMA). The new platform was developed to support all-electric and hybrid powertrains. The battery-powered version of the concepts are expected to achieve around 215 miles on a single charge.

The designs of the two new concepts are stunning and refreshing after what we have been seeing with EV concepts lately.
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Nissan had its press briefing today for the opening of the Tokyo Motor Show 2015 and the Japan-based company reaffirmed its commitment to electric vehicles with 3 new EVs on stage.

Watch Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn’s presentation below the break:
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The Guardian is reporting that Apple legal representatives met with California’s department of motor vehicles to discuss regulations about self-driving cars. On record, the DMV told The Guardian that “the Apple meeting was to review DMV’s autonomous vehicle regulations”. This news follows reports that Apple is searching for a private road-testing site for its ‘Apple Car’ electric vehicle project.

More interestingly, The Guardian claims to have obtained documents that suggest the Apple Car is close to leaving the lab as the project deemed ‘Project Titan’ has now an official Engineering Program Manager. When a project gets an EPM, it typically means a product is entering the next stage of development and finishing testing stages.

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Before Martin Eberhard and Mark Tarpenning founded Tesla Motors in 2003, they were trying to figure out the best way to break America’s addiction to oil. 75% of the oil consumed in America is used in transportation, and of that, 50% is used for passenger vehicles. So it became clear that what was needed was an alternative way to power cars, but what exactly would that look like? They examined all kinds of interesting alternative drivetrains, from hydrogen fuel cells to ethanol, but they eventually decided that an electric car was the way to go. So they began to learn everything they could about electric cars; how they worked, past attempts to bring one to market, and the engineering challenges of building one. They learned many things which we will not get in to here, but one of the most interesting, and the one I will be focusing on today, was about the demographics of people who bought the LAST generation of electric vehicles.
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