My Short Q&A With Elon Musk, Tesla Gigafactory Europe, Electric Vans (Titillating Tesla Tidbits #2)

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Jacek Fior, Tomek Gać, and I got together for another Titillating Tesla Tidbits chat. Check out the video or read the summary in text below the video to see if you really truly want to hit play. Head on over to Facebook if you’d rather watch and share there.

To kick off this discussion, I started by saying a bit about Tesla’s quarterly conference calls, my invitation to join the last one, the brief Q&A I had with Elon Musk on that call, and some of the stuff I couldn’t squeeze in.

Jacek and I then discussed Wrocław’s electric vehicle (or e-mobility) leadership, which is something Jacek recently wrote about and I happily edited. We were eager to sell Elon on the city for a gigafactory. Not having the time to do so on the Tesla conference call, we made our pitch here on this CleanTechnica video … which I assume Elon will never see. 😛

All of that said, we assume the European location for Tesla’s next gigafactory is more or less settled, and we assume it’s in a corner of Germany near the Netherlands where transport between it and Tesla’s headquarters in Tilburg, the Netherlands, won’t be too difficult or costly.

We moved on from that to talk electric vans — the Nissan e-NV200, Renault Kangoo ZE, Voltia, Fuso eCanter, Mercedes eSprinter, Mercedes eVito, and SAIC Maxus — and, as so many EV discussions go, the batteries for those electric vans.

Tomek also mentioned a soft plan to drive a Tesla from Poland to Shenzhen, China, which as CleanTechnica readers know is the home of BYD.

A topic we’ll have to come back to for a full discussion, we talked a little bit about electric car ads. Well, we tried to figure out if we had ever seen one on TV. Have you seen any?

We landed on Hyundai by chance and Jacek noted that they met a Hyundai sales rep at a conference not too long ago who was adamant that Hyundai would be the first major automaker to go 100% electric globally. It was unclear if he had anything solid behind the prediction, but he told them to check back in a few years and see if he wasn’t right. Hmm … we’ll see.

In the end, as usual, we figure it all comes down to batteries. Which company will have enough battery supply first? Which company will really try to make the fully transition first? Hyundai? BMW? Volkswagen? Nissan?


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Zachary Shahan

Zach is tryin' to help society help itself one word at a time. He spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as its director, chief editor, and CEO. Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, and Curaçao. Zach has long-term investments in Tesla [TSLA], NIO [NIO], Xpeng [XPEV], Ford [F], ChargePoint [CHPT], Amazon [AMZN], Piedmont Lithium [PLL], Lithium Americas [LAC], Albemarle Corporation [ALB], Nouveau Monde Graphite [NMGRF], Talon Metals [TLOFF], Arclight Clean Transition Corp [ACTC], and Starbucks [SBUX]. But he does not offer (explicitly or implicitly) investment advice of any sort.

Zachary Shahan has 7324 posts and counting. See all posts by Zachary Shahan