The news is coming fast and strong these days. Even with much greater output, it seems we have a harder time covering everything important now than we did a decade ago. One of the hottest areas of intrigue and rapid development is autonomous driving. Below are 11 autonomous driving news items from recent months that you might have missed.
Back when we published “Pravduh About Tesla” reports, it became clear that CNBC was the media outlet that published the most about Tesla. We tracked Tesla and Elon Musk coverage in the 22 or so largest media outlets, and CNBC routinely had the most stories published each week on Tesla or Musk. (Bloomberg was 2nd, Business Insider 3rd, and Fox News 4th).
Being the start of a new year, it’s time for a review of the most popular stories on CleanTechnica last year, and since it’s actually 2020 now, I’m also going to scroll through a list of the most popular stories of the past decade here on CleanTechnica.
The Tesla Cybertruck may be “old news” by now (ah, the not-so-endearing ADD of the internet), but a piece of ours explaining why it doesn’t really need a garage was still king of the hill last month. Tesla took silver too, with a story explaining that the 2012 Tesla Model S still has superior specs to new 2020 EV entrants from other companies than Tesla. In third was a piece on world-leading research from our friend Mark Z. Jacobson and several colleagues on how the world could be a galaxy-leading 100% renewable energy planet!
There’s a bit of a problem in much of the media these days. There’s a broad assumption — from both media consumers and members of the media — that media outlets are supposed to present “two sides of the story.” Case in point: Tesla.
We published this podcast in early December, but it’s as relevant today as ever. If you missed this Tesla Inside Out episode, check it out now:
Volkswagen Group has been spending a lot of time these days focused on its electrification plans — or e-mobility, as they call it in Europe. Some take this as simply PR, but I think the sales targets are real and we know the company has launched an initial electric car factory and is investing tens of billions of euros into batteries and EV development.
I think we’ll have more to come on this, but for now, the breaking news is that the first Made in China Tesla Model 3 has been delivered to a lucky customer. More are surely flowing out as I write this.
Previously, Volkswagen announced an intention to produce and sell 1 million fully electric ID vehicles in 2025. The target year for that is now 2023, while the 2025 target has increased to 1½ million.
For our new report, Electric Car Drivers: Demands, Desires & Dreams (2019), we investigated whether EV drivers bought their cars new, bought them used, or leased them. The split was interesting. We then dug in deeper as well, for the first time ever, to learn a bit more about the cars they replaced, and why they went electric.
