Renault and Ferrovial have begun a joint venture and created Zity, a fresh electrified carsharing service that will launch in October. The first fleet of electrified cars — 500 Renault ZOEs, to be exact — will be located within Madrid, Spain (the M-30 Beltway and in some adjoining areas).
With Tesla CEO Elon Musk forecasting the market for Model 3 vehicles could swell to 700,000 vehicles, the streets may soon be flooded with electric cars. To put that in perspective, the popular BMW 3 Series only has an annual production rate of about 400,000 per year. However, having electric vehicles like Tesla’s Model 3 selling in these larger volumes could have some unintended side effects.
What will the self-driving automotive world of the future look like? Nobody really knows, although a lot of people seem convinced that they do. Predictions are all over the place, and in a few years we’ll see that some of them were right, and some were wrong. The only thing certain is that autonomous vehicles will trigger huge changes that will disrupt every automobile-related line of business, and then some. Another point that the pundits all seem to agree on: Tesla is poised to be one of the major players.
The top 30 CleanTechnica stories of last month were blockbusters, with the #1 article receiving 158,523 views, #2 receiving 111,370 views, and #3 receiving 92,720 views. If you somehow missed these or others further down the list, check them out now! Or don’t. Whatever suits you.
Electric cars — great, fun, quick, clean, smooth, quiet, convenient to charge at home and work. But wait, what’s life like with an electric car? How do you charge? Where do you charge? What do you need to charge? How do you protect the most valuable component of the car — the battery?
A little over two months ago, I provided my initial observations from life with Tesla Autopilot. Clearly, I was young and foolish. Without a doubt, I rushed in. That said, I have no regrets and stand by what I wrote on June 25.
A month and a half ago, I wrote a raving review of Tesla’s navigation system for long-distance trips. It’s brilliant. It’s unmatched by any other car’s navigation system. The core benefits are:
it estimates how much battery capacity you’ll have remaining when you arrive at your destination,
it tells you where to stop to Supercharge if you need to,
and it’s extremely accurate because it takes so many factors into account — topography, temperature, your own recent energy use while driving, average driving speed on the route (or at least the speed limit along the route — I’m not sure dataset Tesla uses, or if it uses both), and perhaps even whether or not it’s raining.
However, it’s not perfect. There are three major issues with it, from my perspective. Anecdotally, I gather that most Tesla drivers are irritated by the same three things.
Driving an all-electric vehicle with limited range and no Supercharging, I do sometimes think about options for long-distance travel, off-the-beaten-path travel, and perhaps even off-the-grid travel. The challenges of EV charging on highways along open fields and long, winding mountains is sometimes that there’s no high-power connection to the grid, and creating a connection is very costly.
Tesla has dropped the price of its cars equipped with the 100 kWh battery by $3,000, citing a 3% drop in manufacturing costs.
The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) has reported that policymakers in China will be unveiling the country’s finalized plans for electric and hybrid car quotas within the near future, but that the penalties for non-compliance will be less severe than was first proposed.
