It has been a while since I wrote a “What Changed In The EV Industry … ?” article, so I’m now rolling through three months of news as we approach the end of November.
Below is a roundup of notable September and October electric vehicle news.
It has been a while since I wrote a “What Changed In The Solar Energy Industry … ?” article, so I’m lumping two months of news together for this one as November closes. That means cutting out more of the “small” stories, which should make this an especially potent roundup of notable changes in the electric vehicle industry. Enjoy!
What is going on with Tesla? We have seen weeks with 283 articles of which there were only 29 positive headlines. This week, we have a total of 28 articles. As we said last week, this is probably a good thing — no distractions for Elon or other Tesla staff.
You may remember months earlier this year when the financial press and certain analysts obsessed over Tesla’s declining cash balance. Perhaps it was genuine, but my impression is it was “concern trolling,” faux hysteria, and even an attempt to confuse and manipulate the public in the worst cases.
This struck me yet again while looking at a chart that a CleanTechnica reader created and shared.
The blockchain and related technologies assessed in the first part of this article, along with the evaluation criteria, are Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Casper, and Hyperledger.
While EV adoption is fairly well documented in North America, Europe, and Asia, other geographies have been mostly or entirely absent from the media coverage — like Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. While electric vehicles in most countries in these areas are still something for the future, there are some interesting cases that deserve special mention. As such, I have split this topic in three chapters — one for Africa, the second for the Middle East, and the third for Latin America. Here, I am covering chapter 1, Africa.
Nori, a company which recently emerged from stealth, is creating the Nori token. It’s a cryptocurrency token that represents a ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere and sequestered in one of a number of potential ways. This isn’t a cap-and-trade or carbon-tax system, but a market mechanism which values removed tons of CO2. Like carbon offset programs for fliers and drivers, it allows individuals and businesses to offset their CO2 emissions with guaranteed removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.
After a slip in September (-12% year over year), the German plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) passenger car market returned to a growth path, growing 6% in October with 5,292 registrations.
This week we broke a record — the smallest number of articles about Tesla. While there is merit to the argument that bad press is still press, Tesla doesn’t need it.
After a record-breaking September (104,900 plug-in electric vehicle sales), one would think that the market would take some time to breathe in October, but that wasn’t the case, with close to 120,000 registrations last month, breaking the previous record by a significant margin (14%). Overall, October 2018 electric vehicle sales were up 85% year over year (YoY).
