Last Friday, a Tesla Model S crashed into the rear of a fire truck at a red light. We don’t know yet if Autopilot was active at the time, but does it really matter whether or not it was?
Audi Group held its annual general meeting this week on Wednesday. As expected, the company provided news on its long-term plan for cars’ electrification. It was an interesting update and a significant one: four new full electric production models will be introduced by 2020, plus a fully autonomous EV in 2021. A total of 25 “electrified” Audi models will be available on the market by 2025. Will that be enough to challenge Tesla?
As I discussed yesterday in a couple of pieces, Tesla Model 3 sales are beginning to look very good compared to gas cars in its class, and they should even give the top selling passenger cars in the United States a run for their money by summertime. I’m probably going to start doing monthly reports on those sales, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop doing the super fun US electric car sales reports.
In the middle of last month, I published an article about expected Tesla Model 3 sales versus gas car sales in its class. To be clear, the estimates were for all models (not just the Tesla Model 3), with gas car estimates based on April 2017 sales and recent trends. It turned out that estimates for a few of the models were quite off — sometimes high, sometimes low. The good news is that makes this update all the more interesting.
It’s been a minute — or a month — since our last cleantech news roundup, but we’re back at it again, and this week we have stories about the state of electric motorcycles, the pros and cons of biofuels, electric supercars, smart wood, solar deals, topsoil fertility, and more.
This is a special edition of the #CleanTechnica Top 20 — I’m listing the top 20 CleanTechnica articles of the last week and the top 20 CleanTechnica articles of April. Have a gander:
The European passenger plug-in car market hit unprecedented levels last month, beating a two-year old record (34,000 units in December 2015) by scoring over 40,000 registrations. That’s 41% growth compared to the same period last year, and pulls the year-to-date count to 87,000 deliveries (37% growth). It allowed the 2018 market share to date to reach 2% (2.2% in March).
As a means of further promoting the approaching launch of the model, Audi has released new press images of the all-electric e-Tron prototype that were taken during a “simulated electrical storm” at the high voltage test bay at Siemens’ Berlin switchgear plant.
Electric vehicle fever has definitely caught on in Germany, with March coming in as a record month to echo France’s record month. Germany had over 6,700 electric car registrations last month, a 52% increase year over year (YoY). The plug-in vehicle share of the overall car market was 2%.
At the beginning of the month, Tesla noted that it had gotten Model 3 production up to 2,000 cars a week at the end of March. More recently, Tesla CEO Elon Musk told CBS that Tesla had produced 2,070 Model 3s in the week leading up to April 10. If you assume Tesla stalls at approximately 2,000 cars a week for the whole month, that’s still over 8,000 Model 3 electric super-sedans produced in April.
