BMW stunned the world in 2009 with its Vision Efficient Dynamics. We couldn’t get enough of the shapes, the lines, the numbers, the possibilities. What resulted, the i3 and i8, have helped take the company to a new electric vehicle US sales number — those two cars plus other plug-in models account for 7%. Surely, BMW must be paying attention.
CATL, China’s largest battery manufacturer, will build its first foreign battery factory in eastern Germany, to supply the German auto industry with the batteries its will need for the electric cars that will start arriving soon.
Let’s get the biggest matter out of the way right off the bat: no one outside of Tesla really has a clue as to how many Model 3s were delivered in the US in each month of Q2. Yes, we have a Model 3 delivery total from Tesla for the quarter as a whole, but the company doesn’t break that down by month or region. For a while, the slowly growing ramp allowed us to estimate without too much difficulty, but a few things changed in May and June.
In the first 4 months of 2018, the proportion of new German SUV registrations dropped almost in half from where it was before DieselGate and the impending bans on older diesels in some cities, like Hamburg. The dramatic decline was documented by a study conducted at the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) located in the University of Duisburg-Essen.
CleanTechnica has just launched a detailed report on the EV safety advantage. The short and sweet of it is: electric vehicles are safer than gasoline/diesel-powered vehicles. The report actually follows the first two parts of a series we’ve been writing on whether electric vehicles (EV) are inherently safer than their internal combustion engine (ICE) car cousins. The first article introduced the idea of why EVs could be designed to be safer than traditional gasoline cars. The second article dove a bit deeper. And we saved this third part of the series for after the publishing of The EV Safety Advantage.
Electric vehicles are part of a sustainable energy/transportation ecosystem that also includes charging infrastructure, smart grid technology, and renewable energy. The key that ties all of these components together is energy storage. Storage, specifically batteries, is the enabling technology that makes modern EVs possible, and that makes renewable energy viable. Battery storage also provides a number of other benefits for the electrical grid, such as load balancing and frequency regulation.
The second half of Q2 2018 has been notable and the flood of news from around the world continues. In China, the flood of developments is so massive that we can only show you a keyhole insight into what is happening.
Tesla had more news, as usual. We also had a lot of fun talking about the Chinese and European EV markets. And then: The Batteries.
Good old CHAdeMO. CHAdeMO fast charging has been powering electric vehicles since 2009. I remember my first charging experience with one of the first LEAFs — charging with a hefty cable and pouring the electricity into the car in just 40 minutes. It was a revolution and instantaneously made long EV drives a possibility.
The big news for the CleanTechnica family this week was the addition of a new BMW i3 REx to the family. Our very own Zachary Shahan moved with his family from Poland to Florida. The move required that he leave Tesla Shuttle’s Tesla Model S in Poland, leaving Zach and the family to find a new car.
