Like Germany is to Europe, South Africa is the manufacturing powerhouse of sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, it has 8 automobile assembly plants. The companies are BMW, Ford, Isuzu, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Renault, Toyota, and Volkswagen. In 2018, South Africa produced 610,854 vehicles.
This week, Toyota pulled the wraps off the new 2021 Mirai, boasting an impressive 30% increase in range thanks to a new and improved fuel cell stack paired with slightly larger hydrogen storage tanks. The new tanks have a total of 122.4 liters of volume and can hold about 5 kilograms of hydrogen when full.
Editor’s Note: I’ve been planning to write an article about these two cars for a while, so it’s nice to get a bump from Loup Ventures, which has beat me to it! Check out Matt’s summary of the analysis below.
We start this month’s EV sales reports in the Netherlands. (Well, we already started there with another article, but here’s a second.) The Dutch plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) market grew a whopping 281% in September compared to the same month in 2018 (year over year, or YoY). The nation had 8,067 PEV registrations, the best month ever for plug-ins aside from previous fiscal-derived peaks in December 2013 (9,304 units), December 2015 (15,908), and December 2016 (11,132). So, all points to a record performance this coming December. How much, would you say? 16,000? 20,000? More?
The most popular CleanTechnica article of September did not have “Tesla” in the title, but if you read the piece, you can see the story is closely tied to the Tesla Model 3. The shock I just couldn’t stop shaking was about how many people continue to buy new Toyota Camrys and Honda Accords. Compared to the Model 3, I get it — even if they have the same 5 year cost of ownership (possible), they have a lower upfront price. That said, if $100–200 a month is a dealbreaker for someone looking at these options, my opinion is that they definitely shouldn’t be buying a new car at all. But hey, that’s just my opinion.
The most popular stories on CleanTechnica this past week were led by a McDonald’s story for the first time (or perhaps second — I remember a very popular McDonald’s story here in 2010). The second and third most popular stories were both about total cost of ownership comparisons — between the Tesla Model 3 and Toyota Camry and then the Chevy Bolt and Tesla Model 3 and Toyota Camry. Next in line were videos of Tesla Smart Summon (which went a bit viral on what the kids call “the Internet”) and a couple of pieces on how early concerns about the Model 3 and Gigafactory 3 became irrelevant.
Overall, non-Tesla US passenger vehicle sales were up by 14,910 units in the 3rd quarter of 2019 compared to the 3rd quarter of 2018, and 14 brands saw their sales increase while 13 saw their sales decrease.
As self-driving cars move closer and closer to reality, one particular market stands to benefit — autonomous taxis (aka robotaxis). Tasha Keeny from Ark Invest recently evaluated the players who’d likely benefit from this massive market opportunity. Keeney writes, “Autonomous vehicles will transform personal mobility … reap[ing] the benefits of a new market which promises to ramp from essentially $0 now to $10 trillion in global gross annual revenues by 2030.”
It’s time for another roundup of the 20 most popular stories of the week. As proof of the fact that you don’t even need “Tesla” in the headline to have a Tesla story go viral, the top story of the week was about the Honda Accord & Toyota Camry while silently being about the Tesla Model 3. The second most popular story compared the Model 3 to two top sellers on the other end of its gradient of competitors, the Mercedes-Benz C-Class and Audi A4.
I was browsing Facebook a few days ago and I saw a member of the Southwest Florida EV group posted that Chevy Bolt prices were really low. The Bolt got a lot of publicity a couple of years ago as many made a big deal that it beat the Model 3 to market. Though, now that Model 3 production is ramped up and meeting US demand (although foreign demand is still unsatisfied in many places), we don’t hear much about the Bolt.
