The historic city of Schaffhausen, Switzerland, is located on the River Rhine, which provides not only a picturesque setting, but a reliable source of hydroelectric power—an ideal source of green energy for the city’s new electric buses. Switzerland’s Federal Office of Transport (the equivalent of our Federal Transit Administration) has tested and certified the electric… Read more »
Even as automakers have been abandoning hydrogen fuel cells as a powertrain option for passenger cars, many believe that the technology will find its niche in the heavy-duty truck sector. Now Hyundai is moving beyond the pilot stage and beginning to deliver vehicles to customers. The company has shipped 10 units of the XCIENT Fuel… Read more »
I’ve written so many articles about Switzerland being an EV laggard in Europe that it’s only fair to trumpet the news that the Swiss auto market has been “struck by Tesla lightning,” as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, one of the country’s top daily newspapers, put it. Tesla’s Model 3 was the best-selling car of any… Read more »
Compared to other countries of Western Europe, Switzerland is an EV laggard. The government has set an aspirational goal of electrifying a third of the auto fleet by 2030, but every proposal to establish purchase incentives has been nixed by the powerful auto importers’ lobby. While a few of the Swiss cantons (the equivalent of… Read more »
Swiss battery system and production specialist ecovolta (don’t kill us yet folks, the lowercase isn’t a typo) will build a 200 MWh battery pack assembly plant this September in the Swiss canton of Schwyz. The plant will use fully-automated processes to produce both prismatic and cylindrical batteries. The battery packs will have voltage levels ranging… Read more »
In Switzerland, it’s not just the Alpine meadows that are green: every corner of the country can be reached by public transport, solar panels are ubiquitous, and recycling programs are strong. When it comes to automobiles however, it’s a different story. The Swiss love their cars every bit as much as Americans do, and in… Read more »
For over half a century, Switzerland has been a land with no auto racing. In 1955, the Swiss government banned racing after 80 people were killed at a disastrous crash at Le Mans in France. EVs to the rescue! The law was changed in 2015 to allow racing, but only if it is fully electric…. Read more »
Charged has been reporting on electric trucks for a decade, but the electrification of real-world fleets has been frustratingly slow, and several would-be e-truck builders have gone bust waiting for fleet operators to conduct years-long pilots. Now we’re finally starting to see some large orders. Will 2021 be the year of the electric truck? A… Read more »
2020 may have been a bummer of a year by most measures, but it was a banner year for plug-in vehicles. Global sales of EVs and PHEVs reached 3.24 million (as reported by EV-Volumes), compared to 2.26 million in 2019. That’s an increase of some 43%, which is all the more impressive in light of… Read more »
If EVs are to replace fossil-fuel vehicles, they need to be able to make long highway trips, which means that DC fast charging needs to be reliable, convenient, affordable and ubiquitous. However, as Charged and other media have often reported, we’re still in the early days of public EV charging, and the user experience often… Read more »