The saga of Saab recently entered a new chapter, as its parent company, National Electric Vehicle Sweden (NEVS) made an alliance with two state-owned Chinese organizations. Motor Authority reported that the Tianjin Binhai Hi-tech Industrial Development Area (THT) and the Beijing State Research Information Technology Company (SRIT) will pay a total of $200 million for… Read more »
The LA Times recently ran a “now it can be told” article highlighting the various government subsidies and incentives that benefit Tesla and Elon Musk’s other companies, SolarCity and SpaceX – a total of about $4.9 billion by the Times’ reckoning. Certainly Tesla, like many other energy companies and automakers, has benefited from a wide… Read more »
Chemists at Canada’s University of Waterloo have described a key mediation pathway that explains why sodium-oxygen batteries are more energy-efficient compared with their lithium-oxygen counterparts. “Our new understanding brings together a lot of different, disconnected bits of a puzzle that have allowed us to assemble the full picture,” says Professor Linda Nazar. “These findings will… Read more »
The California Air Resources Board thinks of everything. It not only provides funding for local companies to research EV technology, and requires automakers to produce zero-emission vehicles for sale in the state. Now the agency has launched a pilot program to help low-income people replace old, polluting cars with newer, more efficient vehicles, including EVs…. Read more »
The DOE has selected 162 projects to receive $26.6 million in the 2015 Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) awards. About 16 of these are vehicle-related, encompassing such technologies as batteries, power electronics and hydrogen fuel cells. Under the SBIR and STTR programs, federal agencies with large R&D budgets set aside… Read more »
For several years now, the California Air Resources Board’s ZEV mandate has required the largest automakers to produce a certain number of zero-emission vehicles for sale in the state. Beginning in 2018, smaller OEMs will be subject to the rules, too. Unsurprisingly, these companies would rather skip it, and at a May hearing, Jaguar Land… Read more »
Will Apple’s next blockbuster product line have wheels and a windshield? Well, the company hasn’t said it won’t, and Senior VP Jeff Williams made some tantalizing comments at last week’s Code Conference. Responding to a question about what the company might do with its massive pile of cash, Williams said, “The car is the ultimate… Read more »
The global market for EV chargers is set to grow from about one million units in 2014 to more than 12.7 million units in 2020, according to a new EV Charging Infrastructure report by IHS Automotive. IHS expects public charging to be a small but important part of the picture. In 2020, approximately 10% of… Read more »
Another entrant has joined the suddenly trendy market for stationary energy storage. Daimler’s wholly-owned subsidiary Deutsche ACCUmotive has announced plans to sell energy storage systems to both residential and commercial customers. ACCUmotive’s lithium-ion battery modules have an energy capacity of 2.5 kWh for the residential model, and 5.9 kWh for the industrial version. Up to… Read more »
Tesla isn’t the only company that can play the patent-opening game. Ford has announced that it will make its portfolio of over 650 electrification-related patents available to competing automakers. Unlike Tesla, which has implied that it will allow others to use technology “in good faith” free of charge (and Toyota, which plans to make some… Read more »
