Workplace charging is exploding in popularity, and it’s encouraging more and more drivers to go electric. The DOE’s EV Everywhere Workplace Charging Challenge, a program that offers assistance to companies to provide charging to their employees, began in January 2013, and has since grown to 150 partners, which provide charging at over 300 work sites… Read more »
Daimler plans to invest around €100 million ($125 million) to expand production capacity for lithium-ion batteries at its Deutsche ACCUmotive subsidiary. A new building is under construction in Kamenz, Germany, and when it is completed in mid-2015, Deutsche ACCUmotive will have nearly 20,000 square meters of production and logistics space. “Deutsche ACCUmotive will be producing… Read more »
Put the cork back in the Champagne bottle – it turns out that talk of a Tesla/BMW collaboration was just that. The German business magazine Wirtschafts Woche reports that BMW has no plans for cooperation with Tesla, and no interest in investing in the company. The putative partnership seems to have been pretty much an… Read more »
The Renault-Nissan Alliance has sold its 200,000th EV, highlighting its dominant position in the pure EV market, with a 58% market share. Renault and Nissan EVs have driven approximately 4 billion kilometers, saving 200 million liters of fuel and 450 million kilograms of carbon dioxide. The flagship LEAF is the top-selling plug-in vehicle in the… Read more »
BMW’s new 3 Series plug-in hybrid prototype combines a four-cylinder TwinPower Turbo gas engine from the new Efficient Dynamics engine family with an electric motor and power electronics based on the eDrive technology used in the i3 and i8. It’s designed to offer performance on a par with the legacy 3 Series six-cylinder model, with… Read more »
Kandi Technologies (Nasdaq: KNDI) has announced that its new mid-tier luxury EV has been approved by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The new model, with the cumbersome name SMA7002BEV05, has been added to the list of recommended new energy vehicles, which means that buyers are now eligible for a wide range of national… Read more »
Anyone who’s interested in the present and future state of the auto industry will want to watch this interview with Carlos Ghosn on the Charlie Rose show, in which Ghosn has a good bit to say about the EV scene. As the CEO of Nissan, Renault and the Russian automaker AvtoVAZ, this is a guy… Read more »
As the average fuel economy of US vehicles increases, gas tax receipts around the country are declining, leaving less funding available for road construction and maintenance. In an effort to make up the shortfall, Wisconsin could join five other states in imposing a fee on fuel-efficient vehicles. The $50 annual charge, which would apply to… Read more »
Florida-based CarCharging, which inherited the Blink public charging network from bankrupt ECOtality, has announced plans to upgrade its chargers, restoring the amperage from 24 Amps to its maximum capacity of 30 Amps. About two years ago, users began to report of problems with Blink level 2 charging stations at power levels above 3.3 kW. ECOtality… Read more »
Ricardo Reyes, who headed Tesla’s communications department through the Roadster era, has returned to the company, replacing Simon Sproule as communications chief. Reyes left Tesla in 2012 to work for payment startup Square. His previous gigs included running communications for YouTube and Google. Back at Tesla, Reyes will oversee public relations, customer communications and the… Read more »
