New Jersey State Assemblyman Tim Eustace (D-Bergen) has introduced a bill that would let electric car retailers such as Tesla sell directly to consumers. The bill (A2986) would override a March 11 decision by the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission which effectively banned sales of the Model S. “What we should be doing is supporting American… Read more »
Battery maker A123 Systems has agreed to sell its grid storage business and other assets related to energy storage for telecom and IT data storage applications to NEC for approximately $100 million. NEC will incorporate the former A123 Energy Solutions Business into its Smart Energy Business Unit. A123 facilities in Westborough, Massachusetts and Chesterfield, Missouri… Read more »
China’s National Passenger Car Association has named BYD’s QIN plug-in hybrid sedan (pronounced “cheen”) the country’s best-selling electric vehicle. Since its launch in China in December, the BYD QIN has sold more than 6,000 vehicles, which represents over half of the Chinese new-energy vehicle market. Chinese buyers of plug-ins and other “new energy” vehicles receive… Read more »
Johnson Controls and the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, one of Europe’s biggest organizations for applied research, have signed an agreement to develop next-generation cooling systems for vehicle batteries. The collaboration will focus on technologies and thermal management strategies for lithium-ion battery packs. Currently, systems with fans, compressors or pumps use energy to pull heat out of a battery…. Read more »
Airport ground support equipment (GSE) such as baggage tugs, bag ramps and pushback vehicles represents a category of vehicles that’s ripe for electrification. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport has taken a major step towards converting its GSE, a project that’s projected to save $2.8 million in fuel costs and 10,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year…. Read more »
The EV Project, which deployed over 12,000 EV charging stations across the US, and collected charging data on 8,300 LEAFs, Volts, and smart fortwo EDs, has amassed what is surely the world’s largest database of EV driver charging behavior, representing almost 125 million miles of driving and 4 million charging events over 2 years. Since… Read more »
The UK’s Darvill Racing Team will be fielding a pair of Brammo Empulse TTX electric motorcycles in the Southern 100 Road Races, to be held on the Isle of Man in July. While one of the bikes will race in its stock trim, the other one will have racing-grade enhancements. The Brammos will be competing… Read more »
Tesla’s war with the auto dealers is getting more interesting by the day. Barely a week after New Jersey outlawed the company’s contentious direct-to-consumers sales model, the Arizona legislature is considering a bill that would explicitly legalize it. According to the Associated Press, Arizona House Bill 2123, which was approved by a state Senate committee… Read more »
Aging is an inescapable fact of life, not only for people, but for batteries as well. Researchers at the Helmholtz Center Berlin (HZB) recently identified a major reason why Li-ion batteries degrade with time. They have directly observed atomic rearrangements occurring in cathode materials during charge and discharge processes, which lead to the breakdown of the… Read more »
It seems everyone has a story about an underutilized public charging station in their neighborhood. It’s an unfortunate fact that, of the over 7,500 public chargers in the US, many were installed by local governments that had no idea how to go about selecting an appropriate location (the parking lot at city hall is usually… Read more »
