The Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority (PSTA), which serves Florida’s St Petersburg/Clearwater metro area with 40 bus routes and a fleet of 210 vehicles, recently began construction on a new electric bus charging station at a transfer hub. The new wireless charging station, which PSTA claims will be the first on the US East Coast, uses… Read more »
A team of scientists led by the DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has captured in real time how lithium ions move in lithium titanate (LTO), a fast-charging battery electrode material made of lithium, titanium and oxygen. They discovered that distorted arrangements of lithium and surrounding atoms in LTO “intermediates” (structures of… Read more »
Faraday Future (FF) has announced an agreement with US Hybrid Corporation to advance the use of FF’s electric propulsion system in energy products currently under development by US Hybrid. The collaboration will expand the use of FF’s technology—first developed for passenger vehicles—into the commercial vehicle space. Specifically, the partnership will provide powertrain systems for commercial… Read more »
BYD and Toyota have established a 50/50 joint venture to conduct R&D for battery-electric vehicles (BEVs). The new company will be headquartered in Shenzhen City, is expected to have around 300 employees, and is to begin operations in May 2020. “With the engineers from BYD and Toyota working together under the same roof, we aim… Read more »
Electric boat manufacturer RAND Boats has launched a new propulsion package for its Leisure 28 Electric model. The new Leisure 28 Electric stern drive propulsion package features a 240 kW engine and modular Li battery pack with a capacity of 80-120 kWh, allowing for a top speed of more than 40 knots (+72 km/h) and… Read more »
Tesla pulled off a massive upset, announcing record first-quarter deliveries despite disruptions due to the coronavirus crisis. Analysts were expecting to see a delivery figure of around 77,000 vehicles for Q1 2020. The Great Electrifier delivered 88,400, its best first-quarter performance ever. The production figure was 102,672 vehicles, just a shade off the record of… Read more »
Microchip Technology has expanded its portfolio of silicon carbide (SiC) power modules for high-power system control, gate drive and power stages. Microchip’s SiC family includes Schottky Barrier Diode (SBD)-based power modules in 700, 1,200 and 1,700 volt versions. The new power module family includes various topologies, including dual diode, full-bridge, phase leg, dual common cathode,… Read more »
When I interviewed Tesla co-founder Ian Wright in 2014 for my history of Tesla, he described the software found in traditional automobiles as “a dog’s breakfast,” by which he meant that it was a motley mixture of heterogenous hardware and software, in contrast to Tesla’s elegant unified system, which controls every function of the vehicle…. Read more »
The popular discussion of EVs tends to center on range, and this has led battery makers to focus on increasing energy density—some would say, at the expense of other equally important attributes such as longevity and safety. Chinese EV giant BYD has introduced a new Blade Battery, which is designed to “bring battery safety back… Read more »
Researchers from the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) and the Samsung R&D Institute Japan (SRJ) have published a study on high-performance, long-lasting all-solid-state batteries in the journal Nature Energy. Compared to lithium-ion batteries, which employ volatile liquid electrolytes, all-solid-state batteries use non-volatile solid electrolytes that support greater energy density. However, their lithium metal anodes… Read more »
