A two-year-old Michigan startup, Our Next Energy (ONE), has built a custom battery pack that recently propelled a modified Tesla Model S for 752 miles. John Voelcker, writing in Car and Driver, reports that ONE retrofitted the car with a pack that stores twice the energy of Tesla’s original, and fits in exactly the same… Read more »
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2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5: Strong new electric SUV competitor
Hyundai’s new compact EV crossover is good enough to sell every unit the company imports—the question may be how high that number will be. The 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5 is the Korean brand’s first dedicated electric vehicle, positioned at the heart of the fastest-growing part of the market: compact crossover utilities. The premium electric SUV… Read more »
NADA partners with Chargeway to help dealers inform car buyers about EVs
Auto dealers are a well-known bottleneck for EV sales, but it’s not (entirely) because they’re a bunch of gas-loving Luddites. EVs are unfamiliar to most consumers, and it takes valuable time to explain them to shoppers. Most salespeople don’t have the needed product knowledge, and EV sales are such a small part of the market… Read more »
Why is Hertz deploying a huge fleet of Teslas? Hint: it has little to do with emissions.
Are rental car customers ready for EVs? We’re going to find out. Rental giant Hertz theoretically began introducing EVs to its fleet in 2011, and competitors soon followed. However, they were offered only in select markets, sometimes at super-premium prices. Meanwhile, Teslas became popular on the peer-to-peer rental network Turo. Now Florida-based Hertz, which rents… Read more »
Stellantis and LG Energy Solution to build battery factory for North American EV market
Stellantis and LG Energy Solution have agreed to form a joint venture that will produce battery cells and modules for North America at a new production facility. The companies are obviously fans of EV journalist John Voelcker, who praised Ford and GM for announcing new battery facilities in a recent Car and Driver article, and… Read more »
Chevy Bolt battery recall—Car and Driver reveals the gory technical details
The Chevy Bolt battery recall is bad news for GM, and for the EV industry. Every single Bolt EV and Bolt EUV is now under recall because of a potential battery defect that could cause a fire. Roughly a dozen fires have been reported, but no injuries or deaths to date. The three separate recalls… Read more »
“A sad state of affairs”: VW Group CEO Herbert Diess calls out shortcomings of IONITY charging network
Taking a road trip in an EV is no longer a novelty, but it’s still an instructive (and hopefully, fun) thing to do, and the EV road trip story remains an online literary staple. It’s especially interesting when an exec at an automaker takes a trip in one of their company’s new EV models—and even… Read more »
Texas fails to change dealership law—Tesla still can’t sell directly to state residents
For almost a decade now, Tesla has been fighting state governments for the right to sell its vehicles directly to customers—something which has historically been prohibited in most US states. Texas is one of the states that still forbids direct sales, so residents have had to resort to a workaround some call the “Texas two-step.”… Read more »
Ford says all its passenger vehicles in Europe will be electric by 2030, invests $1 billion in Cologne EV plant
A game of one-upmanship seems to be developing between America’s top two legacy automakers, and we’re cheering them on. In January, GM made a weaselly (but still significant) announcement of its “aspiration to eliminate tailpipe emissions from new light-duty vehicles by 2035.” A week later, Ford announced that it would double its planned investments in… Read more »
Is Ford’s increase in EV investment a shot across GM’s bow?
Ford’s Q4 2020 earnings report included an announcement that the automaker will increase its investments in electrification to at least $22 billion through 2025, nearly twice the previously-announced level (the company also committed an additional $7 billion to autonomous vehicle tech). As auto analyst John Voelcker pointed out, Ford’s figure tops GM’s announced investment of… Read more »