Powerful plug-ins: Q&A with Efficient Drivetrains Inc. CEO Joerg Ferchau. In November 2014, US officials and electric utility executives stood in front of the White House to announce a new EV commitment from power companies. More than 70 investor-owned electric utilities have pledged to spend an estimated $50 million per year – $250 million over five… Read more »
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LG Chem Power CEO: We’re the Li-ion leader for PEVs because of material science
Q&A with LG Chem Power’s CEO: Dr. Prabhakar Patil on how the company became a Li-ion battery front-runner, the economics of building batteries, and why it spends little energy on what comes after lithium. Among Tier 1 automotive suppliers of lithium-ion cells, LG Chem is off to a clear lead, based on the number of announced… Read more »
MOEV Inc. develops distributed power smart-charging systems
An educated EVSE: Part of the academia-to-enterprise pipeline, MOEV Inc.’s distributed power smart-charging systems may be the economical answer to California utilities’ grand infrastructure plans. The usually pejorative term “ivory tower” refers most often to an intellectually cut-off academia, which sits separated from the practical world, musing away on obscure research or useless pursuits. However, it’s… Read more »
FTC officials: States should allow consumers to choose how they buy cars
Federal Trade Commission officials have weighed in for a second time on the war between Tesla and the auto dealers. In an 11-page letter that is summarized in the Competition Matters blog, a trio of senior FTC staffers wrote that a recently-passed Michigan law, which strengthens the requirement that automakers sell only through third-party dealers,… Read more »
EXCLUSIVE: Stealthy EV startup Atieva ramps up hiring, including many top ex-Tesla engineers
Last month at the SAE World Congress in Detroit, Charged came across a very interesting booth in the career development section. Atieva, a company we’ve heard little about, is hiring a lot of engineers for a new EV project. “Atieva is designing and creating a breakthrough electric car in the heart of Silicon Valley,” says the… Read more »
Tesla has yet to build an alpha prototype of Model 3
Tesla’s Model 3, the promised EV for Everyman, is due to disrupt the automotive world in 2017, but the company has yet to complete an alpha engineering prototype. Should we be worried? Automakers are usually secretive about this sort of stuff, but it seems that developing alpha and beta prototypes are milestones that CEO Elon… Read more »
New imaging technique displays the advantages of iron fluoride batteries
“Iron fluoride has the potential to triple the amount of energy a conventional lithium-ion battery can store,” says Song Jin, a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “However, we have yet to tap its true potential.” Jin and his colleagues have been using a novel X-ray imaging technique to visualize and study the… Read more »
Los Angeles mayor’s environmental plan calls for 1,000 new public chargers
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has set out his vision for the city’s environmental goals in an upbeat report entitled “the pLAn.” It covers a wide range of topics, from water conservation to energy-efficient buildings to renewable energy to recycling to public transit. Many of the goals are very modest, such as the call for… Read more »
180 cities ask to host a Formula E race
The Formula E electric racing series is only a bit more than halfway through its first season, but it’s already looking like a big success, attracting sellout crowds, major new investors, and a long list of aspiring host cities. “We have over 180 cities that have requested to have a race, and many of them… Read more »
ORNL researchers develop Virtual Integrated Battery Environment design tool
As part of the DOE’s Computer Aided Engineering for Batteries (CAEBAT) project, scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have developed an open-architecture battery modeling framework that integrates multi-physics and multi-scale battery models. The Virtual Integrated Battery Environment (VIBE) allows researchers to test lithium-ion batteries under different simulated scenarios. The physics phenomena of interest… Read more »