When a big company signs an agreement to be a good environmental steward, we tend to think of greenwashing, that the company is just looking to paint themselves green and there’s no real depth to the commitment. Today, GM became the first automaker to sign on with the Climate Declaration…
Can electric cars be successful as a Taxi? Taxi’s seem to drive lots of miles a day, which would be many more than the 70-100ish mile range of typical electric cars. Where New York City has launched use of Nissan Leaf as taxi’s ahead of deploying the electric e-NV200 minivan,…
The North Carolina Legislature is considering SB710, Fair Share Contribution for Elect. Vehicles., which would enact a $100 per year annual registration fee for electric vehicles. It’s a fairly straight-forward law: SECTION 1. G.S. 20‑52 is amended by adding a new subsection to read: “(c) At the time of an initial…
There are 10 (?or more?) states around the U.S. who have either enacted electric vehicle taxes, or are considering them. The observation is that electric vehicle owners are not paying anything into the transportation funds, because the current funding method is the gasoline tax. Electric vehicles don’t consume gasoline, or…
Is Tesla’s announcement of profitability for Q1 2013 an elaborate April Fools Joke? Their release did not come out on April 1, but March 31, but a poster on Seeking Alpha makes an interesting case for this. Tesla Motors announced that day that the companies streak of posting massive losses…
Elon Musk may be a smart guy, but that doesn’t mean he can’t do dumb-ass things. Over on InsideEV’s it’s reported that Musk said that “getting rockets into space is easier than navigating the I-405 freeway” and is calling for a widening of the highway. The LA Times quotes him…
The Brusa NLG6 22 kilowatt 3 phase AC electric car charging unit is making an appearance in the Volvo C30 electric car. Volvo sent out an announcement today that they’d upgraded the drive train and charging unit on the C30. With the Brusa NLG6 the charging time is reduced to…
Yesterday, GreenTech Automotive announced a new phase of the company’s electric car product line in which they’ll work with JAC Motors, a Chinese automaker, to start manufacturing a five passenger electric car. The car will be based JAC’s award-winning Rejoice vehicle platform, and use as the electric drive train what…
This may seem like an obvious observation: Ubiquitous fast charging will improve electric car adoption, and electric car utilization. To me that’s a “DUH” sort of thing to say, but at the same time the U.S. planning for electric car charging is dominated by public level 2 charging stations. Obviously…
Why is Fisker Automotive on the brink of collapse? (reportedly) The news is full of stories today saying that Fisker Automotive is unable to pay its bills, has laid off 75% of its workforce, is being sued by the landlord and the webmaster for lack of payment, that the negotiations…
Could the Protean hub motor (a.k.a. in-wheel electric drive system) be more significant than I’d thought. They’re at the SAE World Congress this week showing the production version of their in-wheel drive system, and the specs are catching my attention in a big way. And the simplicity of integrating their…
A bunch of my friends are up in arms about the Keystone XL pipeline, and the “carbon bomb” it would be if built. Why carbon bomb? Because it is a vast store of hydrocarbon fossil fuels, and building the pipeline would facilitate extraction of those fuels. There’s another deposit of…
Could “hackers” abuse electric car charging stations to crash the grid because of smart grid features? That piece of fearism was presented recently at a security conference, and while the researcher laid out several plausible attack routes, he didn’t demonstrate a working attack. The basic idea is that electric cars…
Why do electric car charging stations have to be part of a charging station network? To charge an electric car why do we have to be a member of ChargePoint or Blink or whatever? Gasoline car owners don’t have to maintain a membership to buy gasoline, they just drive to…
Yesterday, Edison2 unveiled their new version of the Very Light Car (VLC) with CEO Oliver Kuttner claiming some features in the new VLC would be a disruptive technology that could “change the entire automobile industry.” These are big claims which remind me of the hype surrounding the launch of the…
