Tesla’s stock price popped today after an obtuse Elon Musk tweet promised a big announcement and implied a bigger investment in the company. Elon Musk’s obtuse tweets have gone to the next level with a promise, on Monday, of a big announcement on Thursday. The tweet gives us less to…
How do we calculate the average greenhouse gas emissions of a vehicle fleet? The European Union has legislated a target of an average 95 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) per kilometer by 2020. Clearly when an automaker sells an electric car, that car lowers the automakers fleet average environmental footprint. …
Those of us who own electric vehicles know what it’s like to arrive at a charging station, expecting to charge our car, only to find it is blocked by a gas car. Such a situation is infuriating and endangers the electric car owner because of the increased risk of being…
What does Tesla Motors’ CTO JB Straubl think about the future of batteries and charging protocols? The SAE published a recent interview with him which in part is interesting because Tesla uses a non-SAE-standard protocol for electric vehicle charging. Battery format: Tesla is still using 18650 size cells in their…
Hybrid and plug-in hybrid electric trucks for commercial fleets could see greater adoption thanks to an agreement between Meineke and Echo Automotive. Meineke and Echo Automotive have signed an agreement under which Echo’s hybrid truck conversion kit can be installed at Meineke service centers. This will increase the availability of…
Now that Tesla Motors is producing the Model S, that car has passed from the realm of hype to reality. It means we can now start judging the Model S and Tesla Motors based on the actual results rather than on what we hope they’ll be building in the future. …
You don’t think of the head honcho of a major corporation like General Motors (GM) doing something altruistic like changing the company’s vehicle strategy just to save the polar bears. The GM shareholders hope their CEO will be making choices that improve the bottom line, and aim the company into…
Earlier this week Climate Change Skeptic Bjorn Lomborg wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that’s one of these bash-the-electric-cars hit pieces that come along every so often. The piece has a number of holes in it, and in a TorqueNews piece I went over a response published…
The hydrogen economy could take a step towards reality with an approach of delivering hydrogen by blending it with natural gas in natural gas pipelines. One of the key problems in the hydrogen economy is the lack of delivery infrastructure for hydrogen. At the same time the U.S. has an…
Routinely some news makes the rounds touting some far off future battery technology as the savior of electric cars. The headline vaporously screams we’ll be driving cars powered by graphene, or lithium air, or compressed air, or something or other. There are several ways to think about this and the…
Washington State is looking to institute a fine for ICE’ing an electric vehicle charging station. An ICE’d charging station is one that’s blocked by a car, typically gasoline powered, blocking access to the station and preventing an electric car driver from using it. There’s nothing more frustrating or dangerous to an electric car…
After about six years of leading Fisker Automotive, Henrik Fisker has resigned amid financial problems and an impending sale of the company to Chinese automakers. What leads a company founder to leave his company while it is under fire? We don’t know for sure, but it is clear that the…
Toyota has long clung to the Nickel-Metal-Hydride (NiMH) batteries, claiming that lithium-ion batteries are too expensive. While that might be the case, there are dozens of research projects going on that aims to increase energy density, increase power density, and reduce the cost of batteries. What it means is that…
Tesla Motors’ management expects to immediately shift from massive losses while preparing for Model S sales, to immediately become profitable due to Model S sales. On Thursday, Tesla Motors released their fiscal year 2012 SEC filing, after having to delay that report after accountants discovered errors in presenting financial results…
The news is buzzing today with word that GM is working on a 200 mile range Chevy Volt. Bloomberg News has a report claiming that GM’s CEO Dan Akerson said this: “There will be breakthroughs in battery technology, they’re on the horizon. We’re actually developing a car today which is…
