Today Tesla Motors released their financial results for Q4 2015, and it’s a mixed bag. The company strongly emphasized strong sales growth for the Tesla Model S, claiming it is outselling the other cars in its class, and that “Cash Flow From Operations” went from hugely negative to hugely positive.…
The January 2016 plug-in electric vehicle scorecard doesn’t look too good. For example, Nissan just introduced the 2016 Leaf with great new features (more range, bigger battery pack, etc) that customers likely wanted. But its sales haven’t taken off, instead sales plunged to 755 Leaf’s for USA in Jan 2016,…
What’s the scope of a local planning commission authority? When that commission is considering construction project approval at an oil refinery to enable five oil trains (each a mile long) arrive per week at that refinery, does the local planning commission have the authority to consider issues outside on-site safety and…
I’m working on a book meant to teach “Range Confidence” as a way to avoid letting Range Anxiety keep us from driving electric cars. The key knowing the capabilities of your car, the local charging network, the ins-and-outs of selecting between Level 2 and Fast charging, and having a car with fast charging.…
Today the Obama Administration took a welcome step concerning coal consumption. The news arrived to me saying they’d frozen new Coal leases on federal lands. While that’s true, what’s actually happened is potentially better, depending on who the next President is. Namely, the Interior Department has launched a review of…
Today the Obama Administration announced a plan to accelerate autonomous vehicle development, citing the need to reduce traffic congestion and to embrace the future of transportation. The press release referred to a report published last fall by the Department of Transportation highlighting transportation challenges we face due to increasing population,…
Yesterday, a post by John Voelcker of Green Car Reports noted that General Motors has no intention to invest in building fast charging infrastructure. He had been able to attend a meeting between the press and GM at CES last week. Several GM executives agreed, no support by GM to…
Any autonomous driving system relies on the correct software functioning. As we all know, any software has bugs in it, even software that has seen “lots” of testing. In the rush to add autonomous driving to cars (zero fatalities zero emissions is the Nissan/Renault pledge) may produce an unexpected result.…
With the production version of the Chevy Bolt finally being shown, Wired Magazine got access inside the engineering and management teams responsible for that car, and has written an interesting inside story of how the Bolt came to be. It’s easy to dismiss GM as not understanding electric vehicles, this…
Along with releasing the Tesla Model S/X version 7.1 update, an online press conference was held this morning in which Elon Musk said some crazy things that might just become true. We have to wonder if some of the things which are possible are in fact desirable. Namely – most…
Tesla Motors is incrementally adding more autopilot autonomous driving features to the Model S and Model X. With the 7.1 update just released, the car will detect the ability to autopark into a space while driving through parking lots, and can drive itself (unoccupied) in and out of a garage.…
Nissan-Renault is one of (er.. two of) the automobile companies working on autonomous drive. Nissan had previously announced the Zero Emissions Zero Fatalities pledge, and more recently showed off an autonomous vehicle prototype. The other day the Nissan-Renault Alliance laid out a roadmap for autonomous driving, and reminded us of…
It’s a bit premature to do this, but can we compare between the Chevy Bolt and Tesla Model 3? While precise details for these cars haven’t been published, enough is publicly known to draw a few conclusions. And while we’re at it, we can include some hypothetical information on some other 200+…
The US Department of Transportation is proposing to “Amend the Definition of 3-Wheeled Vehicles”. While the description of the Proposed Rulemaking is something I agree with, if the proposed rules had been in place 10 years ago certain aspects of the Electric Vehicle industry would have been held back. There…
Earlier today Volkswagen unveiled the BUDD-e, a reboot of the venerable VW Bus that had been passed through an uglifier and given an ultra-modern electric drive train and infotainment wizardry. The most curious part of the car is its recharge time, which Volkswagen described as allowing a “80% recharge in…
