Recent news has claimed the European version of the Chevy Volt, the Opel/Vauhall Ampera, is being canceled due to poor sales. As I’ve noted before, the Chevy Volt isn’t selling too well in the U.S. itself, and I imagine the European version isn’t doing very well against the Leaf. The…
The Los Angeles area is infamous for sprawl, huge giga-highways, bad air conditions, and people stuck in gridlocked cars for hours at a time. The success of the automobile as a transportation method has led to, in the U.S., a massive system of highways, cities designed for the benefit of…
As we’ve established over the last couple posts, Tesla Motors urgently requires a doubling of the worlds lithium-ion battery production capacity. To do so, the company has turned to Panasonic (the agreement isn’t finalized) to build a huge battery factory – somewhere. At the same time, Tesla (and Panasonic) have…
The story around the Tesla Gigafactory competition is fast moving, so of course as soon as I published yesterday’s story that the Gigafactory was being built at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, that Bob Tregilus (the source on that story) learned construction had halted at that site and the construction workers…
Where, oh where, is the Tesla Gigafactory going to be located? Where, oh where, will it be? Many of us are waiting not so patiently for Tesla Motors to speak the location, while others of us are going out in the field to talk with people, take pictures, and draw…
An electric car with just a 50 mile range can barely be used around town, right? That’s what conventional wisdom says: that a short range electric car is useless because the range is too limiting. What if the real limitation is charging speed, and you couple the short range car…
The Israeli’s and Palestinians are fighting again, because of a long-running dispute over the political system that will control the land which was once called Palestine and is now called Israel. Normally I wouldn’t cover the conflict on TheLongTailPipe because it’s one of those intractable political squabbles where one wishes…
Want to own an electric vehicle, but feel constrained by the short distance? While it’s true that most people drive 40 miles or less per day, we all take those longer trips from time to time. While Tesla Motors understands this, and builds long distance travel into their electric cars,…
Energica Ego in San Francisco CRP’s Energica Ego has been several years coming – in 2010, CRP came onto the TTXGP scene with the eCRP, a bike patterned after the Agni Motors entry in the 2009 TTXGP on the Isle of Man. This was the act of a motorcycle manufacturer…
Tesla Motors is confirming previous plans for the Gen3 affordably priced mass market electric car, and has given us the official name: Model III (or perhaps Model 3). Hopefully everyone will stop saying “Model E” and now get on to debating whether the correct name is Model III or Model…
Tesla Motors is angry this week at Hyundai making bogus political allegations about Tesla’s Supercharger network, and at the U.S. White House for passing the buck in dealing with the battle over Tesla’s direct car-sales model. On the one hand Hyundai is making yet another astonishingly bad statement, and on…
We want more electric cars on the road, and one thing sure to help is workplace charging. By charging at the office the effective daily electric driving range is doubled – because you start from home fully charged, and get fully charged at the office. Since it’s so critical that…
Could the anti-fracking forces (environmentalists) be secretly working for Russia? That’s what NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen recently claimed, that Russia is using “sophisticated information and disinformation operations” to engage with environmental organizations and other anti-fracking organizations, to tilt the political climate in Europe against hydraulic fracturing, so that Europe…
Good news for anti-fracking protesters in Romania: Chevron has announced on Tuesday that drilling activities have been completed, and that they’re now analyzing the rocks, and other data collected from the operations, to determine the potential for shale gas fracking in that region of Romania. The activist website, Frack Off…
Whether we like the idea or not, self driving or autonomous cars are coming. It’s more a matter of “when” rather than “if” because enough companies are working on the technologies that we are certain they’ll work out enough bugs within a few years to make autonomous cars viable. My…
