It’s the end of the year and Washington DC is abuzz with end-of-year tax package proposals. One of special interest to us who care about electric vehicles is the Growing Renewable Energy and Efficiency Now act (The GREEN Act) which “extends current renewable energy tax incentives and creates new models…
It’s the campaign season for the 2020 USA Presidential election, and of course there are some crazy things happening. Recently an issue arose over Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s work for McKinsey and Associates, and are there any skeletons in his closet because of that. Buttigieg managed to get McKinsey to release…
On Monday, General Motors, Fiat Chrysler and Toyota said they were intervening on the side of the Trump Administration in its fight with California over that states’ right to set its own emissions policy. Since the 1960’s California has set its own emissions policies, and has a specific allowance to…
In another sign of the shift to electric vehicles, both Maserati and Bently have announced new models with either hybrid or plug-in hybrid drive trains. While that’s a bit of a yawn since both types of vehicles still depend on fossil fuels, it is two more auto manufacturers changing their…
In the 1880’s Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler, who was co-founder of the Daimler Motor Group, parent company of several important automotive brands like Mercedes-Benz and Smart, developed several engine designs. The company he founded is now one of largest automakers in the world, and its reputation rests soundly on high quality…
Here in Silicon Valley there are so many electric cars driving around that it’s easy to forget what it was like in 2011 or before. Back in the 2000’s owning an electric vehicle was outright weird, but today the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley has one of the…
Recently a big-box retailer in Romania, Kaufland, announced it would build a network of 10 fast charging stations across Romania. I take this as a cool sign of progress with electric vehicle adoption. While Western Europe has taken to electric vehicles in a big way, especially Norway, Netherlands and Germany, Eastern Europe…
Electric Vehicle adoption should make a big contribution to reducing the urban heat island effect, significantly lowering temperatures in big cities during the summer, causing a large decrease in electricity consumption because there’ll be less need for air conditioning. That’s the claim of a research paper published in Nature in…
In the 2011 State of the Union Address, President Obama boasted that we’d have 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015. As I noted in my last post, it’s 2015 and we’re nowhere near that goal. What happened? I think Obama over-reached … but there is this little…
Is the electric car inevitable? With lower gasoline prices currently I’m seeing news articles going both ways, some predicting the rate of electric car adoption will be hurt, while others say lower gasoline prices won’t harm the adoption rate because there are other advantages. Who can predict the future? However,…
From the viewpoint Silicon Valley’s award-winning National Drive Electric Week celebration yesterday, electric cars are becoming mainstream. Our region is enjoying the highest rate of electric car sales in the country, and for our 2014 NDEW event we had the intention to have the largest assemblage of electric vehicles anywhere.…
Jalopnik, a so-called “automotive news” website (so far as I can tell, they rely on luridness rather than journalism) just posted a “10 worst electric cars of all time” list, placing the Coda electric sedan at the #10 spot. Really? I think they missed on some real gems they put…
Toyota’s Chairman, Takeshi Uchiyamada, all but confirmed my suspicion from a few weeks ago – Toyota is planning to stick with Hybrid technology and wait for the next generation of battery technology, or fuel cells, before making a big push in vehicle electrification. Speaking last week at the Economic Club…
It probably doesn’t matter to most people what their car weighs. Some people geek out on things like this, and for example claim that the Tesla Model S is really heavy because it weighs about 5,000 lbs. And when you’re told a number like that, it sounds heavy, but then…
While Ford and Toyota disappoint us in announcing they won’t collaborate on hybrid drive trains for full-capability SUV’s and light trucks, Nissan gladdens us with news they’ve sold their 100,000th electric vehicle. I frequently come across naysayer articles pointing out that electric car sales are 0.5% of all car sales. …
