Some of us want to take road trips with electric cars. Thanks to ever-more-powerful fast charging systems and ever-larger battery packs electric car road trips are increasingly possible. A year ago a friend in Romania informed me he would not consider an electric car until it could go 1200 kilometers…
Today Ford Motors has announced it has the largest electric car charging network in the world, with over 12,000 charging locations. Uh, blink blink, how did that happen? It did not come about by buying the Car Charging Group (owner of the Blink network), writing “blink blink” was simply one’s…
Electric vehicle owners in Iowa, and those wishing to drive across Iowa, might feel frustrated with relative scarcity of charging stations. Recently while scoping out the feasibility of driving an electric car from Kansas City to Minneapolis, I found very few charging stations in Iowa. It turns out that electric…
According to a Reuters report, a small pilot study of electric car charging behavior concluded that users quickly adopt to “slow charging”. The problem with this is that the participants were given Renault Zoe’s and a 22 kiloWatt wallbox for use at home. For most intents and purposes 22 kiloWatt…
NY Times reporter Ivan Penn has Broder’d the whole concept of electric cars in an article describing his recent road trip between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Penn, whose beat for the NY Times focuses on alternative energy issues, had as a co-pilot an eVgo employee. You’d think that with…
Electrify America recently announced plans for upgrading the electric car charging user experience. In the immediate term the company will launch a mobile app to help customers find charging stations, reiterated its commitment to keep charging stations open to all through allowing payment using a credit card, while announcing membership…
Over the weekend Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted a bunch of tweets including the above charging advice. At least these tweets did not get him in trouble with the SEC, as he has done so many times over the last year. But this particular advice seems (to me) to not…
According to Tesla, the company mission is to hasten the adoption of electric vehicles, and in general the renewable energy ecosystem. Hence Tesla is developing what are regarded as extremely awesome cars that happen to be electric, have managed to build a manufacturing asset base allowing them to approach a…
Today Nissan unveiled a trio of electric vehicle ecosystem announcements, but separately said it was delaying launch of the 60 kiloWatt-hour Nissan Leaf. This follows the turmoil over revelation that Renault/Nissan/Mitsubishi Alliance leader Carlos Ghosn was being fired from Nissan following revelations of fraudulent financial filings. The announcements today have…
The other day I wrote about growth in electric car sales in Romania (up 165% from 2017 to 2018), and happened to include pictures from the Kaufland Barbu Văcărescu EV Charging location in Bucharest. Yesterday Kaufland held, at that same location what it calls the “Inauguration” of “the first fast…
Nearly 30 years ago I had the misfortune of being laid off from three separate jobs because Microsoft yawned and stretched a little bit. In one case Microsoft added TCP/IP support to Windows with Win95, which drove out of business the several companies who had sold TCP/IP for Windows –…
Last week the US Department of Energy announced a $68 million package of “available funding for early-stage research of advanced vehicle technologies that will enable more affordable mobility, strengthen domestic energy security, and enhance U.S. economic growth.” The advanced technologies in this case are about low-cobalt battery designs, and more importantly…
Electric cars with 400 miles range are preferable, according to presenters at the CharIN Alliance 1st annual North American meeting held in Fremont earlier this week, see CharIN alliance meets on Tesla’s doorstep, presents CCS as the best DC Fast Charging system for electric cars. The main topic of the meeting was…
On Monday the CharIn Alliance (the organization behind the Combo Charging System, a.k.a. CCS) held its first North American conference in Fremont CA. The location was a Marriot Hotel directly across the highway from Tesla’s factory in Fremont, a fact that seemed pointed in the direction of trying to catch…
Look out Tesla Motors and ChargePoint, here comes a charging network with big plans. Electrify America just announced a plan to build a nation-wide electric car charging network comprising thousands of charging locations over the next 10 years. What’s most important is the coverage of inter-city routes as shown in…
