The Truth About Cars » Electric vehicles
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• The Fix Is In As GM Makes Changes To Volt After NHTSA Investigation
  General Motors announced changes to the Chevrolet Volt’s design after a NHTSA investigation into why a Volt caught fire following crash testing. The changes will go into effect once production restarts at the Hamtramck, Michigan facility, but customer cars already sold will follow a different protocol. Starting in February, GM will initiate a “voluntary customer satisfaction [...]
• Volt And Consequences: GM Responds To NHTSA Volt Investigation
  With NHTSA opening a formal defect investigation into the Chevy Volt, GM is moving to defend its rolling lightning rod (no pun intended) and allay consumer fears about its safety. Yesterday I briefly appeared on Fox Business’s Your World With Neil Cavuto show to talk about what the intro to my segment referred to as [...]
• In The Battle For The Post-Oil Auto, Big Investors Are Shooting The Moon
  As Bertel pointed out earlier today, peak oil is here: the graph above is not from some fly-by-night EV firm, but Toyota, an auto industry giant. What years of environmental and security arguments failed to communicate, economics is now explaining with little difficulty. Namely, that demand for oil is growing faster than supply, forcing developed [...]
• Why The Government Should Have Stayed Away From Fisker And Tesla
  The Detroit News reports that the White House has ordered a review of the Department of Energy’s various loan programs in the wake of the Solyndra scandal, noting White House Chief of Staff William Daley ordered an independent analysis on the state of the Department of Energy’s loan portfolio — including loans to solar, nuclear [...]
• Global EV Demand Stuck At 2%-4%. Unless…
  Of all the persistent questions faced by the auto industry in these tumultuous times, perhaps the most pressing is: how many consumers would actually consider buying an electric car? There’s no single answer to this question, but we do have one new perspective on it today, courtesy of a study by Deloitte [PDF] which analyzed [...]
• The Case For Better Place: Shai Agassi Addresses The APEC Transport/Energy Ministerial Conference
  TTAC’s Twitter followers already know that I’m at the 2011 APEC Transport/Energy Ministerial Meeting in San Francisco, rubbing elbows with key decision-makers from the world of energy and transportation across the Asia-Pacific region. Earlier today I had the opportunity to sit down with Better Place CEO Shai Agassi, the intense, formidable CEO of Project Better [...]
• 57 Business Consortium Creates Fair-Weather EV
  The famous Japanese monozukuri  (craftsmanship, sometimes “the process of continually making something better”) is going down the drain. It took the combined efforts of “a consortium of 57 small businesses in Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture,” reports The Nikkei [sub] before they could  “unveil a prototype one-seater electric car that can travel 100km between charges.” According the [...]
• Do Electric Car Companies Have A Sense Of Humor?
  The first time Top Gear “tested” an electric car, it depicted Tesla’s Roadster running out of electricity and being pushed from the track. Tesla immediately pointed out that the batteries “never fell below 20%” during the test, a charge the British motoring show addressed by claiming that its review offers a fair representation of the [...]
• 2017-2025 CAFE Details Emerge, Loopholes Appear Gaping
  A final rule for 2017-2025 CAFE standards won’t be published until September, but a pre-publication notice by the EPA [PDF here] reveals some of the key details we’ve been looking for. The broad strokes, which we are already well aware of are shaping up as follows: NHTSA currently intends to propose standards that would be [...]
• The Electric Car Jungle: Battery Swap And The “Natural Monopoly” Of Grid Management
  Electric vehicles present all kinds of challenges to the traditional ways of understanding cars. From design to differentiation, from range to refueling, EVs simply act different than the internal combustion-powered cars we’ve been refining for centuries now. And yet, through consumer incentives and subsidized charging stations, governments seem to be barreling headlong towards the goal of simply [...]
• “Volt Scam” Debate Misses The Point
  Mark Modica, a former Saturn dealer GM bondholder, has leveraged his financial loss at the hands of the government bailout into a blogging position at the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative nonprofit that “promotes ethics in public life through research, investigation, education and legal action.” At the NLPC, Modica focuses on what he [...]
• Better Place Prices “Range Anxiety”-Free EVs In Israel. But What About Resale Anxiety?
  In the last time we heard from Better Place – a little less than two months ago – we’ve witnessed the unfolding of the company’s first functional battery swap station. And yet we were left with one big question mark hovering over the entire project: the price for the end customer. This question is particularly [...]
• The Chinese Are Coming: Part One: A Tale Of Two Nobles
    For years now the Chinese automakers have been the bête noir of the global car industry, inspiring equal parts fear and contempt in boardrooms and editorial meetings from Detroit to Stuttgart. In an industry built on scale, China’s huge population and rapid growth can not be ignored as one scans the horizon for dark [...]
• Trade War Watch 16: US Doesn’t Understand China’s EV Policy, Rattles Saber Anyway
  George Orwell’s warning, that “the first victim of war is the truth,” apparently applies equally to trade wars. On Friday, Senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow (both D-MI) wrote the United States Trade Representative to express their concern over “reported draft regulations” of China’s New Energy Vehicle plan, noting We are concerned that these draft [...]
• Stick And Carrot: Why Beijing Will Become The World’s Electric Vehicle Capital
  It’s long form Saturday! Most of you probably thought you would never see the day Bertel writes a fiery manifesto for the Electric Car. Today is your day. Yesterday, we were first to run with the story that Beijing most likely will become EV capital of the world. Not because Beijing scientists have developed the [...]