And that, friends, is why the Tesla weighs almost 800 pounds more than an Elise.
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Better Place founder Shai Agassi brags that his firm’s purchase of 100,000 Electric Renault Meganes is the first such mega-buy since the Ford Model T. Better Place’s cell phone-inspired battery leasing infrastructure hits Israel and Denmark next year, and Agassi insists that “real customers will be driving real cars” by the 2011 Frankfurt Auto Show.
The WSJ reports that EV manufacturer Aptera is asking the government for $75M from its energy-efficient retooling funds. Unfortunately for the makers of the Jetsons-inspired 2e, there’s some debate about whether its three-wheel design makes it a car or a motorcycle. Which means the gravy train could be delayed at the station. The Department of Energy has already rejected Aptera’s request for this reason, but Congress is wading into the issue at the EV maker’s request.
Bloomberg reports that Toyota spent the last three years secretly testing lithium-ion batteries for its hybrid Prius, then rejected them as unsuitable. And they still don’t want to talk about it. “Toyota last month ended road tests of 126 Priuses in the U.S., Japan and Europe that began in 2006, Jana Hartline, a company spokeswoman said in an interview [with someone somewhere at some point]. Details of the program, in which the cars’ nickel metal hydride batteries were replaced with more expensive lithium models, weren’t released.” [Point of information: that’s Priora.] Bloomberg fails to make the obvious contrast with GM’s public trials (sans gas engine) and tribulations (say hello to my little bankruptcy) vis à vis its electric/gas plug-in hybrid Hail Mary, the . . . wait for it . . . wait for it . . . Volt. But they do kinda hint at it . . .
Jay Leno’s Top Gear-aping “Green Car Challenge” will pit guests on the new Jay Leno Show against each other in battery-powered Ford Focus EVs, according to The Ford Story. Not that Ford has a 2,305,476 MPG-rated battery-electric car ready for production or anything. The Focus EV “especially made for the show, foreshadows elements of the electric Focus that Ford will begin selling in North America in 2011.” But does putting whiny celebrities in a whining EV add up to great television? Too bad Tesla couldn’t come up with the product-placement cash.
GM set off something of an insanity bomb a few weeks back by claiming their Volt moonshot would get 230 mpg based on draft EPA testing standards. Nissan countered via Twitter, claiming that its forthcoming Leaf EV would get 367 mpg using the same test, and the age of EV efficiency madness was initiated. Needless to say, neither the Volt nor the Leaf can be directly tested to give an apples-to-apples comparison to internal combustion-powered vehicles, and this opening salvo seemed bent on removing plausibility from the EV efficiency equation. But sanity in EV efficiency has an unlikely new champion in luxo-EREV maker Fisker.
Ailing EV-manufacturer TH!NK has escaped the dark specter of oblivion. After a long period of economic struggle, investors have come up with the funds necessary to bring the former Ford subsidy out of court protection. Named investors: American battery maker Ener1 (31 percent), Finland’s Valmet Automotive production company and the Norwegian Government-backed investment fund Investinor. As you’d expect, TH!NK’s plant in Aurskog is rostat bröd, removing 85 workers from the EV-maker’s payroll. Valmet has a contract with Porsche to build the Boxter an Cayman models until 2012, after which Porsche is scheduled to move manufacturing to Magna Steyr in Austria. Meanwhile, Fisker has contracted with Valmet to produce its luxury EV Karma, with production to start early next year. So TH!NKs will be assembled alongside the Porsche Cayman and Fisker Karma for a couple of years. Great news, but Ikke selg skinnet før bjørnen er skutt (don’t sell the hide until you’ve shot the bear).
The LA Times interviews AC Propulsion’s Tom Gage, and sheds some light on what an actual, honest-to-god profitable EV firm looks and thinks like. The short version? Think of the exact opposite of Tesla and you’ll be getting close.
Honda will be showing a prototype electric car at the Tokyo Auto Show in October, as the EV-adverse automaker prepares to offer a battery-electric option. And though development is going forward now, according to reports from Automotive News [sub], the Honda EV won’t be reaching the market until 2015. Honda had previously committed to its nickel-metal hydride battery technology (along with its hydrogen fuel cell system), and it’s not clear that this new vehicle represents a shift to lithium-ion technology. That might explain the long delay; Nissan’s Leaf EV and GM’s Volt EREV are supposed to go on sale in late 2010. But Honda’s not slacking, it’s just doing things the old-fashioned way. The Motor Company will be releasing electric motorcycles around the same time the Leaf and Volt come out and building from there. Sound familiar?
More details about the Volt’s charging system emerged at a GM FastLane livechat with charging equipment engineer Gery Kissel. Kissel reveals that the Volt will have 120V and 240V power chargers, but the 240V unit will be wall-mounted and hard-wired. Though the 240V charger will refill batteries much quicker (3.3 kW), it won’t be portable. Though the 120V will be able to plug into any outlet, it will charge more slowly (1.2 kW) and the cord will only be 20 feet long. Kissel said code required the cord to be under 25 feet or have some kind of management system to keep it off the ground. A retractable cord has been ruled out, and a decision hasn’t been made to allow the cord to lock to the vehicle while charging.
Chinese battery/auto firm BYD has been on a roll since Warren Buffett took a ten percent stake in it last year. BYD recently snagged a technology-sharing agreement with VW, and just agreed to supply SAIC with its batteries. In fact, in the nine months since Buffett invested in BYD his $230 million investment has increased its value by an estimated $1 billion. Which is a good enough return for Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway Co-Chairman Charlie Munger to call BYD CEO Wang Chuan-Fu “a combination of Thomas Edison and Jack Welch—something like Edison in solving technical problems, and something like Welch in getting done what he needs to do. I have never seen anything like it.”
As much as Californians would like to see jobs at NUMMI saved by their homegrown automaker Tesla, the deal isn’t going to happen. For fairly obvious reasons. “We need about 500,000 square feet for our plant,” Tesla’s Rachel Konrad tells Automotive News [sub]. “NUMMI is 5 million.” Thanks to Your Shitty Economy, the EV automaker has plenty of plants to choose from. “The auto industry isn’t the only segment of the California economy that has been struggling,” says Konrad. “We have a lot of mothballed plants to choose from. There are some aerospace and chip factories around here that have closed.” Tesla has just announced that it will build powertrains for its Model S sedan at the Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto, CA. Model S production is likely to take place somewhere in Southern California.
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