Clean Energy and Transportation News for 2017

Hyundai becomes one of the first automakers to offer the same model with 3 or more drive-trains. In theory this gives car purchasers the power of choice. As a plug-in Hybrid the Ioniq offers a paltry 29 miles electric range, which hardly seems attractive.

Jaguar shows off the all-electric I-Pace SUV at the Los Angeles Auto Show. The car will be available in production in early 2018, with more details in March 2018.

Uber is taking a step closer to eliminating those pesky humans driving cars for Uber. Volvo is supplying a fleet of cars to Uber, which Uber will use to develop self-driving cars. At the same time Volvo will use the same base vehicle for its own autonomous car development work. What Uber looks to do is to develop cars that drive themselves around a city, so that Uber doesn't have to hire humans to do that work.

Last week Tesla Motors unveiled the Tesla Semi, and in a "one-more-thing" moment, they also unveiled the Tesla Roadster2. The Semi is perhaps the more important vehicle, and in any case the guy behind the KmanAuto YouTube channel was at the unveiling, and managed to sneak underneath the truck to take this video. The drive train - motors, gearboxes, wiring, etc - was all exposed underneath the truck, and Kman was able to post this 5-minute video tour of the parts. In a second video he demonstrated that the charging port is NOT the same as a Supercharger port, meaning it's gonna be a different charging cable and connector for the MegaCharger.

Eventually all vehicles must be electrified, including police cruisers. Ford is taking a step in that direction by offering a pursuit-rated plug-in hybrid sedan. This car is targeted at personell whose job does not require a pursuit-rated vehicle, though Ford also describes it as being pursuit-rated. There are a number of features for police officers, including "anti-stab plates" which would seemingly mean a metal plate in the driver seat preventing someone in the rear from stabbing the officer through the seat. Ford does have decades of experience in building police cars, and obviously understands what they need. Another interesting feature is a power export outlet in the trunk, presumably to run lights or other equipment off the traction pack without having to idle the gas engine.

California Rule 21 phase 1 requirements took effect in September 2017, meaning that solar inverter makers are required to achieve UL1741SA certification to continue selling inverters in California. The phase 1 requirements, a.k.a. the autonomous functions, mean that the inverter can automatically, without any intervention by a human, take actions to support the grid in case local grid conditions go wrong. Those functions are as described by Chilicon in the press release below. What's interesting is they could implement the update without changing the control board -- it's just a software change.

Over the next year or two further requirements, phases 2 and 3, will kick in requiring communication across the Internet with cloud systems for command/control of inverter capabilities. The goal is even more support of electricity grid reliability as well as orchestrating energy production and energy storage systems to time-shift electricity produced from renewable resources to other times of the day.

If Honda had brought this to market in 2011 or 2012 or 2013 we'd be jumping up and down excited about this. As it stands, this isn't any more capable than the Chevy Volt except in two ways -- first, the electric range is a smidgeon longer -- second, and this is actually very important, the charging rate is 6 kiloWatts versus the 3 kiloWatts for most other Plug-in Hybrids. You calculate this by dividing the battery capacity (17 kWh) by the charging time (2.5 hours) and you end up with a number close to 6, meaning it's a 6 kW charging system. Or maybe 5 kW. The point being that the more powerful the charging system the more degrees of autonomy the driver has. Conceivably a driver taking a longer trip might feel more encouraged to plug in and charge the car during the trip, because of more miles of range gained per unit of time, than with a lower-power charging system.

Because it's not 2011-13, this car is (to me) an interesting curiosity. Honda wants us to believe they're really interested in green and minimizing the harmful pollution from the vehicles we drive. But they're behind the game on electric vehicles and instead spent a few years working on fuel cell vehicles rather than battery electric.

This price, base MSRP $33,400, also leaves me a little underwhelmed. At not that much more dollars one can buy a 200 mile range battery EV and not have to put up wth stinking gas car attributes like oil changes and gasoline stations. If that sentence made one say "hey wait a minute, gasoline isn't all that bad, and it lets me take long trips" then this car is for you since it'll let you continue using gasoline as the means to long trips. I apologize, but my point of view is the necessity of switching completely to electricity.

Billionaire Carl Icahn is under investigation for double-dealing, a.k.a. personal enrichment, regarding biofuels policy changes he pushed for while an advisor to the Trump Administration. Namely, in December 2016 Icahn joined the Trump Transition team to help shape Trump's regulatory agenda. During the time he was in that role, Icahn pushed for changes in the renewable fuel standard that would have benefited CVR Energy, an independent oil refiner in which Icahn owns a majority share.

Iceland has wanted to exploit its significant geothermal electricity resources to produce clean electricity to power a clean electric vehicle fleet. ABB and Iceland have teamed up to expand Iceland's fast charging infrastructure to better serve the growing electric vehicle fleet on the island.

Countries like Iceland have a big incentive to switch to renewable energy due to the high cost of importing fossil fuels from elsewhere. Electricity generated from Iceland's abundant geothermal resource is a fraction the cost of imported oil or coal. Twenty years ago Iceland's goal was to be the first full-fledged Hydrogen Economy, but the underlying fuel cell technology is completely impractical for vehicles and is still 5-20 years away. Obviously Iceland has decided to go with electric vehicles to solve their fuel price problem, instead of Hydrogen Fuel Cells.

The plan is to install fifteen Terra 53 dual-protocol DC Fast Charging stations along Iceland's main highway. This highway rings the island and clearly will allow drivers the freedom to drive on electricity pretty much anywhere in Iceland. A trip from Reykjavik to Vallanes, at the other end of Iceland, is about 650 kilometers, and therefore the trip would require several charging stops.

Volkswagen and Google are announcing a plan to do some kind of research using Quantum Computing. The focus of the research is said to be "traffic optimization" meaning aids to drivers navigating through cities, "high-performance batteries" meaning using computing resources to guide R&D of high performance battery materials, and "machine learning" as applied to the artificial intelligence required for autonomous driving. It's not clear from the press release how "Quantum Computing" is used in relation to this sort of research. Each of those tasks does require extremely high computational capabilities, and perhaps the team is looking to quantum computing to implement super-computer capabilities within the space constraints of a family car. The autonomous cars I've seen were dominated by the computing equipment being carried on-board, which obviously would be unacceptable for a regular car, meaning that some kind of magic computational wizardry will be required to shrink the enormous computational requirements into a tiny box.

Volkswagen had previously used a Quantum Computer for traffic optimization of 10,000 taxi's in Beijing, China. The are looking at the Google universal quantum computer and are looking to develop algorithms to optimize travel times across an entire city, as well as assigning access to charging stations and parking spots. With such a system, traffic in a city could automatically route around major events, optimize the flow of traffic, and eliminate traffic congestion.

Another development area concerns developing chemical structures in advanced batteries. Computationally designing battery chemistry could conceivably lead to better designs with optimum weight/performance ratios for various target scenarios.

The last area of effort, machine learning, is rather general. The phrase refers to the capability of a program (or system) to link data, analyze relationships and make predictions on this basis. Machine learning is widely used in modern artificial intelligence techniques. Advanced AI systems are a prerequisite for advanced autonomous driving capabilities.

Italian supercar maker Lamborghini has announced an intriguing all-electric supercar, the Terzo Millennio. Large portions of the car will be made of Carbon Fiber with unique new properties. The CF will act as an "accumulator for energy storage", meaning the shell of the car will be part of the battery pack. Further, it will continuously monitor the carbon fiber structures for cracks or damage, and use "self healing chemicals" to perform self healing of the vehicle. It's claimed this will reduce to zero the risks of small cracks propagating further in the carbon fiber structure. It will be an all-wheel-drive car with one electric motor per wheel, and obviously Lamborghini will strive to implement torque vectoring for superiour handling at high speed. They are talking about this as an all-electric super sports car, that's made for future sports car enthusiasts, who will want to take this to race tracks, and who will really appreciate any handling benefits Lamborghini can implement with four-wheel-drive.

Europe is pushing ahead on electric vehicle adoption, and this plan is poised to make European electric car manufacturers relavent in the face of advances by Tesla Motors. Tesla has been building its proprietary Supercharger network aiming to have a ubiquitous fast charging network that can only be used by owners of Tesla's automobiles. That network makes Tesla's cars far more attractive than cars built by other automakers. By leapfrogging to a 350 kiloWatt charging rate, these automakers (all of them Combo Charging System proponents) will have a network offering potentially higher speed charging than Tesla's Superchargers. Except, nobody is making a car capable of a 350 kiloWatt charging rate. Going by the number of installed stations, Tesla's Supercharger network is way ahead of this plan which will see a paltry 20 stations installed by the end of 2017, and only 400 stations by the end of 2020. Any expansion of the fast charging network is good.

We're intensely interested in the Tesla Model 3 and whether it will live up to the hype. The guys running The Model 3 Owners Club got this chance to make an in-depth evaluation of the Model 3, giving an hour of video going over all kinds of details.

In the 4+ years since BMW started mass production of the BMW i3, sales have reached nearly 100,000 electric and plug-in-hybrid BMW i3's, and yearly production capacity stands at around 25,000 vehicles. By comparison, that is one quarter of Tesla's production capacity for the Model S and Model X, meaning that Tesla Motors has achieved a faster production growth velocity than BMW. In any case the BMW i3 is a fine electric car, and BMW has achieved a significant milestone.

One step taken to mark the occasion is innauguration of a second-life battery facility at the BMW i3 factory in Leipzig. The phrase "second life" means that after a battery pack's first life as the traction battery in a car, it can be repurposed as an energy storage unit.

What happens to an electric car battery pack that's depleted to 80% usable capacity? That battery still has significant usable capacity, and can be reused. In theory. Hence the "second life" concept.

The facility being built by BMW will hold 700 BMW i3 battery packs, some recycled from old cars, the others from newly produced packs. It is to be paired with wind turbines on the site, to time-shift some of the electricity produced by those turbines to being used at other times of day.

In the 4+ years since BMW started mass production of the BMW i3, sales have reached nearly 100,000 electric and plug-in-hybrid BMW i3's, and yearly production capacity stands at around 25,000 vehicles. By comparison, that is one quarter of Tesla's production capacity for the Model S and Model X, meaning that Tesla Motors has achieved a faster production growth velocity than BMW. In any case the BMW i3 is a fine electric car, and BMW has achieved a significant milestone.

One step taken to mark the occasion is innauguration of a second-life battery facility at the BMW i3 factory in Leipzig. The phrase "second life" means that after a battery pack's first life as the traction battery in a car, it can be repurposed as an energy storage unit.

What happens to an electric car battery pack that's depleted to 80% usable capacity? That battery still has significant usable capacity, and can be reused. In theory. Hence the "second life" concept.

The facility being built by BMW will hold 700 BMW i3 battery packs, some recycled from old cars, the others from newly produced packs. It is to be paired with wind turbines on the site, to time-shift some of the electricity produced by those turbines to being used at other times of day.

"Turnover" means that Soltec has essentially doubled their sales, with over 200 percent revenue growth in 2017. The company supplies solar tracker systems across three continents. It's likely the company will rise to 3rd place in global PV Tracker supply market in 2017. Whatever good that means for Soltec as a company, it is an early indicator of continued strong growth in solar for renewable electricity production.

Carbon nanotube fabrics could be used to convert waste heat into electricity or serve as a small power source. This is the result of research by NREL scientists announced today. The research concerns using semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) as the primary material for efficient thermoelectric generators. That's opposed to the current practice of using that material as a composite, e.g. carbon nanotubes and a polymer. The research revealed that removing polymers from all SWCNT starting materials served to boost the thermoelectric performance and lead to improvements in how charge carriers move through the semiconductor.

NREL's patented inverted metamorphic (IMM) multijunction solar cells are coming down to earth thanks to a licensing agreement with MicroLink Devices. The IMM technique enables multijunction III-V solar cells to be grown with both higher efficiencies and lower costs than traditional multijunction solar cells. It gives two advantages, the first being greater power extraction from the higher-bandgap sub-cells, and the second being more efficient low-bandgap sub-cell materials such as Indium Gallium Arsenide. Further, manufacturing improvements act to lower device costs, while also reducing the weight allowing these cells to be used on solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicles (a.k.a. Drones). The NREL technology adds to MicroLink's existing expertise in producing lighter-weight solar cells.

California's plan to reshape the electricity grid is taking a big step forward as solar inverter makers, like Ginlong Technologies, adopt UL1741SA. The plan hinges on smart inverters, with the UL 1741SA standard being the first concrete step. Previous inverters would, if grid conditions go wonky, disconnect from the grid. Power systems engineers thinking about the problem recognized that inverters could help prop up the grid, to remedy certain wonky grid conditions.

The increasing rate of installing solar inverters gave California an opportunity to field a different kind of solar inverter. California Rule 21 governs the methods of interconnecting solar power systems to the electricity grid. Over the last 3-4 years, the Smart Inverter Working Group convened by the California Public Utilities Commission worked on redesigning solar inverters to provide grid support functions. The content of UL1741SA, which was ratified in September 2016, is the first concrete result and describes the sort of grid support functions required of solar inverters.

UL1741SA contains what is called the "Rule 21 Phase 1 autonomous functions", meaning these functions automatically kick in whenever the electricity grid frequency, voltage, power factor and similar measures are out of line with grid stability requirements. If the grid strays beyond certain parameters, the inverter will still disconnect itself from the grid, but so long as the grid stays within those parameters the inverter will assist with keeping the grid stable. This may seem like a small thing, but it is the first step of a cooperatively managed electricity grid.

Over time Rule 21 Phases 2 and 3 will be standardized and be required features of future inverters. Those phases add communications ability so that smart inverters can be proactively managed from a central cloud-based service. It's thought that over time the electricity grid will morph from a system of large centralized electricity generation resources, to a distributed set of electrical grid resources of many types and sizes. A distributed management system will orchestrate electricity inflows and outflows to balance electricity demand throughout the day, and also take care of the intermittency issue.

The US Department of Energy is pushing for even faster charging time. The agency is ponying up $15 million in R&D grants to develop batteries and infrastrcture supporting 400 kiloWatt charging and a 15 minute recharge time.

BMW is building a battery factory, but it doesn't appear to be on the scale of a proper Gigafactory. This factory is based in China, and is positioned as producing battery packs for the BMW 5 Series Plug-in Hybrid for the local market, meaning China. In other words, sales volume for that vehicle may not be that significant and therefore the factory described below is likely to be at a much smaller scale than a Gigafactory. On the flip side, a BMW Board Member is quoted discussing the planned expansion of BMW's electrified vehicles to be 15% to 25% of global sales. It may be this new battery factory is intended to expand battery production capacity to meet that future demand.

Bottom line is that Tesla Motors has demonstrated that to move electric vehicles to the mass market requires building a massive increase in global battery production capacity. Whether we are to perceive BMW as being serious about electric vehicles depends in great measure on how big they go in battery production.

Volkswagen is announcing a return to the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in 2018, driving a custom-built four-wheel-drive all-electric race car. It will have been 31 years since Volkswagen's last attempt at that race, in that case with a highly modified VW Golf that failed to reach the finish line. Pikes Peak is a very dangerous race course, climbing up to the top of the 14,000+ foot Pikes Peak near Colorado Springs CO. As you might expect, the course includes many stretches of road carved literally out of a cliff face, and a single mistake can send a racer plunging down a thousand-foot high cliff.

In recent years electric vehicles have made a significant showing. In 2015 electric cars won outright, taking both 1st and 2nd place. In 2012, Lightning Motorcycles won the motorcycle field outright, beating the entire motorcycle field by 20 seconds.

Racing is one place where electric vehicles will prove themselves to the public. The stereotypical die-hard petrol-head fast-car-fanatic will need to see concretely that electric cars can serve their need-for-speed. To the extent that these people are influencers, the more who convert from fast-petrol-cars to fast-electric-cars the more successful will be this project of converting to electric vehicles.

After home charging, workplace charging is the most convenient place to charge an electric car. The 4 hours for a full recharge doesn't matter if you're inside the office working. Your personal involvement is the time to plug the car in, and the time to move the car when charging is complete. Having charging facilities at the workplace obviously will make folks more amenable to driving electric if only because the total driving radius is greatly expanded.

Ford Motors says they've learned, after installing 200+ charging stations at 50 facilities, that Ford's employees are more open to buying a plug-in electric car knowing they have charging available at the office.

This isn't exactly an earth shattering ground breaking research result. This result has been seen by others over the years, and it is an intuitively obvious result. It's nice to see the intuitively obvious verified by actual research results. And, it's nice to see that the results of this study will convince Ford to triple the number of workplace charging stations at Ford facilities. Maybe it will finally start sinking into the collective knowledge at Ford Motors that Electric is the direction we all need to take.

Last thing to note is that Ford's charging facilities expansion is meant to enable bad charging etiquette. The press release says the burden of moving ones car after it's fully charge is a major downside to electric car ownership. I can imagine certain office campus situations where that would be true. However, it means the folks who plug in to charge in the morning will be hogging the charging station all day. That a car is parked in front of a station tends to make it impossible for another car to use that station. Bottom line is that electric car charging facilities are a scarce resource that we must learn to share. This plan instead gives folks the idea they do not have to share charging facilities.

Toyota has long held off from supporting electric vehicles, instead relying on hybrids and fuel cells as their contribution to cleaning up the transportation system. In this project Toyota is deploying prototype fuel-cell class 8 big rigs in the Port of Los Angeles area. The task of drayage trucks is delivering containers offloaded from ships at the port over to rail facilities a few miles away. Traditionally this has been done with regular diesel-powered big rigs, and as a result the area around the Port of Los Angeles is horribly polluted.

With a dual-motor drive train, Proterra is now offering an electric city bus with nearly twice the horsepower and acceleration of previous models. The new drive train will be five times more efficient than a standard diesel bus, an industry-leading 26.1 MPGe. That the bus can climb a 25 percent grade makes it attractive to the Park City Utah transit organization, who must climb a steep mountain from Salt Lake City to Park City.

Van Hool, the leading bus and coach manufacturer, has chosen Proterra to supply its battery platform for Van Hool's first all-electric motor coach. The plan is to integrate Proterra's electric drive train with Van Hool CX45E coach platform. That model is designed for long-range intercity travel, while delivering a world-class customer experience in quality and comfort.

Last month, Proterra drove one of their heavy-duty buses for over 1100 miles on a single charge, blowing away the previous record. Given that Van Hool plans to integrate Proterra's drive train into Van Hool's long-range bus platform, it's next to obvious that Van Hool plans to deploy these electric buses to customers with long-distance inter-city routes.

Earlier this week GM announced a plan to transition to all-electric vehicles. Curiously the only vehicle mentioned in the announcement was a fuel cell autonomous vehicle platform, which is a non-electric hydrogen powered vehicle type. Here is the announcement concerning that fuel cell vehicle platform, and the fact that it's targeted at the military and heavy duty trucking sectors.

The military faces a deadly problem with "regular" military vehicles, because of the necessity to deliver fossil fuels to the field. The delivery process exposes more soldiers to harm because delivering fuel to remote outposts requires driving convoys through possibly hostile territories. The military has been interested for several years in other energy systems if only to reduce the risk to soldiers. You might think that instead of invading countries willy nilly for unclear reasons and terrorising the population so badly they want to fight back, that the best choice would be to pull out and say we're sorry and try to make amends. But the political leadership we have instead wants to keep the war going and obviously I've flown off into tangent land.

That tangent was meant to explain why the press release stresses "minimize logistical burdens and reduce human exposure to harm." Clearly this Association of the United States Army meeting will include some attention on the issue of mitigating risks from delivering fuel to dangerous territory.

I don't understand why General Motors thinks this is a solution to the named problem. Fuel cell vehicles require pure hydrogen. Since it's difficult to deliver fuel to a remote outpost in hostile territory, how does switching to hydrogen fuel make any difference? The hydrogen still has to be delivered to the field.

The last few months several carmakers have announced plans to go fully electric. General Motors, the company that killed the EV1, has announced their own plan. You'll notice that details are lacking below just what is meant, and that the announcement curiously includes discussion of a fuel cell prototype vehicle platform. Fuel cell vehicles are driven by electric motors, but it's hard to call them "electric" since they do not plug in to a power socket to recharge. Remember, "It's not electric if you can't plug it in".

Call me hopeful but skeptical. The image GM included with the announcement is obviously meant to convey several vehicles in the R&D stage waiting to be unveiled.

STEREOTYPE: A full-size electric bus would necessarily have a short range. A vehicle that big can't possibly be practical as an electric vehicle, except for uselessly short routes for a company wishing to greenwash itself. In other words, conventional wisdom would say an electric bus can't be used for regular transit routes, who why even try.

Proterra just proved all those stereotypical ideas to be completely wrong. Driving a heavy-duty electric bus for 1,100 miles is an astonishing feat. It's doubly astonishing considering the previous record, 1,013 miles, was set by a light-duty passenger bus 46 times lighter than the Proterra Catalyst E3 used in this record-setting run.

Proterra appears to have a winning combination on their hands. Battery prices are falling rapidly, and electric buses have a significantly lower fuel cost than diesel buses. Between those two factors, electric buses could quickly become the most financially pragmatic choice for transit fleets. Falling battery prices mean Proterra should be able to rapidly drive down the cost for their electric buses. The low fuel cost will make these buses financially attractive to transit operators, and a lower up-front price will only increase that attractiveness.

On the heels of this announcement Proterra is claiming a nominal 400 mile range for the Catalyst E2. This is well beyond the typical driving range required for intra-city transit routes, and is closer to what's required on long-distance bus routes.

Also today, Proterra announced a battery partnership with LG Chem. Given what LG Chem has done to enable long driving range for many electrics, this record is surely due in part to this partnership with LG Chem.

Like almost every other announcement of a long range electric vehicle, Proterra is announcing a partnership with LG Chem to supply batteries. Proterra's new battery pack manufacturing plant is capable of producing 500 megaWatt-hours of battery packs per year. With the new battery technology, Proterra just drove one of their buses for over 1000 miles on a single charge, an astonishing distance for a vehicle this big.

Audi's Elaine electric SUB coupe, and Aicon four-door 2+2, are meant to show that highly automated driving is around the corner. The Aicon has no steering wheel, no pedals, and can (within a designated area) automatically drive itself to a parking space in a parking garage.

Plug-in Hybrid's with significant range are rare - specifically, the BMW i3 REX, the Chevy Volt, and now the Honda Clarity PHEV. Most PHEV's have a paltry electric range of 20 miles or less. The longer the range, the less often the car owner will have to hit the gasser engine, and the more often they can drive on electricity. The 40 mile threshold is enough to cover most driving since the average driver travels less than 40 miles a day on average. With a 47 mile electric range, the Clarity PHEV should handle an even higher percentage of drives on electricity.

The recharge time of 2.5 hours at 240 volts says this car has a 6 kW on-board charger that would give 20-25 miles range per hour of charging. This is higher power than other PHEV's.

One of the long-predicted primary uses for autonomous self-driving cars is all kinds of delivery services. You could order a pile of lumber from Home Depot, and rather than rent a truck by the hour to drive it to your house on your own, Home Depot could send it in a self-driving truck. In this case instead of a human pizza delivery agent (a job I had myself over 30 years ago), Dominos would instead send the Pizza in a self-driving car. How does Domino's expect to get the Pizza upstairs to, for example, the second floor of a college dormitory? Or inside a hospital to a surgery team that's about to start an operation? Or elsewhere in that same hospital to a mother that just gave birth? Or upstairs in an apartment complex? Or to a hard-to-find apartment in a house that's been divided into aprtment units? There's all kinds of special situations I recall as a Pizza delivery driver that aren't satisfied by driving a car up to the front door and tooting a horn and expecting someone to come outside to retrieve the pizza.

Domino's has long been exploring alternate vehicles. Back in the 1990's they hired Corbin Motors to build a special version of the Corbin Sparrow where the rear end was designed for pizza's. Those cars are affectionately known as the Pizza-Butt Sparrows. Amongst the select few of us who know Corbin's history that is. You can imagine that a large cost center in Domino's financials is the salary and fuel costs for their current pizza delivery system -- humans driving gasoline powered cars. And, no, I did not work for Domino's. Instead I worked for Archies Pizza, a Pizzeria in Lexington KY that went out of business years ago but made really nice high quality pizza's from all kinds of fresh ingredients. There was a Domino's a half-block away from our store, of course.

I foresee this being a difficult service to develop because of all the special delivery situations that exist. One way it might work is to have a van with a mobile pizza kitchen. The raw pizza would be assembled at the store, then the delivery agent loads those pizza's into ovens in the van, and manages the cooking process while the van is driving the delivery route. That would be tricky to implement, but would give a human delivery driver tasks to do while the van is driving from place to place. And the pizza could plausibly be deliveried more freshly cooked...? Which would address one of the key issues of pizza delivery -- keeping the pizza hot while driving to the customer's residence.

For Ford, "electrification" means any kind of electric assist including mild-hybrid, hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and battery-electric. In this case Ford is exploring a partnership with Chines automaker, Zotye Auto, to maybe sometime in the future possibly build some electric cars.

A few years ago the Volkswagen Group showed the I.D. Buzz concept car. Think the iconic VW Microbus modernized with various things including an electric drive-train. Now that Volkswagen was found guilty of defrauding emissions regulation systems around the world by faking emissions results in Diesel cars, they're looking to launch more electric vehicles. In this case they're bringing the I.D. to production, with it going on sale in 2022.

Mercedes-Benz has decades of experience building luxury cars. Give them the opportunity to design a luxury electric car, and sure of course they'll do a good job with the luxury car side of the thing. For a few years they owned a chunk of Tesla Motors, and worked with Tesla on at least two electric cars including the Mercedes B-Class Electric.

Since launching the LEAF, Nissan's battery packs came from its subsidiary Automotive Energy Supply Corporation (AESC). That subsidiary is now being sold to GSR Capital. The deal is being spun as a win-win as GSR Capital has deep pockets necessary to develop this battery business faster than Nissan could. Supposedly.

That might be accurate, ...or... It's long been rumored that Nissan wants to switch to LG Chem battery packs. If Nissan had switched to LG Chem batteries by now, the 2018 Leaf (due to be released soon) might have had a 200+ mile range with a 60 kWh pack. Instead the 2018 Leaf is rumored to have a 40 kWh pack which would give a respectable-but-not-competitive 150-180 mile range.

According to CleanTechnica, NEC also sold its portion of this business to GSR Capital. According to Nikkei, where Panasonic had a growing EV battery marketshare due to its partnerships with Tesla and Toyota and others, NEC relied on Nissan and Nissan is looking to broaden its battery supply chain.

Nissan originally built batteries in Japan. With the shift to localized Leaf production in 2013, Nissan launched battery factories in both England and Tennessee. The original vision was that owning the battery factory would give Nissan an economic/price advantage. One supposes that would have only held true if Leaf sales had risen enough, but instead Leaf sales have held steady for several years.

In any case, the Renault side of the Nissan-Renault alliance already uses LG Chem batteries. That partnership has been very good for adoption of the Renault Zoe in Europe. A Leaf with better batteries should sell very well.

Volvo Cars and Geely Holding are announcing two joint ventures to rapidly develop next generation electrified vehicle technology. GV Automobile Technology will be 50/50 owned, with operations in China and Gothenburg Sweden. The LYNK car line will be manufactured by LYNK & CO, a newly formed JV between Volvo and Geely.

According to Reuters, they'll be sharing engine technology as well, and that Geely purchased Volvo from Ford seven years ago.

This is not about Volvo switching to an electric-only strategy. In July, the company said it would fully electrify its model line by 2019. This announcement with Geely obviously sets Volvo on that path. However the key word is ELECTRIFY, not ELECTRIC. That word lets an automaker weasel around, making it sound like they're moving to an electric drive train, when in reality an ELECTRIFIED drivetrain could be a gasoline engine with mild electric assist.

It is a big deal that Volvo's total model lineup will have some kind of electrification. It would have been far more significant if Volvo had announced an all-electric-only plan. Instead, they'll stick with plug-in hybrid or even more mild electrification for now. The company is pledging to launch five all-electric vehicles over the next few years.

The Aon Center and Prudential Plaza in downtown Chicago are being served by the first all-electric commercial transit bus fleet. The fleet shuttles employees at those locations to transit centers in downtown Chicago including the Amtrak station. That enables employees to commute to work by train, and cover the last mile in an electric bus.

A few years ago the CarCharging Group bought out the Blink Network assets from ECOtality, which was rapidly going out of business. Until that time CarCharging's charging stations were on the ChargePoint network, which one would notice only if one paid attention to host site ownership details. By buying Blink, they got themselves an independent identity and a large charging network with its own identity.

What they also bought was a piss-poor reputation grounded in the reality that their charging stations are often broken and not maintained properly. The name, Blink, lends itself to jokes about Blink Being On The Blink.

While I'm sure updating the website is important for establishing corporate branding and whatnot, that shouldn't be their highest priority. Electric car owners unanimously want CarCharging to focus on reliability and good quality service.

Honda, nice try, if you'd delivered this in 2011 or 2012 or even 2013 there'd be a market for this car. Today, you're competing against the Chevy Bolt EV, the Tesla Model 3, the 2018 Nissan Leaf, etc, all of which have more range than what you're offering. As we point out elsewhere total driving range autonomy makes one car more valuable than another. By offering an 80ish mile range Honda is not making a competitive offering versus the other automakers.

Tesla Energy, the Energy/Solar side of Tesla, is partnering with a large off-shore wind farm on an energy storage system that will be the largest that industry. The project, called Revolution Wind, will be off the coast of New Bedford, Mass, and include a 144 megaWatt wind farm paired with a 40 megaWatt-hour energy storage system provided by Tesla.

BMW's electric maxi-scooter, the BMW C Evolution, is being deployed in Berlin for a guided tour service. For just 49 euros, you get to experience riding an electric maxi-scooter while being guided through the sights of Berlin and potentially surrounding areas like the Harz mountains.

The Formula E electric race car series will be joined by another large car manufacturer for the 2019/2020 season (season 6). Porsche is a major performance car brand, and plans to join the Formula E series the year after next.

Yesterday was Tesla Model 3 day, meaning it was the first deliveries of the Tesla Model 3. Expectations are HIGH for this car and what everyone expects Tesla Motors will do. While there were 30 cars delivered yesterday in Fremont, there was also a test-ride event where attendees were driven around a course on the Tesla Factory grounds. Several people who took those test rides filmed their experience.

Following yesterday's signing of climate change legislation, California Governor Jerry Brown commemorated the opening of Proterra's West Coast Manufacturing facility. Proterra is a rapidly growing manufacturer of electric transit buses. The new facility will handle production of buses for its West Coast customers, and adds to Proterra's battery manufacturing facility in Silicon Valley, and its East Coast manufacturing facility in South Carolina.

The Los Angeles area is already a strong customer of Proterra. Foothill Transit has 17 Proterra buses and serves 22 cities in the area. That agency plans to go 100% electric by 2030.

Last Winter Lextran, the transit system for Lexington KY, bought five Proterra Catalyst all-electric buses plus one charging station. Lextran plans to buy another shortly, and hopes to buy others as they secure funding to do so. The charging station is installed at the Transit Center on High Street, near the downtown area. Most bus routes in Lexington go through this Transit Center.

Louisville KY, a nearby city engaged in a 100+ year long friendly rivalry with Lexington, has had Proterra buses for a couple years.

The Solar Decathlon is a yearly contest held by the US Department of Energy. They line up University teams to each develop a solar-powered high efficiency house. For the contest, each team must develop and build the house on their campus, disassemble it, transport the house to the contest site, reassemble it for the contest, then after the contest is finished to disassemble the house, and transport it back to their campus. The contest encourages lots of cross-field development work, covering 10 areas (hence, a Decathlon), and acts as a job training exercise for the students.

The big point is that even though the Trump Administration is pushing all things fossil fuels, the US Department of Energy has not canceled this contest. The contest is all about solar power and energy efficiency, but they're letting it proceed as planned. Hurm...

A Transport Evolved viewer in Europe happened upon a Nissan Leaf in the wild, that happened to be at a charging station, shared the pictures with the show, letting them make educated guesses about the car. The Nissan Leaf still has dual charging ports, still sporting CHAdeMO, but the AC charge port was larger implying that Nissan a switch to the Type 2 port for Europe instead of the J1772 port. Doing so will make the Leaf more compatible with Europe's charging infrastructure.

The other detail is that this car seemed to allow a maximum 160+ miles range, implying it has a 40 kiloWatt-hour battery pack. Hurm... is Nissan going to wait on offering the 60 kiloWatt-hour battery size required for a 200+ mile range?

The competition is over what? Will more market share be had with a lower priced car that still offers a significant range boost? What if a 160-180 mile range 40 kWh Leaf can be bought for significantly less than the 238 mile range 60 kWh Chevy Bolt EV or the Tesla Model 3? Would that mean more Leaf buyers because it's much less expensive?

On the other hand, Nissan has long talked about offering multiple battery pack capacities, and has shown promo videos of a Leaf with a 60 kWh pack. It's far more likely that Nissan will offer both 40 kWh and 60 kWh capacities on the Leaf.

Greenlots is a leading company in the electric car charging space. One big claim they continually make is of being the "Open Charging Leader", meaning that their charging network is implemented using open protocols versus the closed proprietary protocols used by other network operators. While the end customer doesn't care about this issue, it is important to network operations. By using open protocols, in theory, Greenlots has a wider choice of charging station providers compared to the networks using closed protocols.

California Governor Jerry Brown today signed significant climate change legislation, AB398/AB617. Part of what happened is the extension of a law originally signed by Gov. Schwarzenegger 10 years ago. With AB398, we have a Cap-And-Trade program that is an attempt at economic pressure to solve for climate change. With AB617, certain gasses are defined as air pollutants and toxic chemicals.

What follows is the text of the legislation.

The Formula E electric race car series will be joined by another large car manufacturer for the 2019/2020 season (season 6). Mercedes-Benz had previously intended to join during the 2018/2019 season, but has instead chosen to wait a year.

This feel-good story about a guy finding his car after he forgot which parking lot he'd parked in has a dark side. His car was blocking an electric vehicle charging station for 4+ days. The news article doesn't talk about this, and the parking lot owner did nothing about this. The parking lot owner should have seen this gasoline car parked at the EV charging station and had it towed.

Back in 2010-2011 an association for blind folk began a push for electric cars to make noise, because quiet cars are dangerous to blind people who use sounds to navigate the world around them. While it's obvious that blind folks need to hear things to avoid risks, it's only part of the story. What about the pedestrian/bicyclist deaths due to gasoline cars and even big trucks? Obviously it's not about the noise emitted by the vehicle. What about noise pollution in our cities? When will we solve for noise pollution?

Instead, doesn't it seem possible the "quiet electric cars are dangerous" idea might be pushed by organizations seeking to delay electric car adoption?

By that measure why is an electric car charging network like eVgo publishing a note saying electric cars are dangerous? What the ____, as they say! I think I'm speaking for all of eVgo's customers when I beg them to please please please work on improving your back-end services.

Lightning Motorcycles can rightfully claim to produce the fastest production motorcycle in the world, an all-electric bike dubbed the LS-218. The name was earned in August 2012, when Lightning set a land speed record at Bonneville of 218 miles per hour. The record was actually 215.960 miles/hr averaged over two runs with the faster run being 218 miles/hr, forming the basis for the bike's name. The next year they took the bike to the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb race, and beat the entire motorcycle field by over 20 seconds. That bike was one of a handful of prototype bikes Lightning built for racing, and the company now sells a production version to the public.

Lightning's engineering team has been at work on two tracks -- One is developing the manufacturing expertise required to produce motorcycles -- The other is to develop a new prototype bike. The team plans to take this new bike to the Bonneville speed trials this summer where the team intends to set a new land speed record, and the new bike will be named after whatever speed it attains. In the riders seat is a leading land speed record holder, Jim Hoogerhyde.

In their "shakedown run", at the El Mirage track in California, they recorded a 211.730 miles/hr record from a standing start. The standing start is a different format than is used at Bonneville, which uses a "flying start" where racers are timed over a 1 mile stretch in the middle of a longer run. In November 2012, Lightning recorded a 189 miles/hr standing start speed at El Mirage compared to the 215.590 miles/hr record at Bonneville. Does this imply they might hit 250 miles/hr at Bonneville?

The company has long used racing as the cauldron within which to develop their motorcycles. They achieved many wins in earlier years, but the last couple years their racing program took a back seat to the priority of building bikes for customers. Lightning has long promised a range of motorcycles targeted more typical usages than racing, such as the daily commute. This press release repeats that promise. At their shop I've seen several prototypes such as an urban-oriented scooter, and a street bike meant for every-day riders.

Previously, Lightning had partnered with Remy for the motor and Ener1 for EnerDel batteries. In this press release Lightning names Farasis as the battery partner. That company has supplied super powerful battery cells to several electric racing teams.

Encouraging person-to-person sharing of charging stations is one way to expand the electric car charging network. It's clear a key to a successful switch to electric cars is the speed with which the charging network becomes ubiquitous. This isn't the first effort at person-to-person charging station sharing. To my knowledge that honor falls on PlugShare/Recargo/Xatori (Xatori and Recargo merged). In any case, the interesting twist in this case is the use of Blockchain to record payments.

Blockchain? That's the transaction recording technology underly Bitcoin and most other digital currencies. Blockchain is a simpler mechanism to record transactions than the prevailing system of monetary settlements through the ACH banking system. Blockchain-style transactions are as fast as an API call on an Internet service, and are touted as being highly secure due to well-thought-out algorithms and encryption mechanisms. Instead of Bitcoin, the team is instead using Ethereum.

Almost two years ago I had a frenzy of excitement about Bitcoin, and posted some theorizing that using Bitcoin in charging stations would reduce the need for charging networks. Who knows if that would be the result.

In California and Hawaii, policy changes are underway requiring "smart inverters" for solar power systems. Requirements going into effect in September call for what's called "Phase 1" functions, comprising a set of "autonomous" actions providing "grid support" functions like voltage or frequency support. That is, these functions happen automatically without any explicit control, and act in reaction to grid conditions. For example the voltage or frequency might go out of bounds, and rather than disconnect from the grid the inverter instead shifts into a mode of helping to correct the problem.

The industry developed a supplemental standard, UL1741SA (Supplement A), defining those autonomous functions. Shortly Enphase, and the other solar inverter manufacturers, will be unable to sell inverters in California that lack this feature.

GE has for a few years operated their own charging network. It wasn't widely recognized nor popular, but they were doing it. It makes sense that GE (a.k.a. General Electric) would get into such a business. The name of the company says it all, that GE's corporate purpose is anything to do with electricity. But, their charging station business and network was never very popular.

GE selling its charging network to ChargePoint is likely part of a larger transformation underway at GE. According to current news reports, GE sold off its appliance division, most of GE Capital, is thinking to sell its "lighting" business, amid a general sell-off of "side businesses" so that GE can return to its "industrial roots".

In other words, it would seem GE see's the charging network business as a "side business" it should jettison. If so, I'd suggest that to be short-sighted since electric vehicles are the future. Shouldn't GE be positioning itself to reap the rewards of the rise of electric vehicles?

This Chevy Volt owner (note - Plug-in Hybrid) tells us he is frequently asked why he doesn't own a Tesla. In other words, why not own a battery electric car, and why instead to own a plug-in hybrid? The obvious first answer is that the Volt and other PHEV's are nowhere near as expensive as a Tesla Model S or Model X, and therefore regular folks can buy a Volt. That's a completely understandable answer, though will change later this year as the Tesla Model 3 comes on the market.

Next reason - usable driving range for road trips. That is, when the Volt runs out of battery power you just keep on driving because the gasoline engine kicks in. You can even never touch the charging port and drive forever on gasoline. Or, that's what the guy in the video says. Too bad that's an incorrect idea.

Gasoline vehicle owners can have range anxiety because they can be just as stuck on the side of the road having run out of fuel. It's called "running out of gas" and happens to people all the time. For more information on Range Anxiety see: A brief history of Range Anxiety

It boils down to refueling time, effective trip speed, and refueling/recharging infrastructure. Gasoline does have a very fast refueling time and therefore effective trip speed is high with gasoline. Effective trip speed means the distance traveled divided by travel time factoring in everything including pee breaks, food breaks and refueling breaks. As more DC fast charging infrastructure is built, electric car effective trip speed will increase. The guy is right that currently the balance tips towards plug-in hybrids if your primary goal is optimum trip speed on road trips. To understand the calculations see EV Charging Rates

For most of us road trips are a secondary use of our car, and the primary use is around-town driving. That means we don't need to optimize for road trip effective speed, but we need to optimize for around-town driving. See Charging rate needed

What about battery swapping as the solution for increasing charging time? It's not a good choice that failed in the market. See Battery swapping

If you pay closely to your electric vehicle history, you may be aware that Elon Musk is nothing more than a co-founder of Tesla Motors. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning started Tesla Motors, with Elon Musk joining shortly afterward as the Angel Investor. This talk is by Marc Tarpenning talking at Stanford University to a group of entrepenuerial people.

Martin and Marc had built and sold a previous company, and were looking for a new challenge. They decided to look at the Oil industry, that is to disrupt the Oil Industry out of existence. The primary place Oil plays is transportation, specifically for cars and light trucks. It's unrealistic to use biofuels -- for example corn-based-ethanol would require more arable land than exists in the USA to fuel the vehicles used in the USA. On the other hand, electric cars can be powered by the solar panels on the roof of the house. See Solar/Electric Vehicle Nirvana

They chose to build a sports car first because it's an area where they could more easily compete than other market segments. The electric drive was able to outpace gasoline powered cars because of "100% torque at 0 RPM". The Roadster doesn't do so well at a race track because they knew high speed wasn't so important for daily driving, and instead the 0-60 miles/hr time was most important.

The real plan was to make an extremely compelling attractive car at the high end, and then move towards the Sedan market.

Supercapacitors are like batteries because they store electricity, but they're different from batteries because the electricity is not stored as a chemical reaction. Supercapacitors are capacitors, but super, meaning they hold far more energy than regular capacitors. Capacitors store energy between metal plates that are separated by an insulator, and are used in pretty much every electrical gizmo to smooth out electricity, store bits of electricity here and there in a circuit and so forth. In some cases capacitors are used as primary energy storage -- for example some photography flashguns have a large capacitor that's charged up from a battery to emit a huge flash of light.

This video shows a Supercapacitor system built with easy-to-assemble modules with built-in balancers, that is charged from regular solar panels, and can drive regular 120 volt equipment from an inverter. The system is small and lightweight, but provides great energy storage capability.

With the system shown here, he went to a remote site and ran a cement mixer and various power tools all day long straight off sunlight and a small solar array.

Volvo is spinning off a new company intended to enter the Electric Performance Car market.

We're continuing to see rays of possible sunlight at the US Department of Energy. That while the Trump Administration is chock-a-block full of fossil-fuel-loving partisan advocates, that somehow the DoE is still supporting clean energy work. This set of funding supports clean energy technologies, and is part of a [larger $116 program of awards](https://energy.gov/articles/department-energy-announces-116-million-small-business-research-and-development-grants) across a wider range of technologies.

A spreadsheet showing [all the projects is on the DoE website](https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/06/f35/FY%202017%20EERE%20SBIR%20STTR%20Phase%20II%2C%20Release%202%20Award%20Selections.xlsx).

Renewable electricity with Wind and Solar is quickly becoming financially viable as the cheapest form of electricity production. The cost curve is falling rapidly thanks to production efficiencies as the manufacturing volume rises, and as the manufacturers grow more and more comfortable with producing the technology. The cost is low enough, that in some places, it is cheaper than natural gas electricity without subsidies.

Case in point, Dubai, in the middle of the Oil-Rich Persian Gulf, is building out a massive solar farm that's slated to expend to 800 megaWatts within a few years. In the middle of the Persian Gulf region, they're able to build solar at a cost cheaper than natural gas. Let that sink in.

In the USA we did elect a government full of climate change denying fossil fuel loving leaders. But the economics dictates a different solution. The economics says that the future is renewable electricity.

One of the voices in this documentary points out that the price-cost-curve for renewable electricity is dictated by manufacturing efficiency, while the price-cost-curve for fossil fuel electricity is based on the price for the resource. With renewable electricity the resource is as endless as the Sun. With fossil fuel electricity the resource is limited, and the price for that resource goes higher the more you extract, simply because as fossil fuel resources reach depletion extraction is more expensive.

Another case story is an island in the Canary Islands. They have a high cost of energy because there is no local energy resources. Their goal is moving 100% to renewable electricity, with local energy storage, organic produce, and electric vehicles. Once accomplished more of their money will stay on the island, as opposed to the current situation where money is shipped off the island to buy fossil fuels. In other words, locally produced renewable electricity can produce great economic goodness.

The more renewable energy is deployed the less need there is for wars -- since in many cases wars (especially in the current time period) are often to do with resources. The whole mess in the Middle East is, after all, a war where the West seeks to protect access to the fossil fuels in the Middle East.

Multi-rotor aircraft are related to those "Drone" devices making all those fantastic aerial movies. Except, they use quite a few more motors and propellers, and in some cases they carry passengers. Electric manned flight is happening, and it may happen faster than we expect.

We have two aircraft to report on today. The first, the Kitty Hawk Flyer, got a lot of overly hyped attention back in April. In this video we see one flying not in the overly scripted scenario of their advertising footage, but along the San Francisco waterfront. For previous coverage, see Kitty Hawk Flyer - electric powered quad-copter electric motorcycle thingymajob

The second is a gentleman with a german accent flying a vehicle in a forest, presumably on his own property. He recently posted a video showing the first flight of his multi-rotor design, and today's video shows a tuning test-flight. He flew for 11 minutes achieving 80% depth of discharge, indicating more flight time than the previous video. For previous coverage see Very cool Manned multirotor helicopter-like -First Flight!

First test flight with this aircraft - 8 minutes of flying time consumed 57% of the battery capacity. The power comes from a 35 kG LIPO battery pack, and it's estimated to have 14 minutes total flying time or 11 minutes to 80% depth of discharge. He's not wearing a helmet to feel the freedom thing.

It kicks up quite a bit of "wind" while flying - notice what happens to the plants.

Since this is an initial test flight, he's taking it easy ("don't fly higher than you want to fall"). Certain control system limits were set conservatively and he may loosen those limits for future flights.

Yesterday GM released news that a hundred or so Self-Driving Chevy Bolt EV's were being manufactured on an assembly line, and being shipped to test fleets around the USA. They described this as a milestone, as the first self-driving car to be built with mass-production techniques. We've found a video that goes over the assembly line.

This is clearly not a robotized modern assembly line. Instead of an building the cars from scratch, they are attaching parts to a pre-built chassis. It looks like Engineering team members are doing some of the assembly.

The other thing to note is the size of the computing cluster, and that it takes up a significant amount of cargo space. As advanced as their self-driving technology surely is, they still haven't shrunk the equipment down to where it fits into the woodwork.

Deutsche Post DHL Group and Ford have announced a plan to develop an all-electric delivery van for use in Germany.

For the first time, autonomous self-driving cars have been built using mass-production methodology. As we can tell via the pictures released with this press release, they built some kind of assembly line for this purpose. The assembly line clearly isn't "high-end" (no robots), but it's an assembly line, letting them claim to have used mass-production methods. GM is deploying the 130 vehicles to test fleets in San Francisco, Scottsdale and Detroit.

Another thing to see in these pictures is that these cars have many sensors, including a whole sensor package mounted on the roof, and some sensors at the side near the front. The press release talks about LIDAR, cameras and other sensors, as well as computing equipment.

Proterra has been raising lots of investment capital the last few months.

What Audi has done is achieve the first license for automated vehicle testing in New York. They held a technology demonstration in Albany NY, of the Audi Highway Pilot technology, showcasing their "Level 3" capabilities.

The Honda Clarity Electric may be a waste of time - 2011 called, and they want their electric car. That is, the Honda Clarity Electric has specifications (80 mile range) that were hot in 2011, but are has-been today given the 200+ mile range of the Chevy Bolt EV or the Tesla Model 3. This lease price means you're not getting a lower price in exchange for sub-par capabilities.

At the same time we must recognize that Honda has until now refused to deliver a credible electric car in anything but "compliance car" quantities. Just enough Honda Fit EV's were made to produce enough electric car sales to earn enough ZEV credits so they could stay in the business of selling gasoline vehicles. This new car perhaps represents a change in tune for Honda given their long term focus on fuel cell vehicle research. Except that we see in the press release below that the Honda Clarity Electric, just as the Fit EV, is limited to California and Oregon, and is therefore a "compliance car" until proven otherwise.

Another item of note is that it supports fast charging -- using the Combo Charging System. This is the first time for a Japanese automaker to be selling (er.. leasing) a car with Combo Charging System. The Honda Fit EV was not delivered with fast charging. In general the Japanese Automotive Market requires CHAdeMO, because that system was developed in Japan long before the Combo Charging System (CCS) was developed. CHAdeMO charging infrastructure in Japan is ubiquitous, but the technology failed to take off in the market largely because the Society for Automotive Engineers choose to take a different direction. See

We're seeing a ray of hope that all is not bleak in Washington DC, because the US Department of Energy is still moving forward on clean energy projects. In this case they're ponying up $3 million in funding for "High Performance Computing" projects meant to be applied to manufacturing processes in the Energy Industry. Specifically: "aid in decision-making, innovate in processes and design, improve quality, predict performance and failure, quicken or eliminate testing, and/or shorten the time of adoption of new technologies."

What that means is using high end computer-aided-design technologies in the product design process. For example with virtual reality hardware, an engineering team can create a virtual 3D mockup of a product and more quickly iterate the design without having to build physical hardware. Other techniques can simulate physical stresses to predict failures without building physical hardware. In general, by using virtual modeling techniques, an engineering team can iterate through large number of designs in a fraction of the time required to build and test physical hardware.

The Department of Energy is seeking proposals in these areas --

• Proposals that require HPC modeling and simulation to overcome impactful manufacturing process challenges resulting in reduced energy consumption and/or increased productivity.
• Proposals that uniquely exploit HPC modeling and simulation to reduce energy consumption through improved clean energy technology design and clean energy manufacturing.
• Proposals that accelerate the development and qualification of new energy materials; with a primary emphasis on the nuclear and fossil energy program areas of the Department of Energy.

A Tesla Model S owner managed to snag a Chevy Bolt EV for 24 hours. He isn't doing a comparison between the cars because the Model S and Bolt EV are very different market niche's. What he's doing is an in-depth examination of the Bolt EV.

King County Metro, in the Seattle area, has announced they will purchase 73 Proterra electric buses. For its part, Proterra claims this is "the moment when batter-electric buses crossed over to mainstream acceptance." The advantage an electric bus brings is fuel cost reduction. The cost for electricity-as-a-fuel is lower than the cost of diesel-as-a-fuel in equivalent vehicles. The more the vehicle is driven, the greater the gain from fuel cost savings, and since city buses obviously drive a lot there's a big opportunity to save on costs. See Cost per mile of Electric Vehicle Range