FYI Stevo,
Tesla Sets September 15 For Shareholder Meeting And ‘Battery Day’
Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting was scheduled for July 7, but Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said in a Tweet that the electric carmaker would have to delay the meeting as large gatherings are not currently permitted.
The shareholder meeting has now been rescheduled for September 15.
The company’s long anticipated "Battery Day," which will coincide with the shareholder meeting, is when Tesla is expected to reveal details about its future million-mile battery.
Last week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said that Tesla’s Model S is the first electric vehicle that has a 400-mile battery range.
The EPA tested the 2020 Model S and updated its range to 402 miles per battery charge.
The new rating is a 20% increase when compared to the 2019 Tesla Model S 100D.
Over the last year, Tesla has revised several facets of the Model S to maximize its efficiency and increase its battery range.
Separately, Tesla announced that it is acquiring a 2,100-acre piece of land outside Austin, Texas at a cost of $5 million.
The company plans to build a new factory in Austin to manufacture its Cybertruck.
The land in Texas is currently occupied by a sand and gravel mining site.
France: In May 2020 Plug-In Electric Car Sales Up By 61%
The overall market went down by half, but plug-ins are surging up.
Despite in early May
France was still in lockdown and that the overall market declined by almost 50%, the plug-in electric car market expanded significantly.
In total, some
7,564 new plug-in electric cars were sold last month (
up 61% year-over-year).
The BEV and PHEV passenger cars (7,167) had more than
7.4% market share. Only light commercial vehicles still need to recover.
https://insideevs.com/news/429635/france-may-2020-plugin-car-sales/
Meet The Futuristic-Looking Electric Arrival Bus
Arrival hints at new electric buses, which will join the commercial vans.
UK-based Arrival, which earlier this year got
€100 million ($110 million) boost from
Hyundai Motor Company and
Kia Motors Corporation, revealed a new electric vehicle - the
Arrival Bus.
It looks pretty futuristic, but it's not just a render. As you can see below, the company has already started tests of a beta prototype.
So far we thought that Arrival was focused solely on the commercial vehicles (
including 10,000 vans ordered by the UPS), but it seems that buses might also be part of the equation.
Arrival, which currently has over 1,000 global employees located in offices across the USA, Germany, Netherlands, Israel, Russia and Luxembourg, said that by 2026 intends to deploy 1,000
Microfactories globally.
According to the press release, the low-footprint and low-CapEx Microfactories will be easily deployable to produce highly customized EVs locally, using
"a unique assembly technology".
Both, the commercial vehicles and buses to be assembled at those sites, and still remain
"better priced even at low volumes" compared to conventional offerings.
"The Arrival Bus will be produced in local Microfactories which are designed to be capable of assembling all vehicles from Arrival's portfolio.
These Microfactories support the creation of market-specific products and will regenerate regional economies through the use of local supply chains, retention of talent and payment of local taxes."
We guess that the company is working on simple, modular blocks, like LEGO. The modules will then be supplied to the network of Microfactories on order.
https://insideevs.com/news/429727/electric-arrival-bus/
The EV charging plan no-one is talking about (but should be!)
There’s been a lot of talk around
green stimulus lately.
In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated economic downturn, organizations across the US have recently proposed federal programs that promise to create jobs, jumpstart the economy, and support public health, all while reducing US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
And there’s one thing that many of these proposals—including those from
Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI),
Data for Progress,
Transportation Electrification Partnership, and
Securing America’s Future Energy—have in common: they all include efforts to decarbonize the transportation sector, particularly by transitioning from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles.
One segment that is ripe for this change is regional haul trucking, which means it’s crucial to start thinking about where and how to prioritize infrastructure investments for these short return-to-base operations.
Regional haul trucking is ripe for decarbonization, which means it’s crucial to start thinking about where and how to prioritize infrastructure investments for these short return-to-base operations.
Trucking Goes Electric
Earlier this month, the House Transportation Committee unveiled a nearly $500 billion green infrastructure bill dubbed the
INVEST in America Act, which includes investments in EV charging stations.
And while for many, the term “EV” tends to conjure images of passenger vehicles like the Tesla Model S or Nissan Leaf, electrification is coming to the medium- and heavy-duty vehicle world as well.
Commercial fleets are increasingly considering zero-emissions trucks for their freight hauling operations as new models go into production and upfront purchase prices come down.
In fact, product availability is improving rapidly.
In the heavy-duty North American market alone,
19 zero-emission truck models (either battery electric or hydrogen fuel cell), from 14 manufacturers, are expected to be in production within the next three years.
This represents an impressive 280 percent increase in the five Class 8 models commercially available today.
This is great news for the climate since transportation is now the nation’s single largest source of GHGs, accounting for
29 percent of GHG emissions.
Nearly a quarter of those emissions come from medium- and heavy-duty trucks—more than two-and-a-half times the amount that comes from aviation.
In addition to GHG emissions, pollution from tailpipes, tires, and brakes reduces air quality, increasing smog and particulate matter in the air and harming communities, particularly lower-income communities of color, who, due to discriminatory housing practices and environmental injustice, tend to live near highways and logistics hubs.
This inequity has particularly disastrous impacts during a health crisis like COVID-19.
In fact, new research from
Harvard shows that an increase of one unit of fine particulate matter is associated with an increase of 8 percent in COVID-19 death rates.
Needless to say, it is beyond time to clean up road-based goods transportation.
But with limited resources available— both from the public and private sectors—questions are raised around which sectors and regions make the most sense to electrify first.
Regional Haul Needs Charging Infrastructure Too
Although the industry has begun electrifying
medium-duty urban delivery applications—with companies such as
UPS and
FedEx already starting to pilot the technology—RMI and the North American Council for Freight Efficiency (NACFE), through their extensive work on
electric trucks and regional haul, have discovered that regional trucking operations are also suited to be early adopters of electric trucks, given the segment’s relatively short-haul nature and return-to-base operations.
They tend to have predictable destinations and consistent mileage, which means that range isn’t as much of a challenge as compared to, say, long haul, and that it’s relatively straightforward to know where to build out charging infrastructure.
We expect regional haul fleets to charge mostly at home bases, similar to the vast majority of
light-duty EV owners.
As the
Run On Less Regional analysis concluded, their return-to-base operations—no matter their duty cycle—are a key factor in making this segment ideal for electric trucks. The Run On Less Regional team defined three major categories of regional duty cycles as follows:
- A-B-A, where the truck goes out to the same location and returns to base, doing this once or several times in a driving shift.
- Hub-and-spoke, which is like A-B-A, but has different B locations over a day, week, or month.
- A-B-C-D-A, where there are multiple pick-ups and deliveries over the course of the route with the vehicle still returning to the same base.
Fleets identified lack of charging infrastructure at facilities as one of the
top barriers to electrifying their fleets.
But investing in that infrastructure makes a lot of sense for fleets with regional haul operations because the trucks are guaranteed to return to the facility, so fleets can have confidence that any charging infrastructure they invest in will be highly utilized by their vehicles, particularly as they grow their electric truck deployments.
Therefore, investing in the infrastructure to support electrification of this segment will likely see large returns in the years to come as the economic and policy cases for electric vehicles continue to increase.
Unique Charging Needs
But charging a heavy-duty truck is
quite different from charging a passenger vehicle, perhaps most notably in the difference in charging levels.
While many personal EV owners are able to charge using a regular wall outlet in their garage or potentially a Level 2 charger in the ballpark of 7 kW, heavy-duty trucks tend to require much higher power levels.
Depending on the size of the vehicle’s battery, the state of charge at the end of a shift, and the amount of dwell time available for charging between shifts, these vehicles may require DC fast charging (DCFC) involving power levels of over 150 kW.
In fact, the industry is currently working to
standardize high power charging for commercial vehicles, expecting power levels over 1 MW in the not-too-distant future.
It can be quite expensive to generate and deliver this amount of power, particularly on the “make ready” infrastructure side, which includes expenses such as service line and transformer upgrades, trenching, conduit, and conductors.
The charging stations themselves can be quite pricey as well. An expert from the California Air Resources Board (CARB) recently estimated that, all in, charging infrastructure alone currently costs approximately
$100 thousand per vehicle for battery electric freight trucks.
That is a hefty bill, even for large fleets, particularly when you consider that the upfront purchase price of the electric trucks themselves is still two to three times as expensive as a traditional diesel-powered truck.
Given the price tag, it’s not difficult to see why fleets prioritize electric truck deployments in regions where funding incentives, such as loans, grants, rebates, and tax credits are available – both for vehicles and infrastructure.
But what else should fleets, utilities, and policymakers consider when deciding where to prioritize infrastructure investments to support regional haul electric truck deployments? Stay tuned for our upcoming Insight Brief!
This article was first published by the
Rocky Mountain Institute.
https://thedriven.io/2020/06/22/the-ev-charging-plan-no-one-is-talking-about-but-should-be/
Committee Leaders Unveil the INVEST in America Act, a Transformational Surface Transportation Bill to Bring Nation’s Infrastructure into a New Era
Chair DeFazio: “The INVEST in America Act is our opportunity to replace the outdated systems of the past with smarter, safer, more resilient infrastructure that fits the economy of the future, creates millions of jobs, supports American manufacturing, and restores U.S. competitiveness”
The INVEST in America Act, which enables the completion of critical projects through long-term, sustainable funding and is fueled by American workers and ingenuity thanks to strong Buy America provisions and labor protections, authorizes nearly $500 billion over five years to address some of the country’s most urgent infrastructure needs, including:
- Putting the U.S. on a path toward zero emissions from the transportation sector by prioritizing carbon pollution reduction, investing in public transit and the national rail network, building out fueling infrastructure for low- and zero-emission vehicles, and deploying technology and innovative materials
“The bulk of our nation’s infrastructure—our roads, bridges, public transit and rail systems, the things that hundreds of millions of American families and businesses rely on every single day— is not only badly outdated, in many places it’s downright dangerous and holding our economy back.
Yet for decades, Congress has repeatedly ignored the calls for an overhaul and instead simply poured money into short-term patches.
The result?
We’re still running our economy on an inefficient, 1950s-era system that costs Americans increasingly more time and money while making the transportation sector the nation’s biggest source of carbon pollution,”
Chair DeFazio said. “That all changes with the INVEST in America Act.
Moving Forward Framework
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https://transportation.house.gov/ne...-bring-nations-infrastructure-into-a-new-era#
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