EV Universe #141: New EV world record — Tesla now has the best ASS in automotive — Volvo stalls

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AUTOMAKERS & GLOBAL NEWS

I’ve released some updates on the EV Sales Report for the first half of 2024.
All these changes are now live on the spreadsheet (link), and I’ll update the graphs and text in our full report (link) next week. Here are the updates:

🇨🇦 Canada: Q2 results came in and Canada continues growing — 84,260 EVs were sold in the first half of 2024, growing 40.8% from H1 2023 and EVs reached a 9.10% market share of all cars sold (up from 7.20% same time last year).

🇸🇬 Singapore: 6,019 EVs were sold in the first half of 2024, growing 218.13% (!) from the same time last year. The EV market share of all cars sold jumped from 18.10% to 32.40%!

🇹🇼 Taiwan’s 18,223 EV sales grew the EV market share in the country to 7.8%. I’m afraid I don’t have access to 2023 data to showcase the market growth.

🇲🇾 Malaysia sales I’ve updated, now accessing the gov data down to each sale, we’ve got 10,663 EVs sold in the first half of the year, and the EV sales grew 141.8% and reached a 2.60% market share (up from 1.15% the year earlier).

🇲🇴 Macao, which we’re reporting on for the first time like Taiwan, saw 1,814 EVs sold in the first half of 2024, up 18.2% from last year and EVs took a very notable 30.52% market share.

🇭🇰 Hong Kong, we now also have the June numbers to complete the first half of 2024 with 20,097 EV sales, which shows a 51.1% growth year-over-year and, get this, a 83.61% EV market share! We all know Norway is almost fully electric now (94.3% share in August), and the country hasn’t collapsed under EVs. Turns out Norway isn’t quite alone at the top anymore.

Huge shoutout to the great work from our reader John Baker in helping me find a bunch of these missing countries. Thank you!

Volvo walks back on the all-electric by 2030 plan

Volvo announced the goal in 2021 and now says it’ll include plug-in hybrids or even other kind of hybrids. (link)

Volkswagen — sorry, most of Germany's automotive — is feeling the heat from their lack of long-term competitive EV plans too.

VW said on Monday it was considering closing some factories in Germany and ending job guarantees at six of its plants within its ~$11B cost-cutting plan.

Reportedly, the executives said in a meeting with ~25,000 workers last week that VW has “maybe one, two years" to turn its main car brand around to cut spending and adjust output to match the demand.

“We are short by around 500,000 vehicle sales, corresponding to production numbers for two plants. And that has nothing to do with our products or poor sales performance. The market is simply no longer there.” — Arno Antlitz, VW Group CFO, to workers (link)

CEO Oliver Blume reportedly said “There are no more cheques coming from China,” referring here to the profits VW has made on the market, which is now significantly falling. The reason for the fall is obvious, too — China only wants EVs, and good ones.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that nearly a third of major car plants in Europe are currently making less than half the vehicles they have the capacity for. In other words, the utilization rates in these factories are far too low to make a profit.

Herbert Diess, the former VW Group CEO who I think is the one who could’ve actually saved the group in the EV future had they not scrapped his plans, put it well:

Meanwhile, China recognizes its leadership and the government asks its EV makers to keep the technological EV know-how in the country. (link)

And here’s a walkback that currently means nothing anyway:

Toyota reduces its production target from 1.5 million all-electric cars to 1 million in 2026.
Context: Toyota sold ~104k EVs in 2023.
I say: Toyota will not make the 1M EV target in 2026 either…

Our friends at Electric Avenue set a new EV World Record

Janek and Julius, the guys running the Electric Avenue newsletter that I often recommend EV Universe readers subscribe to (and I know at least 370 of you reading this have already), went and completed the famous 2,800-mile Cannonball Route across the US, from LA to NYC, with a twist:

they made it in an EV and completed the route with the least charging stops. Janek and Julius did it with a rented 2022 Lucid Air Grand Touring (112kWh) battery and they averaged at 4 miles per kWh (15.5kWh/100km) efficiency.

You can read their whole story, details, and takeaways in the newsletter here, and the 1h33min video is here.

Congratulations to the guys from EV Universe. What a feat!

In terms of EVs with the shortest driving time, Ryan from the Kilowatts holds the record for a Tesla vehicle crossing the U.S. in 42 hours and 17 minutes (video)

The Arctic Cybertrek team made it! 

They completed the journey of 5,500 miles we talked about last week, from Florida to the Arctic Ocean, with nothing but two Cybertrucks.

Here’s part one, a 1h30 min video on the journey up until arriving. Follow the channel for part II.

The impact of their trip goes beyond showcasing how tough EVs can be — the trekkers also brought six Tesla L2 chargers with them, and installed the very first public EV charger in Inuvik for future EV travelers.

The 🇺🇸 EV tax credit loophole

A chart that tells us a whole story: the share of US vehicle transactions that were leases.

Context: you can see how the share of leases in EV purchases shot up from 2023. This is mostly because the average payments for buyers of new vehicles with a new-car loan in the US rose to $735/month in Q1 this year, but the average lease payment fell to $595/month. Here’s a breakdown per brand:

Why lease? One major factor here is something of a loophole we called out early around the $7,500 in IRA tax credits:

While all sorts of conditions apply for the tax credits when the EV is bought outright, like $55k or $80k price cap for cars and SUVs/trucks respectively, or the condition of non-China battery materials being used, or domestic assembly, none of these conditions apply when leasing the EV.

Bloomberg’s Keith Laing explained it well (link):
“The law considers leased EVs to be commercial vehicles, allowing them to qualify for the full credit even if they don’t meet federal battery and parts-sourcing requirements. That’s allowed car companies or dealers to bundle the $7,500 tax credit savings into the lease financing cost, lowering consumers’ monthly payments.”

Quick takes:

• Tesla now has the best ASS in automotive. I am of course talking of the Actually Smart Summon, which allows owners to summon their vehicle from a parking spot to a particular location nearby.
  Works in parking lots, not on public streets. Here’s @AIDRIVR finding Summon’s maximum range in a ~2-minute video. And here’s how the ASS is doing on a roundabout.

• I’m sorry if you heard the loudest facepalm the other day. It was me when I learned BMW and Toyota are intensifying their cooperation for fuel cell passenger cars. (link)

• “We don’t need another war, in this case, a trade war,” says Spanish PM Sanchez saying the EU should reconsider the tariffs on Chinese EVs. (link) Germany seems to be also on the same page. And insiders say the EU is slightly lowering the tariffs further, including Tesla from 9% to 7.8%.

• A way for you to make an impact: consider signing this petition that calls for an increase in the UK Apprenticeship Levy cap, which in turn helps address the shortage of technicians who are qualified to work on EVs.

EV SPOTLIGHT: a weird yellow thing

A camouflaged Tesla Robotaxi has been spotted testing in the Warner Bros. site, where Tesla will hold the unveiling event on 10/10.

Now this of course might be a decoy, and it has definitely been made fluffier (it kind of looks like they might have removed some body panels / front bumper), but I can kind of see how the robotaxi would fit in this shape. Especially the telltale short front area of the vehicle.

Here’s one of my earlier images showing the cameras from the engineering prototypes we’ve seen (red) and how the b-pillar camera we also see on the yellow thingy fits with the prototype (green):

Of course, the first thing I did when I saw this camo was… memes.
This one went especially wide on X with around 2,000 likes by now and whatnot:

And here’s the second one I made:

Quick takes

• Volvo launched the EX90. We’ll do a spotlight soon, but meanwhile here’s a review from Top Gear (video)

• Renault does one-off R17 restomod and it looks fantastic to me (link).

• Watch tip: Rivian founder & CEO, RJ Scaringe, on the Kleiner Perkins podcast “rethinking the EV landscape” (1h video). Great insights from both Rivian’s story and entrepreneurship too.

• Lucid Motors’ Tech and Manufacturing Day: Here is the full presentation (167-slide pdf), and the webcast (1h23min video). Lucid Gravity will be equipped with a NACS charging connector in 2025. Lucid also shared the first teaser render of its upcoming mid-size platform with a <$50k price tag and late 2026 production.

• Read (and drool): the most interesting EVs at Monterrey Car Week (link).

• VW announces the ID. Buzz in the US will start at $59,995 for the “Pro S” RWD model, and the EPA range for it is 234 miles. The AWD models get 231 miles of range. The launch-only 1st Edition is $65,495. (link)

• Related: here’s a new review of the ID. Buzz from MKBHD (video). One of the best decisions from VW marketing department, in my opinion, has been accompanying the ID. Buzz test everywhere, literally even in my small country, with the 60’s “hippie van”.

• Range Rover EV has 42,000 reservations, but nobody has officially even seen the car yet (link).

• Watch: BYD Shark pickup, Cybertruck, and Rivian R1T side-by-side (video).

• Watch: Chris Hazell bought one of the now-bankrupt Arrival vans built for UPS, from the warehouse landlord. (video) He also does a walkaround in the factory, discovering what’s left.

Btw we actually covered Chris’ Miata conversion in the early days of EV Universe. Wow, how time flies.

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CHARGING

Tesla has filed four patents related to a wireless charging mat for vehicles.

The four patent titles are:

• Temperature sensors and applications for wireless charging

• Shorting switch to reduce ground leakage in inductive charging

• Wireless charging circuit topology and related methods of manufacturing

• Parameter estimation for wireless charging

Now, this doesn’t ensure the robotaxi will be using this system, but we’ve seen Teslas hints towards wireless charging for a while now:

• Investor Day 2023 pic of a wireless charger below a Tesla in a garage,

• Tesla acqui-hired the German Wiferion wireless charging team;

• Franz confirmed they’re working on wireless charging in a Jay Leno video (timestamped here).

• Inductive charger connectors on the battery pack are shown in the Cybertruck service manual.

I’ve also seen quite a lot of the other industry players start their research programs into wireless charging since they need to stay ahead of try to keep up with Tesla, with one major automaker to launch their plans soon (can’t tell you yet).

Quick kW:

• EVgo and General Motors will expand their cooperation to install another 400 co-branded 350kW chargers across the metropolitan areas in the US. (link) The first station to open by 2025, and on-site features include lighting, canopies, pull-through stations, and security cameras — flagship locations with more amenities.

• Beam Global launched its BeamSpot curbside EV charging system that acts as a streetlight replacement, and integrates solar, wind, and utility-generated electricity with batteries and a charger. (link) They plan to launch in both US and Europe (it entered Europe last year by acquiring Amiga DOO, a streetlight manufacturer). So far, I’ve seen most Beam solar charging stations deployed on government-related deployments. So is this what our future streets will look like?

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