EV Universe #142: My Tesla Semi ride — electric school buses — NIO Onvo L60

Before we kick off, I’m seeing these devastating scenes from the US in the aftermath of the hurricane. So many people are still stranded waiting for help. I hope all of you, our ~8,500 readers from the US, are safe.

I am writing this from far away in Europe, but if you or your family needs assistance, let me know through a reply to this email. We‘ve got a strong community of good folks here and might be able to help.

Exclusive deep dive: Tesla Semi ride & learnings

I couldn’t possibly fit it all in this email and can’t show you videos here, so here’s a link to my deep dive article for you on how:

• Tesla Semi is ready for Europe as it is — but isn’t coming for a few years;

• Tesla’s European Development Platform and sleeper cab;

• My ride in the Tesla Semi and a detailed look;

• How the competition is snooping around;

• My chat with Dan Priestley (lead of Semi Program)
  including the “We will never do CCS”;

• All my notes on Dan Priestley’s keynote speech & the discussion on PepsiCo’s fleet case study (they have 86 Tesla Semis);

• … plus 19 images and 5 videos I took for you.

EV GLOBALLY

Big milestone in Norway 🇳🇴 

Norway now has more electric cars (754,303) than gas-driven vehicles (753,905) on its roads. It’s a big milestone, but to be aware of the headlines that make it look EVs have now fully overtaken ICE. Not quite the case. There's another 999,715 in the diesel fleet.

However, seeing how the trend goes with recent reports, EVs tend to be driven more than ICE vehicles on average, and considering the overall high percentage of EV sales in the country — I wouldn’t be surprised if the still dominant ICE fleet here would be disproportionally less used than the EV fleet. Will we see overall EV kilometers (miles) driven overcome ICE soon? I think so, very soon. Meanwhile,

Oslo, the capital of Norway, now has 100,000 EVs on the road, making up about 40% of the car fleet there (and based on my experience, about 80% of the actual traffic?). As we know, Norway has well incentivized EV adoption and I found the latest plans, the Oslo Package 3 decision of Oslo municipality and larger Akershus county, interesting:

Today, EVs pay 50% of the tax the fossil fuel cars do. This will be approaching 60% by 2028, however, a separate increased tax rate will be applied to any new petrol and diesel cars that are bought from 2026. “The agreement means that the rate for these cars will be set twice as high as the ordinary fossil car rate” (link in 🇳🇴). They’ve yet to get a go-ahead for this from the Minister of Transport though.

The header image with A-Ha members? If you’ve been with us long enough, you might recognize it from an article I wrote for you about it. Of course, there were just about 2,000 of us back then (12k now), so I decided to re-upload this great story today:
“How the pop band A-ha created Norway's rEVolution.”

US School buses go electric

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is opening the tender for a new $965M round of the “Clean School Bus Rebate Program”. (link) Interested parties can apply for up to 50 units per application and a maximum of $325,000 per zero-emission bus, until 9 January 2025. (link)

So far over the three previous funding rounds, the EPA has awarded almost $3 billion to fund approximately 8,700 school bus replacements, ~95% of which are battery-electric. Funding has been awarded to nearly 1,300 school districts in nearly all states.

The United States now has 12,000 electric school buses, either in operation or coming soon, in more than 1,500 school districts. California, New York and Illinois states are leading the adoption. A great source from this analysis: The Electric School Bus Dashboard, interactive PowerBI dashboard by World Resources Institute.

Related analysis: “State of Electric School Buses” was released by U.S. PIRG Education Fund and Environment America Research & Policy Center (16-page pdf). 

A large part of this fleet: Blue Bird Buses delivers its 2,000th electric school bus in North America. The whole fleet has now driven more than five million miles, in 41 US states and 4 Canadian provinces. (link)

Quick takes globally:

• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom government confirms the plans that purely ICE car sales will be phased out in 2030, but ‘some hybrids’ will be allowed until 2035. (link) My gut says that once we’re nearing 2030, this will no longer be necessary.

• 🇺🇸 Zion National Park becomes the first in National Part System to have their fleet of shuttles fully electric. (link)

• 🇲🇽 DiDi, the Chinese ride-hailing company, plans to build the largest fleet of electric cars in Mexico and Latin America, plans bringing 100,000 EVs to Mexico by 2030. (link)

• 🇳🇱 The Hague becomes world’s first city to pass law banning fossil fuel-related ads. (link)

• 🇦🇺 Fortescue and Liebherr signed a $2.8B deal for 360 autonomous T264 electric trucks, 55 electric excavators, and 60 electric dozers to Fortescue’s mining operations in Western Australia. Fortescue also developed a 6MW charging system for these trucks. (link) I mean can you call anything a proper EV if it doesn’t have TWO MegaWatt charging ports?!

• 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 Rivian begins sales of pre-owned vehicles from its own site (link).

EV SPOTLIGHT: Nio Onvo L60

As promised when we reviewed XPeng’s Mona 03, we’re taking a look at the next EV that promises to hit the sweet spot in price and what you get for it.

While the Mona 03 was a direct attempt at the Tesla Model 3 (the CEO said even the model name is due to that), NIO’s Onvo L60 is aimed very specifically at the Tesla Model Y.

• Price: RMB 206,900 ($29,260) with the 60kWh battery pack, which is RMB 43,000 ($6,129) less than the Model Y starting price in China. RMB 235,900 ($33,635) for the 85kWh battery version.

• Price if using BaaS (Battery-as-a-Service) model where you don’t buy but ‘rent’ the battery, is RMB 149,900 ($21,372) and depending on battery size, 599 or 899 RMB ($85.4/$128) per month for the battery.

• Battery: 60kWh / 80kWh LFP from BYD. Onvo, as its mother brand NIO, is able to use battery swapping stations (swaps at ~ 2min 30s)

• Range: 555 km (mi) / 730 km (mi) per CLTC

• Performance: RWD 240kW version with 5.9s 0-100km/h and AWD 340kW version with 4.6s 0-100 km/h

• Platform: using NIO’s NT 3.0 platform, 900V architecture

• Aerodynamics: 0.229 drag coefficient, lowest of any production SUV in the world,

• Efficiency: 12.1 kWh/100km (0.195 kWh/mi), which is nuts, but it’s also per the lower-speed CLTC standard so expect our WLTP and EPA consumption to be somewhat higher.

• Dimensions: L 4,828mm; W 1,930; H 1,616mm; wheelbase 2,950mm. So wider and longer, yet slightly lower than Model Y.

• Interior: Has heads-up display (HUD) that also displays navigation, quite a rectangular-like steering wheel. Heated & ventilated seats come as standard, electrically powered leg support for passenger too.

• No frunk. Designed by former Bentley designer Raul Pires.

• Deliveries started on Saturday, and production is to reach 5k in October and 20k/month by March.

Here’s a 10-minute walkaround and driving video from Telescope (video), and 20 minutes from Elliot Richards (video). NIO hasn’t held back in Model Y comparisons in it’s launch — here’s a attempt-at-humor video I shared with our Pro members already in May on the room inside the vehicle, and a still I captured comparing the turning circles:

How does Onvo fit into NIO’s plans? Well, CEO Li says they want the main brand to maintain a premium image, targeting a market with prices from RMB 300,000 ($42,430) and up, while Onvo takes aim at the lower, mass market price points.

Fun fact: Onvo currently has 180 store managers in China, 40% of whom are from Tesla. “The salespeople from Tesla are exceptionally good,” Xia Qinghua, head of Onvo’s user and service operations said. Onvo says it has 120 stores as of today and plans 200 in 68 cities by the end of the year.

As for Onvo, it’ll launch one new model per year, with a mid-to-large-size SUV coming in 2025, deliveries starting in Q3 2025. “If you think the L60 is good, then this new model is a much more competitive product,” Li said.

In related news: Nio announced just this week a RMB 3.3B ($470M) capital raise for its Nio China subsidiary (link).

Share this: if you want to share this Nio Onvo L60 overview separately, I made it into a standalone article on our site here.

Quick takes

• 🇺🇸 The Tesla Model Y is now very close to becoming the #1 bestselling vehicle in the US, of any fuel type, according to new data from Experian — with a 2.8% market share, just slightly below the Toyota RAV4. (link) It’ll also make this likely the first year since 1982 that the Ford F-150 doesn’t come out at the top.

• The best-selling vehicle of any type in China in August was the electric BYD Seagull (link) and the best-selling SUV of any fuel type from January-August has been the Model Y (link).

• Leapmotor International — the Stellantis-Leapmotor joint EV venture — announced the T03 compact car will go on sale in Europe today starting from €18,900 ($20,990) and the C10 SUV from October at €36,400 ($40,6k).

• I’m sharing details and my pictures on the new electric vans and pickups that I saw launched at the IAA on tomorrow’s Pro Report, including BYD E-VALI; VW e-Transporter; Maxus e-Terron9, KIA’s PBV Concept and more.

• Watch tip: McMurty Spéirling Pure test track review (video).

• Watch tip: Firefighters training to crack Cybertruck's windows, invited to try it by ALSET Collision. Took 3 swings for the first crack to form, and 12+ to actually break through.

• Thread: Lucid Air in about 13 different videos celebrating 94th National Day of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, videos from districts to ministries and authorities (link). Feels like a native 🇸🇦 company doesn’t it. I guess there’s plenty of reason for that, now with 60%+ of the company owned by Saudi’s PIF.

• If you saw the 10/10 robotaxi event teaser from Tesla and was wondering what it means… I figured a part of it out (link). It’s the one event I’d fly to the US for if I could… but I wasn’t invited. So I guess 5 am livestream from Europe it is.

CHARGING

I really enjoyed this show booth from Milence at the IAA — they built it to look exactly like their heavy-duty charging sites in real life. More of this in the industry, please.

Why are you still describing range as a number?

A good question asked by the Chargetrip team.

When talking about EV range (or range added by a charging session), it’s not actually straightforward to picture how much it is in a customer’s head. So how is the 260 miles I can drive again? It’s especially foreign for someone new to EVs.

I stumbled upon this Chargetrip’s new “range spider” tool lets you select your specific EV model from their search, set a location, if needed your battery %, and then see what the actual range of the vehicle looks like from said location.

It’s a smart tool since they are doing EV routing anyway, so it also accounts for weather (choose summer, winter, or current forecast), elevation of the route, road surface, driving speed, and so on.

Now, they also provide an API access so you could essentially white-label this and show the range to your customer on your website — just like LiveWire launched this week: (link).

Disclaimer: no, the team didn’t pay me to write this praise, I just stumbled upon it like I always do and had one of those “duh, why did this not exist before” moments.

India: Our friends at ExpWithEVs launched a tool for the deepest overview of EV charging infrastructure in India. I had a chance for an early peek into their dashboard built on Power BI and it is just marvellous for EV geeks like us: (link). If the EV industry and stakeholders had this for every country, we’d see a lot more informed decisions all around.

Enel X Way shuts down US & Canada arm on October 11th. Apps are closed, Juicebox home chargers left without smart features (now only work as ‘dumb’ chargers), and commercial infrastructure will essentially be bricked as Enel discountinues all software. (link to statement)

If you are a commercial operator of any, I’ve seen other platforms like Wevo Energy and Chargelab offer free migration of these ‘orphaned chargers’ to their platform. Chargelab describes the situation a little better as well. (link)

I don’t think the original eMotorWerks team — acquired by Enel in 2017 — would be too happy about how this has gone down…

GM announces NACS access for its EVs, gaining access to 17,800 Tesla Superchargers in North America. GM-approved NACS adapter is coming later this year, for $225 (link), and using a 3rd-party adapter can apparently void your warranty (link).

To compare, Kia America is offering NACS adapters for EV6 and EV9 owners soon, free of charge for new owners. (link) New Rivians also come with a free NACS adapter, and it will offer free adapters to everyone that already bought an R1S or R1T.

And the first non-Tesla EV in the US to come with a NACS charging port from the factory is the 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5. (link)

• A new rule proposed by the Treasury Department would make credits worth up to $1,000 for individuals and $100,000 for businesses available for each EV charger that is installed. (link)

• Ford creates “Ford Power Promise”, says every new Ford EV comes with a complimentary home charger now, including a free standard install. Jim puts it into a little story here.

• Lyft partners with Smartcar and introduces “Rides in Range” feature, so that the EV drivers would receive only ride requests that match their current battery capacity (20-mile buffer added). (link)

There are 23 more charging industry news waiting for you on the Pro Report tomorrow. Join the EVU Pro if you’re thirsty for more.