EV Universe #145: Scout Motors launches EVs — Ford CEO drives a what now?! — US charging overview

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NEW EVU PRO RESOURCE: EVent calendar

I just launched a new version of the EVent calendar (EV Events = EVents, yes I consider myself so funny) for our Pro members.

There are 22 ev events already listed, and another 30 I’ve saved to add this week. All the EV industry events are listed per month, with dates, locations, links to the website, speakers, ticket prices, and a short description. These include both niche EV industry events, and public-oriented EV ride&drive events. I’ll also soon start adding smaller regional EV community events.

It lives permanently on our website, and all you need to do is log in as a Pro member (the membership will be tied to your email after you join).

Here’s the direct link to the EVent calendar, and you can also upgrade through there:

AUTOMAKERS & GLOBAL NEWS

I happened to play something like an actual journalist this week and reported on two news before anyone else in the world Universe. First up, the one that did quite the numbers on Friday and earned us a link to from Teslarati and other outlets:

Tesla and Uber partner to give drivers $2,000 to buy a Tesla Model 3 or Y (link):

• $1,000 in Tesla Credits upon taking delivery +

• $1,000 in cash from Uber after completing 100 trips.

The second piece I reported is from yesterday, as Tesla launched the Third-Party Business Tokens, expanding Tesla's B2B "Tesla for Business" platform. (link)

Behind the curtains, I’m building a platform for breaking quite a lot more than just a few Tesla news… stay tuned ;)

Did I mention that this past month, our EV Universe work, especially our EV sales report, has been covered in outlets like Fully Charged, Teslarati, Electrek, The Cool Down, Todos Eléctricos, Electrified, and more? Really happy to see the stuff I spend all my time on making even a slightly larger impact.

Making competitive EVs isn’t easy.

Ford pauses the F-150 Lightning production from 18th of November to 6th of January. Reportedly due to weak demand - Ford says “We continue to adjust production for an optimal mix of sales growth and profitability.” (link)

Three things to note for context:

Production at their Michigan plant was already reduced from three shifts to two back in October 2023, and then to one shift per day in April this year. Ford’s initial production goal for this year was to produce 166,000 units for 2024, then they cut it down to 83,000 before the year started and now don’t seem to reach 30k units for the year.

Ford’s Model e division (the EV arm) has recorded a $3.6B loss in the first three quarters of this year. In the 3rd quarter, it showed a $1.2B revenue on the 32k vehicles sold.

The Tesla Cybertruck — another electric pickup in the US — has had an incredible run on its first year on the market (despite it’s premium-priced Foundation Series being sold until now), already surpassing F-150⚡️ sales by the end of the third quarter in the US. 28,250 Cybertrucks and 22,807 F-150⚡️ (link).

What else is wild in this picture is that Cybertruck has already achieved a positive gross margin for the first time, in Q3. None of the other electric pickups have gotten to that yet, even being ~three years on the roads already.

Jim Farley drives a WHAT?!

Now, I’ll end this Ford talk with something you probably did not see coming. I sure didn’t.

Jim Farley is the CEO of Ford.

That very Ford CEO says, in an interview, that he has been driving the Xiaomi SU7 EV in Chicago for six months now, and he doesn't want to give it up! They flew in one from Shanghai to study it. From the Fully Charged interview: (video on X | on LinkedIn).

Yes, he really said that. Out loud. On video.

Jim answered the video with: “I try to drive everything we compete against. Have done it my whole career. Specs can tell part of a story, but you’ve got to get behind the wheel to truly understand and beat the competition.”

We’ll talk of Xiaomi SU7 and SU7 Ultra in the EV spotlights section below, but here’s a good roundup for this F-150 Lightning story we started out with. @Cybertruck account on X answered to this note from Jim fittingly with:

“Ok. Try me.”

Quick takes:

• Tesla held its Q3 Earnings call recently. I wrote up everything noteworthy for Tesla Space here. If I had to pick three most important news from there, it’d be:

  • Preparations for new vehicles remain underway, and begins launching in first half of 2025. Elon says the “affordable model” next year will be under $30,000 when including the $7.5k incentive.
    ((I’m wondering though, didn’t his President candidate of choice promise to abolish that very incentive?))

  • Tesla’s cost of goods sold (COGS) per vehicle came down to its lowest level ever, at $35,100 (read: this is why nobody can touch Tesla yet)

  • Tesla has confirmed that their Cybercab will have a new powertrain with an estimated 5.5 mi/kWh.

  • and for a fun bit, Elon says there should be movies made about the heroes who got 20% of the cost out of a car. (link)

• Europe kicked in its EV sales gear: 213,443 EVs sold in September across Europe (EU+EFTA+UK), up 13.9% from last year. Even Germany showed +8.7% YoY in an overall auto market decreasing by 7%.
  This got the EV market share in September in Europe to 19.1%. Nearly every fifth car sold in Europe in September was fully electric.

  Year to date, Europe is still in slight decline at -2.6% (Germany is still at -28.6%), and EVs are at 14.65% market share.

• Listen tip: Is There Really an EV Slowdown? Michael Liebreich’s Cleaning Up podcast hosting Colin McKerracher.

EV SPOTLIGHT: Scout Motors’ electric relaunch

Scout Motors, the legendary US brand owned by Volkswagen Group since it bought Navistar back in 2021, has now relaunched as an EV maker. They now presented two EVs: Scout Traveler SUV and the Scout Terra pickup truck. Here’s the full reveal event: (video).

Note, that these two, while accepting pre-orders, are not the final production versions, and some of the specs are targets rather than actual technical data. Also, these EVs are available as fully electric, or come with an optional built-in gas generator for another +150 miles of range (they called this the Harvester option). This would also technically make it an extended-range electric vehicle (EREV) instead.

Scout Traveler SUV

• Price: <$60,000 plus incentives, can be reserved for $100 today

• Range: 350 miles (563 km)
  optional: 500mi with built-in gas generator to charge the battery

• Architecture: 800V,

• Charging: up to 350kW, NACS, has bi-directional charging

• Performance: 0-60mph in 3.5s, AWD, 1,000ft-lbs torque

• Towing: 7,000lbs

• 12" ground clearance, 3 feet of water fording capability

• Production: starts in South Carolina in 2027

Scout Terra Pickup Truck

Comes with exactly the same specs as Traveler above, but with +3k lbs towing (10,000 lbs), a pickup bed, and a bench seat at front.

• Price <$60,000 plus incentives, can be reserved for $100 today

• Range: 350 miles (563 km)
  optional: 500mi with built-in gas generator

• Architecture: 800V,

• Charging: up to 350kW, NACS, has bi-directional charging

• Performance: 0-60mph in 3.5s

• Towing: 10,000lbs

• Bench seat in front

• 12" ground clearance, 3 feet of water fording capability

• 5.5-foot pickup bed which offers two 120V power outlets and one 240V power outlet

• Production: starts in South Carolina in 2027

Here’s an article on how the Scout Terra compares to the Rivian R1T. (link)

Here's a video walkaround of the two launched Scouts by The Fast Lane Car (video).

Scout also sells direct to consumer here, and says it’ll have 100 100 locations across the US & Canada by 2032 “for test drives, handshakes, and service.”

Scout Motors broke ground on the production center in South Carolina in February this year, so we’ll see the 2027 production start very much dependent on how the factory build goes.

While I personally am highly skeptical of the need for a gas generator to be carried around as the use case will be a very edge case for most users, it seems the company might’ve tapped into some kind of demand for exactly that assurance.

A crowdsourced reservation tracker (so take it with a grain of salt) shows 81.8% of those who have entered their order information, which over 998 people total, have opted for the "Harvester" EREV. (link)

Memes

While others go and put out an article with all the specifications, my core audience is you, in our semi-weekly newsletters. That means I can start with memes. Perfect life.

My first one went especially wide on X, somehow getting more likes (4,100 🤯 ) than Scout’s post on launching the truck itself 🤷‍♂️:

It did also well for my small-but-growing LinkedIn presence — see and share the meme on LinkedIn.

I was dying to use this meme template too, so here’s my take #2:

Okay, let’s talk about some more EVs:

You know that Chinese smartphone maker that started making EVs?
Yeah, the Xiaomi. Probably a flop, right?

Well, that Xiaomi just set new Nürburgring record with the SU7 Ultra Prototype, beating the times of Rimac Nevera, Model S Plaid (that one was stock though) and Porsche Taycan (full video)

Just after, Xiaomi released the SU7 Ultra preorders for $114,200, set to launch in March, and they received 3,680 pre-orders in the first 10 minutes.

What’s wild is that Xiaomi can actually deliver on it all. They are on track to reach 100,000 Xiaomi SU7 deliveries already this November, and delivered 20k in October, which I believe is the strongest production ramp-up we’ve seen in the EV industry so far.

I can see why Jim Farley is keeping an eye on that one.

Quick takes:

• Aptera completed the first function test of its first production-intent solar EV (video).

• Lucid opens Gravity SUV preorders on the 7th of November, starting at $79,900 (link), and starts production late this year.

• General Motors opened its online configurator for the Cadillac Optiq SUV (link). The price starts at $54,390 ($46,890 with credit,) deliveries start in the US in the next few weeks.

• Watch tip: Tesla, your software is cool and all, but can your update progress bars act as a volume slider? (video, VW strikes again)

CHARGING INFRASTRUCTURE

In the third quarter, 607 new charging sites went live in the US. (link) At the current pace — number of deployed sites growing 35% year-over-year, stations will number roughly 11,600 by the end of the year, or roughly one for every 10 US gas stations.

Here’s a great look at the current progress by Bloomberg Green — another record year for charger deployment:

Ok, let’s go deeper.

I recently stumbled upon a startup called EVPin — which in itself is a fascinating addition to our industry and more on that below — has built an interactive EV Charging Infrastructure Tracker for the US. A lot of great insights per state, like DC installations per 100,000 people, largest public networks per L2 and DC ports, etc:

And here’s what EVPin does — it’s an all-in-one tool that provides you with the necessary data you need to identify, analyze and select EV charging sites. They’ve got data from EV registration to power capacity, traffic volume to utilization potential. You can also create site layouts to show equipment locations or create true-to-scale 3D renders.

I like that these EV industry adjacent tools are popping up to solve actual needs (solving actual problems instead of solutions looking for a problem), this time with charging infrastructure planning.

Another similar company I’ve shared with you is Stable Auto. Stable Auto just partnered with Blink Charging to increase the latter’s site utilization and efficiency, mostly by tailoring the pricing to regional energy costs and driver demand. Their pilot saw 34% net revenue increase across 200+ chargers, so they’ll now roll it out to all 4,500+ across the US (link).

A few more charging news (get more in the Pro membership reports):

• Volvo and Polestar owners can now access Tesla’s Supercharger network across North America with a NACS adapter.

• Monta expands its EV charging business to the US, and hopes to connect another 25,000 commercial charge points to its platform by the end of 2025 and 1M by the end of 2030. (link)
  Expansion to the US sounds reasonable considering quite a few of Monta’s clients have also already expanded across the pond, or plan to. Monta’s scale today: two million monthly charging sessions and 190,000 commercial charge points on its platform.

• Ford’s newest OTA software update adds Google Maps EV trip planning in the car’s native Android Auto system (Apple Maps already works through CarPlay). (link) This includes battery preconditioning and taking the car’s state of charge into account, and also now showing Tesla Superhargers where the Ford can charge with an adapter. Talking of which, Ford now offers Lectron’s NACS adapters next to the Tesla-made adapters, presumably to roll out quicker (link).

• Meanwhile, Google debuted Gemini AI-curated Maps, which they said will be rolled out in Rivian EVs next month. (link) It’ll show summaries of restaurants, shops and supermarkets on their infotainment screens to learn more about any point of interest fast.