EV Universe #136: Elon to tap Uber founder for Robotaxi? — ⚽️ BYD and Fußball — Jim Farley drops an honest EV note

AUTOMAKERS & GLOBAL NEWS

wait what’s that? We’ve got a… new design effort from Jaan with these sections? Do let me know if you like it or hate it.

Fisker’s remaining Ocean stock sold for… $14,300 a piece?

Fire sale! The filed-for-bankruptcy Fisker plans to sell off its existing stock of 3,231 Oceans for just $2,500 (damaged ones), $3,200 (previously owned), and $16,500 (good shape) per vehicle, to the US leasing company American Lease.

The total of $46.25M puts the average price at $14,300. American Lease plans to lease the vehicles to ride-hailing drivers in NY. (72-page court filing) The documents also show, for example, that Fisker “shall have no obligation to update the Vehicles beyond Software v.2.1” (page 61).

Fisker will also not be honoring the vehicles’ warranties, and will have ‘no obligation of repair or maintenance of the vehicles, nor does it guarantee spare part availability’.

While this comes with its huge downsides of its own (parts & software problems with the company defunct), I wouldn’t even second guess buying a $14k Ocean right now and figuring out all the mistakes along the way.

What about the Fisker Ocean owners?

Meanwhile, in June, the US Ocean owners formed the nonprofit Fisker Owners Association to try and keep their vehicles running for the years to come and to represent themselves in the bankruptcy process. Among everything else, they hope to gain access to the Fisker diagnostic tools.

As to how many owners are out there - all I found was that as of April 16th, the company said it had delivered “over 6,400 Oceans”.

In the end of 2023, Fisker had 1,560 employees, while the court documents now show 179 people on payroll. The Delaware bankruptcy court hearing is upcoming on July 9th, which is when we might learn more on what’s next.

Sad, all of it.

BYD plays ⚽️ in Germany and… confuses people

As we reported earlier, BYD became the main vehicle sponsor of the UEFA European Football Championship taking place right now in Germany. I still can’t believe the German auto let them do it. Here are a few examples of how that’s going:

By now, BYD has confused enough football fans with its main slogan: 
“NO.1 NEV MAKER”,
mainly because none of us here knows what an NEV is. It’s a China thing. Not to mention most of us haven’t heard of BYD either.

NEV means New Energy Vehicle by the way, which combines Battery-Electric Vehicles (BEV) and Plug-in Hybrids (PHEVs).
BYD is indeed the No.1 in the world in NEV sales, and I guess it just couldn’t call itself No.1 in EVs, as it’s currently still #2 after Tesla at that.

Now, all this confusion could’ve been intentional to get some interest going. I’m not sure if they did these ads before or after they realized people have no clue about NEVs, but I found they’re running social media ads (FB ones can be seen here) to play exactly on that NEV question:

“NEV” stuff aside, there’s something wild going on with the BYD name too.

I want you to imagine this for a sec:

You're a German. Hallo. And you get curious about BYD, or its NEVs, after you see their ad running on the matches. As a German, you’ll probably think BYD has established a local site by now, and just type in BYD .de

Now I’m sure that leads us to a proper site with EV… Oh mein Gott! It says:

Buy Your Dildo 🤦‍♂️ 

I’ll save you from linking to the website (who knows what ads you’ll start to see), but you can see my screenshot on X or on LinkedIn (I just had to share didn’t I).

They must be getting enough traffic to it too, as they’ve even left a note on the site saying they are NOT the sponsors of EURO24. The actual site for BYD in Germany is BYD-auto.com.

Anyway, BYD keeps playing its largest advertising campaign on European soil yet. In addition to the in-game ads, BYD shows off its vehicles in fan zones, especially features like in-car karaoke, and offers a shuttle service with ~300 cars.

For context, EURO2020 matches had an average 100M+ live audience globally.

Elsewhere: BYD is also reportedly nearing a deal with Turkey to build a $1B plant in the country, expected to be announced this Monday. (link)

Turkey, which we’ve reported had the largest jump (over 700%) in EV registration last year and is on triple-digits so far this year too, plans to impose a 40% (and +10%) tariff on cars from China with a minimum of $7k per vehicle. So BYD’s move makes sense for the local Turkish market. but will likely also serve as an export hub for Europe in addition to its Hungary plant.

Oh, and Ayvens partners with BYD to offer leasing services to SMEs and individuals in Europe, starting with France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. (link)

Enough about the Build Your D…… for today? Yeah, I agree.

Quick takes:

NIO Chief Financial Officer Steven Wei Feng resigns ‘for family and personal reasons’, effective immediately. The current Senior VP of Finance who has been with NIO since 2019, Stanley Yu Qu, will be promoted to become the CFO. (link)

Polestar plans to expand to 7 new markets in 2025: France, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Thailand and Brazil. (link) It’s currently in 27 markets.

📊 I found this chart in BNEF’s EV Outlook 2024. In these markets, EVs are driven more annually than combustion cars (except in US). Guess what? That also means that every ICE replaced with an EV has that much more impact on the world.

EV POLICY

Let’s start with a little context: per Matthias Schmidt and his research, Chinese automakers are on track to surpass 200,000 new BEV registrations on the Western European markets on an annual basis this year, for the first time.

EU tariffs on Chinese EV imports went into effect, with slight modifications. Discussions continue.

“Based on the investigation, the Commission has concluded that the BEV value chain in China benefits from unfair subsidization, which is causing a threat of economic injury to EU BEV producers.” — the European Commission press release, 4th of July.

The exact tariffs were slightly specified, with BYD getting hit with 17.4%; Geely 19.9%, and SAIC with 37.6%. The other EV makers that cooperated with the investigation are subjected to a weighted average tariff of 20.8% and the non-cooperating companies (like SAIC) get 37.6%.

There’s a report by Politico saying Tesla has received EU inspectors at its Chinese factories last week. I would assume an announcement specifically for Tesla and its Model 3’s from Shanghai within weeks now. Should probably land somewhere under BYD’s tariff number considering it receives lower subsidies than locals.

All this is on top of the regular 10% import tariffs. As we’ve written, these will be applied only for the next four months, and the final duties that’ll apply for the next five years will be decided by the last phase in November, which includes a vote of the EU member states.

If the member states would reject this — for example, Germany has been a voice against the tariffs with Scholz personally involved, probably because Germany auto doesn’t want retaliation tariffs by China, at all, it’d destroy their cash cows cars — we’d probably return to the old 10% tariff or similar.

What I am worried about, however, is the lack of specific language in imposing duties for PHEVs. This would perhaps lead automakers like BYD to prefer shipping plug-in hybrids our way instead of its all-electrics, which would be quite a bad side-effect.

Related reading tip: An analysis finds China has spent $230.8B over more than a decade to develop its electric car industry (CSIS study with great breakdowns).

EV Policy on the other side of the pond:

Canada opens 30-day public consultation on Chinese EV tariffs (link). The possible options published by the government include putting tariffs on imported Chinese EVs and blocking Chinese investment in new Canadian factories.

The US Supreme Court overturned the “Chevron Doctrine”, which might take away some of the power of agencies like EPA and its fuel economy targets (link) via Trucks’ FoT.

Virginia is withdrawing from California’s EV mandate (Advanced Clean Cars) it adopted in 2021 by the end of this year, right when the stricter emission standards would start to apply. (link) Connecticut has reportedly also abandoned the plans of ICE ban of 2035.

EV SPOTLIGHT

Meet the electric Pininfarina Battista, Gotham edition.

Yours for just €3,400,000.

Quick takes:

• Tesla is about to launch parental controls in a software update (link), so car owners can limit vehicle options for teens or other drivers, like

  • setting maximum speed;

  • reducing acceleration by limiting the car to ‘Chill’ drive mode;

  • forcing safety features to be always turned on;

  • receiving notifications when the vehicle is driven after a certain time.

• Kyle takes his Cybertruck to Tesla Service, and the service lets him know they’ll swap out one of the drive units for free just so they can study it. (link) It turns out they’ve done it for other owners & other Tesla models too. Smart feedback loop.

• Only in 2024: a kid on video asks if Tesla can fix a bug in the sketchpad inside the Tesla infotainment. Musk: “Sure.”

• RJ Scaringe of Rivian: Why We Build Our Technology In-House (4min video)

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EV SALES 📊 

Half of the year 2024 has passed now.
Sorry if I just broke it to you. I know. There there.

That makes it a good time to go over how the EV sales, which by all the year-beginning headlines were supposed to drop to near-zero, are doing. I’ll bring you European numbers soon enough too.

Tesla sold 443,956 EVs globally in the second quarter (-4.76% YoY), and 830,766 vehicles in the first half of the year (-6.55%).

Here’s a wild number for you: Tesla has now delivered a total of 6,227,920 electric vehicles since Model S production started in 2012.

BYD sold 426,039 BEVs globally in Q2 and 726,153 in the first half of the year (+17.7%). 45.2% of all BYD passenger vehicle sales were fully electric, the rest were plug-in hybrids.

🇬🇧 UK has seen 167,096 EVs delivered in the first half of 2024, up 9.2% from last year and a market share of 16.6% (16.1% same time last year). Especially notable is the drop in diesel vehicle sales, down -12.1% from last year. Petrol grew by 2.7%.

🇺🇸 🇨🇦 North American market:

• Rivian delivered 13,790 vehicles in Q2 (+9.1% YoY) and 27,378 (+33%) in the first half of the year.

• General Motors delivered 21,930 EVs in Q2 (+40%) and 38,355 in the first half of the year. 40% of Blazer EV buyers are new to GM. 2.97% of GM sales in US were fully electric.

• Kia US: 29,392 EVs in the first half of the year (+112% YoY), of which 10,941 were EV6 and 9,671 EV9. 7.6% of all Kia sales in US were fully electric.

• Toyota sold 9,468 bZ4X EVs in the first half of 2024 (+158.8%). 0.93% of Toyota division US sales were fully electric.

• BMW sold 14,081 EVs in Q2 (+23.8%) and 24,794 in the first half of the year. 32.12% of all passenger cars or 14.1% of all BMW vehicle sales were fully electric in the US.

*Jaan flies off and will bring you EV geeks more EV sales numbers next week.

BATTERY, MINING & ♻️ 

Indonesia’s first cell factory starts production

A 10GWh plant built by Hyundai and LGES in West Java. They started building it in 2021 and it’s located at an existing Hyundai EV plant. (link)

At least eight Chinese battery makers have announced new investments in Morocco since the Inflation Reduction Act was signed. (link) Why? Morocco has a free trade agreement with the US, and thus the batteries and components produced there would be eligible for the incentives and not subject to the new tariffs.

Nio plans to establish new, separate battery-swapping stations for its upcoming Firefly brand, which won’t be able to use its existing batswap stations. Firefly stations will be special, smaller stations that have a simpler design, are roughly the size of a shipping container, and can offer products like coffee inside. (link)

From last week’s Pro Report #135: Nio also just launched its Power Swap Station 4.0, which is 22% faster than the previous generation, completing swaps in 144 seconds. It can accommodate 23 batteries and perform 480 swaps per day.

Sila Nanotechnologies, the Californian silicon anode developer, raised $375M led by Sutter Hill Ventures, to fund the completion of its Moses Lake plant in Q1 2025. It will supply its Titan Silicon anode material to Mercedes-Benz, Panasonic, and three more customers, from Q4 2025. Sila has now raised $1.3B from investors and $100M from US DoE. (link)

📚️ Reading tip: fresh report “The Rise of LFP” from strategy&, 6-page pdf, especially the chart of the suitability of different battery cells per vehicle use case.

Read about Ampere’s European supply chain, Northvolt’s stalled expansion plans and suspicious workplace injuries, Group14, Stellantis, BMW Group and more battery news in the next Pro Report.

CHARGING & INFRASTRUCTURE

So we can still expect another set of dumb headlines like the recent “$7.5B spent and only 10 charging sites?!” pop up in the next years.

I recommend watching this short video of Buttigieg being the EV hero we need in Congress answering with calm facts when Pennsylvania Congressman Scott Perry was spitting false claims about EVs left and right: (2-minute video)

Quick ⚡️ takes:

• Tesla now offers all new US & Canada S3XY buyers 3 months of free Supercharging, if taking delivery before Aug 15th.

• Related, in case you’ve missed it: a lot of automakers partnered with Electrify America to offer complimentary charging in the network, mostly either 250kWh, or free 30-minute charge for 2-3 years. Details for each model through here.

• About 2,000 of Netherlands’ current 4,131 gas stations are likely to close in the next five to 10 years as electric cars start to take over the market, according to ING Research. (link) Thanks, Jon, for sharing! The evolving concept (and survival) of the gas station as we move away the ‘gas’ part — and the creation of CPO-started amenities — is a great topic to dig into further.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

I recommend reading Jim Farley’s article titled:

“Confessions from a lifelong Petrol Head. I love electric vehicles and it has nothing to do with politics.”

on LinkedIn here, or on X here. It’s a good read, and I’ll quote just a bit from these, and his recent Aspen Ideas talk, here.

Even Elon Musk reposted the article on X with “The CEO of Ford loves electric vehicles!” Actually, Jim and Elon seem to be getting along pretty well.

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