EVU Report: ⚡️Europe hits 21.7% BEV uptake — 🤷 UK postpones ICE ban — 🚭️ Volvo quits diesel

Hey, Jaan here.

With your weekly dose of everything.

Today we’re seeing the UK planning to rest on its laurels a bit with its 16.4% all-electric sales mix.

While the rest of Europe is already about to zoom past it, reaching over 20% BEV sales in August for the first time ever. 🥳 

Actually, quite a lot of milestones in today’s newsletter. And more. Enjoy!

PS — as usual, there are some invisible graphs & media I can’t fit inside the e-mail. Do click the read online link up top for a better experience.

Words: 1,873 | Time to read: 9 minutes | Feeling: like buying a phone from my automaker

EV Universe newsletter, on July 27th: “The latest power games in the UK seem to put the country’s 2030 ICE ban into question.”

Oh, they sure did.

Here’s a great write-up on this topic by Craig Trudell of Bloomberg (link), whose takes I often enjoy btw, including the insight on how:

• the gov was never going to ban the combustion cars in 2030 in the first place;

• all this has been roughly “the plan” all along, and

• “mild hybrids” were never ruled out anyway either.

Meanwhile, Dave Doogan from the Scottish National Party calls this an “unprecedented tragedy for the UK car industry”, and says the Scottish Government will now also have to move its targets to 2035 as it can’t intervene in that particular legislation. (link)

Lisa Brankin, Chair and Managing Director of Ford in the UK, posted on her LinkedIn (link):

Labour party politician Steve Reed says if they win the next election, they’ll reinstate the 2030 ban. (link)

All of this aside, it seems that the ZEV Mandate (56-page pdf from March) will still be upheld by the government, which means that starting from January, UK carmakers need to ensure at least 22% of their vehicles sold locally are emission-free. (link)

In 2030, this will be increased to 80%, and in 2035 to 100%. The fines are £15,000 per vehicle that goes over the target (and is tradeable as credits with others, apparently, so I’d expect the real cost for automakers to be less).

One thing seems certain — it’s a messy message from the government so far, and this will lead to misaligned incentives across the industry.

NIO launched its first smartphone ($890), built around its vehicles to “offer an interaction with the vehicle that no other device can offer.” (link) The company also released SkyOS, its intelligent vehicle operating system. (link) Not really reported but in my eyes also significant: NIO also brought in an App Store for its vehicle cockpits, with more than 40 apps already adapted. (link)

The system will also be able to exactly mirror the new Nio Phone on the vehicle screen:

While the 40 apps available mostly seem just adaptions of already-popular widespread apps, I wonder how far NIO is from opening its system up for developers to build upon.

This is, by the way, something that I expect Tesla to launch rather soon and “out of the blue”: its own platform to build upon for all Teslas. I can’t wait to see the storm of new possibilities this will unlock.

Volvo Cars says its last diesel car will be produced in early 2024, leaving just BEVs and PHEVs in its production mix. (link) Volvo also claims it won’t spend another cent of its R&D budget on developing new combustion engines.

Extra Watts, anyone?

• Update on the UAW strikes in the US:

  • 5,600 workers at 38 GM and Stellantis parts depots join the UAW strike, while Ford seems to be making progress on the talks. (link)

  • UAW President says Musk is so greedy so he can build rockets, while Tesla employees are “scraping to get by” (video)

  • What the continued UAW strike means for EVs ,a great overview by TechCrunch.

  • The UAW strike is estimated to have cost the economy $1.6B in the first week. (link)

• Harbinger Motors, the US-based medium-duty EV maker, raises $60M in Series A (link), led by THOR Industries and Ridgeline. THOR, essentially the largest RV maker in the world, also announced a strategic partnership with Harbinger late last year for electric RVs. (link)

• B-ON files for bankruptcy. The carmaker formerly known as Odin Automotive, took over StreetScooter early last year. (link in 🇩🇪)

• RJ Scaringe says the company is “open for partnerships” with other companies in the car industry to build a factory in Europe. (interview in DE)

In case you missed it, check out our special issue covering the IAA Mobility event, by our friend Nick:

Also, it is now pretty clear we need to bring Nikita back to cover more of these events — 95% of you voted we should make this regular and 15 of you added some kind words too. I passed the words on to Nick as well, thank you all!

ELegend EL1, an all-electric Audi Sport Quattro. Hand-built from next year, only 30 units will be made. €890k. but… just look at it.

Watch tip: Rivian Electric Delivery Van, the best overview I’ve seen so far — by Marques Brownlee aka. MKBHD (13min video).

Starting from how the key fob works to the little Amazon “smile” logo inside the headlight, and the overnight L2 charging systems in the facility, it’s worth checking out.

A few more Watts

• Kicking it off with a joke: Tesla’s new Romance Mode is amazing (8s video)

• Tesla explains its audio system developed in-house (3min video).

• ROAM Move is an all-electric shuttle bus, the first of its kind built entirely in Kenya. (link)

• Porsche Taycan 4S Cross Turismo completed the 5,000-km (3,100-mi) journey across Australia, from Darwin to Bondi Beach, in 19 days and 28 charging stops. (link)

~but that’s not all, folks~

• Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo also claimed the Guiness World Record for the greatest altitude change by an electric car: 5,573 metres across the 2,783km journey on the Xinjiang-Tibet route. (link) (4min video)

Tesla produced its 5-millionth car. (link) It took Tesla 12 years of operations to build the first million cars. Then 18 months to produce the second million. Third? 11 months. Fourth? 7 months. And now, we’ve gone just over six months for the latest million.

BYD saw its 500,000th Dolphin EV roll off the line, about 2 years after first deliveries. (link) Same with the ATTO 3 — the first global EV model of BYD (link). The company also just made Dolphin available in Mexico, as its fourth EV in the country — starts at ~$31,250. (link) To compare — the Dolphin starts at ~$16k in China.

Headline: “Toyota plans to speed up Toyota and Lexus EV production to over 600,000 vehicles/year in 2025.” (link)
Some context from your truly:

• Starting point? Toyota produced less than 25k electric cars last year.

• Previous targets? 1.5M EVs/year by 2025 and 3.5M/year by 2030.

• Reality? Toyota significantly lowered its previous targets to a more manageable one, which I still seriously doubt it is able to reach.

Meanwhile, here’s the latest battery technology roadmap that Toyota shared (link):

And here’s more on its “next-gen” BEV production line, including gigacasting in the Myochi plant. (link) Oh, and Hyundai is reportedly also developing hypercasting for its EVs, following Tesla’s casting footsteps in manufacturing. (link).

EV SALES

For the first time ever, in August over 20% of the passenger cars sold in Europe (EU+EFTA+UK) were battery electric vehicles (BEVs) (pdf):

196,647 BEVs were sold in Europe in August, out of 904,509 vehicles total, making it a 21.7% BEV mix. Aka every fifth car sold was all-electric.

The year-to-date BEV tally is at 1,284,920 out of 8,516,943 total putting us at a 15.1% BEV mix. We’re up 53.6% year-over-year.

If you’re on Twitter 𝕏, here’s my tweet post you can share on this news (link).

Also notable, best-selling car models, of any fuel type, in Europe this year until the end of August have been:

1. Tesla Model Y - 151,191 units

2. Dacia Sandero - 148,080 units

3. VW T-Roc 138,302 units

HERE and SBD Automotive partnered to create an EV Index ranking for European countries and US states. (link with interactive graphs, also, surprisingly, an excel spreadsheet with all the data here)

Shell Recharge and BYD jointly opened their largest EV station globally, in Shenzhen, China, with 258 public DC charging points (link).

A few more Kilowatts for the road

• There are now 50 Rivian Adventure Network sites open across the US (link).

• California reaches the goal of 10,000 fast chargers, more than a year ahead of its schedule set in 2018 (when it had 2,657 chargers). (link)

• Jaguar adopts Tesla’s NACS (link) for its next-gen EVs launching in 2025.

• Hyundai gives a free ChargePoint Home Flex L2 charger (and an installation discount) for all its new EV buyers in the US until the end of Oct. (link)

• NIO President, Qin Lihong, says the NIO management underestimated the difficulty of building charging and batswap infrastructure in Europe, with Germany being much slower than China to get approvals for the swap station constructions. (link)

I’m not trying to downplay this $340k EV or anything, but I couldn’t help myself:

That’s it for today. This issue went out to 4,156 subscribers.

Last week, we got an 89.58% “loved it” score.
Did I do better or worse this time?

Also, I want you to know: I read every single comment you leave there. Thank you all, both for the kind words and telling me what I can do better. Keep it coming!

I’ll feature one of the comments from last week here, touching on the Chevy Blazer price we reported on (here):

Have an electric week!

— Jaan