This Week in EV: Not that Super
We kick off this week with the big news from Tesla, Elon has said they would be going hardcore with laying off 20% of the staff across the company, however no one expected the entire Supercharger team at the company to be fired including the Director in charging of Supercharging Rebecca Tinucci. The Supercharger network is by a long way the best DC ultra rapid charging network in North America and Europe and access to it has been a key selling point for the sale of Tesla's cars. With the network opening to other manufacturers and the selling of Supercharger hardware to other CPO’s it looked like it could become a serious profit centre for Tesla until this latest round of layoffs. Read more
I’ve written about StoreDots battery technology a number of times over the last 18 months with the promise of their 100in5 technology. Well now Polestar has installed the technology into a prototype Polestar 5 and the results were impressive. The battery pack managed to charge at a peak of 380kw and with consistent speeds of 310-380kws with the usual drop off in speed not occurring. This meant the car could charge from 10-80% in just 10 minutes. It’ll be a few years yet though before we see the battery pack in production. Read more
The next big frontier in EV adoption will be in trucking and whilst the Tesla Semi might get a lot of the headlines there are alot of other companies working on electric trucks and Mercedes has hit a significant milestone with the development of its electric truck. The company has completed its first successful test of a 1MW fast charge using the Megawatt Charging System (MCS) standard. The Mercedes eActros 600 has a 621kWh battery with a range of over 300 miles. Initially the truck will come with a CCS2 charging port rate for upto 400kW but will be able to be retrofitted with MCS later as megawatt charging becomes available. Read more
Honda is making a big investment as it looks to grow its EV footprint with the company announcing a $11 billion investment to build four new EV factories in Canada. The factories will enable Honda to build 240,000 EVs for the North American market. The plants will give Honda a full EV supply chain and allow the company to cut costs by over 20%. Read more
Closer to home MG has opened the order books for the MG Cyberster in the UK. The roadster will start from £54,995 with the first orders expected to be delivered in the summer. The top trim version will go from 0-62 mph in just 3.2 seconds and is speed limited to 125mph. This is only a fraction slower than the Tesla Model 3 Performance which has a 0-60 time of 2.9 seconds. Read more
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