Cars

A South Korean news agency is citing anonymous industry sources in the the cause of the atypical battery fires in the Bolt and Kona LG EV batteries.

Update: An official from LG Energy Solution told us…

“The exact cause of the Kona fire has not determined yet. The investigation is still underway with related authorities. However, we can say for sure that the cause of the fire is not a separator problem.”

AC Cars, the British carmaker behind the one of the most beautiful and famous cars of all time, the AC Cobra, is making a fully electric Cobra. It will be the first electric car made by AC.

The car will sell for £138,000 and only 58 will be made.

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I’m just waking up after last night’s Tesla Semi and next gen Roadster Event and it feels like a dream in a lot of ways.  If you would have told me yesterday that there would be an EV that met any of the following specs, I would have said “Vaporware!” Keep in mind these are base specs (!!) and the Founder’s Series car, which will take advantage of technologies gained in the 3 years before production, will somehow be better than:

• Acceleration 0-60 mph: 1.9 sec
• Acceleration 0-100 mph: 4.2 sec
• Acceleration 1/4 mile: 8.8 sec
• Top Speed: Over 250 mph
• Wheel Torque: 10,000 Nm
• Mile Range: 620 miles
• Seating: 4+ trunk

It’s over. It’s. Just. Over.  I’ve said it before but there is no way to dispute it anymore. Electric vehicle engines are superior to internal combustion. Full stop.

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The World Solar Challenge started about 8:30 AM local time, Darwin, Australia. 42 cars, in three categories, from 21 countries race for 3-7 days using mainly solar power. The race takes place every other year. Starting in Darwin and moving south, across the continent, ending in Adelaide, Australia.

The challenge’s primary goal is a ‘design competition to discover the world’s most efficient electric car.’

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Alphabet-owned Waymo is now asking a judge to stop Uber from using the self-driving car tech it claims the ride hailing company stole, in what is the latest development in a legal feud between the two companies. This news follows Waymo’s suit against Uber that was filed late last month over theft of key self-driving technology…

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It feels like Google/Alphabet’s self-driving car project has been at a bit of a yellow light lately, with the recent departure of its technical lead & director Chris Urmson and other key members being the biggest sign of trouble. Now, Reuters reports that the Mountain View company has hired ex-Airbnb executive Shaun Stewart as “a director of the self-driving car project” (albeit not a replacement for Urmson), and that his role will be “to help commercialize Google’s self-driving technology.”

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Nissan today in Rio unveiled its BladeGlider “working prototype” which combines electric powertrain with a futuristic design and moderate 268 horsepower split between two rear 130kW electric motors. Max speed is quoted as nearly 200km/h (125 miles/hour), with 0-100km/h (0-62) taking less than five seconds.  No information was given on the battery pack size but as this is a two model exhibition car, it is likely to differ in a big way from any possible related production car.

The system features torque vectoring, controlling the torque delivered to the driven wheels, improving the handling even further. With torque vectoring, if the car starts to understeer, it automatically sends more torque to the outside wheel to restore the handling balance. Designed to add to the driving experience rather than govern it, the torque vectoring system has three settings: off, agile and drift mode. Power is supplied by a high performance, five module lithium-ion 220kW battery. Bespoke cooling systems have been developed for both the battery and the motors.

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Electric vehicle enthusiasts and some automakers have been calling for more homogeneity in charging standards. Some progress has been made, but ultimately, it looks like we will have to wait to see which standards will prevail and which will become obsolete.

In the meantime, we are starting to see some interesting charging stations using several different standards at the same location. Tesla has even been participating in a few of these stations around the world, but its latest, which happens to be its first Supercharger in the Czech Republic, is particularly impressive. Expand
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Clemson University’s International Center for Automotive Research, also known as CU-ICAR, is home to the university’s renowned Automotive Engineering program. Clemson has been producing top automotive engineers for years and more recently, the architect behind the traction control system of Tesla’s Dual Motor powertrain, PhD Justin Sill.

Now Electrek has learned that instead of hiring Clemson students, Tesla is going directly to the source and hired CU-ICAR Professor Paul Venhovens. Expand
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Earlier today, we reported on Tesla quickly renewing the referral program for the fifth round with again a $1,000 discount on both the Model S and X, but at the time, Tesla had yet to reveal the prizes for the referrers.

Now the company released the list and there’s no big surprise. The small prizes are similar, the automaker will still raffle a Model X P90D with Ludicrous mode, but most interestingly, the company refers to an upcoming ‘Tesla unveiling event’ without specifying for what product. Expand
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As we discussed when Tesla announced its last round of the referral program, the automaker is still tuning the program since the first round over a year ago now. Tesla went through 4 rounds with the latest ending last Friday and each round had different rules, rewards and discounts.

On occasions, Tesla waited a few weeks before launching a new round, but now we learn that the company quickly renewed the referral program for the fifth round with again a $1,000 discount on both the Model S and X. Expand
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk is a little late to publish his ‘Part 2’ of the ‘Tesla Secret Master Plan’, which he hoped to reveal last week, but it looks like it was pushed to today. He was a little busy overseeing the successful Falcon 9 launch and landing in Cape Canaveral last night, and the ongoing Dragon mission.

The plan is expected to outline Tesla’s future product lineup as the company transitions from a transportation company to an energy company. In line with the transition, Tesla finally moved its main domain ‘teslamotors.com’ to its recently acquired ‘tesla.com’ over the weekend. Expand
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Tesla recently made a key hire in digital retail and user experience. Electrek has learned that the automaker hired Chester Chipperfield, former Burberry Vice President of Digital and Interactive Design, earlier this month. Chipperfield, who more recently worked at Apple, confirmed the move on his LinkedIn profile.

He is taking over the role of ‘Global Creative Director’ at Tesla after leaving ‘Special Projects’, which is where Apple’s Titan car project (and other ventures) lives, at the Cupertino company earlier this month. Expand
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New Tesla Model X owners are reporting receiving their vehicles with a dual front-facing camera housing instead of one for only a single camera. The same housing has been spotted in the Model X before, but what is particularly interesting here is that it could be the first time that it was delivered with the second side exposed. Expand
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Tesla’s reliability improvements have been helping capacity needs at its service centers, but the recent increase in Model X deliveries added a strain on the workload. A lot of early units need some tuning, which in turn require to free up service hours at Tesla service centers in order to fulfill regular service appointments to perform repairs.

Some Tesla owners are complaining about weeks or sometimes even months of wait time. Jon McNeil, Tesla President, said that he is aware of the issue, which he referred to as a “challenge”, and that Tesla introduced ‘fast lanes’ at service centers to “address minor issues in an expedited way.” Expand
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One of the prizes for the latest round of Tesla’s referral program, which ended last Friday, was an invite for two at the ‘Gigafactory Grand Opening’ on July 29. The invites are now going out with a few more details on the event, as well as a raffle for more invites for Tesla owners. Expand
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Flashback to when we reported that India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, met with some executives at Tesla, we now have, via the Indian Express, learned that India’s Transport and Highways Minister, Nitin Gadkari, met with Tesla executives on the 15th to talk about introducing and increasing the adoption of “pollution-free road transport” with a focus on commercial and public vehicles i.e trucks, buses and two-wheelers.

Nitin hopes to accomplish this by having Tesla settle in India to create an “Asian manufacturing and assembly hub”. Gadkari goes on to state:

“the Indian government is committed to encouraging alternate pollution-free transport in the country by providing incentives to bio-fuel, CNG, ethanol and electric vehicles.”

Further, in his meeting with the Tesla team, he “offered up land near major Indian ports to facilitate export of their vehicles to South and South East Asian countries.”

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Tesla is planning a next generation Roadster reportedly to be built on the Model 3 platform by the end of the decade. A Tesla executive recently described the vehicle as “different, faster and bigger” than the original Roadster, which was built on a Lotus chassis.

Little is known about the vehicle at this point, but it doesn’t stop rendering artists to try to help envision the possible design of the car. And these latest renderings are pretty impressive. Expand
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The limits of the Autopilot under its current suite of sensors have been debated for a while, especially since Tesla has been discussing an upcoming second-generation hardware for the program to allow fully autonomous driving.

But last night, Elon Musk announced that “certainly moderate and maybe big advances” are possible with Tesla’s current sensors. Expand
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Earlier this year, we reported on the PSA group, which includes the French automotive brands Peugeot, Citroën and DS, announcing its plan for the electrification of its brands starting with two new electric vehicle platforms on which the company will build 4 new all-electric vehicles and 7 new plug-in hybrids by 2021.

One of the first vehicle to come to market under this new plan, although in limited-production will be the DS E-Tense all-electric supercar, which was spotted in the wild for the first time this week. Expand
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The success of the Model 3’s production plan is highly important not only to Tesla, but to the ~400,000 people who by pre-ordering the vehicle are now planning their next car purchase around the release of the Model 3. If Tesla starts volume production in late 2017 and manages to manufacture 500,000 vehicles (Model 3, S and X) in 2018 as planned, the automaker will work through its backlog fairly quickly and everything should work out fine.

But if god forbid Tesla misses some deadlines, it will create headaches for a lot of people, including the automaker. The next important deadline is pencil down on the design of the Model 3, which should be this week based on Elon Musk’s most recent timeline. Expand
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