Some heartening recent progress on the EV front, first on consumer demand and automaker supply and second on fast-charging technology:
- Tesla reported Model 3 third quarter sales of 56,000. They averaged production of 4,300 Model 3s a week, and in the final week of the quarter the company produced 5,300. Perhaps more significantly, the Model 3 had the highest revenue of any car model in the United States, beating out the Toyota Camry and the Honda Accord, which ranked it fifth among all car models sold.
- Major battery maker LG Chem just announced an investment in Enevate, a company that is developing a lithium-ion battery charging technology that could allow EVs to charge at close to the speed of filling up a gas tank. Batteries can get up to 75 percent of their full capacity in just five minutes. With a 200+ mile battery, that means drivers can get 150 miles range in a few minutes.
With lots of gloomy environmental policy news out there, it’s nice to see progress continuing on this crucial clean technology.
Maybe one of the best parts about 2015 will be being one-step closer to a mass market, 200-mile range electric vehicle. At an Autoline panel of experts (video below), two battery business leaders (Ann Marie Sastry, CEO of Sakti3 and Prabhakar Patil, CEO of LG Chem’s North American unit), and a researcher (Brett Smith of the Center for Automotive Research) hint that we may be two years away from such a transformative vehicle.
The key is to get the cost down to $100 per kilowatt hour, which Sastry is pledging to achieve at her company by 2017. Meanwhile, if Tesla can get there with the Gigafactory, the panelists predict the company will have competition from other automakers. Which is only a good thing for consumers and fans of keeping the Earth’s climate at a livable temperature. If you don’t have time to watch the video, Green Car Reports has a write-up of the video here.
