EVU Report: Global EV sales Q3 — Spinning charge port doors — Hertz' "EV" problems

Hey, Jaan here.

Two newsletters in one week. Four if you’re a Pro member.
I bet you didn’t see that coming. 🙃 We’ve got plenty to report on today!

But first, three quick ideas if you’re working in an EV-related industry:

Ads: We’re nearly fully booked for EV-related ads in the EV Universe newsletters until the end of the year. The last two spots are up for grabs: send me a message if you want to get your message in front of nearly 5,000 of our readers here.

Niche reports: I currently have the capacity to take on two more EV-related startups/businesses for what I call “niche reporting”. Need a monthly report on EV fleets and heavy-duty EVs in North America? Let’s do it. Need to focus on the charging industry in Europe? I got you. Want your team to get one live call every month that gets them up to speed? That’s me. Ask me for more at [email protected].

Team deals: While we’re at it, there’s lots of room here if you want to get the Pro membership for your whole team. Extra perks involved.

OK, let’s dive into the EV Universe now.

Words: 2,322 | Time to read: 12 minutes | Feeling like: spinnin’

British Columbia, Canada is revising its EV plans, planning to set more aggressive targets for automakers on its Zero-Emission Vehicles Act by demanding 26% light-duty vehicle sales to be EVs by 2026, 90% by 2030 and 100% by 2035. (link)

The “Go Electric EV Charger Rebate Program” designed for homes, workplaces and residential buildings will be repoened (ran out of funds earlier) with $7M in funds. There are 4,800 chargers in the province right now, with 129,500 EVs on the roads now. There are ~11k people employed in the local EV sector across 274 companies.

Ontario, Canada is inviting applications for its $91M EV ChargeON program to install chargers across the province. Ontario currently has over 2,900 charging locations with 6,600 L2 ports and 1,300 L3 ports. There are ~135k EVs currently registered in Ontario, but the government “anticipates an exponential growth” reaching one million on the road by 2030.

These insights about EVs in Canada come from a friend of ours, Michael, from the weekly EV North newsletter. You can sign up for his newsletter with just a click below. No, I get nothing (except a bit of happiness) from plugging this.

Rebelles: You might remember us covering the longest off-road rally in the US last year. This year, Rivian engineers Lilly Macaruso and Alex Anderson, team #187 Limestone Legends, made history at the Rebelle Rally when they drove a (Quad-Motor) R1T across the finish line on Friday — becoming the first EV ever to win the competition. (link)

Speaking of Rivian: The first-ever charge the Rivian vehicles get, in their Normal, Illinois factory, will be produced by the now-operational 2.8MW wind turbine. (link)

The EPA launches an EV video competition in the US: “My Electric Ride”. (link) Film a short, 1-2 minute video of your experience with EVs and win up to $3k. Categories:

• Personal Mobility: 2- and 3-wheelers like e-bikes, e-trikes, e-scooters, or e-cargo bikes

• Electric Vehicles: cars, trucks, or SUVs

• Electric Buses: school buses, shuttle buses, or transit buses

Each category gives out $3k to the winner, $1k to second place, $500 to the third. Submissions by January 23rd. And more info here. Good luck! If you do take part, send me the video too — would love to cover it here.

Hertz slows down its EV roll-out plans, claims it’s because of two reasons: dropping Tesla resale values and high cost of EV repairs. (link) Makes for a good headline, does it not? Especially when paired with the auto industry ones we covered last week.

Now, in reality, the high cost of repairs comes from Hertz renting 50% of its Tesla fleet out to Uber drivers, who say they love ‘em but (obviously) use them more intensively. Then Hertz put some of those EVs into its leisure segment, and (obviously) saw a drop in revenue-earned-per-day metrics.

These sound more like its own business model issues than anything to do with EVs, but it sure looks like a good scapegoat for the lowered financial results in its earnings call.

The Tesla price drops leading to a larger depreciation of the cars Hertz bought, at what was almost the peak-price for these models at the time, is surely an expected yet understandable loss for the company. A make-or-break of a fleet business often relies exactly on the car-as-an-asset value there. Usually, the fleet operators win from the discounts of buying the cars in bulk (so under the regular market price), but in Tesla’s case, the company does give discounts to fleet orders.

We’ve covered other EV fleets running into the same problems before, like Autonomy with its Tesla fleet. It seems Hertz will stay on the EV track in the long run, however, with CEO Stephen Scherr saying “we nonetheless remain committed to our long-term strategy to electrify the fleet.”

Munro Vehicles is raising crowdfunding through the Seedrs platform:
£439k, or 67%, has been marked from 61 investors towards the £650k ($804k) target, at an £18M ($22.3M) pre-money valuation. (link) This, as with everything else in this newsletter, is not financial advice.

Munro Vehicles is a UK startup that we’ve covered a few years ago already, and plans to build “the world’s most capable 4×4 EV”. The 85-kWh LFP battery gives it a 200-mile range, can charge at 130kW DC and tow up to 3,500kg (7716 pounds). Available as a hard-top or pickup, and starts at €89,393 (with lots of extras on the ordering page that make it very easy to go over €100k)

It has raised £1.75M before this campaign, has working prototypes in testing, and just rolled out its first pre-production model of the Series M Utility 4×4. Deliveries are set to start mid-2024 and they plan to reach 2,500 units/year by 2027. Here are the specs: (link), and here’s a Fully Charged episode from half a year ago (18min video).

Update on the Stellantis→Leapmotor deal: the 51-49% joint venture will be called Leapmotor International, will act as a Stellantis Group brand for low-cost EVs and has a set target to sell 500k EVs outside China by 2030. So Stellantis gets the exclusive rights to all of the exports, which should start in second half of 2024. HQ will be based in the Netherlands. (link) Interestingly, the news made Leapmotor stock drop 26% over 4 days of announcing the deal. (link)

As I see it, there’s a larger shift in the auto industry can summed up as:

Before: global carmakers sell in China
Now: Chinese carmakers sell globally

Related: here’s a great read for context on JVs in China and what to do with the extra capacity after ICE doesn’t sell there anymore, from our friend Michael Dunne (link).

Someone actually quoted my EV takes — part of it the rant above. 🥳 

Smartcar is powering quite a few of the EV startups that I write to you about here every week, and it's been a real pleasure to work together with the team on their latest report — check out the State of Connected Car Apps report (25-page pdf):

• Volkswagen is finally going for the electric station wagon: the ID.7 Tourer (link). Will be launched next year.

• Ford launches the F-150 ⚡️ in the second European market after Norway: open for limited orders in Switzerland, in high trim at ~$140.5k (link)

• Polestar 4 Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) reveals lowest carbon impact of all Polestar cars to date, at 19.4 tonnes of CO₂e at launch (link).

• Bloomberg Green gives a “green rating” to every EV model available in the UK (link), based on its range, curb weight and battery. Tesla M3 LR, Hyundai Ioniq 6 and Renault Megane E-Tech are top three.

• Joe Rogan shoots an arrow at the Cybertruck door, which would normally go straight through the door (although I admit that I am no expert on arrows nor doors). (pic) (video)

Anti-FUD corner

You might have seen the viral video of the seemingly random well-versed logging trucker saying why BEV trucks don’t work. This one. It’s spreading like wildfire because it gives people the “I told you electric trucks are dumb” argument, here also with saying hybrids are better.

Toyota is investing an additional $8B (now a total of $13.9B) in its North Carolina battery manufacturing plant. It should reach 30 GWh capacity by 2030.

Czechia is reportedly in talks with five possible battery-plant investors. Prime Minister Petr Fiala said “We cannot continue to hold the land for this (VW) project.” (link) CEO Blume says “no 4th gigafactory site plans at present” (link)

📚️ Study tip: Benchmark Minerals has created a Global Gigafactories 2023 Infographic with 400 gigafactories listed, (available to download for free after entering info here).

🎧️ Listen tip: CEO of OneD Battery Sciences, Vincent Pluvinage was interviewed on Munro Live, discussing the North American EV supply chain, managing IP, and battery chemistries (link).

GLOBAL EV SALES

I just put this together yesterday for a European CPO that I do niche EV reports for (wink-wink, get in with your company too by replying to this email), and I found this part suits our regular newsletters here well:

In Q1-Q3, that’s from January to the end of September this year,

• 4,468,000 BEVs were sold in China (link)
  (+24.9% Year over Year, BEV share 21.2%)
  

• 1,472,457 BEVs were sold in Europe (link)
  (+46.9%, BEV share 15.2%)
  

• 873,082 BEVs were sold in the US (link)
  (+51.5%, BEV share 7.9%).

Here’s the per-fuel-type breakdown for Europe:

“Did you plug the car in honey?”
“Nope I couldn’t”
“Why?”
“The charge port door was spinning”
“It was doing WHAT?!”

This edge case comes to us from the new NIO ES8 (video).

• Europe currently has 96,275 public DC chargers and 634,801 public AC chargers, per the data I put together via EAFO.

• Lexus is looking into launching its own charging network. (link)

• Subaru adopts NACS. (link).

• Nxu (formerly Atlis Motor) introduces a $69/month subscription pilot for unlimited charging at its MW+ charging system in Mesa, Arizona. (link)

• Ford adds over 10,000 chargers from Francis Energy, Blink and Red E to its BlueOval roaming network in the US, now at 106k charging stations. (link)

This one comes from an internal letter as the company released “an organizational and business optimization plan for all employees.” With the other plans (detailed here), the company plans to reduce its employee count by about 10%. As of the end of last year, NIO had 26,763 full-time employees.

This newsletter went out to 4,922 subscribers. Looks like we’ve got a milestone incoming next week. 🫣 

Share this report with your friends, please. See you soon! ✌️ 

— Jaan