EVU PRO Report: California sues Big Oil — Rolls Royce Spectre — Toyota exclusive with LGES

Hey Pro! Jaan here.

This week I’m coming in hot with insights on:

• California sues Big Oil;

• Teslas cheaper than the US average new car;

• Rolls Royce Spectre, BMW iX2;

• Magnesium castings incoming?

• Toyota exclusive battery supply deal with LGES for US;

• Tesla drops Wiferion but keeps the brains 🧠 

… and of course, plenty more. Click the ‘read online’ on top right and you’ll get more images, tweets and videos inside the newsletter.

Words: 2,210 | Time to read: 11 minutes | Feeling: like the world is moving in the right direction after all.

Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, will ban combustion vehicles from the city centre from 2025 (link).

The base prices for Tesla Model 3&Y, which Tesla recently lowered again, are now $8,700 and $3,700 below the average sales prices for conventional vehicles in the US, per Bloomberg (link):

New York State wants all school buses on the road to be zero-emission by 2035, and all new buses sold in 2027. (link) Applications are now open for $100M in funding.

People of the State of California v. Big Oil, aka how California is suing the Big Oil for more than 50 years of deception, cover-up, and damage that have cost California taxpayers billions of dollars in health and environmental impacts. The press release is here, the 135-page text of the lawsuit is here, and a 49-second video on X here.

📚️ Reading tip: Case study from Australia: “I went full electric with two Teslas, solar, and batteries. The payback is eight years.”

Extra Watts

• ElectricBrands appoints a new co-CEO, Max Brandt, and says its quite-weird-but-maybe-in-a-good-way^? electric minibus XBUS should start series production at VDL Nedcar’s plant in late 2024. (link)

  

  Weird? Definitely. In a good way? Not sure. Thoughts?

• Kleanbus signs a deal with Lothian Buses to convert 18 of its diesel buses to its fully electric platform. (link) According to Kleanbus, “repowering” a bus takes only about two weeks and is more cost-effective than purchasing new electric buses.

• Germany gave out its 2-millionth EV subsidy. (link)

  • €6.4 billion has gone out to 1,230,000 BEVs,

  • €3 billion has gone out to 770k PHEVs.

• WM Motor, the Chinese EV startup, files for insolvency. (link)

• Polestar preps to raise about $1B in capital. (link, SEC filing)

Rolls Royce is about to start deliveries of the Spectre.

Here’s a great review by the Throttle House (26 min), their usual humorous takes included:

Spectre’s range is up to 260 miles (418km) per EPA, on a 102kWh battery. It goes 0-60mph in 4.4s, with 577 hp and 664 lb-ft of torque. The price starts at $422,750, fully specced over $500k.

Also, this “$420k electric Rolls-Royce Buyer at a Broken EA Charging Station” is still one of the funniest memes I’ve seen. (link)

BMW unveils the iX2… even if it actually starts out the press release talking of the launch of the “all-new” fossil X2… (link)

Both fossil and all-electric versions will be made in BMW Group’s Regensburg plant and the worldwide market launch for the iX2 is set in March 2024.

• Range: 259-279mi (417-449km) WLTP

• Battery: 64.8kWh usable

• Charging: up to 130kW

• 0-62mph in 5.6s, top speed 112mph (180 km/h)

• Output 308 hp (230 kW) and 364 lb-ft

Here’s the BMWBLOG’s walkaround from yesterday (video).

Extra Watts

• Cadillac Lyriq can now be ordered in Switzerland, starting at CHF82,000 ($89,705). This marks the return of General Motors to Europe, with Cadillac expanding to Sweden, France, and three more European countries over the next two years.

• Porsche e-Macan spied with almost no camo (link).

• Mercedes launched the 40-tonne eActros 600 electric truck, series production starts at the end of next year. (link) (23-minute live stream)
  It goes 500km (310mi) on the 600kWh battery, runs on 800V, can charge at the Megawatt level.

Toyota North America 🤝 LG Energy Solutions for ~20 GWh of EV battery modules per year from 2025. (link) The NCMA pouch cells with a high nickel content are likely first meant for its US-made electric SUV planned from 2025. LGES will invest ~$3B in its factory in Michigan to set up cell and module production lines exclusively for Toyota.

CATL announces that Avatr and Neta will be the first to use its new extra-fast-charging LFP battery called Shenxing. (link) Avatr is partly owned by CATL and Neta has been a partner since 2021, also using CATL’s CIIC chassis platform.

The Shenxing battery will be produced in CATL’s China plants, but also in Germany and Hungary. It can be charged with up to 4C (where charging power is ~4x the battery size in kWh, which means a theoretical 15-minute full charge time… as far as I can understand).

Tesla reached its 20-millionth 4680 cell built at Giga Texas, just 4 months after reaching 10M. If my estimations are right, that’s about 1.92GWh in capacity so far. I’ll dig a little deeper on this in next week’s Teslaverse newsletter.

📚️ Study tip, just published last week: Degen, F., Winter, M., Bendig, D. et al. Energy consumption of current and future production of lithium-ion and post lithium-ion battery cells. Nat Energy (2023) (link, 15 pages pdf).

Partnerships & plants

• Flex|N|Gate 🤝 StoreDot to produce samples of StoreDot’s 100in5 battery cells for the US EV market at its pilot battery factory in Windsor, Canada, starting next year. (link)

• Northvolt has confirmed the location of its “Northvolt Six” 60 GWh battery factory in Canada: in McMasterville and Saint-Basile-le-Grand, just outside Montreal, Québec. The first phase of 30GWh should start operations in 2026.

• Volvo Cars and Northvolt started construction of their joint venture’s (Novo Energy) 50GWh battery cell factory in Gothenburg, Sweden. Should start operations in 2026. (link)

• Ghana’s first lithium mine should become operational in 2025, and reach full ops at 365,000 tonnes of lithium/year in 2026. Atlantic Lithium and Piedmont Lithium will operate it. (link) On Piedmont’s side, this will feed into its 30,000 tonne/year lithium hydroxide conversion plant in Tennessee.

• Altilium 🤝 ABB to automate battery recycling in Europe (link)

• As all things should be: Albemarle is in talks to use Caterpillar’s electric vehicles in its lithium mine in North Carolina. (link)

Stellantis is focusing some of its EV production in Southern Italy, building five different EVs on the STLA Medium platform in its Melfi plant next year. (link)

Jeep says it has received over 40,000 orders for its all-electric Avenger in Europe. (link) Deliveries are just rolling out in different markets.

Lucid launches AMP-2, its assembly plant in Saudi Arabia. At first, it’ll have an annual capacity of 5,000 cars and is re-assembling the Lucid Air vehicle kits that are pre-manufactured in Lucid’s AMP-1 in the US. Eventually, the AMP-2 should transition into a full manufacturing facility of 150k units/year. I guess we were roughly right on the timing.

VW ramps down the production of its ID.3 and Cupra Born at the Zwickau and Dresden plants for the first two weeks of October. (link)

A 6,000-ton press for Ford by IDRA (the original Tesla gigacasting partner) (link).

Although I haven’t ventured into this side of production too much with our reporting, there’s exciting innovation going on. I’ll tell you what’s likely coming next after we are already seeing these aluminum castings become the norm:

Magnesium castings.

SALES:

• Polestar, Q3: 13,900 (+50% YoY), with 41,700 year-to-date. 60-70k target remains set. (link)

• Fisker reaches 5,000 Ocean’s built (link), will deliver 300/day by the end of the year.

• BMW Group (BMW + Mini), Q3: 93,931 BEVs, up 79.6% over last year and 100.3% if only for BMW (83,211 units). BEV mix of all vehicles sold in Q3: 15.1%. (link)

• Ford Q3: 20,962 BEVs (+14.8% YoY), with YTD 46,671 (+13.2% YoY). Out of the 21k, there were 14,842 Mustang Mach-E sold (+42.5% YoY) and 3,503 F-150 Lightnings sold (-45.8% YoY). e-Transits had 2,617 sales (+89.8%).
  Zoom out: BEVs took up just 4.20% of the 500,504 vehicles sold by Ford in Q3.

• Mercedes-Benz Cars, Q3: 61,600 BEVs sold, up 66% YoY. YTD 174,500 BEVs. The BEV share, including Smart, is at 12% for Q3. (link)

• Mercedes-Benz Vans, Q3: 6,300 BEV vans sold, up 105% YoY. (link)

Next up on the Tesla-wireless-Wiferion play: Tesla sells the recently acquired Wiferion to PULS, a German company. (link) But Tesla keeps the engineers. Wiferion’s engineering team has vast experience in high-power wireless power transmission. (link)

Germany has now awarded the contracts for the Deutschlandnetz, where across 26 projects, ten companies will build over 8,000 charging points with 200 kW each at around 900 locations by 2026. (link)

Autel Energy launches its MaciCharger DC HiPower in the US market, capable of 320kW and can be upgradeable to 640kW (I assume this is for the system, not per dispenser, but they should do a better job in explaining it in the press release). (link) It can charge up to 8 vehicles simultaneously.

From the European spec sheet, it seems it can deliver 480kW from the liquid-cooled dispenser, at up to 950V, also being able to charge 2 EVs simultaneously with 320kW (I believe it might be the first of its kind at that).

Deals & Partnerships

• Electreon 🤝 SITEC for a strategic agreement to bring the inductive charging technology to China. (link)

• St1 Nordic 🤝 Driivz to become the charging OS provider for the Scandinavian CPO. (link)

• Tritium → Driveco, the French CPO ordered over 200 fast chargers, which will primarily be installed at “a major European supermarket chain”. (link) Not shared in any press releases, but I bet it’s Carrefour.

• Instavolt → Electroverse, Octopus Energy’s roaming service, which has over 580 CPOs on its platform so far.

• Kia adds Plug&Charge compatibility to the EV9 in Europe, will expand it to the rest of the lineup. (link)

• Daimler Truck Financial Services 🤝 Electrada to introduce a Charging-as-a-Service (CaaS) solution for electric trucks and buses in North America. (link)

• Itselectric 🤝 SWTCH Energy to use SWTCH’s software system for the curbside chargers. (link) This, I think, is an actual win towards residential charging.

• Parkopedia 🤝 Blink Charging, adding the 12k Blink public chargers (over 4k locations) to its in-car EV service. (link)

• Yinson GreenTech (YGT) 🤝 ComfortDelGro ENGIE to set up the largest combined Singapore →← Malaysia EV charging network. (link) YGT currently has 400 chargers in Malaysia and CDG has 600 in Singapore.

Plans & Deployment

• New Zealand government will co-fund over 100 charging stations across 16 projects with $11M, which is matched by $13.5M in private investment. (link) Also in New Zealand, Tesla opens up the first 6 charging locations to non-Teslas. (link)

• Volvo Trucks launches a service for haulers to find and access chargers, first launched in Sweden (where ~130 charging stations for trucks are opening this year and next), and then in rest of Europe. (link)

• Tokyo: Terra Motors will build out 1,000 locations with 150kW chargers in Tokyo by March 2025 (which is, coincidentally, more than the 900 gas stations in the city total). (link)
  Zoom out: There were 30,287 EV chargers across Japan as of the end of August, including 9,237 fast chargers, according to mapping company Zenrin. The Japanese government is aiming for 300k chargers total, with 30k being fast chargers, by 2030.

• First Tesla V4 stations in Hong Kong (link).

Funding, M&A

TapElectric raised a €1M seed round lef by LUMO Labs. (link) TapElectric is an European charging OS and a consumer charging app provider. They’ve taken an interesting route — charging a 10%+ fee (depending on the plan) from the driver in addition to the tariff set by the charging station operator and thus the platform is completely free for the installer/charger owner/operator.

Cepsa, the Spanish gas station operator, received a €150M ($159M) loan from the European Investment Bank to deploy over 1,800 fast chargers at its gas stations across Spain and Portugal. (link) Cepsa currently has ~130 ultra-fast charging points and has 330 more in the pipeline.

That’s it for today’s Pro Report! I’ll also make this one available for all of our 4,326 readers as a one-off sample of the Pro Reports. How did I do?

See you next week ✌️ 

— Jaan

Subscribe to EV Universe Pro to read the rest.