Tag: electric vehicles

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Canada on track to get two EV battery cell factories

Canada may get not one but two electric vehicle (EV) battery factories in the future if plans from companies BritishVolt and StormVolt come to fruition.

Both say they will base their factors in Quebec and feature extensive corporate backing from existing companies.

BritishVolt

BritishVolt is a relatively new company that dabbles in clean energy and operates a 30GWh battery plant in the United Kingdom. The company has already partnered with a few businesses in Montreal to bring a 60GWh factory and more to Canada.

In an interview with Electric Autonomy Canada, the company said that it’s currently working with a small team to find land and work on securing government funding for the large-scale undertaking.

Specifically, BritishVolt wants to build an R&D centre, an anode and cathode processing plant and a 60GWh battery cell manufacturing area.

StormVolt

StormVolt is an Ontario-based startup with backing from the Taiwan electronics company Delta Electronics. It also has ambitions to build a battery cell plant in Quebec, hoping to scale it to 10GWh production.

This means that the StormVolt factory might be significantly smaller than BritishVolt’s. Still, the upstart Ontario company hopes to serve smaller local EV manufacturers like Nova bus and Lion Electric.

While StormVolt may not become the most significant player in the EV battery space, two battery cell plants in Canada would go a long way towards helping the country produce EV batteries end-to-end.

Source: Electric Autonomy Canada, (1)

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Tesla’s Full Self-Driving beta to release to some at the end of the week says Musk

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has tweeted that roughly 1,000 people with 100/100 safety scores in their Tesla EVs will start testing the Full Self-Driving beta version 10.2 (FSD 10.2).

Once these drivers receive the update, the rollout will pause for several days so the company can assess its performance. If things go well, the update will start to roll out to other drivers with 99/100 scores and so on.

Tesla released the Safety Score system a few weeks ago when it announced that all newer Tesla owners could request to join the Full Self-Driving beta. They only need to drive cautiously for a week to receive a 100/100 driving safety score to get into the beta.

The FSD 10.2 update includes several more minor fixes, but Musk also mentions that it significantly improves the driving experience. However, even with the Full Self-Driving name, this software is only SAE-level 2 compliment like GM’s recently announced Ultra Cruise.

This means that the car can drive itself in a wide variety of situations but that the driver needs to remain attentive and keep their hands on the wheel for safety reasons.

Source: Elon Musk 

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Survey finds one in four Canadians want an EV, but price remains an issue

Image source: Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Electric_vehicle_charging_station_at_Pippinger_Flur_10.jpg

A new survey shows that while a solid chunk of Canadians are interested in making the switch to an electric vehicle (EV), the cost of purchasing one remains a major barrier.

Out of a survey of 1,551 Canadians, nearly 26 percent said they planned on purchasing an EV, according to a post on Tesla North drawing on a recent Bloomberg article.

That said, a 31 percent of respondents in the Leger Marketing survey confided that price is the main reason why they would not be buying an EV.

Moreover, a whooping 59 percent of folks surveyed said while cost is not their primary barrier to buying an EV, the steep price tag is still among the list of considerations keeping them from making the purchase.

Lack of charging infrastructure, concerns about range, and worries about battery replacement and longevity clocked in at 18 percent, 16 percent and 13 percent respectively.

In the recent 2021 federal election, all the major political parties made significant commitments to EV vehicles and zero-emission laws.

For their part, the newly-reelected Liberal Party promised that a minimum of half of all passenger vehicles sold in Canada will be zero-emission by 2030 and 100 percent by 2035.

The party also pledged to build 50,000 charging stations, and offer $5,000 in federal incentives for people who purchase zero-emission vehicles, as well as $5,000 in grants and $40,000 in interest-free loans towards retrofitting initiatives.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Source: Tesla North Via: Bloomberg

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Rolls-Royce switching to all electric by 2030

Luxury automaker Rolls-Royce will stop building gasoline-powered cars by 2030 as it moves to go fully electric. The legacy manufacturer even has plans to release its first electric vehicle (EV) in 2023.

This follows other high-end automakers like Jaguar Land Rover and Bentley. The latter is also moving to an all-electric line by 2030, and the former will be fully electrified by 2025.

The first fully electric Rolls-Royce is set to be called the Spectre and will hit the roads at the end of 2023.

BMW owns the luxury automaker, but it’s only pledging to go 50 percent electric by 2030. It also holds the car brand Mini, which plans to go fully electric by 2030.

At this stage in the move towards EVs, it’s no longer surprising to see a company like Bentley shift to all-electric. If you’re interested in more pictures of the automaker’s Spectre EV, you can visit the Rolls-Royce website. That said, beyond images, the company hasn’t revealed much else about the vehicle.

Source: Rolls-Royce, Reuters

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Samsung in talks with Tesla to develop next-gen self-driving chips

Report are circulating that Samsung and Tesla are looking to further their relationship by developing a new self-driving chipset for the automaker’s Full Self-Driving 4 chipset.

Samsung already makes chips for the Model 3 and other Tesla vehicles with the Full Self-Driving 3 hardware, so if the rumour is true, this will keep the Korean tech giant’s computer chips in every Tesla vehicle moving forward.

The automaker has said before that we’d see new self-driving hardware with the launch of the Cybertruck in 2022. If we’re going to hear about a new Samsung and Telsa partnership, that seems like the place to do it.

The previous self-driving chip that Samsung produced was built on the 14-nanometer technology, but the new chip is rumoured to feature 7-nanometer construction. This should increase both the speed and the power of the chip considerably. The Cybertruck self-driving tech is reportedly roughly four times as capable as the current chip, which also suggests it will include the new chip. You can learn more about the previous Tesla chip, here.

A Reuters report mentions that the leading chipmaker globally — TSMC in Taiwan — builds 52 percent of the world’s chips, and Samsung is in second place with 17 percent. with this in mind, a move more into EV and vehicle chip production might help the South Korean company gain some more market share.

Source: Electrek, WikiChip

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Ford increasing production for F-150 Lightning electric truck

Ford is investing an extra $250 million USD (roughly $318 million CAD) to boost production and add more electric vehicle-related (EV) jobs to its production facilities.

The automaker says that this investment will add a total of 450 jobs and bring Ford’s Lightning production capacity up to 80,000 per year. This seems like a nice amount of trucks, but since the company is sitting on over 130,000 pre-orders, it will be over a year before everyone who wants one gets one.

The first trucks should start rolling out to consumers and dealerships in the spring of 2022.

These numbers are nothing to scoff at and Ford getting into the electric truck game is a big deal, but these stats illustrate how small the EV market actually is for the automaker. For comparison, Ford sold 900,000 F-150 trucks on average every year before the pandemic.

Over the next few years, with  Tesla, Rivian, GM and Ford all releasing electric trucks, it will be interesting to see what company becomes the next major North American truck supplier.

Image credit: Ford 

Via: Engadget