EV

Who is going to buy Cadillac’s $300,000 hand-built EV? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Cadillac, Celestiq, EV, General Motors, TransportationNo Comments

The battery-electric Celestiq sedan, which starts “north of $300,000,” is tasked with more than restoring Cadillac to its former glory; it now must back executives’ bold claim to “reestablish the iconic brand as the standard of the world.” But with a price tag more than three times the average transaction price of a vehicle from General Motors’ luxury marque, it’s difficult to imagine many Cadillacs of that heft — no matter how highly customized — will be quietly charging behind suburban garage doors. As the market enters an age where lower priced EVs pack 300-mile ranges along eye-popping horsepower and torque, who needs a bespoke EV? Cadillac is betting on it. The GM luxury brand, which plans to follow the market in phasing out gas engines by 2030, is trying to zig where its luxury competitors are zagging. Executives boasted that the brand will build, on average, fewer than two Celestiqs a day, when it goes into hand-built production at GM’s Technical Center outside of Detroit in December 2023. But will customers bite? The specs Cadillac revealed Monday don’t seems spectacular enough to justify the price. Built on the same Ultium platform underpinning all of General Motors’ future EVs, the Celestiq will feature a 600-horsepower, dual-motor, all-wheel-drive setup that can go from 0 to 60 mph in 3.8 seconds – a crawl compared with some Teslas, Porsches and the Ford Mach-E Mustang GT Performance model). Cadillac estimates that the sedan can travel around 300 miles on a fully charged battery, which will be the industry standard by the time the Celestiq arrives. High-tech features include a four-quadrant, adjustable smart roof, a 3D-printed steering wheel, and the latest iteration of Cadillac’s Ultra Cruise advanced driver assistance system. The car, available at certain Cadillac dealers “by waitlist only,” will come with a concierge to help decide upon colors, trims and materials. So far, the brand’s “whisper events” have shown a “broad spectrum of high-net worth individuals that would consider wanting to have a vehicle like this,” said Rory Harvey, global vice president for Cadillac. Cadillac has not specified how many “extremely low-volume” Celestiqs it will build but said it expects to sell the majority in North America, followed by China and the Middle East. Executives were emboldened this spring by high demand for its first-ever EV, the $60,000 Cadillac Lyriq SUV expected later this year, that forced it to close its 2023 order book earlier than expected. “I believe that we primed the pump,” Harvey said. “We have very solid foundations now to take the brand to the next level.” Still, is there demand for a Cadillac with fivefold the starting price? Executives said they believe buyers are willing to spend even more, noting that a fully loaded Escalade V, the high-performance version of Cadillac’s full-size SUV, pushes $150,000, and that some Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing models venture into six-figure territory. “We believe that we’ve got the ability to be able to generate customer demand at this higher price point,” Harvey said. Cadillac expects to begin delivering the Celestiq to customers in 2025, with high hopes for a revival. “Cadillac at a point in time was referred to as the standard of the world,” Harvey said. “We believe in terms of this vehicle that it gives us the ability to start to reclaim some of that position.”

Polestar steers towards the mass market with its first electric SUV • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in EV, Geely, Polestar, Polestar 3, Transportation, volvoNo Comments

EV maker Polestar has unveiled the Polestar 3, its first SUV designed to help propel the startup to bona fide mass market automaker. Priced from $83,900, the 489-horsepower Polestar 3 will achieve an estimated 300-mile range, according to Polestar – a competitive set of figures designed to compete with a forthcoming crop of battery-electric luxury SUVs from Mercedes-Benz, Maserati, and the like. Polestar’s five-passenger SUV is also available with a Performance Pack that raises output to 517 horsepower. The Swedish electric performance car company is still small by any measurement – delivering just 6,638 cars in the U.S. for the first nine months of the year, compared with Tesla’s 390,814. But so far the company seems to be one of the few EV SPACs still going strong, in part due to support from its largest shareholders, Volvo and Geely. Image Credits: Polestar Polestar went public in a SPAC deal with Gores Guggenheim in June. It has managed to avoid the pitfalls facing most other EV manufacturers that have opted to go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company rather than completing an initial public offering – namely cash crunches, investor lawsuits, federal investigations and bankruptcies. It’s also one of the few EV SPACs with actual production vehicles on the road and more coming. Polestar has said it’s on track to deliver 50,000 cars worldwide this year, and plans to scale up to 290,000 cars annually by 2025 — about 10 times the automaker’s 2021 sales. Those are impressive targets given that the brand currently sells just one model, the 270-mile range Polestar 2 battery-electric sedan. Its debut model, 600-horsepower Polestar 1 plug-in hybrid, was discontinued in December. The arrival of the Polestar 3 SUV, a new entrant in a profitable, fast-growing segment, could be a game-changer, as it was for Maserati, Porsche, Lamborghini and other staunch sedan brands that took the leap into utility vehicles. Polestar 3 details Image Credits: Polestar The company will begin building the Polestar 3 at Volvo Cars’ plant in Chengdu, China, next summer and Ridgeville, South Carolina facility in mid-2024. The SUV is expected to arrive in showrooms in the U.S., Europe and China late next year, followed by the Middle East and Asia Pacific. All told, the automaker hopes to have showrooms in 30 countries by the end of 2023. Polestar plans to continue launching new models at a steady clip, starting with the 2024 arrival of the Polestar 4 SUV coupe. The Polestar 5 4-door GT and Polestar 6, an 884-horsepower hard-top convertible, are slated to follow. Polestar plans to sway SUV customers to the new brand with a cutting-edge technology palette, which includes hardware from lidar supplier Luminar and software from Zenseact, Volvo’s division for advanced driver assistance systems. Analysts note that certain new Volvo safety features may debut in Polestar models first. The Polestar 3 will share some equipment and features with Volvo’s upcoming EX90 battery-electric SUV, including bidirectional charging, which allows the car’s battery to feed power back to the grid when not in use. Polestar said the SUV will use centralized computing from Nvidia as its “AI brain,” processing data from its five radar modules, five external cameras and twelve external ultrasonic sensors to power its advanced safety features. An optional Pilot Pack features a lidar system lets the Polestar 3 scan its surroundings in greater detail, allowing for over-the-air updates as Level 3 and Level 4 autonomous driving becomes legal on public roads.

Tiger Global, Blume back startup bringing safety — and intelligence — to EVs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in blume ventures, electric vehicles, EV, Startups, tiger global, TransportationNo Comments

Tiger Global’s latest investment in India is Vecmocon, a startup building solutions to bring safety and reliability alongside intelligence and health monitoring to light electric vehicles (EVs), addressing concerns that are curtailing the sales of electric scooters in the South Asian market. Unlike traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles that have existed for more than 100 years, EVs are pretty new to the market. The data recently shared by the Indian government shows that the country has over 1.3 million EVs, compared to more than 278 million non-EVs. The cost of service and turnaround time of an EV in the country are also quite high compared to those of traditional combustion engine-powered counterparts. A number of EVs, especially EV scooters, that are available in the Indian market are also not meeting quality standards. Some have even caught fire in the recent past. Vecmocon, an abbreviation for vector motor control, is trying to solve all this using its core EV components and software that it sells to OEMs. The New Delhi-based startup additionally offers platforms for cloud integration to enable remote diagnostics for fleet operations. “For electric vehicles to happen, its ecosystem has to happen, and that ecosystem has to be data-driven. It has to be digitally enabled for a quick evolution,” said Peeyush Asati, co-founder and CEO of Vecmocon, in an interview with ZebethMedia. IIT Delhi alumnus Asati co-founded the startup with Shivam Wankhede and Adarshkumar B — alumni of IIT Delhi and Indian School of Business (ISB), respectively, in August 2016. Before starting their venture, the trio provided pro bono consultancy to e-rickshaw manufacturers. That helped them notice the industry’s strong reliance on China. “The Chinese component manufacturers are not cooperating because the ecosystem in China around EVs is fundamentally different from how it is in India. The geography is diverse, the use cases of how people use electric vehicles are two-wheelers, kind of in terms of culture in terms of behavior, in terms of geography, all of it was different,” Asati said. All this brought them to the conclusion that while many companies have started building the mechanical side of things for EVs locally in the market, the core tech side continues to leave a lot to be desired. Vecmocon offers battery management systems, vehicle intelligence modules, instrument clusters and chargers, among other components. It targets light EV manufacturers making two-wheelers, three-wheelers, forklifts and electric tractors at the moment, as those are the lowest hanging fruits, said Asati. He believes electric cars would still take some time to enter the Indian market due to the lack of physical infrastructure, though the solutions that Vecmocon makes are also ready for four-wheelers. The co-founder said the startup’s battery management systems comply with the Automotive Industry Standards (AIS)-156 that the Indian government introduced last month to address EV battery fire issues. The safety standards are yet to become mandatory for manufacturers, though. “We have already executed those recommendations in our previous generation and improved on them further. So, we are ahead in terms of safety and reliability,” he said. Now they secured some much-needed fuel to expand. Tiger Global co-led the pre-Series A round of $5.2 million in Vecmocon along with Blume Ventures. “We are impressed with the deep commitment and progress that Peeyush, Adarshkumar and Shivam have made to solve long-term problems in India’s EV industry, and we are excited to partner with them as they build a high-quality global automotive tech company to support the adoption of EVs,” Connie Lee, partner, Tiger Global, said in a prepared statement. The funding from the all-equity round will be used to build a business around the offerings created by Vecmocon, Asati said. He noted that the startup is planning to hire sales, HR, operations and finance people in the team, which currently has 20 engineers developing different hardware and software solutions. Vecmocon, which is currently using labs at IIT Delhi, also plans to build its in-house labs to test and develop new offerings for the market. “An electric vehicle is a technologically advanced product. For the larger number of OEMs, it is hard to develop the expertise to design and perfect the software and hardware components like a BMS (battery management system) or VIM (vehicle intelligence module). Such customers stand to win greatly by adopting Vecmocon’s platform which allows them to launch high-performance vehicles faster to the market. Over the last 5 years, Vecmocon has built a unique capability to engineer such data intensive components and deliver a highly robust and safe system,” said Arpit Agarwal, director, Blume Ventures. In this financial year, Vecmocon claims to have already orders of around $5 million to execute — giving it touch points with 30,000-40,000 odd vehicles. Asati said that the plan is to power more than 100,000 vehicles by next year and the hit the milestone of 500,000 by 2025. The startup also does not want to limit itself to India, as it has started working in a pilot phase with clients in global markets and has its initial customers in the U.S., Sri Lanka and Malaysia. Prior to the pre-Series A funding, Vecmocon had raised $300,000 in a strategic seed round in 2019 from Tessellate Tech Ventures. It also received seed support in a debt and equity mix from India’s Department of Science and Technology (DST).

Honda to create $700M EV hub in Ohio • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Batteries, EV, honda, LG Energy, TransportationNo Comments

Honda said on Tuesday it is spending $700 million to retool three of its Ohio plants to build electric vehicles as it aims to phase out gas engines by 2040. Batteries for the electric vehicles from Honda and its Acura division will be supplied by a joint venture with LG Energy Solutions. The automaker confirmed that the $4.4 billion battery plant will be located near Honda’s operations in Fayette County, Ohio, pending regulatory approval. The “new EV hub” will leverage Honda’s manufacturing and purchasing network in Central Ohio, emblematic of an industrywide scramble to bring battery production onshore to control supply and access to new battery technologies. So far, automakers and suppliers have announced more than $38 billion in investment through 2026 to boost battery production in the U.S., according to AlixPartners. That figure is likely to rise as the industry takes advantage of the $40 billion in tax credits included in the Inflation Reduction Act aimed at accelerating EV production. Last month, Ford broke at its $5.6 billion BlueOval City complex in Tennessee, where it plans to begin building advanced batteries for future Ford and Lincoln EVs, including the F-150 Lightning and a second battery-electric pickup, in 2025. Toyota plans to spend $3.8 billion to build a battery plant near Greensboro, North Carolina, for hybrid and battery-electric vehicles mid-decade. Panasonic, which supplies Tesla and other automakers, has committed to creating a $4 billion battery plant in Kansas – the state’s largest-ever economic development project – and is in talks for another $4 billion factory in Oklahoma. Honda and LG Energy aim to begin construction early next year and the mass production of advanced lithium-ion battery cells by the end of 2025. The joint venture has committed to investing an initial $3.5 billion, with total investment projected to reach $4.4 billion. Honda plans to ramp up production to sell millions of EVs in North America, a far cry from the 100,000 EVs and hybrids it sold in the U.S. last year, mostly the Accord Hybrid and CR-V Hybrid. The company, which plans to launch its first battery-electric SUV, the Prologue, in 2024, is currently co-developing models using General Motors’ Ultium platform but plans to begin producing vehicles based on its new Honda e:Architecture in 2026. The $700 million Honda has earmarked for re-tooling its existing Ohio factory footprint will help transition its Anna Engine Plant to build vehicle battery cases, Marysville Auto Plant to marry the battery modules and East Liberty Auto Plant to install the battery unit.

Rivian voluntarily recalls 13,000 EVs for a potential loose fastener • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 10, 2022Posted in EV, Recall, Rivian, TransportationNo Comments

Rivian informed customers Friday that it is conducting a voluntary recall of all 13,000 vehicles it has delivered so far due to a loose fastener. The fastener, which may not have been sufficiently torqued on a small percentage of vehicles, connects the front upper control arm and steering knuckle. This can cause loose and vibrating tires, wheel tilt and loss of steering control. The company’s voluntary recall is expected to be posted on the National Transportation and Safety Administration on Saturday. Rivian sent an email to customers Friday evening. Rivian said that as of September 28, 2022, it had become aware of seven reports potentially related to this issue that had accumulated over the production of Rivian vehicles. The company said in a statement: The safety of our customers will always be our top priority, and we are committed to fixing this issue on any affected vehicles as quickly as possible. We will begin immediately contacting affected customers to schedule appointments for inspections and repairs if needed. We will make any necessary adjustments free of charge at one of our service centers. The repair takes a few minutes to complete, and with customer collaboration, we have built out the capacity to complete the needed action in as little as 30 days. To date, we are not aware of any injuries that have resulted from this issue. Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe also emailed customers saying that while the company has only seen seven reports potentially related to this issue across our fleet to date, “even one is too many.” “It’s important not to minimize the potential risks involved and why we are volunteering to conduct this recall,” Scaringe wrote in the letter. “In rare circumstances, the nut could loosen fully. I want to reiterate that this is extremely rare, but it does reinforce why we are acting with such urgency and caution.” If owners experience excessive noise, vibration or harshness from the front suspension, or a change in steering performance or feel, they should call Rivian immediately, Scaringe said, adding that if customers don’t feel safe driving the vehicle a Rivian employee will either service it as a house call or come pick it up. If a replacement part is needed, Rivian said it will offer loaner vehicles free of charge. Customers can call 855-RIVIAN5 (855-748-4265), you schedule a service appointment and a Rivian employee will come to the customer. They can also bring your vehicle to a Rivian service center, no appointment necessary. The company said it will also have pop-up locations in high-density areas for additional coverage as well.