Batteries
Toyota Releases Thousands of Hybrid Patents
In a complete reversal of its longstanding policy, Toyota has decided to stop suing every manufacturer that dares to offer a hybrid vehicle to the public in an effort to protect its more than 24,000 patents on the technology. It says everyone is free to use those patents without paying royalties from now until 2030. Why? Because it thinks there is more money to be made consulting with others than preserving the moat it has built around it hybrid systems. Toyota executives believe that other companies will be happy to pay it fees to use its tech, saying “when (other companies) use Toyota’s motors, batteries, PCUs, control ECUs, and other vehicle-electrification system technologies as part of their power train systems,” according to Green Car Reports. More Hybrids for More People Toyo...
Amnesty International: We Need Ethical EV Batteries
With both major auto and motorcycle manufacturers pushing hard to gain market share in the emerging electric future, sources of the raw materials needed to make advanced EV batteries are getting harder to come by. That’s especially true as manufacturers work to keep costs down– and those needs have led many companies to third world/emerging markets. As such, organizations like Amnesty International began to look into how companies’ policies are impacting those regions … and they didn’t like what they found. Amnesty International documented serious human rights violations linked to the extraction of the minerals used in lithium-ion batteries, particularly in the DRC. A 2016 investigation found children working in hand-dug cobalt mines. Children who were being e...
5 Tips to Pick a Winter-ready Home Charging Station
As I sit here typing this in the near suburbs of Chicago, the wind chill is -50 and the governor has declared a state of emergency. More than one of my Volvo PHEV and Nissan LEAF buddies have asked me about charging their cars in this cold, and I was reminded of a sponsored post over at our sister site, EVO, about choosing a winter-ready home charging station. With temperatures outside dropping fast, it’s time to think about how the cold will affect your EV charging station. The FLO Home Level 2 charging station will ensure you leave each morning fully charged, so you can make the most of your range all winter. 1. Get a Level 2 Charging Station Most electric vehicles come with a 120V Level 1 charging station that you can plug into a standard wall outlet. However, charging with a Lev...
Gogoro Shows Off Battery Swap Partners
Taiwanese electric scooter startup Gogoro has a sharp design, smart engineering, and massive capital behind it. Now, it’s taking its über-clever, battery swapping electric scooters to the big time by partnering with DHL and Taiwan Post to supply the two shipping giants with Gogoro 2 utility scooters. That’s not an order for a few dozen electric scooters. That’s, more likely, an order for a few hundred electric scooters over the long haul. Enough scooters, in other words, to ensure that Gogoro has a future, regardless of consumer/commercial acceptance. But wait, there’s more!! PGO will also be adding big numbers to Gogoro’s order books over the next few years, as well. They’ve signed on to use Gogoro’s EV batteries in their future electric scoots, b...
EVgo is Exploring Uses for Second Life Batteries
EVgo has announced that it is getting serious about exploring new business models for second life batteries. These are efforts that maximize the effort put into the initial construction of the EV battery, as well as the value extracted throughout their primary, secondary, and maybe tertiary use cases. The company will be starting with the addition of second-life batteries to its grid-tied public fast charging systems— and its first such system is being set up in the northern California city of Union City. In that project, the charger taps into the residual storage capacity of used BMW i3 batteries to store energy during peak solar generation times, and dispense that stored energy as needed to reduce the overall strain its fast charging systems can have on the grid. EVgo is Com...
Nissan to Offer Rebuilt LEAF Batteries for Less
Nissan has built a battery remanufacturing facility that will disassemble used battery packs, discard any of the 48 modules that have lost 20% or more of their original capacity, and replace them with modules from other batteries that are still serviceable. The clusters that are no longer adequate for automotive use can be repurposed for use in energy storage products or batteries for electric fork lifts and other heavy equipment. The price of a remanufactured 24 kWh battery for a Nissan LEAF is $2,855 in Japan. The price in the US is unknown at this time, but Craig Van Batenburg of the Automotive Career Development Center in Worcester, Massachusetts, tells Green Car Reports the replacement batteries can be installed by your local Nissan dealer or properly trained independent. The new fact...
CES 2018: Honda PCX Electric Scooter w/ Battery Swap Tech
Launched at CES 2018: Honda PCX Electric Scooter w/ Battery Swap Tech taht could do for light electric vehicles what batteries did for cordless drills!
GAS2 Report: “Electric Cars: What Early Adopters & First Followers Want”
We here at CleanTechnica, EV Obsession, and GAS2 are launching our first report. It’s a report that was made possible by the thousands of readers who completed a handful of surveys we created to dive deeper into the electric car market. I think the report, Electric Cars: What Early Adopters & First Followers Want, fills a number of important information gaps, and includes many interesting findings. The intro of the report is below, or you can just download the full thing (for free) right here and read it all. The electric car market has been growing exponentially in the past few years. But it is still a small percentage of the new car market in most places, typically representing less than 1% of new car sales. What is needed to grow electric car sales to a majority of new car sal...
Is This Why Toyota Is Really So Anti-BEV?
I’ve been planning to write this article for months. Maybe a year? Toyota has been perhaps the most anti-EV mass-market car company out there by some standards (perhaps excluding Fiat due to Sergio Marchionne). As I noted yesterday, its foray into plug-in electric cars was essentially the lamest of all, bringing a Prius Plug-in to market that just has 11 miles of battery-electric range, or 6 actual miles. It has been promoting the heck out of its lame, over-priced Mirai, while talking smack about battery-electric vehicles that are soooooo much better. And then it drops this kind of nonsense on the “limits” of battery-electric vehicles. I wasn’t going to even address that Forbes article and just jump into why I really think Toyota is so anti-EV, but I can’t res...
California Cuts Red Tape For Tesla Gigafactory
Bipartisan legislation backed by California Governor Jerry Brown has been introduced to possibly make California the home of the first Tesla Gigafactory.
The Telsa Gigafactory Faces Skepticism
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has plans to build a massive battery “Gigafactory” someplace in the United States. The Gigafactory would start production by 2017 and by 2020 would produce enough lithium-ion batteries batteries for 500,000 electric cars. The question is will this become a reality? Tesla sold 23,000 cars last year, and all of them ran off lithium-ion batteries imported by Panasonic. These are the same batteries that power your laptop, tablet, and smartphone, among other home electronics, and they’re assembled into massive battery banks. So yes, there is an obvious market for mass-producing lithium-ion batteries. However, the concern is over the electric vehicle part of the Gigafactory business plan. Specifically, is there really a market for 500,000 electric vehicles ...
Long Term Test | Lithium Ion Motorcycle Batteries
Well, the Skyrich is in that special battery home in the sky now, ready to become fertilizer (for real) thanks to the lack of any battery management system (BMS). I ran this battery on my 2009 Yamaha R1 since May 2011, (first reported here) putting about 12,500 miles of mostly city riding on it. So while Skyrich advertises that the battery lasts 2,000 cycles, as opposed to the 3-500 lead acid batteries can take, I only found it to last about 2.5 times as long as the lead acid my bike came with. I didn't count the cycles, I counted the years. The stock battery lasted 1 year. The Skyrich was starting to get weak this winter, but I didn't do the research until after it died. It turns out that with liIon batteries, when it's cold you actually heat it up by turning the key and letting it power ...
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