Daily Archives: February 24, 2016

Growth of the new Source London charging network

Charging, Electric Cars, News, Reviews and Comment, Source London

One year into its new ownership, the Source London charging network isn’t only improving its offering to electric vehicle owners, it’s about to become the basis of a large-scale car sharing scheme.

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“London should be even more electric vehicle orientated than Paris – it should be the leading city in Europe,” says Cédric Bolloré. “We want to give the citizens of London an easy way to use non-polluting form of transport. Autolib appeals to public transport customers who occasionally need to use their own car – one Autolib car takes nine cars off the street according to our studies.”

The challenge:

Bolloré Group took control of the former Plugged-in Places scheme, Source London, in September 2014. Notoriously unreliable, this included 835 charging points spread across the Capital’s boroughs, with a 60% availability rate.

In its first year, the Group’s subsidiary, BluePoint London, has invested £10m in a back-office system enabling boroughs to see how often the network is used, and replaced units as necessary. At the end of August, it reached 85% accessibility and grew network slightly to 845 charging points, targeting of 98% of 1,000 units by the end of 2015.

Read more: Fleet World

Superior electric cars wreck oil markets

Another Oil Crash Is Coming, and There May Be No Recovery. Superior electric cars are on their way, and they could begin to wreck oil markets within a decade.

It’s time for oil investors to start taking electric cars seriously.

In the next two years, Tesla and Chevy plan to start selling electric cars with a range of more than 200 miles priced in the $30,000 range. Ford is investing billions, Volkswagen is investing billions, and Nissan and BMW are investing billions. Nearly every major carmaker—as well as Apple and Google—is working on the next generation of plug-in cars.

This is a problem for oil markets. OPEC still contends that electric vehicles will make up just 1 percent of global car sales in 2040. Exxon’s forecast is similarly dismissive.

The oil price crash that started in 2014 was caused by a glut of unwanted oil, as producers started cranking out about 2 million barrels a day more than the market supported. Nobody saw it coming, despite the massively expanding oil fields across North America. The question is: How soon could electric vehicles trigger a similar oil glut by reducing demand by the same 2 million barrels?

That’s the subject of the first installment of Bloomberg’s new animated web series Sooner Than You Think, which examines some of the biggest transformations in human history that haven’t happened quite yet. Tomorrow, analysts at Bloomberg New Energy Finance will weigh in with a comprehensive analysis of where the electric car industry is headed.

Even amid low gasoline prices last year, electric car sales jumped 60 percent worldwide. If that level of growth continues, the crash-triggering benchmark of 2 million barrels of reduced demand could come as early as 2023. That’s a crisis. The timing of new technologies is difficult to predict, but it may not be long before it becomes impossible to ignore.

Source: Bloomberg

Automakers not currently promoting EVs are doomed

Electric Cars, Opinion

Why the company making your car in 2030 doesn’t exist yet

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Okay, let’s be honest. The sky isn’t falling – gas prices are. In fact, some experts say that prices at the pump will remain depressed for the next decade. Consumers have flocked to SUVs and CUVs, reversing the upward trend in US fuel economy seen over the last several years. A sudden push into electric vehicles seems ridiculous when gas guzzlers are selling so well. Make hay while the sun shines, right?

A quick glance at some facts and figures provides evidence that the automakers currently doubling down on internal combustion probably have some rocky years ahead of them. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is a prime example of a volume manufacturer devoted to incremental gains for existing powertrains. Though FCA will kill off some of its more fuel-efficient models, part of its business plan involves replacing four- and five-speed transmissions with eight- and nine-speed units, yielding a fuel efficiency boost in the vicinity of ten percent over the next few years.

Recent developments by battery startups have led some to suggest that efficiency and capacity could increase by over 100 percent in the same time. Research and development budgets paint a grim picture for old guard companies like Fiat Chrysler: In 2014, FCA spent about $1,026 per car sold on R&D, compared with about $24,783 per car sold for Tesla. To be fair, FCA can’t be expected to match Tesla’s efforts when its entry-level cars list for little more than half that much.

But even more so than R&D, the area in which newcomers like Tesla have the industry licked is infrastructure. We often forget that our vehicles are mostly useless metal boxes without access to the network of fueling stations that keep them rolling. While EVs can always be plugged in at home, their proliferation depends on a similar network of charging stations that can allow for prolonged travel.

Tesla already has 597 of its 480-volt Superchargers installed worldwide, and that figure will continue to rise. Porsche has also proposed a new 800-volt “Turbo Charging Station” to support the production version of its Mission E concept, and perhaps other VW Auto Group vehicles. As EVs grow in popularity, investment in these proprietary networks will pay off — who would buy a Chevy if the gas stations served only Ford owners?

Read more: Autoblog