The future of electric vehicle technology

[Busjack]

Although Tesla car sales are below projections, here's a CNN video on a Tesla Pepsi delivery truck.  It also mentions that California has a 2042 zero emissions truck fleet mandate.

[YoungBusLover]

On 1/25/2024 at 2:00 PM, Busjack said:

Although Tesla car sales are below projections, here's a CNN video on a Tesla Pepsi delivery truck.  It also mentions that California has a 2042 zero emissions truck fleet mandate.

After this recent cold snap across the country I hope the EV manufacturers can improve the flaws that were widely publicized. It's bad enough you have some already taking a step back from mass production all together due to low sales and high inventory. Hertz has already pulled the plug on what was I believe 200,000 Teslas from there fleet.

[Busjack]

18 hours ago, Jstange059 said:

The White House is creating a roundtable regarding the manufacturing of electric buses in the United States. Hopefully we can manage to attract foreign companies to enter the US market, similar to how many European and Japanese train manufacturers have constructed facilities in the US. Because at the current state of having 2 major bus manufacturers in the United States, the companies simply are unable to keep up with the demand for new electric busses, not to mention the fact that there is hardly any competition to encourage them to improve their busses, especially considering the far higher quality of buses by European manufacturers like Mercedes and Scania

Since you were talking foreign, there is Warren Buffett owned BYD, which is not getting "traction." Reorganized Proterra is back to assembling buses. And here are three essential, related issues:

• What does a foreign company gain to come here? If there were any money to be made here, Volvo/Nova would not have left. I don't know what the Chinese government sought to gain by bringing CRRC here, but that apparently bombed, and Congress barred it from getting new customers. MAN was here and then gone, because it couldn't afford to import German parts.
• The issue most assemblers and manufacturers raise is a lack of components. For instance, Gillig and ENC cited, among other things, that they used Proterra's batteries, the source of which was purchased by Volvo, but there are other problems, such as chip shortages.
• Any foreign-owned company would have to be Buy America Act compliant. From the above, if a foreign company can't import its bus, is limited in importing components, and can't procure sufficient components here, what's the point?

Toyota makes a neat-looking fuel cell bus, but you won't see it here.

 

[Busjack]

If you were hankering for a BYD car, doesn't look like it is going to happen. It was reported that BYD would probably not import from China, but might set up a factory in Mexico to come under the USMCA (AutoWeek), Now Biden is raising the tariff on EVs manufactured in China from 25% to 100%. Yahoo! Finance says it probably will have little immediate effect on the U.S.  market (the main Chinese exporter being Polestar), but China has excess production that it is trying to dump.

Surprisingly, there seems to be agreement on both sides of the U.S. political divide to stick it to China.