Electric Vehicles

To Swap or Not to Swap? Batteries in the Electric Vehicle

As the electric vehicle (EV) industry evolves a wildcard is whether swappable batteries go mainstream or become another trial balloon in the effort to lower costs and increase range. Swapping batteries is already a niche industry in China, but if history repeats itself here, they will be sidelined in North America. The issue is to swap…
The $27,389 Car: An Electric Vehicle Price-Point

If you are curious about the price- point that convinces drivers to switch to an electric vehicle (EV) think $27,389. That’s a winning window sticker. In dollars, it’s a tad more than the $25,000 car that Elon Musk promised in 2020. Instead, Musk brought the Cybertruck to market which can cost more than $100,000. There’s…
Stop Exporting Those Gas Cars!

The vehicle you traded in a decade or two ago may still be on the road, plying roadways in Central America, Africa, or Eastern Europe. The developing world has been shipping out older, gasoline guzzling cars and trucks for a long time. In fact, one-quarter of the world’s population lives in countries where about 50%…
Dumb: Smartphone Apps Try to Plug Into the Utility Grid

Sometimes it pays to be dumb. Particularly when it comes to smartphone apps that try to plug your electric car into the utility grid. This Fall (October, 2024) a well-known and popular EV charging device failed. Connected Juice Box chargers stopped working. That’s because their European owner, called Enel X Way, stopped supporting this software…
Locally Sourced: Should You Care Where Your Car is Made?

Labels like ‘locally sourced’ and ‘farm to table’ are ways that we discern the quality of our food. They are not generally applicable to transportation as they conjure images of healthy edibles in a reputable supply chain. Until now, locally sourced has not been important in the automotive realm. In fact, car shoppers often paid…
Electric Vehicle Myths: Is it Cleaner to Keep Your Gas Car?

Cars and trucks are on the road for upward of 12 years now. So why not keep your vehicle running instead of replacing it? It’s an electric vehicle (EV) myth that it is cleaner to keep your gas car.
The Car That Never Sleeps: Who Controls the Downloads?

We all get these notifications- “please keep your phone plugged in for a download tonight.” It seems like when we go to sleep our smartphones do not. Increasingly, cars are going to be staying awake too. Modern vehicles require software updates during the downtime when there’s more bandwidth and less interruption. This “synchronicity” brings some…
Ablaze From a Car Fire. Is that Car Electric?

People are afraid of car fires. But they should be less afraid of ones from new electric cars. There’s a lot of flammable misinformation.
Smartphones and Cars Blend… (or brick)

As smartphones and cars continue to blend it seems like phones are the technology, for now, that goes the extra mile. More than 25 years ago, Frances Cairncross, the media editor for the Economist, pronounced the “death of distance.” Cars have become the ultimate smartphone with their large touchscreens, automatic crash reporting, and collection of…
Electric Vehicles at Disneyland (someday)

For as long as I can remember, Autopia is my family’s first stop at the Happiest Place on Earth, aka Anaheim’s Disneyland. Admittedly, that’s incongruous considering we have driven forty or fifty miles on the treacherous Interstate 5 and encountered traffic snarls throughout. But even if you loathe the car trip to Disneyland, you don’t…
Electric Vehicles are Tailgating Superstars

Tailgating should be on everyone’s mind after the LVIII Super Bowl. It was a long party- in fact the longest Super Bowl game in history- and it also had, if you count, the fewest number of ads for new cars. There were just four car advertisements, and three of them touted electric vehicle models (EVs)…
The Big Freeze: Storytelling for Electric Vehicles

Baby it’s cold outside….but the EV stories are heating up. Particularly the ones that favor the status quo.
Future Cars Will Talk

Autonomous cars may be headed your way and they will be in dialogue. Today, Google’s Waymo vehicles display your personal initials when they arrive at your pickup. But they lack an advance way to communicate more information. That will change and future cars will talk. It’s called a “tertiary language.” “Tertiary language” is not a…