Leafs Light Up Japan

One of the primary questions facing the electric vehicle industry is what happens to the lithium ion batteries after the vehicle has either crashed or it’s met the end of its useful life. Lithium Ion batteries are far more impressive than their Nickel-metal-hydride predecessors, but after 10,000 cycles or so, they will start to see some capacity loss due to general wear and tear. You’ll know from having a cell phone that batteries don’t last forever, but Nissan is preparing for the future by partnering with a company called 4R Energy Corporation. They are recycling used Nissan Leaf batteries in street lights, which utilize a combination of solar generation and storage (in the former Leaf battery cells) to provide illumination to roads not served by the electrical grid. They’re starting this program in Namie, Japan, which was hit hard by and is still recovering from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. Pilots are under testing now and the company plans to install lights throughout the town later this year. One can see this being especially useful in other disaster zones like Puerto Rico after Maria, New York after Sandy or the city of New Orleans after a weekend night.

Lincoln Launches Subscription Service

If you’ve ever wanted to drive a used Lincoln, but the thought of owning one just put you off too much, there’s great news. The company is following in the footsteps of Volvo, Cadillac and Porsche and offering a subscription service. No, not for the new Continental or Navigator. For its used cars. That means you can pay just over $400 a month to drive New York’s finest fleet taxi vehicle, the MKX. If that price doesn’t sound appealing, consider that that price also pays for insurance, maintenance, warranty and the ability to swap into a slightly smaller but no more enjoyable MKC at any time. If it still doesn’t sound appealing, than consider yourself in the same boat as me.

California Self-Driving Registration Deadline Update

April 2nd was the first day self-driving cars could legally hit the roads in California. Being home to more than 50 companies testing autonomous systems, it was slated to be a truly historic day for the state. And then only one company applied for a permit. So on the first day, zero self-driving cars hit the road. The timing, perhaps, was not excellent, coming on the heels of Uber’s fatal wreck and a general cringing of other companies as they look to perfect technology before pushing it out to the public. Nevertheless, it’s a good sign that California is regulating it, and that companies were honest enough with their self-assessments that nobody is putting unsafe hardware out on the streets.

Thumbs Down to BMW

Thumbs are great – they’re one of the best things about being human and allow us to grab things and compete in sports like baseball and tennis without accidentally flinging rackets and bats everywhere. We all like our thumbs, and so does BMW, but perhaps not in the right way. According to a law suit filed in New York, a software developer named Godwin Boateng was waiting for a friend, posted up with his hand on the pillar of his front driver’s door, acting casual, as you do. This BMW X5, however, was equipped with the company’s Soft Closing Automatic Doors (unfortunately abbreviated SCAD), which casually closed on Godwin’s thumb, causing it to then separate from his body. After taking his BMW and his thumb to the hospital, doctors were unable to attach the latter, which has caused Godwin considerable consternation about the former, leading to the lawsuit alleging BMW knew that the sensors in the SCAD system were faulty and didn’t do anything to fix them. I don’t have to tell you listeners that, regardless of your car or features, it’s not a great idea to dangle any phalanges in places where there’s even the possibility that they may be involuntarily amputated, nor was I aware BMW even had a feature that would close doors on you, which is slightly creepy. In any case, who’s got two thumbs and chose the right German car? This guuyyyyyyy.

Florida Civic Takes Short Trip, Long Dip

Source: Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office — Source: Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office

I don’t have a pool, mostly because I’m lazy and the maintenance sounds absolutely dreadful, but if I did, and I didn’t have to work on a Tuesday afternoon, I’d totally take a quick splash to unwind. But I don’t think that’s what was planned earlier this month when a Florida resident left her car without placing it in park, causing the vehicle to roll into a nearby pool. Making matters worse, her husband and daughter were inside and were subjected to an unexpected plunging. They both made it out safely, but the same cannot be said for the bright blue civic, which looked positively serene at the bottom of a no doubt pissed off neighbor’s pool. The jokes here are obvious – gives a whole new meaning to carpool, go for a drive, not a dive, for sale with slight water damage, etc. etc. Please feel free to write your own as I enjoy not picking leaves out of my pool.

Cheetah Thinks Land Rovers are Purrfect

Big cats are noble creatures, and that’s probably why Jaguar chose one as its mascot. Even Mercury had the Cougar, which started out as a muscle car and developed into something, well, bad. But every once in a while we’re reminded that big cats are essentially just gigantic versions of the little assholes who go around knocking cups off the counter tops and destroying the legs of couches in homes across the world. Recently, wildlife photographer Peter Heistein was touring the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania when he paused in his Land Rover for lunch while observing a group of cheetahs. As they are wont, one of the curious cats approached and then jumped into Heistein’s car, sampling the fine interior head rests and gaining a commanding view of the surrounding plains. Heistein did the opposite of what you see on most YouTube Fail videos and remained calm, respected the animal’s space and allowed it to leave once it inevitably got bored. Next time the cat pukes on my pillow, I’m going to tell myself “at least it didn’t devour my interior.”

Not Stock Nissan Outruns All

If having a car with a ridiculously high top speed that you’ll never achieve on public roads or basically anywhere but an air strip or a salt flat is what you are looking for, you have several very expensive cars to select from. The McLaren P1, the LaFerrari, Lamborghini Aventador, you get it. Or you could get a Nissan Rogue Sport and beat all of those, because that’s just what some English guys did. British speed shop Severn Valley Motorsports made some slight tweaks to their Nissan, which is for sale in Europe as the awkwardly-named Qashqai, and hit a blistering 237 miles per hour, making it the world’s fastest SUV, though unofficially because it didn’t make two runs in opposing directions. What sort of tweaks did they make, you ask? Well, actually quite big tweaks. They threw out the absolute shit 2.5 litre four and CVT and tucked in the 3.8 litre twin turbo V6 from the Nissan GT-R, lowered it and provided a bunch of bespoke bodywork to streamline the otherwise boxy thing. So while sure, this is neat and it’s great that people are having fun in Nissan Rogues, this does absolutely not change my opinion that they are cars for people who would rather be doing anything but driving.

Devlin & G35 circle story attribution.png

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

It’s another week in 2018, meaning there’s been a new batch of news about electric vehicles since they’re pretty much regarded as the future of motoring. But how fast that future is coming is very much in question, and a new study from the Centers for Automotive Research suggests it’s not any time soon. According to the study, government emissions and fuel economy mandates are helping drive the push into future technologies, rather than consumer interest, which tracks with the amount of people leasing electric vehicles instead of buying them.

The research suggests that electrification and self-driving tech will start in densely-populated urban areas with ride sharing services and slowly proliferate to the rest of the market with EVs expected to comprise just eight percent of the vehicle market by 2030. Remember that several cities and countries are aiming to ban the sales of gasoline and diesel-powered cars by 2040, so to make up a 92% gap in adoption in the span of ten years will require some serious incentives or some revised expectations. Additionally, any sort of slowing new vehicle sales market (like we’re seeing now) or economic downturn (like what might result from the ridiculously high deep subprime vehicle loan market) would push adoption even further down the line.

The United Kingdom’s National Grid, however, isn’t waiting around for electric cars to take off. The electric utility announced this week that they would spend between £500 million and £1 billion to upgrade the electrical grid and install 50 fast chargers throughout the country to the point that 90% of the population would live within 50 miles of a fast charger. Such chargers would fill batteries in most EVs in about 12 minutes, which will go a long way toward soothing the range anxiety of British EV owners. Current demand for such chargers may be low, but in 2017, for the first time, the Tesla Model S outsold both the BMW 7 series and the Mercedes S-Class, so demand is certainly there among the upper crust buyers.

But you may not see many other cars at those chargers for some time since the Centers for Automotive Research also suggested that investment in electric vehicle technology would slow over the next few years as companies fail to see the return on their investment with slow sales. Part of the problem with investment is that production of EVs is still very expensive because of rare earth elements like cobalt, which is used in batteries. The demand for cobalt has driven a boom in small-scale cobalt production in Africa, particularly the Democratic Republic of Congo, where some mines have been found using child labor to meet production quotas. These small-scale mines, which are sometimes referred to as “artisanal mines” because nothing can just have a normal name anymore, are tough to police and companies that purchase from them are increasingly under pressure to better vet how the resources are being produced. The value of cobalt has tripled in the last 18 months, and companies looking for the lowest cost aren’t likely to commit too much effort into ensuring their suppliers are acting ethically, which is a problem. Unfortunately, the answer usually means slowing the pace of production or paying more from reputable miners.

Toyota, however, is exploring a third option, which is developing batteries that don’t rely on rare-earth elements. While they haven’t yet found a replacement for cobalt, they have developed a battery that uses less neodymium, replacing it with lanthanum and cerium, which I understand are much more abundant and cheaper despite the fact that I’ve never heard of them before. That said, the development will take a while to get itself into vehicles and Toyota is aiming for implementation sometime in the next ten years, which won’t help potential neodymium shortages in the near-term. Now to figure out that whole cobalt thing…