transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Welcome back to EV News Daily. On the podcast today, BMW update the i7, Rivian starts building the R2, and Smart brings back the 4.2. Plus stay tuned. Later in the show, I'll tell you how two new pilots are bringing vehicle to grid another step closer to the rest of us. Over on our spin-off podcast today, EV News China. Today, we're talking about CATL making battery breakthroughs, the Leap Motor D19, and VW's China EVs. I wish I could spend longer talking about the CATL technology on this podcast. It is all available in China, though, so that's why we've got the spin-off podcast these days. But if you want to know, go listen to the first minute, and I try and summarize it all, then we go deeper. But basically, they're introducing a 10% to 90% battery charge in less than seven minutes, about six and a half minutes. 10% to 90%. It's a full battery. They're also introducing a new LFP pack for long-range EVs that will charge at 15C, and on an average size pack, around 100kWh, I think, delivering 600 miles, 1000km. Also, a new aviation grade technology, a new hybrid battery, which mixes LFP and NCM, sodium ion, and a battery swapping network as well. It's just, well, we can't get it outside of China, so there's no point putting it on this podcast. But if you're interested, first minutes of summary over on there, and then the first 10 minutes or so I dive into all of that news. Let's get into it today. BMW's revealed an updated 7 Series and calls it the most extensive refresh ever applied to a BMW. The electric i7 will arrive in September with plug-in hybrids later. Pricing will be up from what it is at the moment. Now here in the UK starts at £105,000. It'll be more. The battery's bigger, goes from 105.7 to 112.5 kilowatt hours. It uses the same Gen 6 cylindrical cells as all the latest Neue Klasse goodness, but it's not a full Neue Klasse platform vehicle like the iX3 and the incoming i3. Maximum range though is, it's really big. It goes from 387 to 452 miles. Maximum DC charging. Well, it's not Chinese speeds, but it's 250 kilowatts. And I'm almost being an apologist for that. It's good, isn't it? 250. Both i7 variants use the iX3's electrically excited synchronous motor and dual-wheel mode, dual-motor drive. BMW makes adaptive dampers and active rear steering available on the whole range. The styling also looks like another class of styling, like the iX3 with the crystal embedded headlights, the new air intakes, the horizontal slat grill at the rear. Looks like a wider iX, i3, and this is a big vehicle, the i7. 22 inch wheels look right sized. There's the two-tone exterior finished, which looks very premium and very Maybach-y and joins the options list for the first time. The buyers can choose from 500 exterior color combinations. The 7 Series becomes the first BMW to offer a front passenger touch screen. If your front passenger really wants a touch screen, they can now have one, a 14.6 inch unit and that's fitted to standard. The cabin gets the iX3's 17.9 inch slanted central touch screen and the iX3 steering wheel. The traditional instrument cluster makes way for the 43 inch panoramic iDrive display. At the back, you still get the 8K 31 inch cinema screen that folds down from the roof, 35 speaker audio system, an Alcantara trimmed, fully reclining executive seats in the rear. I guess they're also aiming this at the China market as well, where people are driven a little more and you want to feel like a king. In the back of this, you certainly would do as well. Automatically opening doors come as standard on every model because touching a door handle these days is, wait, so last year. Okay, I know the market is small for an expensive 100K plus saloon car, but still, I like talking about these top end halo products. They're interesting. Here's a car that more people will buy, the Rivian R2. And it just begun production of customer cars at its normal Illinois plant. We know because Rivian CFO disclosed that in a Reuters interview, Rivian says first customer deliveries begin in the spring, but we know that reservation holders won't get their invitations until June to configure the car. Is June till spring? There is an official definition of the last day of spring, and I guess you could really hold their feet to the fire. But they say customer deliveries in spring, but then you can't configure it till June. And besides, the first one's anyway, the launch edition, which costs $58,000. If you want your bargain basement, $45,000, you've got to wait till next year. Rivian expects the R2 to reach high run rate volumes next year. And when it reaches scale of production, it will cost less than half of what their R1 series vehicles cost to make. R2 carries more than simply volume. It supports their autonomy plus package that cost $2,500. And the firm's own in-house self-driving chip program, which they're also working with Uber on, which is worth about $1.25 billion, should be rolling out in 25 cities. General Motors was forced to deny a report this week. GM says it has not canceled their electric truck programs. Three sources told Crane's Detroit Business that the carmaker had indefinitely delayed their electric trucks. Crane's Detroit Business is a well-respected and highly connected automotive news outlet, part of a larger organization that, again, is full of real journalists, people that actually do journalism, the thing that billionaires like the Musks and Trumps of the world really hate, being asked awkward questions. So that's why much of the media ran with it earlier this week. But General Motors pushed back and said it was false. So Crane's wrote, I'll quickly read you what they wrote on Monday. General Motors has indefinitely delayed its next generation full-size electric trucks amid waning EV sales and a pivot back to internal combustion engine technology. The Detroit-based automaker had been developing lower-cost, refreshed versions of the all-electric GMC Sierra, Silverado and Hummer EVs and pick up with a targeted start production of 2028, according to three people with knowledge of the plan who requested anonymity. Suppliers were recently informed that the next-gen electric truck program was halted and no new timetable specified. The Escalade IQ, underpinned by the same platform, is expected for an eyes-off driving supercruise update next year. Sorry, 2028. Supplier executives and analysts told Cranes they do not expect to see a new generation of the all-electric truck line until 2030. Well, General Motors pushed back and told motor1.com, GM has not cancelled any electric trucks. EVs remain the end game for GM. Yeah, but they haven't cancelled any electric trucks, have they? Maybe I'm just being picky. GM drew a line between the delayed program and its current models because GM's, the reported delays of the next generation trucks would be a really big deal. Their truck line up, the Chevrolet Silverado, GMC Hummer, Cadillac Escalade. They were all quite high-tech vehicles, but massive sellers. That would certainly be a bloody nose for the company if they admitted defeat and wound down those programs or cancelled them. Much easier to delay them, isn't it? And avoid the publicity. I don't know. Maybe it's me. Right, let's move on. The Smart number two, sorry, hashtag two has been unveiled. This is the spiritual successor to the Smart 4.2. And like that car, it's a two-door, two-person layout for city use. It's still technically a concept, but why wouldn't they make it? Smart expects to produce this model. The Smart hashtag two will be electric only and use the electric compact architecture platform. Smart puts range at 186 miles, that's 300 kilometers. Look, the old one would do what, 58 miles? So it will do 10 to 80 charge in under 20 minutes, they say. It'll have vehicle to load? I think this could be really popular in some parts of the world. Lots of people love the Smart 4.2 and the 4.4, but that two-seat, two-door urban, clearly not the only car that you have in your driveway, probably anyway, but a second or third car, or just something for fun, for blotting around the city, for parking in small spaces, for getting through narrow gaps. I can see this being popular. Come on, make it as soon as possible. It's 106 inches long, 102.7 meters for the entire vehicle. That puts it very close to the old 4.2 inside, smaller than a Dacia Spring, which is like, it's a tiny car here, and the Renault Twingo as well. One more story before we take a break. Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles is rolling out an update to the ID Buzz. They call it a technology update this summer across the entire range, particularly on the new 4Motion, which is their four-wheel drive. It's the Pro Trim 4Motion. So it's the ID Buzz Pro 4Motion. And so it's got all-wheel drive, but it's not the GTX. But it is the same powertrain now as the GTX. So, 210 kilowatt rear motor and a second front motor for a combined 250. Also, you can spec it in cherry red, which used to be the GTX color. So you could probably get, and also there's a candy white cherry red two-tone combo. Looks nice. So basically you can get what is a GTX looking vehicle on the Pro Trim with the 4Motion. The old 600 kilogram towing limit goes to 1.8 tons on the short wheelbase. The standard wheelbase version keeps the smaller battery, 79 kilowatt-hours net. The longer wheelbase version, which is probably the one you should get anyway, because then you can get, if you want, the six-seat configuration. It's almost 12 inches longer, 30 centimeters. That's the 86 kilowatt-hour battery. It skips the smaller LFP battery cells used in other MEBs. Volkswagen has also reworked the cabin tech. Travel Assist becomes connected travel assist, which reflects live online data. And for the first time on the buzz, it will not pick up traffic lights. And if it detects a red light, it breaks the vehicle to a standstill. One pedal driving is standard, which it always should have been on every EV. But anyway, so recuperation will bring the vehicle to a complete stop. New steering wheel as well, dropping the horrible touch-sensitive surfaces. Vehicle to load is joining the list through a charging port adapter. You can pull two kilowatts, not the six kilowatts that many Chinese cars need a vehicle to load, but that's still better than nothing. If you want to hear all about the Chinese cars, by the way, that's why we launched a month long project last summer called EV News China to educate myself and hopefully pass that on if you're interested. It was going to be a month of shows diving into China. And here we are in April, almost a year later. And we do it Monday to Friday. EV News China, if you haven't heard it yet, if you see it in your feed and just delete it, I mean, that's fine, a bit like briefly, you don't need it, just delete it. But lots of people are finding interesting little nuggets of information in that podcast. I try and keep it under 20 minutes like this one, but I don't always succeed. We'll take a break. We'll be back in a second. Welcome back to the podcast. ChargePoint has unveiled the Express Solo. That's a new DC fast charger that will deliver 600 kilowatts of power from a single box. It's obviously a chunky box because it's not like the modern convention of having small dispensers and then some cabinets further away. This is all in one, but compared to what they used to look like, this is pretty small actually. They say it sets a new benchmark. It will fit urban gas station forecourts and convenience store car parks. Express Solo supports two simultaneous charging sessions, but it can, if you want, send all 600 kilowatts to a single vehicle. It's got CCS1 and J3400 or NACs, and the charger accepts direct DC input. It says that it lets operators link with on-site energy storage systems and removes the need for an AC to DC converter or inverter really. ChargePoint says this DC architecture enables bi-directional charging so the unit can draw power from a parked EV to replenish an on-site battery if you wanted to configure it that way. France's government has unveiled a national strategy to deploy EV charging across major road corridors by 2035. The Ministry of Transport published the plan after announcements earlier this month. The target sits at around 30,000 charging points on motorways and national roads. The strategy centers on high-power charging for medium and long-distance electric travel. So the network is only 2% of France's total road length but carries a third of all traffic. For light vehicles, France plans to install 22,000 fast charging points across 900 service and rest areas, at least 150 kilowatt power output. Coca-Cola is adding new Volvo electric trucks to their lineup. These ones will go to British Columbia and Quebec, pushing its electric fleet to 40 electric vehicles. The company's deployed three electric trucks in Quebec City, adding four more in the Vancouver area. The move builds on earlier pilot programs and extending their electrification strategy, which began back in 2022 with Volvo. In 2023, they ran a pilot program with their six Volvo VNRs. The trial tested the trucks in real world conditions and they flew through that trial running local and regional routes as well. Coca-Cola Canada Bottling said predictable schedules and shorter distances make electric trucks the obvious answer. Each Volvo VNR uses a six battery configuration with a range up to 273 miles or 440 kilometers. And we'll finish off with a couple of stories about grid integration. Firstly, PG&E and Tesla has added the Cybertruck to their PG&E residential vehicle-to-grid program. The setup uses Tesla's PowerShare Gateway and Universal Wall Connector to let energy move between the vehicle and the home and the grid. PG&E says the system should improve the flexibility and resilience of California's grid. The program marks the first AC based vehicle-to-grid application approved. Ford and GM also take part in the initiative. GM, for instance, has their 19.2 kW bi-directional PowerShift charger. Customers in the pilot, if you have a Cybertruck in California, will receive incentives of up to $4500 for bi-directional charging equipment and interconnection costs. You can also earn extra compensation for taking part in grid events. During peak demand, enrolled vehicles exports electricity back to the grid. In response to signals sent by the grid, those exports support programs like emergency load reduction. That program pays customers for cutting your energy use. From California to Germany, where Volkswagen and its energy subsidiary, Eli, plans to launch a fully integrated vehicle to grid offering for customers in Germany in Q4 this year, pre-registration opens in June. Volkswagen says customers could earn up to 900 euros annually. The longer term goal is to be cost neutral. At first, Volkswagen will not pay to have live trading, but customer compensation links to charging flexibility. In time, you will be able to become part of grid trading. You mean you won't personally? That will sit behind a Volkswagen layer, as it were. So you're not sitting at home doing trades. All quick electricity has gone cheap, or whatever that would be in German. Quick buy, sell. However, they would do that, but you would effectively, in time, be part of that live trading. However, for now, you get rewarded for flexibility to give customers a predictable and transparent entry point into the world of vehicle to grid. The covers dynamic electricity, a DC bi-directional charger, smart meter integration and digital controls via an app. Volkswagen says the MEB platform already underpins around one million bi-directional capable EVs on European roads. It's almost three years since Volkswagen said that they would bring bi-directionality vehicle to grid technology to the MEB platform, and they've slow walked that one, haven't they? Look, I'm not criticizing. I am a little bit, aren't I? Yeah, I mean, don't make promises you can't keep. I understand grid integration is difficult. I'm sure lots of people far smarter than me are working night and day to make it happen. We can't wait to see it though. Upcoming ID software, version 6, will extend vehicle to grid to additional battery sizes and VW models as well. I just can't wait for the day when it's turnkey, when it's like, oh, I bought a car and I'm on this tariff and it all just works, and I've got a wall box. Now, I know you can do that in here, in this country, Octopus do it with a BYD lease scheme, and there's more around the world, but still, we just can't wait for it to be a bit more normal, integrating our EVs into vehicle to grid and vehicle to home in an easier way. Not these little small pilot trial programs, but hey, they all play a part, don't they? And that's your podcast for today. Thanks to our premium partners on Patreon, National Car Charging on the US mainland, and Aloha Charge in Hawaii, and TestEV, Avalu's trusted partner for independent EV battery health testing in Australia and New Zealand. Have a good one. See you tomorrow. And remember, there's no such thing as a self charging hybrid.