👀 A Look at the Future of Electric Cars

Good Day, this is your Electric Daily. The email that gives you a daily jolt of electric vehicle trends, insights, and predictions, in 5 minutes or less.

In Today's Email:

• 👀 A Look at the Future of Electric Cars

• 🔋 More Range With Sulfur Batteries

• ▶️ Video of the Day

• 🗒️ Four Nuggets

—Riz Nwosu

A Look at the Future of Electric Cars

As electric cars continue to increase, it is not out of place to wonder what the future has in store for electric vehicles and their impact on humanity. ICE vehicles have had their day, and today's post peers into the future of electric cars.

All legacy auto companies will make electric vehicles

Traditional automakers are joining EV startups in making electric vehicles and abandoning their ICE heritage. The strongest among them are starting to vie for the second position behind Tesla. Examples include German Volkswagen, whose CEO is an advocate of an overhaul in the company culture that must take place for Volkswagen to be competitive in the electric vehicle segment. He is is joined by GM, Ford, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, Peugeot, etc.

While these legacy companies have better access to funds, they will face the challenge of retooling existing production facilities for making electric vehicles. They will also have to retrain their workers.

More governments will shift to electric

More governments are recognizing the connection between ICE vehicles and climate change. This is why some of them are using policies and even outright bans to move their populations away from carbon-emitting ICE vehicles to environmentally-friendly electric vehicles. The UK is an example, as it has banned the sales of new ICE light-weight vehicles after 2030.

Moves like this will make EVs more popular, especially when combined with tax incentives.

Old batteries have to be dealt with

Electric vehicles are still in their infancy, with many earlier models still on the road. However, unserviceable batteries will have to be taken care of as the years go by since they do not last forever. This means millions of old batteries are waiting in the future of electric vehicles.

Some companies are exploring recycling the materials to make new batteries, while others want to repurpose them in energy storage systems.

The electric vehicle industry will have to work out a way to dispose of these batteries without them constituting hazardous waste to the environment.

Vehicle ownership culture will change

Electric vehicles will change the way we have owned cars in the past. For example, while ICE vehicles have longer driving ranges, EV owners have to stop more often to recharge the battery on long trips because of their relatively shorter driving ranges. Even when both vehicles stop for a refuel, the ICE car driver will get back on the road a lot faster than the EV car driver will, as the latter could take up to an hour to ‘fill’ up their EV battery.

Some EV owners choose to engage in other activities while waiting for their vehicles to charge. Similarly, many EV owners charge at home by installing a charging station instead of driving over to a filling station or transporting fuel in containers. This shift in fueling behavior presents a huge business economic opportunity from the commerce that will happen while EV drivers are waiting for their vehicles to charge.

With the transition to electric mobility, gas station C-Stores will soon become a thing of the past as fueling behavior shifts from gas stations to destination charging locations. Companies like Bluedot are addressing this new paradigm and are poised to become big players in tis space in the coming years.

More Range With Sulfur Batteries

Theion, a German battery firm, is promising a new sulfur battery technology that may enable common electric cars to go 900 miles on a single charge. What's the best part? Sulfur is inexpensive when compared to the key constituents of traditional NMC li-ion batteries.

Rare earth minerals abound in the batteries of electric vehicles. As a result, they are costly and, with few exceptions, ethically challenging to create. Theion is wagering that by basing its battery technology on minerals that are significantly more plentiful than those used in "traditional" lithium-ion cells, it will be able to produce a competitive battery that will avoid all of these shortages of recent.

Existing battery technology is made up of 80% nickel, 10% manganese, and 10% cobalt or NMC 811. What Theion's tech does is substitute sulfur for NMC 811. So there is no nickel, manganese, or cobalt required in our cells, and then they replace the existing collective folds of copper and aluminum with graphene, negating the need for aluminum or copper in the cells as well. Theion's battery cell will just consist of a lithium metal foil, sulfur, and carbon.

If they can pull this off, that would be a game changer for EV technology as it will not only make battery production cheaper and more efficient, but also bring down the overall cost of an electric vehicle as the battery constitutes a large portion of the material cost.

Video of the Day

Check out the new redesigned 2022 Kia Niro EV. It's pretty decent looking for a Kia 👏 :

4 Nuggets

• DeLorean teases its EV concept car - [Read more here]

• EV Sales At Warren Buffett-Backed BYD Quadrupled In March - [Read more here]

• France Plugin EV Share Hits 21.4% As Diesels Reach Record Low - [Read more here]

• The Chevy Bolt EV Battery Recall Bonus That Nobody's Talking About - [Read more here]

Consider yourself 80% charged. Why 80%? Well, according to legend, charging your battery to 100% repeatedly will degrade it faster than normal. See ya tomorrow!

What'd you think about today's email?

• ⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡ Fully charged

• ⚡⚡ Meh - was ok

• ⚡ Not even close

Written by Riz Nwosu

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