Many of you are worried about the long-term reliability of electric vehicle batteries. I know because you ask me all of the time. Among skeptics and prospective buyers alike, it’s one of the first things to come up: Will the battery last? Yet more and more data is showing that modern EV traction batteries just don’t fail in significant numbers. You don’t have to worry about them. It’s the damn 12-volts that’ll leave you stranded in the office parking lot. Internal combustion drivers know that risk. Traditional cars use a 12-volt battery—usually a chunky lead-acid unit—to start the vehicle and power the electronics. You may expect that EVs, with their massive drive batteries, don’t need these ancient bricks. Yet they rely on them for the exact same reasons. EV 12-volt
Tag Archives: EVIndustry
Mar
The Xiaomi SU7 Ultra comes with 1,526 horsepower and costs $72,750. The brand wants to sell 10,000 units of the SU7 Ultra in 2025. Recently, the SU7 Ultra beat a Porsche Taycan Turbo GT around the Shanghai International Circuit by about 1.5 seconds. It can be pretty hard to keep up with the breakneck speed of China’s electric vehicle industry. Within about 18 months, Xiaomi pivoted from making cheap cellphones and laptops to a full-blown electric car. That model rocketed to the top of Chinese sales charts and even impressed the hell out of Ford’s CEO, who drove one around the Chicagoland area for weeks. Now, the brand has put 1,500 worth of electric motors in the thing, and they’re gunning for necks of some of the fastest EVs on
Jan
Forget the EV tax credit. Rivian founder and CEO R.J. Scaringe is far more concerned about another threat from President Donald Trump: tariffs. “It has, in some ways, bigger implications, far bigger, than what happens with the IRA tax credits,” Scaringe told reporters last week, referring to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which contains pro-EV policies that Trump has attacked time and time again. “There’s not a car company in the world that’s not thinking about moving supply chains around right now,” Scaringe said. More From Our Chat With Rivian’s CEO Trump plans to slap 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada on February 1, in an attempt to pressure those governments into preventing the flow of drugs and undocumented immigrants into the U.S. But it’s American consumers and