Renault

Key to Successful Pure Electric Cars

There is no correlation of successful sales numbers or value with oil price or even up-front price in relation to electric cars. Dr Peter Harrop explores their trajectory.

Huge Battery Opportunities from Radical Changes in EV Demand

The biggest demand for lithium-ion batteries is moving away from cars and in electric cars it will be a matter of less battery on average.

Electric Vehicle Calamity in Ten Years?

Car demand will collapse as people move to cities. $100 billion was written off the stock value of car companies recently. The US economy is on a sugar rush from a trillion-dollar borrowing boost at the top of the cycle. Climate change getting out of control in 12 years? These and many other negative indicators can portend a recession, maybe a severe one. What are the implications for EVs?

China: Electric Vehicle Program Beyond Cars

The Chinese government shrewdly controls supply and demand for sectors it deems important. As elsewhere it has to cope with people moving to cities.

IDTechEx Show! Agenda Live: Connecting Brands & Emerging Technologies

The IDTechEx Show! on April 10-11 in Berlin brings together eight key disruptive technologies and their customers at one venue.

Auto industry reacts to deal on CO2 targets for cars and vans

The European Automobile Manufacturers' Association takes note of the final deal on the CO2 regulation for cars and vans, setting targets for the years 2025 and 2030, which was struck by the EU member states and the European Parliament.

Argonaut Power and Northumbrian Water to pilot battery storage

Argonaut Power, Ingenious' flexible energy platform, has partnered with Northumbrian Water to pilot the use of large scale battery storage at a number of the utility's sites across the North East, Essex and Suffolk.

Alliance Ventures invests in Enevate

Alliance Ventures, the strategic venture capital arm of Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, has announced that it has invested in the latest round of funding in Enevate Corporation, an advanced lithium-ion battery technology company based in Irvine, California.

UK Power Networks' electric vans lead the charge against air pollution

Britain's biggest electricity distributor has become the first of London's utility networks to put Electric Vehicles on the capital's roads, as part of its operational fleet.

Will battery second life have an impact on recycling?

2018 is regarded as the beginning year for battery recycling as the first batch of batteries are gradually coming out of electric vehicles. Umicore has recently announced their investment plan in ramping up battery recycling capacity in preparation for the boom of spent EV batteries. By 2018, we will already have around 33,000 retired electric vehicle battery packs (including electric passenger cars and buses) which amounts to around 1GWh storage capacity.

Will second-life batteries need to compete with new batteries?

Hyundai Motor Group has recently announced a commercial partnership with energy company Wärtsilä to utilize second-life electric vehicle batteries for stationary energy storage at both commercial and utility scales. This is not the first piece of news that automotive companies are trying to give a second life to their retired EV batteries as major EV manufactures including Nissan, Renault, BMW, Daimler, BYD etc. have announced various battery second use projects around the world.

All EV batteries born after August 2018 in China will have unique IDs

The end-of-life issue of electric vehicle batteries is a key topic in the sustainability of EVs. By 2029, there will be 3 million used battery packs coming out of EVs per year which amounts to around 108GWh available storage capacity (see the IDTechEx's latest report on Second-life Electric Vehicle Batteries). What will happen to this huge amount of retired car batteries?

Large Opportunity for 48VMH Medium and Large Trucks?

Like the car equivalents, 48V mild hybrid trucks do not start as electric vehicles (driving the wheels electrically some or all of the time) but they are headed that way.

What can we do with 100GWh of retired electric vehicle batteries?

More and more companies are exploring how to extract value by repurposing a second-life for those retired but still capable car batteries in less-demanding applications such as stationary energy storage.

Ionic Materials

Ionic Materials (IM) is a US-based start-up developing a solid polymer electrolyte for Li-ion batteries. Founded in 2011 by Mike Zimmerman, serial entrepreneur and professor at Tufts University, in 2018 the company raised $65M in a Series C funding round that included Hyundai, Renault-Nissan, A123 Systems, Total, and Hitachi Chemical, among other investors.