At this point, most industry watchers would agree that car dealers are a barrier to the electrification of the car industry. Recent studies have painted a negative (borderline disastrous) picture of the electric vehicle shopping experience. Car dealers’ lack of interest in selling EVs have led to poor knowledge about the vehicles, no inventories, cars often being left uncharged and not ready for test drives.

Knowing car dealers make most of their money from service and that EVs have fewer moving parts and therefore require less service, Tesla anticipated the issue and decided to operate its own sales force. But other automakers are stuck with their dealership networks and they are now trying to get them on-board with EVs in order to be competitive in the ongoing electrification of the industry. expand full story

Indiana is becoming the latest battleground in Tesla’s seemingly endless war against car dealers and automakers over the right to sell its vehicles directly to consumers without having to go through third-party dealers.

The state legislature introduced a new bill that would prohibit Tesla from selling its cars in the state and they did it in the most unsubtle way. expand full story

The “Right to Repair”, which primarily aims to force electronic manufacturers to sell replacement parts and make their diagnostic and service manuals available to independent repair shops and consumers, is gaining some traction.

It is currently only in place in Massachusetts, which is why it’s the only state where Tesla owners can register to access repair manuals, service documents, wiring diagrams, and part information, but Tesla President Jon McNeill now says that the automaker is working on opening the program. expand full story

Last week, we reported that Tesla quietly brought online its massive 80 MWh Powerpack station on Southern California Edison‘s grid a few weeks back. The two companies are now officially inaugurating the project at the Mira Loma substation today and Tesla CTO JB Straubel made a few comments about the company’s growing stationary energy storage business. expand full story

Volkswagen is among the very few major automakers who are committed to the mass production of electric vehicles. Undoubtedly pushed by the backlash of the ‘Dieselgate’ scandal, the German automaker invested heavily in its new MEB platform for electric vehicles last year and announced plans to build 2 to 3 million all-electric cars a year and unveil 30 new models by 2025.

The company has since unveiled a few concepts using the platform and they are now laying out their design direction for EVs in more details. expand full story

World’s largest oil producer is putting $5B into renewables – Saudi Arabia has known for a long time that the oil revenue would not flow indefinitely. There have been many conversations about diversification – including going public with the Saudi state oil company, Saudi Aramco, and using large amounts of that money to push into tomorrow’s industries. Hard numbers though – Saudi Aramco is pumping about 10M barrels of oil per day right now, at a price of about $50-60/barrel which means $500-600M a day. This $5B investment would take 9-10 days to cover (they pump on weekends), and will probably be spread out over the next couple of years. Small drop in a big bucket, but solar power is now being funded from a very big and well funded bucket.

Top 10 solar cell producers from 2016 – Just so you can get the brand names in your head (though this article isn’t just a list, its a nice read). Maybe afterwards read up on the companies a bit more – find out why they’re there and see if that aligns with what you value. Even better – some stock tips on these companies in the comment section. Thanks!

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Profitable production of electric vehicles is highly important. Our capitalist society revolves around profitability and therefore, if electric vehicles are to prevail over gas-powered cars, they need to be profitable to manufacture in mass.

A new study published this month by McKinsey & Company and embedded below looks into how automakers can move past producing EVs as compliance cars and “drive electrified vehicle sales and profitability”. Unsurprisingly, it describes battery economics as an important barrier to profitability and though the research firm sees a path to automakers making a profit selling electric vehicles as battery costs fall, it doesn’t see that happening for “the next two to three product cycles” – or between 2025 and 2030. expand full story

With the introduction of the P100D with Ludicrous mode, Tesla’s Model S officially became a ’10-second-car’ – a common term used to refer to a car that can run a quarter-mile in 10.999 or less. Since the launch in September 2016, P100D owners have been slowly working through that 10 seconds and have now significantly improved the time on the dragstrip. expand full story

SpaceX held a Hyperloop Pod Competition this weekend at their facility in Hawthorne, CA, and earlier today Elon gave the crowd a short speech talking about transportation innovation, efficiency, and his new “boring” company focused on building tunnels to alleviate traffic, showing that his recent focus on tunnels is probably related to how he sees hyperloop developing as underground, rather than overground, transport.

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