Wednesday 27 September 2017

2018 Honda Clarity Plug-in Hybrid Rated at 47 Miles of Range While there will be three distinct powertrains offered in the Honda Clarity mid-size sedan, most U.S. shoppers will only ever see one of them on sale.

y: John Voelcker

2018 Honda Clarity Plug-In Hybrid
2018 Honda Clarity Plug-In Hybrid
























While there will be three distinct powertrains offered in the Honda Clarity mid-size sedan, most U.S. shoppers will only ever see one of them on sale.
That's the plug-in hybrid, which will go on sale "later this year" as the sole Clarity to be offered at all Honda dealers.
Now the 2018 Honda Clarity Plug-In Hybrid's electric range has been certified by the EPA, and it's come in at a higher-than-expected 47 miles.
That puts the plug-in hybrid Clarity in the top three for battery range, following the range-extended electric BMW i3 REx (with 97 miles of battery range) and the plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt (with 53 miles).
It surpasses the battery range for plug-in hybrid versions of the Ford Fusion, Hyundai Sonata, and Kia Optima mid-size sedans.
Once the battery is depleted, the 2018 Clarity Plug-In is rated at 44 mpg city, 40 highway, and 42 mpg combined, which equals the 42-mpg combined rating of the smaller Chevy Volt.
2018 Honda Clarity Plug-In Hybrid debuts at 2017 New York auto show
2018 Honda Clarity Plug-In Hybrid debuts at 2017 New York auto show




























When operating in electric mode, the plug-in Clarity is rated at 110 MPGe, against the Volt's 106 MPGe and the i3 REx at 111 MPGe.
Miles Per Gallon Equivalent, or MPGe, is a measure of how car a vehicle can travel electrically on the same amount of energy as contained in 1 gallon of gasoline.
The car's powertrain combines a 1.5-liter Atkinson-cycle inline-4 with Honda's two-motor hybrid system, which takes the place of a transmission.

One motor, rated at 135 kilowatts (181 horsepower) and 232 pound-feet of torque, can drive the car itself under many circumstances, especially at lower speeds.
It draws power from a 17-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack located behind the rear seat; Honda quotes a recharge time of 2.5 hours when using a 240-volt Level 2 charging station.
The default driving mode, Normal, runs on battery power until the pack is depleted and then essentially turns into a conventional hybrid car.
2018 Honda Clarity Plug-In Hybrid2018 Honda Clarity Plug-In Hybrid

The Econ mode reduces power draw and cabin ventilation to extend the range, at the risk of slower acceleration, while the Sport mode uses the battery and engine more aggressively.

A separate toggle for "HV" (or Hybrid Vehicle) mode can be selected with any of the three driving modes; it operates the car and maintains battery charge for later all-electric use.

The 2018 Honda Clarity Plug-In Hybrid will be offered in standard and Touring trim levels. Pricing will be released closer to the car's on-sale date.

Honda will also launch a "dedicated hybrid car" next year, about which no details are yet known, and is expected to launch a CR-V Hybrid compact crossover to join its redesigned 2018 Honda Accord sedan.
Meanwhile, the Honda Clarity Fuel Cell version is offered for sale only in California, which now has 35 hydrogen fueling stations operating.
The Clarity Electric version, with a battery range rated at just 89 miles on a full charge and a combined energy efficiency is 114 MPGe, is on sale only in California and a few other states.






article from: greencarreports.com

Friday 22 September 2017

Mercedes Invests in Radical Electric Car Tech Which Could Revolutionize the Industry A NEW battery that can be recharged in five minutes and deliver around 300 miles of range has been revealed as a potential game changer for the EV world.

by: Luke John Smith

 
One company has been busy manufacturing new electric car battery technology that could become a game changer in the EV world which Mercedes has invested in.
Israel start-up StoreDot has developed a new car battery technology which could prove to be revolutionary in the industry. 
Their new developments in the technology has also now just got a $60 million backing from Mercedes parent company Daimler, who want to bring it to their future EVs.
Daimler AG's Truck division is currently interested in the technology for their HGVs.  

StoreDot claim their new technology can be fully recharged within five minutes and enabled a range of up to 300 miles on a single charge. 


Currently one of motorist's biggest gripes with electric cars is how long it takes for the cars to be recharged.
At the moment EVs can take up to 10 hours to charge to full. 
Fast charging is available on some vehicles but it usually takes around 30 minutes to recharge the car to a useful level.
 
This is currently better than other electric cars on the road such as the Tesla Model S. 
These innovative molecules demonstrate uniquely tuneable optical and electrochemical properties
Daimler AG
Mercedes unveiled their new EQA Concept at the Frankfurt Motor Show 2017 this week which will go into production in 2019
Daimler AG's Trucks wrote in a press release: "Complementing the investment, both partners have agreed to a strategic partnership that focuses on the field of fast battery charging. 
"StoreDot's FlashBattery technology enables charging any electric vehicle within minutes, as quickly as filling a tank of gas. 
"Furthermore, FlashBattery's high efficiency in recuperation is particularly interesting for commercial vehicles; better usage of braking energy increases the range and requires less frequent charging. 
 
"This results, together with faster charging times, in higher vehicle usage. 
"Both partners will jointly work on tailor-made, integrated technologies, with the future-generation FUSO eCanter as a possible example of application. 
"The possibility of further joint projects, even beyond the Trucks division, is part of both companies' future discussions."
StoreDot described how it has created its battery technology: "StoreDot's core technology incorporates chemically synthesized organic molecules of non-biological origin. 
"These innovative molecules demonstrate uniquely tuneable optical and electrochemical properties, which allow for enhanced performance of energy storage devices."
Apart from the claimed recharge time and range not much else is known about the technology. 
StoreDot has claimed that it is aiming to bring the technology to mass production by 2022 for their own facility called 'OneGiga' which is to be but in Shenzhen China with a scalable capacity of one to 10 GWh per year.






article from: express.co.uk

Wednesday 20 September 2017

China is Banning Traditional Auto Engines, its Aim is Electric Car Domination China plans to ban new vehicles powered by gasoline and diesel engines. The implications for the global auto industry run deep.

by: Russ Mitchell and Jessica Meyers



The Baojun E100 has a top speed of 100 kilometers an hour, or 62 miles an hour.


China plans to ban new vehicles powered by gasoline and diesel engines. The implications for the global auto industry run deep.
The move is spun as an environmental story. But it's a major economic story as well.
China will set a deadline for carmakers to stop selling cars that run exclusively on gasoline or diesel fuel. The news was announced over the weekend by Xin Guobin, the country's industry and information technology vice minister.
No date was given, but earlier this year Britain and France each vowed to implement such a ban by 2040. Several other European countries and India have announced their own versions, pressured in part to reduce greenhouse gases under the international Paris accord on climate.
China, which is still the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is trying to recast itself as a global leader of environmental initiatives. Its president, Xi Jinping, has become one of the Paris accord's most vocal advocates.
The country has another aim too. In 2010, it made clear its long-term intent to become the No. 1 nation in electric vehicle sales.
"The China market itself is pretty gigantic," said Bill Hampton, AutoBeat Daily publisher. "This will push the China market along very quickly and certainly could create a powerhouse for exports and propel China into the global electric vehicle market."
"Chinese regulators see the success of Tesla and other Californian companies, and want to promote the same success amongst Chinese car manufacturers," said Sophie Lu, Beijing-based China research head for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which analyzes energy markets.
The move could affect automakers' corporate strategy, capital spending, trade policy and intellectual property sharing. Some analysts say the plan could further inflame trade tensions between China and the Trump administration.
In an opinion piece in Automotive News China, Michael Dunne of Dunne Automotive in Hong Kong said Monday that new regulations probably will be "designed to give China a decisive upper hand in the market for electric vehicles."
The Chinese government requires foreign automakers to enter into 50/50 joint ventures with Chinese companies to make and sell cars and trucks in the China market, which is huge. Last year, total vehicle sales in China reached 28 million, up 13.7% from the previous year, according to IHS Markit. In the U.S., 17.5 million vehicles were sold and growth remained nearly flat. Electric car sales in both countries were tiny: 359,000 in China compared with 159,000 in the U.S., with half of those in California.
To tap into China in a big way, U.S. automakers will need electric and "electrified" vehicles in their lineups, said Michelle Krebs, executive analyst at AutoTrader. Electrified vehicles include plug-in hybrids, which typically can run a few dozen miles on electric power alone.
"Regardless of what we do here in the U.S. on a federal level, U.S. automakers will continue to develop those vehicles because they can't ignore the China market," she said. "It's huge, and it's where their future growth and future profits will come from."
Entry to the China market comes at a price, however. High tariffs on imports mean only vehicles with huge profit margins - the Ford 150 Raptor backroad pickup truck, for example - can be shipped to China at a profit.
So most automakers enter joint ventures and build vehicles in China. Under current joint venture contracts, the China partner pays royalties for intellectual property developed by the foreign company - say, software algorithms that make battery use more efficient.
The arrangement will change, according to Dunne, forcing EV joint venture partners to share intellectual property with no compensation other than the profits that result.
Some see that as intellectual property theft, allowing Chinese EV companies to compete globally with technology they neither paid for nor developed on their own. President Trump and his trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, who already are investigating China's approach to intellectual property, will take note.
Automakers in the U.S., Europe and other Asian countries find themselves in a tough spot, said Mark Wakefield, managing director at AlixPartners.
They desperately want full access to the burgeoning China market and may have to give up intellectual property to a future competitor as the price of entry.
"China is the biggest market with the biggest growth going forward," he said. "If you took China's [motor vehicle sales] growth out of the calculations, the last 15 years would have been a flat market" for automakers worldwide.
China already is ahead of the rest of the world in sales of electric cars. AlixPartners measures the electric vehicle proliferation with a metric called e-range. Rather than units sold, e-range takes units sold and multiplies them with each vehicle's electric range. The results include the electric range in plug-in hybrids. In 2017's second quarter alone, China totaled 13.97 million e-range miles, compared with 5.62 million in the U.S.
China's home-grown manufacturers account for 43% of total vehicle sales in China, Wakefield said, but 96% of all-electric vehicles.
 
Most are smaller cars that analysts say come with low range and sketchy quality. But some cars built by Chinese companies, such as BYD and Geely, are meeting the quality standards of the foreign competition, analysts say.
Geely bought Volvo from Ford in 2010, and the two companies are working on a ground-up high-tech electric car called Lynk & Co., which could hit Volvo showrooms in the U.S. in 2019. (Ford, which owns the Lincoln, is suing Geely to rename the vehicle, contending it sounds too much like "Lincoln company.")
China, which had been surpassed in the auto export industry by Japan and South Korea in the 1970s, now sees electric cars as its second chance to become a global player in the motor vehicle market. China never became, say, a major exporter of old-fashioned lightbulbs, Wakefield noted, but it now dominates exports of LED lighting. The same could happen with electric cars, he said.
Automakers appear to be up for the EV challenge. Recently, Daimler (Mercedes), Volvo, Jaguar, Volkswagen and others announced that all vehicles they sell will be offered in electrified versions between 2020 and 2030. (The smaller companies will reach the goal soonest.)



article from: latimes.com

Friday 15 September 2017

Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz launch electric cars: 'anything Tesla can do, we can do better' German automakers Volkswagen Group and Daimler on Monday announced ambitious new plans to make long-range electric vehicles in a rapidly intensifying competition with Tesla, General Motors, Nissan and other global auto companies.

 German automakers Volkswagen Group and Daimler on Monday announced ambitious new plans to make long-range electric vehicles in a rapidly intensifying competition with Tesla, General Motors, Nissan and other global auto companies.
Their timing could be just right after years of tepid industry sales for electric cars.
China, hoping to clear up devastating urban smog, this weekend signaled plans to eventually ban gasoline engines, delivering a sharp jolt for battery-powered vehicles despite limited interest so far among consumers worldwide.
The moves also come amid rapidly falling battery prices, which analysts say will quickly make electric cars as affordable as gas vehicles.
Volkswagen, the world's largest car company, said at the Frankfurt auto show in Germany that it expects to sell up to 3 million battery-powered cars by 2025, representing about a quarter of its vehicles.
The company also Monday showed off a newly designed electric sport-utility vehicle called the I.D. Crozz that will arrive in 2020, along with a compact hatchback electric car called the I.D.
With a battery range of about 310 to 370 miles (based on European regulatory standards, which are higher than U.S. range), the I.D. vehicles will be among the longest-range affordable electric vehicles.
And Daimler luxury brand Mercedes-Benz said it would make an electric model of all of its vehicles by 2022.

It's an "anything Tesla can do, we can do better" strategy, Sanford Bernstein analyst Max Warburton said in a note to investors. "Mercedes is convinced it can match Tesla battery costs, beat its manufacturing and procurement costs, ramp up production faster and have better quality. It is also confident its cars will drive better."
Those product plans follow several recently introduced, long-range mass-market electric cars, including GM's Chevrolet Bolt, Tesla's Model 3 and the forthcoming redesigned version of the Nissan Leaf.
The base models of those vehicles have travel ranges of 238, 220 and 150 miles, respectively, and starting prices of $37,500, $35,000 and $30,000 before tax incentives.
Despite low gasoline prices and U.S. market share of only 0.5% so far this year for electric cars, investments in the segment are accelerating for regulatory and technological reasons. Sanford Bernstein analyst Mark Newman projected that falling battery costs would make electric cars the same price as gas vehicles by 2021, which is "far earlier than most expect."

And although the Trump administration is considering lowering fuel economy standards, automakers are pressing ahead with electric car plans because regulators in other markets are pushing to reduce emissions.

Chief among them is China, the world's largest car market. Xin Guobin, China's vice minister of industry and information technology, announced the ban on manufacturing and sale of gas vehicles but provided no details on timing, according to state news source Xinhua. It follows similar moves by the Britain and France, which are aiming for 2040.
"The measures would surely bring profound changes to the sector's development," Xin said.
With China stepping on the accelerator, global automakers have no choice but to invest in electric cars, despite the corresponding drag on profits.
"If there’s any country in the world that could pull off a switch, it would be China, only because of the government control that they have," AutoPacific analyst Dave Sullivan said. "There’s less free market forces in play."
For Volkswagen, China's move is ideal timing. The automaker is planning 80 electric vehicles by 2025 as it continues its campaign to shed the negative image associated with its diesel emissions scandal.

The I.D. Crozz SUV will be one of the first models, boasting range of up to 310 miles, while the I.D. would have range of up to 370 miles.
"The electric car will quickly gain extreme momentum at the start of the new decade," VW brand CEO Herbert Diess said in a statement.
Diess said sales of VW-brand electric vehicles could total 1 million by 2025, up from a negligible amount today and a projected 100,000 in 2020. VW's other brands include Audi and Porsche.
Mercedes' ambitions are slightly less aggressive. The Daimler brand hopes to sell 500,000 electric vehicles by 2025, Warburton said.
Although the regulatory reasons for investments in electric cars are self-evident, the moves will still compromise profits in the short-term. Daimler warned that its margins could fall from 10% to 8%.
"And that sounds like a best-case scenario," Warburton said

Wednesday 13 September 2017

Tesla is Revealing a Semitrailer This Month that it Won’t Deliver for Years – Here’s Why Tesla is expected to reveal a design for a semitrailer this month. CEO Elon Musk has been heralding this move into the freight business since last year, when he rolled out his "Master Plan, Part Deux."


by Matthew DeBord


Tesla is expected to reveal a design for a semitrailer this month. CEO Elon Musk has been heralding this move into the freight business since last year, when he rolled out his "Master Plan, Part Deux."

According to Morgan Stanley analyst Ravi Shanker, the vehicle will be what's known as a Class 8 truck - a great big old over-the-road semi designed to haul large amounts of stuff. Despite that, Shanker doesn't think the Tesla semi will have a long-range battery delivering 600 or more miles of range; something like 300 miles is more realistic, because of battery costs, and Tesla will deal with the range issue by swapping batteries or enhancing its charging capabilities.
In a note published Wednesday, Shanker suggested that Tesla wouldn't start selling the semi until 2020, but that won't prevent the company from lining up customers.
"We expect Tesla to start taking orders for the truck from the day of the event (we estimate a refundable $5,000 deposit)," he wrote. "We believe this could set off competition for intelligent trucks in the industry."
Shanker calculates that the truck business could add up to almost $12 billion in business by 2028.
This all sounds pretty good, but remember that Tesla has taken something on the order of 500,000 deposits for its Model 3 sedan, at $1,000 a pop. As of August, just more than 100 vehicles had been delivered as Tesla ramped up production. But even with an aggressive ramp, it will take Tesla years to fulfill those preorders.

Friday 8 September 2017

Toyota Concept-I Looks Weird , Will be Fun to Drive, and Comes with a Disney-like AI Toyota's new concept car has a mind of its own. Just unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the gloss white, four seat, bluntly ovoid, fractally embellished, occasionally autonomous pod, known as the Concept-i, comes equipped with


Toyota's new concept car has a mind of its own. Just unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the gloss white, four seat, bluntly ovoid, fractally embellished, occasionally autonomous pod, known as the Concept-i, comes equipped with an artificially intelligent user experience interface known as Yui that will apparently get to know you, your emotions, and your preferences, and react accordingly.

"Basically, this is our futuristic vision of what driving a Toyota means in the year 2030," says Ian Cartabiano, the veteran studio chief for the brand's CALTY advanced design atelier in southern California. "The challenging aspect of it was, how do we make this futuristic car convey something that's still fun to drive, but also have a new way to interact between driver and car, and basically, reignite a love for cars." Their solution? "A proposal for the future that incorporates technology with a soul. We don't want to make a cold, technical, dry, soulless machine."

This is intriguing, especially coming from Toyota, a brand that has basically staked its entire reputation on making cold, technical, dry, soulless machines. Then again, anything's possible. The future is ephemeral and unpredictable, and our prognostications about it are often far more interesting, and far less insidious, than the ensuing reality. We've always thought that the best cars have a kind of mechanized spirit, so we're intrigued by this incipient human/machine meld. If also terrified of it.











Yui, like all of the best and worst agents of artificial intelligence exemplified in a century of science fiction, is at once localized and ubiquitous. "In order for Yui to communicate with you or other passengers in the car, or to the outside, we needed it to move around the cabin, and needed it to go outside the cabin," Cartabiano says.

When you first enter the car, you meet Yui as a pulsing circle on the center console; it raises up to meet your hand, as if you start the car the way you seal a deal with the devil: with a handshake. Yui then moves around the Concept i's interior at whim, appearing on integrated, but subtly hidden, interfaces. It flash-zooms onto the dash and instrument panel like a comet and populates the screens there. It zips in panels built into the doors to call your attention to nearby obstacles. It moves to message boards on the exterior flanks to communicate with other cars and pedestrians. It provides text and warnings ("Watch Out!!!" "Turning Left") via OLED displays on the front and rear bumpers. And it will live in your smart-phone, or whatever accessory or implant acts as its surrogate in 2030.

One of the key challenges in making Yui accessible and approachable was in designing its appearance and behavior. Cartabiano and his team tried numerous options before settling. "We did form studies, we thought about three-dimensional graphics, holograms," he says. But what they ended up with was deceptively simple and low-fi: a two-dimensional ring with a circle inside it. "Basically, the outer ring is like the body, and the inner circle is the soul," Cartabiano says.

Using the Twelve Principles of Animation-a series of guidelines developed by Disney artists in the Thirties to help make inanimate objects appear alive-they populated Yui with manners and motions that will help it convey feelings and emotion-pulsing, stretching, shrinking, overlapping-allowing Yui to communicate with its human subjects in a variety of ways. Visual cues, eye command, voice command, and touch command are also integrated, allowing for multivalent forms of interaction. And interfaces appear and disappear, or morph and change, situationally.






For example, the headlamps are beneath the paint, so when the car is off and you're not present, they're invisible, but as you approach they open up like eyes. They can even wink at you, if you're the kind of person that requires flattery from inanimate objects. The door panel display is similarly invisible, but can "speak" to you, providing messages like Hello, Welcome Back, Goodbye. And there are two distinct light signatures for the interior of the car, purple to signify that it's in self-driving mode and green for manual driving mode, alerting the world around the car to who or what is/isn't behind the wheel.

This adaptability is present in part to add a sense delight-long a key factor in creating a bond between humans and their vehicles. But it also rooted in a venerable Japanese principle. "It's called Omotenashi," Cartabiano explains. "It's a way of saying 'contextual information.' It's basically hospitality at the right time, when you need it, in the right amount, served in a beautiful way. And when you're done, it disappears."

The car's exterior design was based around a similar receding fluidity. Cartabiano describes its guiding principle as, Kinetic Warmth. "It's very easy to draw a smart-phone on wheels, something that's cold and aluminum and gloss black, and it has red eyes. We wanted to stay away from that," Cartabiano says. "For this concept, every surface is moving, but it all has a connected line quality." He mentions the modern architect Eero Saarinen as inspiration. "He was a Modernist, but the feeling of movement he applied in buildings like the TWA Terminal at JFK, we really wanted to apply to this car. Something warm not cold, something inviting, not sterile."

For decades, drivers have had to attend to and interpret only one key language while behind the wheel: the rules of the road. Albeit more or less fluently spoken by America's many drivers, it was a lingua franca that all were expected to comprehend. As the next decades present possible futures in which drivers communicate with each other, cars communicate with each other, cars communicate with other drivers, and cars communicate with pedestrians (and buildings, retail outlets, and domestic animals) we wonder if we're entering into a new age of Babel: saturated with a myriad of distinct dialects and lines of code, firing off a pyrotechnic eruption of delightful semaphore, but rendering us incapable of deciding who should progress forward first at a four-way stop.

"That was one of our big topics of discussion at the very beginning of this project," Cartabiano says. "Don't we have information overload right now? We wanted to do the opposite. We wanted to plant this flag at CES and say, our vision of the future is intriguing, warm, simple, and universal."

We are torn between hoping he is right, and knowing he is wrong. But the future is evanescent. It eludes all of us.




Wednesday 6 September 2017

Eighth record year predicted for global car sales Global car sales are set to reach an eighth consecutive annual record that would represent the longest automotive industry up-cycle in recent decades, according to analysis from Scotiabank.



Global car sales are set to reach an eighth consecutive annual record that would represent the longest automotive industry up-cycle in recent decades, according to analysis from Scotiabank.
The up-cycle comes at a time when the global economy is rapidly expanding, leading to a re-acceleration in global sales. Developing markets like China are at the forefront of the sales gains.
“Stronger-than-expected economic growth in China is also a key contributor to the recent global sales acceleration, especially since it is being accompanied by firmer car prices and inventory normalization,” according to a news release issued by the bank.
China’s new car sales are expected to surpass 24 million units and account for 30 per cent of global volumes, compared to 25 per cent three years ago.

The boost in global sales follows a moderating trend that settled in after a sales tax incentive in China expired at the end of 2016.




article and photo from: canadianautodealer.com

Friday 1 September 2017

ASTON MARTIN PLANS ALL-HYBRID AND EV LINEUP BY 2030. Aston Martin is the latest automaker to get electric religion: The company plans to transition to hybrids and electric vehicles in the coming years, CEO Andy Palmer told The Financial Times.

 The Aston Martin RapidE concept, which electrifies the automaker's 
V-12 luxury touring sedan, previews a zero-tailpipe-emission car due in 2019.

Aston Martin is the latest automaker to get electric religion: The company plans to transition to hybrids and electric vehicles in the coming years, CEO Andy Palmer told The Financial Times.
"We will be 100 percent hybrid by the middle of the 2020s," said Palmer, who also indicated the company will develop EV and hybrid tech in-house instead of licensing it from an allied automaker.
"You need to keep core technology inside the company," Palmer said. "That's why we make our own V-12 engine. We believe that EVs are a core technology, and therefore we want to do them ourselves."
By 2030, Aston Martin expects that EVs will account for 25 percent of its sales, with the rest of the lineup expected to be hybrids.
When will we see the first result of this powertrain direction? The RapidE electric four-door luxury sedan is due in 2019 with an expected full-charge range of 200 miles and 800 hp on tap. Aston Martin plans to produce just 155 of these sedans, which is perhaps more a reflection of demand for Aston Martin sedans than Aston Martin EVs; the gasoline-engine Rapide was a sales disappointment for the company.
"Having unveiled the RapidE Concept back in October 2015, we reach another milestone with the confirmation that we are now putting the first all-electric Aston Martin into production," Palmer said in June. "RapidE represents a sustainable future in which Aston Martin's values of seductive style and supreme performance don't merely coexist alongside a new zero-emission powertrain, but are enhanced by it."
Aston Martin faces a number of challenges as it embarks on this path, not the least of which is the backing of a major automaker with a deep pool of shareable components. Most of Aston Martin's competitors are now wholly owned by much larger automakers already expanding to EVs and hybrids, making it relatively easier for these small-volume marques to field hybrids and electrics in the future.
Aston Martin will have to rely on its own coffers to develop and source components such as batteries, partnering with Williams Advanced Engineering. A partnership with China's LeEco has reportedly fallen apart, which has already pushed the RapidE sedan back a year while also forcing the company to slice the production numbers of the upcoming sedan.
Time will tell if Aston Martin will be able to successfully make the transition to EVs and hybrids -- in previous decades, one constant for such a small automaker has been internal combustion technology, most of which changed very little from decade to decade. Aston Martin will have more than a whole new powertrain technology to worry about in the near future as Brexit also poses the prospect of rising costs for UK-based automakers.















article by: autonews.com