Plug-in Vehicles

John Petersen While the broader market focuses on trivial issues like Asia, the Eurozone and an upcoming presidential election, a small but extremely vocal segment of the car shopping public is breathlessly awaiting the dawn of a new age with the first deliveries Tesla Model S electric cars to customers on June 22nd. The excitement among fervent Tesla Motors (TSLA) acolytes is palpable, but I have to at least ask whether their view of the company's risk-reward profile is rational. Is Tesla a great investment opportunity, or are we witnessing a weird form of transference that...

Doug Young Geely recently signaled its committment to EVs by forming a joint venture with Kandi Technologies, the maker of the Coco EV above.  Photo by Tom Harrison. After making increasing noises about its intent to develop electric vehicles (EVs), domestic automaker Geely (HKEx: 175) is getting serious about the effort by moving one of its top executives into a new role overseeing its EV sales. Meantime, rival EV maker BYD (HKEx: 1211; Shenzhen: 002594, OTC:BYDDF) has gotten its own new boost in the space with...

Doug Young  Bottom line: Tesla will announce a joint venture production facility in Shanghai within the next 1-2 months, and could see its China sales pick up sharply after its more affordable Model 3 reaches the market next year. Just a week after Disney (NYSE: DIS) launched its newest theme park in Shanghai, media are saying that new energy car superstar Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA) is also eyeing China’s commercial capital as the location for a new production base costing up to $9 billion. We should note from the start that the potential partner mentioned in the reports, the Shanghai...

By Jeff Siegel The car world is obsessed with Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA)... And for good reason. After all, in the world of vehicle design and alternative fuels, no one has taken this disruptive technology further than Elon Musk and Tesla Motors. The days of glorified golf carts are long gone. And although few can actually afford an $80,000 Model S, Tesla isn’t the only game in town. In fact, Nissan (OTCBB: NSANY), which makes the all-electric LEAF, recently announced that after four years, its alliance with Renault has officially sold 250,000 electric cars. That may not sound like...

By Jeff Siegel “My next car will definitely be a Tesla,” (NASD:TSLA) my Uber driver said with great enthusiasm. As he was driving me from the Hyatt in Newport Beach to John Wayne Airport, a Tesla P85D quietly flew passed us. It was black, shiny, and clearly driven by an individual that was in a hurry. He must've been doing at least 90, and this 20-something part-time Uber drive could barely control his excitement. While I certainly shared his enthusiasm, I was unsure of how a part-time Uber driver (I believe he was a college student driving for Uber to...

By Jeff Siegel While I've long been an outspoken supporter of Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), as well as a huge fan of both Elon Musk and the Model S, it is the company's smaller version of the Model S that gets me most excited. The bottom line is that cost will be the determining factor for most Americans considering electric cars. After all, you'd be hard-pressed to find many folks who wouldn't love to own a Model S. But at around $75,000, few can afford it. Of course, the vision of Tesla is not one based solely around supplying high-end...

John Petersen One of the hardest parts of blogging about energy storage and vehicle electrification is the inability of some readers to wrap their minds around large numbers. We throw around numbers like thousand, million, billion and even trillion with surprising alacrity, but many fail to grasp their significance because the underlying realities are too big to comprehend. The other day I stumbled across a website that tracks the national debt and uses the humble second to put incredibly large numbers into perspective: A thousand seconds is 16.6 minutes; A million seconds is 11.6 days; A...

Garvin Jabusch We're within a year of the launch of GM's flagship electric vehicle (EV), the Chevy Volt, and we're already seeing detractors call it a failure (e.g. "Revenge of the Internal Combustion Engine") and begin using it as evidence that the entire EV premise won't work. This outcome was predictable, not because EVs are conceptually flawed, but because the Volt is a terrible value proposition, whether measured against better EVs or against high-mileage internal-combustion engine cars. The Chevy Volt isn't failing because it's electric, but because it's a bad value. The Volt is not a pure EV....

John Petersen Last Friday I received my copy of the presentations from September's European Lead Battery Conference in Istanbul. Most of the presentations were written for a technically astute audience and don't offer much in the way of concrete guidance for investors, but an overview presentation from Ricardo PLC, a global leader in engineering solutions for low carbon, fuel-efficient transportation, included three slides that merit serious investor consideration and show why I'm convinced cheap will beat cool for the next decade of vehicle electrification. I've posted a copy of the Ricardo presentation here. Technology Timeline The...

Tom Konrad CFA The Kandi KD501 Mini-EV to be leased in Hangzhou. Photo by Marc Chang. The city of Hangzhou just signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Kandi Technologies (NASD:KNDI) and nine other companies to supply 20,000 electric vehicles (EVs) for the city’s “pilot” EV leasing program.  Kandi is the only EV supplier to take part; other companies involved will supply the batteries (Air Lithium (Lyoyang) Co. Ltd.) and charging by the local utility.  The utility will fund construction of a charging and battery swap station network as well as paying for...

John Petersen The hardest part of blogging about the energy storage and vehicle electrification sectors is coping with ideologues who are so enthralled with their myopic EV dreams that they can't see the industrial metal nightmares that make those dreams impossible at relevant scale in the real world. They whimper, whine and complain about the obscene prices charged by diabolical oil companies and gush over how safe, quiet, clean and secure life will be when plug-in cars with immense battery packs are common as wildflowers in an alpine meadow and getting cheaper every day. The fly in...

John Petersen We all know that you can't have a cost-effective electric car without a cost-effective battery. We also know that a small but vocal hodgepodge of ideologues, activists, politicians and dreamers wants everyone to believe that rapid and stunning advances in lithium-ion batteries will finally make the dream a reality after a century of one abject failure after another. I frequently caution readers that it won't be anywhere near as easy as the proponents claim. In a new report titled "Searching for Innovations to Cut Li-ion Battery Costs" Lux Research did a yeoman's...

John Petersen The last few weeks have been a media and political circus in the US as a pair of high-profile Department of Energy loan guarantees wound up in bankruptcy court. In the first case, solar power innovator Solyndra filed two years after closing a $535 million loan for a factory that never quite made it into production. In the second case, flywheel storage innovator Beacon Power (BCONQ.PK) filed about a year after scoring a $43 million loan for a 20 MW frequency regulation plant that was commissioned in June. Both are black eyes for the Obama administration’s...

Tom Konrad CFA This article was first published on the author's Forbes.com blog, Green Stocks on May 31st as "Kandi Technologies: Weighing The Evidence." I have since added a short update to the end of the article. Last year, I brought Chinese off-road vehicle and electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer Kandi Technologies (NASD:KNDI) to readers’ attention.  I like Kandi because the company was already profitable and trades for a tiny fraction of what a US-based EV maker would. The Strategy I also like Kandi’s electric vehicle strategy, which focuses on inexpensive commuter vehicles...

Company Delivers Electrifying Performance But Stock Gets Shocked. Arthur Porcari What’s that old Wall Street saying. “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished”?  Well, management and shareholders of US listed, China based, always profitable uncontested leader in Electric Vehicle (EV) manufacturing and “Quick Battery Exchange” (QBE) development, Kandi Technologies (NASDAQ-KNDI), know the feeling well. As of now, five months after I published my first article on KNDI, the stock, which subsequently more than doubled on incredible volume, has now made a full round trip and is back to where it started. This in spite of significant business advances and a...

By Jeff Siegel Back in 2007, we jumped on a small electric car company called BYD Company (OTCBB: BYDDF). We actually crushed it on that one as we took a position before Warren Buffett announced he was taking a 10% stake in the company. Of course, when we started covering the company, I had no idea Warren Buffett even knew that a Chinese company was making electric cars. The stock had a nice ride, but shortly after Uncle Warren jumped in, the stock soared and got very top heavy. It got way too hot, way too fast. We...