Plug-in Vehicles

Doug Young  Bottom line: Beijing should promote cutting-edge companies like Tesla that can help advance its new energy agenda, while abandoning ones like Yingli that use old technology to make cheap copycat products. Two green energy stories were in the headlines last week, spotlighting China’s drive to become a global leader in the new technology and also the right and wrong ways to achieve that aim. An item involving US electric vehicle (EV) powerhouse Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA) represented the right approach, with reports that the company might near a deal with Beijing to build a manufacturing plant in China....

by Debra Fiakas CFA CarCharging Group, Inc. (CCGI:  OTC) producers electric car charging stations.  It partners with property owners such as shopping malls or parking garages to operating the charging stations and collect fees from electric car owners.  At the end of September 2013, the last time the company reported financial results. CarCharging had eighty-seven strategic partnerships with a gaggle of private and public entities such as Walgreens, Icon Parking, the City of Miami Beach, and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.    A mobile app helps car owners find locations by city or zip code. CarCharging...

Denny Schlesinger Machiavelli's The Prince and Sun Tzu's The Art of War are the two best known classic treatises on strategies to conquer and to govern. As Kandi Technology Group's electric vehicle strategy unfolds, I'm reminded of these masterpieces. The Challenges There are many of them. To start with, the current personal land transportation paradigm, the internal combustion engine, is not just well entrenched, it is becoming more efficient as time goes by. The fears of peak oil are vastly exaggerated specially now that fracking technology has added billions of barrels of recoverable...

Doug Young A couple of interesting news bits are coming from the new energy vehicle sector, including a potential roadblock into the China market for up-and-coming US player Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA) and new results from struggling domestic electric car maker BYD (HKEx: 1211; Shenzhen: 002594; OTC:BYDDF) that look encouraging but not too exciting. The main common theme in this latest news is that new energy vehicle makers continue to hold out hopes for the China market, banking on strong government policies to boost the market, even though progress has been slow so far. Let’s start with a...

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...

Part IV - KNDI's Stock Valuation Arthur Porcari. This is the last installment in a four-part series on Kandi Technologies (KNDI).  Part I was an introduction, Part II took a look at Kandi's Business, and Part III looked at the company's financial condition. What’s With The Stock Price? KNDI, like most US traded China stocks is currently trading approximately 50% below its January high for the year, and 60% below its 2008 all time high. Unlike most, it's numbers are growing dramatically. Perhaps not too a-symptomatic when one considers how little Wall Street knows about this...

*with humble apologies to Charles Darwin John Petersen The Oxford Dictionary defines the adjective 'specious' as: Superficially plausible, but actually wrong; Misleading in appearance, especially misleadingly attractive. The Wiktionary offers a broader definition as: Seemingly well-reasoned or factual, but actually fallacious or insincere; strongly held but false; Having an attractive appearance intended to generate a favorable response; deceptively attractive. Over the last two years I've patiently analyzed the evolving price and performance forecasts of electric vehicle advocates and lithium-ion battery developers. In the process I've shown them to be possible, but unlikely, and...

Part II - The Business Arthur Porcari. This is part two of a four-part series on Kandi Technologies (KNDI).  Part I was an introduction, and Part III and Part IV will look at the company's financial condition and stock price, respectively. Kandi was founded by its effectively sole controlling shareholder Hu Xiaoming in late 2002 in Jinhua City, Zhezjiang Province, PRC as a prolific developer and manufacturer of two, three and four wheeled gas powered, mainly off road, recreational vehicles exclusively for the US export market. By 2007 KNDI rose to the status of being...

Doug Young Chinese local media were trying to accentuate the positive when they reported that China’s new energy vehicle sales rose 10-fold in the first 4 months of this year. (Chinese article) That figure caught my attention, but then I read further into the reports and saw that even after the huge jump just 10,000 new energy vehicles were sold in China in January through April, averaging a meager 2,500 per month. Adding further gloom to the picture, the vast majority of vehicles were purchased by fleet operators of taxis and buses. Within the larger figure, half of all...

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...

Tom Konrad CFA On September 17th, the Chinese Ministry of Finance announced the long anticipated renewal of China’s New Energy Vehicle (i.e. electric vehicle or EV) subsidies.  The new subsidies for cars were in-line with market expectations, but will be reduced to 10% below the current levels next year, and 20% below the current levels in 2015.  Subsidies for buses fell short of expectations. Conventional gasoline-electric hybrid models were not included in the subsidies, but some plug-in hybrid (PHEV) were.  The subsidies amount to 60,000 ($9,802) yuan for pure electric autos with a range over 250 km (155 miles),...

by Debra Fiakas CFA Earlier this week, the quieter half of Tesla Motors (TSLA:  Nasdaq) founding team and the company’s chief technology officer, JB Straubel gave a speech at a solar energy conference in San Francisco.  He is largely responsible for Tesla’s innovative battery technology, so it should be no surprise that he thinks that eventually all vehicles will be powered by batteries.  As profound a this view might seem, let’s remember that if hammers could see, the world would look like a nail. Nonetheless, I thought it worthwhile to take Straubel at this word.  This is...

Doug Young Tesla plugs in with Unicom Despite disappointing progress in China’s plan to put hundreds of thousands of new energy vehicles on its roads by next year, American electric car maker Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA)has made remarkable progress despite its late arrival to the market. The company has won its strong initial results though a smart combination of savvy marketing and initiatives to encourage building of necessary infrastructure to support its buyers. The latest of those initiatives saw Tesla last week announce a partnership with Unicom...

Doug Young Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has remained faithful to Chinese car maker BYD (HKEx: 1211; Shenzhen: 002594; OTC:BYDDF), refusing to change his 10 percent holdings in the company despite a rapid tumble as its bet on electric vehicles (EVs) fails to take off. But soon the man known as the Oracle of Omaha may have no choice but to reduce his stake, since BYD has just announced a plan to issue more shares to raise desperately needed cash. Of course Buffett may choose to buy some of those new shares to maintain his stake at 10...

John Petersen On June 14th the International Transport Forum of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development released a Policy Brief that asks the rhetorical question "Electric Cars: Ready for prime time?" I was very surprised that the OECD, an organization of 34 democratic, industrialized and overwhelmingly western nations, would even ask the question. I was even more surprised by their conclusions that most claimed benefits of electric passenger cars are illusory while the societal costs are $9,000 to $15,000 more per vehicle than conventional automobiles. In other words, every EV produced and sold makes society poorer. No...

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...