Plug-in Vehicles

John Petersen The first thing every securities lawyer learns is that technology is a two edged sword. On the leading edge, developers of cheap innovations that ramp rapidly over a few years build thriving businesses that deliver market beating returns for investors. On the bleeding edge, developers of expensive technologies that can't be implemented at relevant scale for years morph into financial black holes that suck the lifeblood out of portfolios and teach a new generation of investors about an insidious market phenomenon the Gartner Group refers to as the hype cycle. The second thing...

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),...

John Petersen I usually write a quarterly recap to summarize what happened in the energy storage and vehicle electrification sectors, but Q2 was a tough enough period that I don't see much sense in dwelling on the bloodletting. So instead of focusing on the past, I'll offer a quick summary table with lots of red ink and turn my attention to Q3, which is shaping up as a time of bright opportunity for some companies and profound risk for others. I expect three companies in my tracking group to perform very well in Q3 –...

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 Debra Fiakas CFA The Tesla Model S, from the unveiling on 26-Mar-2009. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)   The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday morning that Blackrock has cut its position in electric sports car innovator Tesla Motors (TSLA:  Nasdaq).  Blackrock is a widely known and respected fund manager.  I imagine more than just a few investors grabbed whatever device might be available at the time and punched in sell orders on the supposition that smart money always know best.  The really smart investors had already looked at...

John Petersen Congratulations! You've been appointed Energy Czar for the island of Self Sufficiency; a wonderful place that can satisfy the bulk of its energy needs from domestic resources, but needs to import gasoline for a 10,000-unit automobile fleet that gets replaced at a rate of 1,000 cars a year. The island's battery factory can manufacture 45,000 watt-hours of lithium-ion batteries each year and depending on how they set the machines; the factory can make high-power batteries for HEVs or high-energy batteries for EVs. Your mandate as Energy Czar is to minimize Self Sufficiency's fuel imports and...

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....

Doug Young Bottom line: Tesla’s newly announced modest China sales and announcement of a plan for potential local production reflect the uphill road it faces in the Chinese market, which is unlikely to get much easier in the next 2 years. China is fast becoming the land of promising upstart companies that failed to reach their potential, with word that former new energy superstar Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA) has posted very ho-hum car sales in a market where it once held out big hopes. The rare China sales figures...

John Petersen A few days ago Alex Planes published an extraordinary article on The Motley Fool titled the "Real Costs of Alternative Energy" that summarized direct US subsidies for our principal energy sources, restated annual energy consumption from each of those sources using equivalent barrels of oil as a standard measure, and calculated the direct Federal subsidy per unit of useful energy consumed. The following table condenses and reorders the data from the lowest to the highest direct Federal subsidy per unit of useful energy consumed. As I pondered Mr. Planes' work and methodology, the...

Doug Young How do you say in Chinese? This week had US electric car maker Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA) officially driving into China despite its failure to resolve a trademark dispute, meaning it has no official Chinese name as it enters the market. All of the world’s top car makers now manufacture in China. But that’s a very expensive business, and other companies have been chasing more niche-oriented spaces in the market. Online car information provider Autohome (NYSE: ATHM) is one of those, and successfully sold investors...

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 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...

Jim Lane “Electric power is cheap”, and “cellulosic biofuel costs less than $1.00 per gallon”. The Tesla Model S, from the unveiling on 26-Mar-2009. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons) So why isn’t everyone buying a Chevy Volt? And why can you get lower interest rates on your Visa Card than next-gen biofuel developers face? It’s the old capex-opex (Capital Expense vs. Operating Expense) fallacy. Earlier this week, a new study from researchers at UC Santa Barbara determined photovoltaics to be much more efficient than biomass at turning sunlight into energy to...

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 March, I was speaking at a conference about the future of personal transportation. I discussed how a new generation called the Millennials or Generation Y would ultimately force change in the marketplace and present a real challenge to car makers. You see, there have been a number of studies that have suggested this particular generation  which represents the kinds of numbers that allowed the baby boomers to dictate a lot of our consumer decisions today is less interested in car ownership than previous generations... They prefer public transportation, biking, walking, and car-sharing services...

Doug Young Tesla launches trade-in program. Bottom line: Tesla and other EV makers is likely to face an uphill road in China for the next year, but prospects could start to improve in mid 2015 as new initiatives gain momentum. Reports on a new trade-in promotion from Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA) are recharging talk earlier this month that the high-flying electric vehicle (EV) maker isn’t doing as well as hoped in China, where sales have gotten off to a slow start. This kind of a sluggish start isn’t too unexpected,...