Three Roadblocks to EV Adoption
In a recent opinion piece on CNN Business, GM's president (Mark Reuss) describes the three barriers to consumer acceptance of electric vehicle adoption: range, charging infrastructure, and cost. According to GM, range is the most significant barrier to EV acceptance...
What Does the Autonomous Vehicle Ecosystem Look Like?
An interesting article on Medium by Charles Nave describes the collection of technology and automotive companies directly engineering or partnering with entities developing autonomous vehicles. Some companies like Tesla are attempting to own the entire technology...
Nobel Prize Laureate Talks Electric Vehicle Batteries
A few weeks ago, I posted about the three winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on lithium-ion batteries. In this week's Automotive News (subscription required), one of those laureates (M. Stanley Whittingham) provides a very interesting perspective...
Steve Wozniak’s View on Autonomous Vehicles
At last week’s JD Power Auto Revolution conference in Las Vegas, Apple co-founder (Steve Wozniak) stated that he’s changed his mind on the development of fully autonomous vehicles. He now does not believe fully autonomous vehicles will ever occur. He doesn’t think the...
Tesla Gets Better With Time
I’m not referring to the company getting better with time. I’m not even referring to this year’s manufactured Tesla vehicle being better than last year’s produced car. Tesla cars - no matter when they’re purchased - get better over time due to the company’s ability to...
Is There a Tesla Effect? If so, What Does it Mean for Traditional Automakers?
Steve Lang, a special contributor to Capital One, wrote an interesting piece a few weeks ago titled, The Tesla Effect: How Tesla Is Changing the Used Car Game. Lang asserts that the once strong demand for European luxury brands is declining dramatically due to the...
The Controversy of Tesla’s Autopilot
It’s an irresponsible brand name - Autopilot. It’s a name that makes the average consumer believe Tesla’s Autopilot system is Level 5, fully autonomous-capable. It’s not - at least not yet. Zachary Mider tackles many of the issues surrounding Autopilot this week in an...
Is the EV Bubble Bursting?
That’s part of the title of a recent article in Automotive News (subscription required) describing Dyson’s decision to stop the development of an electric vehicle. As described in a prior post as well as here on TaaS Master, the company described an...
A Waymo with No Backup Driver
Tech Crunch is reporting that Waymo is informing customers in the Phoenix area that use the Waymo One self-driving taxi service that “completely driverless cars are on the way.” What this means is that Waymo will start using full autonomous vehicles without a human...
Developers of Lithium-Ion Batteries Win Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded this week to three scientists for their work developing lithium-ion batteries. John Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino are this year's recipients of the award. Without their work, every product from mobile...