Report #100: #savesion — Corvette, Camaro and Escalade as EV subbrands — Corvette, Camaro and Escalade as EV subbrands

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Hey, Jaan here.

The past week has been c r a z y. In a good way.

Here's a warm welcome to 470 of you that have joined us this week!

There are over 2,700 of us now. Wow.

Here's what's up in the industry this week:

• [Deep Dive] Sono Motors might ditch Sion, but not before they try to  save it.
• [Chart]: Battery prices have risen 7% on average in 2022.
• Volkswagen (likely) redesigns the Trinity EV, launches MEB+
• Visiting 1,678 Supercharger locations.

Words: 2,779 | Time to read: 13 minutes | Feeling: Like saving Sion

— Jaan

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TOGETHER WITH DIMO

In addition to collecting vehicle data, DIMO now allows users to track the value of their car across marketplaces (US customers only right now).

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Once you've started, you can access an ecosystem of service providers that save you time and money, like those listed here: dimo.zone/ecosystem.

And the best part? DIMO has just launched a rewards system to help you capture value from the thousands you're already spending on your car.

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EV SPOTLIGHT

"We failed. This could be the end of the Sion. You decide."

— Laurin Hahn, CEO and co-founder of Sono Motors. ( link )

Sono Motors announced yesterday that they have failed to raise the ecessary capital (probably what their US tour was about), and its investors are saying they should close down the Sion solar EV project, lay off 70% of the people, refund the community and focus on their solar technology offerings instead.

With this backstory, Sion launched a #savesion campaign inviting its 22,000 reservation holders (and others) to put in payment for the car in full (€26,900 ($28.3k)) or contribute what they can. The ones that do pay for the car get a €3k discount.

I also wonder if some of its claimed 22,000 B2B pre-orders come into play

The co-founders share in this (emotional) video that if they can get 3,500 people to pay for the car in full within 50 days (which would be north of $90M?), they will be able to go on towards production:

Looks like they have a tracker on their website , which currently says 165.43 of 3,500 paid Sions have been reached. 48 days to go:

Just a few hours ago, the company also dropped a video of the CFO, Torsten Kiedel, answering most community questions about the finances:

 The stock $SEV is down 36.59% over the past 5 days, currently hovering at ~76.8M market cap. ( link )

Sono Motors is one of the most community-involved EV startups I've seen so far and has raised significant funds from the crowd before - like the €53M in 50 days back in early 2020. Back then, 75% came in from Sion reservations ( link ). This is how I see it:

Story: ✓
Community: ✓
‍Chance they'll make it: ✓

Since this is our EV spotlight section, we can't go without some specs and pics of the Sion.

The co-founders of Sono Motors

• Range: 190 miles (306 km) WLTP
• Battery: 54 kWh; LFP battery supplied by BYD, 400V architecture.
• Solar: claims 112km (70 mi) average added range per week (245km (152 mi) max) on ideal conditions. At peak performance, the cells can generate up to 1.2kW.
• Charging: 75kW DC; 11kW AC (bidirectional coming as OTA).
• Speed & power: top speed 140 km/h, 163 hp,  0-100km/h in 9 seconds.
• Dimensions: length 4470 x width 1830 x height 1660 at wheelbase 2830mm.
• Features a tow bar (surprisingly), and processed (not living) moss in its interior.
• Production: set to start in 2024 (after several years of delays) in Valmet Automotive plant in Uusikaupunki, Finland (link). That's the same plant where the first solar EV in production, Lightyear 0 rolled off the product line last week.

Here's a 29-page pdf if you want to dig deeper into anything about the car. I also applaud Sono's transparency. Here's their development roadmap with a lot to geek out on (link).

Pictures:

The best video I've seen of the car so far is with Carl from Munro Live interviewing the COO Thomas Hausch next to the car. They call the Sion "the Swiss pocket knife, not the Gucci handbag" ( video ).

I personally hope this is not the end of Sion. Their dedication in bringing an electric car to the market at a lower price than others is admirable, and the 'quirks', along with several smart design moves of the car, are a sure bonus.

Here's a link to this deep dive separately our blog, in case you feel like sharing it with others.

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BEHIND THE SCENES

A brief note on how far the Tesla Semi things reached. No new info about the Semi here, so you can skip this in case you don't want the 'behind-the-scenes'.

We kind of went semi-viral.

We reached 5.1M sets of eyeballs on our Twitter channel within a week. By the way, please follow me at  @TheEVuniverse , we're just about to break the 5,000 mark.

3 million impressions came in from  tweet  of Tesla Semi passing the ICE truck on Donner Pass (6% grade). It gathered 965.7k views and over a thousand retweets. The guy who owns the platform "liked" it, which gave it a nice boost.

950k impressions came from the  tweet  from our Semi deep dive which compared Tesla Semi to other class 8 electric trucks. The guy who owns the platform likes this one too. This is our 4th so far (yay).

In a bit more indirect impressions, you can add another 6M to the mix, as Musk replied to a  tweet  that was a screenshot from our deep dive. I shall file this one under 'brand awareness'.

15,944 visitors came to our blog to read the Tesla Semi  deep dive . Turns out the biggest driver was someone putting it up on Hacker News, the  post  itself had nearly 500 comments

Overall, I'm frunking happy about how all this turned out. I'm planning to put my Semi curb weight, battery and charging estimations in a nicer format next week and hopefully get Musk to say if they are semi-accurate or not.

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🌌 AROUND THE 'VERSE

The most-clicked link  last week : Doing an Amazon route with the Rivian EDV ( video )

General Motors is considering establishing Corvette as an EV subsidiary from 2025, with a four-door coupé and a high-performance crossover planned, next to the already teased electric Corvette. ( link ) According to a media report citing a ' GM inside source', Escalade and Camaro could also be created as EV subbrands.

If I weren't so lazy I'd find out the place where I predicted: BYD will build EVs in Europe, soon. BYD manager Stella Li told Bloomberg that the company is evaluating locations of 'maybe not only one, it can be two' vehicle plants in Europe. ( link )

She also commented on Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway) selling about a fifth of its holdings and landing at around 16% currently: "It’s very natural for him to get some returns — cash out. I don’t feel this is any indication he’s abandoned BYD."

I... did not see this coming:

"Dr. Hall, a retired ophthalmologist, is part of a cadre of die-hard Tesla owners who are racing to visit as many of the company’s fast-charging stations, called Superchargers, as possible."

There's apparently a whole group of people who track their progress on a shared Google Spreadsheet and compete with each other on Supercharging. The top "players" have visited over 1,500 Superchargers, and Andrew Hall's latest check-in on Twitter said SC #1678. WSJ story: ( link ). Thanks, Gary, for sharing this on our  community .

The United Auto Workers union scored its first battery plant 'victory', with Ultium Cells in Lordstown, Ohio, the LGES and General Motors joint battery venture, seeing 710-vs-16 workers vote in favor of unionizing. ( link ) I'd bet you'll see some more battery plants follow soon enough.

Up to 14 calls to change your mind. This is apparently what you can expect from Lucid Motors if you want to cancel your order of the Lucid Air, based on an internal email. ( link ) In a rather rare sting towards another OEM, Elon Musk replies to this about Lucid ( link ): "They are not long for this world"

As we wrote  last week , Lucid is offering an $18k discount for its employees and now we've learned Lucid sent an email to customers with abandoned orders saying they would reinstate these orders of Lucid Air Grand Touring at the original legacy pricing of $139k... which is a 10% discount for the current $154k ( link ).

434,000 battery-electric vehicles were sold in China in November, which puts the market share at 26.3%. ( link ) Meanwhile in the UK, BEVs took a 20.6% share ( link ), and 81.6% in Norway ( link ). Want to guess the top EV model in each of these markets? My oh MY.

VinFast files for IPO in the US and should start trading on Nasdaq under the ticker VFS after the offering is completed. ( link )

Lukas Wenzhöfer won the Opel Rocks-e (which is basically a Citroën AMI)  design contest  we write about a few months ago. He calls it the "Rocks e-xtreme" and the car will be built as a one-off vehicle. ( link )

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CHART OF THE WEEK

BloombergNEF released data from their annual battery price survey, which I find to be a key overview of the battery industry ( link ).

A few takeaways:

• $151/kWh is the new normal for the industry. 7% year-over-year marks the first time in more than a decade that li-ion battery prices have risen.
• $152/kWh expected for 2023
• $138/kWh average in BEVs globally($115/kWh at cell level)
• $127/kWh average in BEVs in China
• LFP cells are 20% cheaper per kWh than NMC, so its spread held off an even bigger price increase.
• BNEF prediction of reaching $100/kWh now in 2026 instead of 2024.

Evelina Stoikou, the lead author of the report at BNEF, said:

“Raw material and component price increases have been the biggest contributors to the higher cell prices observed in 2022. Amidst these price increases for battery metals, large battery manufacturers and automakers have turned to more aggressive strategies to hedge against volatility, including direct investments in mining and refining projects.”

Here's another interesting view of the battery prices across different use cases:

My two Watts (opinion, could be wildly off)This survey is core data from the industry and mustn't be ignored. However, consider a few factors that would influence the battery cost move for the coming years:

• Raw materials. The elephant in the room is the skyrocketed lithium prices (and adjacent battery materials). Although I can see the demand far outpacing the new mining and processing capacity coming online, the question is: when will the demand/supply "level off" to sustainable levels?
• Incentives. Especially the Inflation Reduction Act, which will hedge the $/kWh price increase pretty strongly and makes this a little less of a blow for OEMs moving towards electrification.
• Energy storage systems. With renewables and the broader remake of the world's energy system, battery storage has taken center stage as an enabler for the change. Related: see the overview in 'I'm reading' section. 🤔 Where should I deploy this next set of kWh, as battery storage or deploy in an EV battery?
• Technology. Cell-to-pack / structural batteries approach is becoming more and more common in the industry, which reduces the pack cost. Not to mention potential new battery tech, with first implications of solid-state and sodium-ion batteries already inbound. A major change that has happened within this year already:
• LFP (lithium-ion phosphate) batteries. LFP deployment over NMC will decrease the average price, and we can assume more OEMs move their cheaper EVs to LFP chemistry because of this self-reinforcing pricing loop.
• Geopolitical stuff.

I'd love to get your thoughts on this. You can also share this BNEF graph (without my Watts) on Twitter  here  or on LinkedIn  here .

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IN A MEME

Herbert Diess looks at Oliver Blume walk back on all his EV plans for VW like:

What prompted this one: In addition to VW Group postponing the software, EV platform and potentially scrapping the Trinity EV plant (my deep dive  here ), the Trinity EV design will now also be redesigned.

The sedan-like Trinity design will reportedly be turned into "significantly more in the direction of an SUV".

According to German media, the launch of Trinity is postponed to around 2028 to 2030. All of these incoming news seem to be a part of bigger restructuring, so we might expect a bigger strategy reveal sometime in the following months. ( link )

Meanwhile, Volkswagen has shared some details of its MEB+ platform ( link ), which is what  we knew  will be coming in the stead of the SSP platform which sees major delays. MEB+ will use the unit cell that allows for up to 200 kW charging and 700 km (435 mi) of range.

And now to the main question:

Should I make the meme section a regular thing?

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WHAT I AM

...watching

👀 The first Brightdrop van rolls off the line in Ontario, Canada. This (reportedly) marks the first full-scale EV plant in production in the country:

"We're creating a whole supply chain here in Canada so that auto workers here in Ontario will be able to build electric vehicles" — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

👀 Sensational headlines aside, BYD Seal is the company's answer (or at least tries to be) to undercut the Tesla Model 3. It should be coming to Europe already this year too. Here's a great overview:

‍👀  Fisker PEAR spotted in the wild (in camo) for the first time ( photos ) ( video ). We knew the 'first driveable prototype' was coming late November per its Q3 report hint, so this from LA is likely it. The 2024 PEAR should start at <$30k.

‍👀  Canoo Lifestyle Van crash tests:

Gary Gumushian, the Global Vice President of Canoo said in a LeasePlan EV event where this video was shown ( link ):

"We've crashed these vehicles hundreds of times, we've put them through millions of miles. Every one of these crashes, the battery was not damaged."

...reading.

📚 A nice deep dive from our friends Intercalation Station various applications in the stationary battery storage world: ( link ).

📚 Tom from The Fast Charge, the British EV newsletter, takes a stab at understanding an important topic: is 99% EV charger reliability possible? ( link )

Background: along with its DC charging infrastructure plans, the UK gov has mandated that all new 50kW+ DC chargers will need to meet 99% minimum reliability standards by the end of 2023.

With California leading something similar with its EV Charging Reliability Transparency Act ( link ), I predict we'll see more and more policy tackling the problem of not only charger availability, but also working charger availability. And that's very, very welcome.

📚 An interesting discussion around fast-charger safety... from another angle. Should the chargers have an emergency unlock capability so you could drive away with your EV if you are in danger? ( link ) I wonder if and how many CPOs and OEMs (or those few that are both) have considered this.

Related: I found the Now You Know channel created a 33-minute in-depth video considering exactly this about a year ago. They even tested several 'charge handle ejectors' made by the community and had  polls  to choose the best one:

📚 Today marks exactly one year of our silly-but-fun 12/9 Tesla stock split 'conspiracy'. ( link )

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

Bernd Lange, the head of the Trade Committee in the EU Parliament, no longer believes the EU-US task force will come to a solution about the EV requirements in the Inflation Reduction Act ( link ):

„I think it is necessary for the EU to file a complaint with the World Trade Organization quickly in the next few months. This will clarify that the US action is clearly incompatible with WTO rules.“

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See you next week.

Jaan

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