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A pundit says (Business Insider, July 20, 2023) that if you are buying an EV right now in North America, it makes no sense to buy anything but a Tesla.  Why does the pundit say this?  Is the pundit right? 

Nissan has now joined the club.  Its newly manufactured EVs will, starting next year, have Tesla-style charging ports at the left rear of the car. This is the first Japanese car maker to join the club. In a way it was easy to guess that Nissan might have been among the first to join the… Continue reading Nissan joins the club

Until about two months ago there was a sort of half-baked argument for some people as to why they supposedly had to purchase a hybrid car instead of an EV.  The argument ran sort of like this: The only way to live my life (says the person making the argument) is that I need to… Continue reading No more reason for hybrid cars, I suggest

The last that you heard in this blog about domino clicks toward Tesla-style charging plugs was this blog article on June 29, 2023.  Since then we have seen five more domino clicks, including Mercedes-Benz, toward Tesla-style (also called “NACS”) EV charging plugs: June 29, 2023 – Polestar announces that soon its newly manufactured EVs will have charging… Continue reading Mercedes-Benz and four more join the club for Tesla-style charging plugs

Today I decided to find out how easy or difficult it is to charge up a Hyundai Kona EV at an Electrify America charging station.  It was not easy. 

What is the device shown in the photograph at right? My quick answer, and you might say the same thing, is that it is “an EV charger”. But my quick answer is wrong. The device shown at right is a mere “EVSE”, not an “EV charger”. This fact, it turns out, explains why a Hyundai… Continue reading What is an EVSE and why do we care?

Yesterday Chargepoint, operator of some 48,000 Level 2 charging plugs across the US, said that it plans to join the Tesla charging plug club (blog article).  Now, today, Electrify America (“EA”) has announced it will do the same. One reason that the EA announcement is of interest is that EA operates mostly fast DC chargers… Continue reading And now Electrify America decides to join the Tesla charging plug club

We now have two more domino clicks with the by now seemingly inevitable shift in North America to Tesla-style charging plugs. As difficult as one might find it to believe, there is a company in the US that operates more charging stations than Tesla (48,000 charging ports compared with a mere 27,000 or so charging… Continue reading Two more domino clicks

Many owners of an all-wheel-drive vehicle have had it drummed into their heads that if you find the need to replace one tire, the only correct way to proceed is to replace all four tires.  But if your vehicle is a “dual motor” EV, that’s wrong.   You can get away with replacing just two tires. 

Four car makers (Ford, General Motors (blog article), Rivian (blog article), and now Volvo (blog article)) have announced that starting about a year from now, their newly manufactured EVs will have a charging port that permits charging at Tesla supercharging stations.  This will doubtless trigger the Osborne Effect (Wikipedia article): The Osborne effect is a… Continue reading The Osborne Effect and Tesla supercharging