EVS IRL: EVs In Real Life

26/05/2025

Maybe Canadians will one day be able to buy normal-sized EVs? The Canadian Automobile Dealers Association is lobbying to be able to sell popular cars from elsewhere without expensive re-certification. Apparently they've discovered we still like hatchbacks!

Only two of the top ten EVs sold in Europe last month (the VW ID.4 and the Tesla Model Y) are available in Canada. It’s not just because of…

15/03/2025

A petition to urge the Canadian government to lift the exorbitant tariffs on Chinese EVs to help make switching more affordable. US and European car makers are not moving fast enough...

Urge the Canadian Government to Lift Tariffs on Chinese Electric Vehicles

09/06/2024

It seems in the US, some EVs are already significantly cheaper than their gas powered equivalents - if you are leasing them (because the lower maintenance costs are built in)

“Darwinian” competition and a slew of new models helped electric cars with at least 300 miles of range reach another milestone in price parity.

14/05/2024

100% US tariff on Chinese electric vehicles?! US automakers have some remarkable pull.. Hope Canada doesn't follow their lead...

Via The Economist: "On May 14th... , the White House decided to raise tariffs on, among other things, Chinese semiconductors and solar cells from 25% to 50%... and lithium-ion batteries from 7.5% to 25%. It hit electric vehicles with the biggest increase of all, *quadrupling the tariff rate on China-made electric vehicles (evs) from 25% to 100%*"

26/04/2024

Canadians deserve to be offered a "good enough" EV. Why pay more than 35K if you don't need a bigger car?

Will the Fiat 500e get the attention and support it deserves?

19/04/2024

Good to see General Motors bringing full vehicle to Home functionality into the mainstream by model year 2026. Handy for regions where electricity supply can be erratic. Hopefully it can also be adopted for vehicle to grid applications where the benefits are even greater. https://news.gm.com/newsroom.detail.html/Pages/news/us/en/2023/aug/0808-v2h.html

08/04/2024

This is discouraging. Of all of the things Elon Musk is trying to accomplish at the moment, arguably this was the most important. Hopefully, others will accelerate their plans to fill this gap...

08/04/2024

I predicted that the limited capacity of our EV charging network would be demonstrated last year on the May holiday but turns out it is today our network's capacity was finally... er... eclipsed... Fortunately my car is stuck well inside the totality zone (but annoyingly distant from the rest of my family!)

20/02/2024

The big carmakers seem to be feigning surprise and horror because of entirely predictable policy decisions that were telegraphed well in advance.

Across Europe and Canada, EV sales were subsidized not because governments wanted to promote luxury vehicle sales but because the idea was car makers would learn as Tesla said they were doing to master the technology at small volumes then mass produce EVs aimed at the mass market. By that time they would be cheap enough to make that the subsidies wouldn't be needed.

They were also clearly warned that they only had a limited time remaining to legally sell ICE vehicles.

Unfortunately, they took the subsidies, failed to adequately invest and after a few years of pretending to be following the path set out they are now clearly hoping to push the deadlines to phase out EVs back and build barriers against the Chinese car makers who took electrification seriously. Perhaps now they are realizing they need a plan B?

16/02/2024

I suspect it is still early days to know for sure the cost/benefit of EVs vs ICE vehicles in terms of repairability, but this article provides some useful fine-grained detail to explain what's behind recent news articles claiming EVs cost way more to repair

It's time to debunk the widely circulated idea that Teslas are being written off en masse after relatively minor accidents; and debunk, too, the idea that EVs and their batteries are leading to runaway repair costs.

27/01/2024

Better city and provincial regulations could do a lot to help EV owners at a near-zero cost to taxpayers. Here are some examples of good practice from the US (and of less good practice from Toronto)...

We could learn some lessons from EV-friendly cities and states

24/01/2024

The problems EV owners in Chicago had in the recent cold snap have been getting a lot of attention. There's no denying that extreme cold (-23C) can make EV use much harder, but this piece gives a fuller picture of why things went so badly wrong. There's plenty of evidence EVs are still a viable means of getting around in very cold countries (eg Norway!) as long as the infrastructure is well-maintained and drivers know what to expect and how to cope.

Teslas are having trouble charging in the extreme cold, but there's a myriad of factors that contribute to the problem. Let us help explain.