Battery EV uptake doubles, but the new car market remains well adrift of pre COVID pandemic levels.

New car registrations grew 1.7% in November, bringing an end to four months of consecutive decline. Compared to the pre-pandemic average, the market remains down significantly, with -31.3% fewer vehicles registered during the month.

Plug-in vehicle demand continued to grow, however with battery electric vehicles equating to 18.8% of the market, while plug-in hybrid vehicles’

 share grew to 9.3%. In 2021 to date, 1,538,585 new cars have been registered, 17.5% have been BEVs or PHEVs.

Britain’s ratio of plug-in vehicles on the road to standard public chargers (16:1) was one of the worst among the top 10 global electric vehicle markets at the end of 2020.

Read more here – https://www.smmt.co.uk/2021/12/battery-ev-uptake-doubles-but-new-car-market-remains-well-adrift-of-pre-pandemic-levels/ 

Electric Car manufacturer Build Your Dreams (BYD) has launched the latest Tang Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) in Norway. This marks a significant step for the company with Norway being the first European country to have their vehicles sold. The arrival of the Tang in Europe is the first step into the Chinese electric brand expanding their audience. 

Globally, BYD was one of the first companies to produce one million electric passenger cars. Since then it has become a well established world leading new energy vehicle manufacturer across an array of industries. 

With 26 years of experience BYD are experts in battery research, de

velopment, and production and place electrification and battery technology at the heart of the business. 

The new Tang vehicle is an all-wheel-drive crossover batter

y electric vehicle. It comes fully equipped with BYD’s 86.4kWh Blade Battery which can charge up to 80% in only 30 minutes. The battery offers a range of 328 miles and an acceleration of 0-62mph in just 4.6 seconds.

As distribution of BYD starts to expand across Europe it is expected that their great value cars will become a lot more familiar on the roads. 

Read more here – https://www.electricdrives.tv/post/build-your-dreams-byd-launches-electric-cars-in-europe 

Sandy Munro has released a two-part presentation about the engineering philosphoies of Munro & associates in comparison to real world examples as well as comparing them to Elon Musk’s 5 step approach at Tesla. 

According to Sandy Munro the design innovations should be primarily focused on value, quality, and profitability. 

One of the main factors to improve on is reducing the number of parts for virtually all products. This will result in lower costs, increase in quality and additionally, investments to launch and maintain the product will be a lot lower. 

Elon Musk’s approach to the production of Tesla consists of five main points:

1. Enhance basic requirements
2. Try and delete part of the process
3. Simplify or optimise
4. Accelerate cycle time 
5. Automate

The extreme progress at Tesla in correlation to the general shift to battery electric vehicles, is a catalyst of change within the industry. In today’s world, such methods need to be applied and competitors who apply them will quickly gain greater advantages. 

To find out more click here.

The Mercedes-Benz EQS is a model that has all it needs to compete against other electric luxury sedans and is arguably the most important number in this company is range. 

They tested an EQS 450+ that they described as light on options, although it still weighed 5,500 pounds. The range test they performed was carried out over 12 hours, in which the car managed to clock up some 442 miles, or an impressive 77 miles (almost 124 km) more than the EPA estimates.

Edmunds breaks down how much the 422-mile trip cost which varies significantly. To find out more click here 

Internal combustion engines convert chemical energy in fuel at the injectors into mechanical energy. Chemical energy can be lost when delivered to the combustion chamber due to the mechanical friction between components. Developing an oil that provides higher-performing lubrication resulting in less friction significantly improves the engines performance. 

Mobil 1 have been working with Honda Formula 1 power unit engineers since 2018. The global motorsport technology manager has confirmed that they have been developing to push the boundaries of what is possible for Formula 1 engine oil. From this they have created a unique molecular composition of products for the Honda Formula 1 power unit.

The new Mobil 1 Oil has the capabilities of withstanding significantly higher temperatures than its predecessor. This provides a knock-on effect to the design of other parts of the vehicle, such as developing a more compact, and efficient engine to effectively improve the car’s packaging volume and aerodynamics, the most performance-dependent factor in Formula 1.

When creating the perfect oil Mobil 1 looked in some unusual places for components and compounds, this included the cosmetics industry which enabled them to bring in new components for the race oil formulation. 

Mobil 1 also aimed to improve the sustainability of their new oil. 25% of the base oil in Mobil 1’s formula 1 race engine oil is bio-based content. Allowing them to prove that environmental formulations can coincide with high performance.

To find out more about Mobil 1’s Formula 1 race engine oil click here.