Tesla
Currently, electric vehicles pay a $17.50 annual registration fee in Illinois. A bill to double the 19 cents per gallon gas tax, unchanged in almost 30 years, would also increase the EV fee over 57-fold to $1,000.
Chicago Tribune
Satirists at The Onion wrote a totally fake, but also very funny, article about a self-driving car.
The Onion
Auto analyst John Voelcker discusses the electric vehicle market in the U.S. on NPR. Ominous clouds belie the excellent sales figures for last year, and policies pushed by Trump only ensure that motor vehicles will continue to gulp more gasoline.
NPR
U.S. sales of plug-in electric vehicles, including those with internal combustion engines, increased by 81 percent in 2018 over 2017. But if you remove the best-selling Tesla Model 3 from the mix, the increase drops to 11 percent.
Greentech Media
It could have been a multiple-vehicle fatal car crash—a driver fell asleep at the wheel driving 70 mph—but the outcome was two DUI charges.
SFBay
The new IPCC report calls for decarbonization of transportation. While many cities are attempting to do their part, two recent federal developments in trade policy and tax legislation threaten to will make progress more difficult.
CityLab
The Fake News website The Onion reports a complete fabrication about Elon Musk and Tesla.
The Onion
It's a classic paradox, observes David R. Baker for the San Francisco Chronicle: bigger, thirstier vehicles sell better than smaller, more efficient ones, while the market for battery-powered vehicles, especially Teslas, also increases.
San Francisco Chronicle
The Tesla Model 3 is now America's best-selling electric vehicle. The news follows a spate of bad news for the Silicon Valley-based electric vehicle manufacturer.
Bloomberg Technology
Autonomous vehicles hold the potential to greatly reduce auto crashes. Advocates want them on the road as early as possible to reduce fatalities. Skeptics worry that the public will be guinea pigs during the testing—case in point: Elaine Herzberg.
San Francisco Chronicle
A rollback of fuel economy standards carries huge financial consequences for the all-electric vehicle manufacturer that makes over $300 million annually by selling credits to auto manufacturers unable to achieve current fuel economy standards.
Vox
Wei Huang, a 38-year-old Apple engineer, died after his Tesla Model X collided with a highway barrier on a Bay Area highway interchange on March 23. NTSB wants to know if it was operating on Autopilot. It took 5 hours to reopen the freeway.
Bloomberg Technology
Both are problems, but globally, sports utility vehicles sales are proliferating far faster than cars, be they electric or petrol-powered, posing a major challenge for governments committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The New York Times - Climate
But only if you drive a Tesla. Unlike a traditional "fill-up," charging an EV takes time—30 minutes for Tesla Superchargers—so Tesla provides an exclusive lounge for its customers at a new 40-Supercharger "rest stop" on I-5 in California.
San Francisco Chronicle
Paul Lewis of the Eno Center gives his forecast of how next year will play out. Prospects for new technologies are good, but come with caveats.
U.S. News & World Report
Tesla introduces a high-performance, totally electric, semi-autonomous truck that that can haul 80,000 of freight for 500 miles without recharging.
Vox
The House GOP tax plan, which Trump wanted to name the "Cut, Cut, Cut" bill, was intended to cut taxes, but it's also cutting credits, like the federal $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit. How much would its elimination affect EV sales?
The Hill
David Yager, an oil industry consultant, writes that recent reports predicting electric vehicles will eventually outsell those with internal combustion engines are vastly exaggerated, notwithstanding national bans on future sales of such cars.
Business Insider
Is the movement away from gasoline and diesel-powered cars unstoppable? In response to air pollution litigation, the British government announced on July 26 that sales of gasoline and diesel vehicles would be banned by 2040.
The New York Times
A new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that due to a plunge in battery prices and improvement in battery technology, electric vehicles will be cost-competitive with gasoline vehicles in eight years. By 2040, they will outsell them.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
