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Germany has leapfrogged Norway as Europe’s biggest market for electrified cars, a sign consumers are warming to the technology just as Volkswagen and Daimler add batteries to their lineups to take on Tesla.

Sales of electric-chargeable vehicles surged 70 per cent in Germany to 17,574 cars in the first quarter, nudging ahead of Norway for the first time, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association. The figure includes fully-electric cars like Tesla’s Model S, as well as plug-in hybrids such as the BMW 2-Series Active Tourer.

Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW are retooling assembly lines in response to stricter European regulations on combustion engines and fallout from the 2015 VW emissions-cheating scandal. While consumers have turned away from diesel – especially in Germany – carmakers are depending on customers to embrace electrified powertrains if they are to recover the massive investments they’re making.

Volkswagen said on Thursday (Friday NZT) that it’s awarded US$48 billion ($68.3 billion) in contracts to battery suppliers, double from just a few weeks ago – bringing the German manufacturer close to its €50 billion ($85.2 billion) target.

Just 6 weeks ago, Volkswagen boss Matthias Müller stunned the automotive world when he revealed the company had placed orders for EV batteries and components worth a total of $25 billion. The battery purchase is spread among three companies — Samsung SDI, LG Chem, and Contemporary Amperex (aka CATL).

Now, Müller’s star is in eclipse inside the Volkswagen boardroom and new head man Herbert Diess has doubled down on Müller’s pledge. At the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Berlin on May 3, Diess told investors his company has signed orders for $48 billion worth of batteries, according to a report from Fortune. That’s double the amount touted just a few weeks ago.

Coincidentally, $48 billion happens to equal to the market capitalization of Tesla, after its stock skidded following Elon Musk’s quixotic Q1 earnings call the day before. Volkswagen says it expects to be producing 3 million electric cars a year by 2025.

“By 2020 we will offer our customers more than 25 new electric models and more than 20 plug-in hybrids,” Diess told those in attendance at the annual meeting. “In just a few years’ time, then, across all brands and regions, we aim to put the world’s largest fleet of electric vehicles on the road.”

Audi is slated to begin production of its three-motor electric SUV, the e-tron quattro, in August. (Audi’s marketing department prefers not to capitalize the names of its electric products.) Next year, the Porsche Mission E electric 4-door sedan will appear, followed closely by the Cross Turismo SUV variant. In 2020, the first cars from Volkswagen’s new ID electric car division are set to appear.

This latest announcement is bound to stir new debate about whether European automakers ought to be building their own battery factories. Last year, Ulrich Eichhorn, head of research and development for Volkswagen, said, “We will need more than 200 gigawatt-hours” worth of batteries annually by 2025. He based his projection on the expectation that a quarter of all the cars Volkswagen sells will be battery powered by then.

Last September, Volkswagen put out a call to other German carmakers to collaborate on battery production in Europe, but there has been no hint the proposal has gained traction since then. In March, Robert Bosch, one of the largest German auto suppliers, decided it had no interest in building its own battery manufacturing facility, citing the high costs involved.

So, for now, no European automaker battery factory is on the horizon. Diess did not say which companies Volkswagen has contracted with for the extra $23 billion, but they probably include the usual suspects.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk blamed an unusual culprit for delays and missed deadlines in the production of Tesla’s Model 3 Sedan, the company’s first electric car produced for the mass market — an automated machine in the car’s assembly line that Musk recently identified as a “flufferbot.”

The robot had one job: grasp and apply fuzzy fiberglass mats to the car’s battery packs, to help muffle their noise, Musk announced on Wednesday (May 2) during the company’s quarterly earnings phone call.

But the robot was simply not very good at performing this delicate task. Its botched efforts held up production, and eventually led to its removal from the Model 3 assembly line, Slate reported.

Though Tesla originally intended to churn out 5,000 Model 3 cars each week, the actual numbers have been closer to 2,000, and Musk bemoaned “excessive automation” as a factor in the production delays, Live Science previously reported. Musk tweeted on April 13 that he had been mistaken to rely as heavily as he did on automated assembly, admitting that humans were “underrated” compared to robots.

During the May 2 phone call, Musk described one particular robotic transgressor — a machine he called “a weird flufferbot,” which was an unnecessarily complex piece of machinery built to perform a fairly simple job. The team at Tesla wanted to automate placing and attaching fiberglass mats to the cars’ battery packs, but the so-called flufferbot’s grasp wasn’t as flexible as a human’s fingers.

What a person would likely have done with ease, the flufferbot flubbed, Musk admitted.

“Machines are not good at picking up pieces of fluff. Human hands are way better at doing that,” he said.

To make matters worse, the flufferbot’s failures were holding up the assembly line, keeping other robots from doing their jobs properly, according to Slate.

“The line kept breaking down because Flufferbot would frequently just fail to pick up the fluff. Or put it in a random location,” Musk said during the phone call. The production team tested the battery without its fuzzy insulation, and when they found that it sounded about the same whether it was insulated or not, the flufferbot was let go, Slate reported.

The bot had been summarily dismissed, but it did not go quietly. On May 2, Twitter gained a new user — @flufferbot — who tweeted plaintively, “I can’t believe Elon let me go. I thought I was doing a great job.”

Production on the Model 3 sedan will continue with presumably more dexterous digits on the assembly line. People who are placing orders for the cars, which carry a price starting at $35,000, can expect delivery within “12 to 18 months,” according to the Tesla website.

Kia has revealed the first pictures of the all new Niro Electric.

The car was unveiled at the 5th International Electric Vehicle Expo in Jeju, Korea.

It is due to make its official global debut at the Paris Motor Show in September this year, but the carmaker has revealed a few details ahead of then.

Firstly, the manufacturer has given the car a new bumper and air intakes and blue strips, indicative of hybrid models.

The car has also been given a new faux ‘tiger nose’ grille, which is closed off to improve the car’s aerodynamics.

It was designed at Kia’s design centres in California, USA and Namyang, Korea.

The car borrows much of the same design language debuted on the Niro EV Concept which debuted at CES 2018, in Las Vegas, earlier this year.

Kia has also confirmed the car’s range and the two battery pack variants available to buy.

There is a 29.3kWh battery pack which produces up to 149 miles (240km) on a single charge and a larger 64 kWh battery system which is good for up to 236 miles (380km).

The Niro EV will go on sale in Korea during the second half of 2018 and be introduced to other markets in due course.

Elon Musk was on the receiving end of seemingly-endless media head-scratching and criticism this week.

The media frenzy to question Elon Musk’s state of mind was rooted in comments he made during the first quarter earnings conference call.

Earnings conference call:

During a highly unusual earnings call, Tesla Inc.’s chief executive officer cut off analysts and got defensive about probing questions pertaining to the electric-car maker’s finances.

–“Elon Musk’s Most Dumbfounding Moments on Tesla’s Earnings Call,” Bloomberg, May 2, 2018

Next, next. Boring bonehead questions are not cool.

–Elon Musk, Tesla Q1 2018 Financial Results and Q&A Webcast, May 2, 2018

And he tolerates day traders even less.

We have no interest in satisfying the desires of day traders, like we couldn’t care less,” he insisted. “Please sell our stock and don’t buy it.”

–“Tesla Slumps After Musk Advises ‘Don’t Buy Our Stock’ in Bizarre Conference Call,” The Street, May 3, 2018

There’s a comprehensive compilation of all of Musk’s “strange” responses in a CNBC story, linked to below.

Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas said it was ‘the most unusual call I have experienced in 20 years on the sell-side.’

–Here are highlights of Elon Musk’s strange Tesla earnings call: ‘They’re killing me’ CNBC, May 3, 2018.

Musk takes to Twitter: Here’s a sample of his tweets post conference call:

‏The sheer magnitude of short carnage will be unreal. If you’re short, I suggest tiptoeing quietly to the exit …

Oh and uh short burn of the century comin soon. Flamethrowers should arrive just in time.

Reason RBC question about Model 3 demand is absurd is that Tesla has roughly half a million reservations, despite no advertising & no cars in showrooms. Even after reaching 5k/week production, it would take 2 years just to satisfy existing demand even if new sales dropped to 0.

The reason the Bernstein question about CapEx was boneheaded was that it had already been answered in the headline of the Q1 newsletter he received beforehand, along with details in the body of the letter

The 2 questioners I ignored on the Q1 call are sell-side analysts who represent a short seller thesis, not investors

–Elon Musk, Twitter

Autonomous vehicle coverage “outrageous”:

And Musk thinks the way autonomous cars are covered is “misleading” and “outrageous.”

Broadly there’s over a 1 million, I think 1.2 million automotive deaths per year. And how many do you read about? Basically, none of them. However…if it’s an autonomous situation, it’s headline news, and the media fails to mention that actually they shouldn’t really be writing the story, they should be writing the story about how autonomous cars are really safe, but that’s not the story that people want to click on. So they write inflammatory headlines that are fundamentally misleading to the readers. It’s really outrageous. 

–Elon Musk, Tesla Q1 2018 Results – Earnings Call Transcript, Seeking Alpha.

All-wheel-drive Model 3: the AWD Model 3 will arrive after Tesla hits a production rate of 5,000 per week, which should happen in about two months, according to the Tesla First Quarter Update.

After achieving a production rate of 5,000 per week, we will begin offering new options such as all-wheel-drive and the base model with a standard-sized battery pack.

–Tesla First Quarter 2018 Update (PDF)

About the Model Y coming in 2019: wrong. Apparently that Reuters report about the Model Y starting production in 2019 was wrong. After all, if anyone should know, it’s Elon Musk. The Model Y — expected to be (more or less) a cheaper version of the Model X — won’t begin production for a couple of years.

The Reuters report is based on nothing. Like I don’t know where that came from. We will not be starting production on Model Y at the end of next year. I would say it’s probably closer to 24 months from now. So 2020 is a more likely prospect for Model Y, early 2020.

–Elon Musk, Tesla Q1 2018 Results – Earnings Call Transcript, Seeking Alpha.

In the world of commerce, the three most important considerations are the price, the price, and the price. The world is becoming aware of how grid storage can let renewable energy meet the needs of the utility industry not only during windy or sunny conditions, but also during all hours of the day as well. Yet the price of such large installations is still a barrier to mass adoption of the technology.

Most of the batteries available today use lithium ion cells. The technology and manufacturing process is well understood. They have amazingly good response time. But they have a few drawbacks. First, they cost a lot of money. Second, their performance begins to degrade after a certain number of charge/discharge cycles. Third, they require a cooling system, which adds complexity and cost to each installation.

Rsearchers at Stanford University say they may have an answer to all three of those concerns — a new type of battery that uses manganese, hydrogen, and water to store electricity. Now, bear in mind, this discovery has only been shown to work in the laboratory. It won’t be available in the energy storage section of your local Home Depot any time soon. But it offers the promise of cheaper energy storage that will withstand more charge/discharge cycles than lithium ion batteries. And that means a door has opened that could lead to greater use of renewable energy in the future — something the environment desperately needs.

The research was published in the journal Nature Energy on April 30. Yi Cui, a professor of materials science at Stanford and senior author on the paper, says modestly, “What we’ve done is thrown a special salt into water, dropped in an electrode, and created a reversible chemical reaction that stores electrons in the form of hydrogen gas.” The basic component of the water battery is manganese sulfate, a cheap, abundant industrial salt used to make dry cell batteries, fertilizers, paper and other products, according to Stanford.

Based on the expected lifespan of the new battery, Cui estimatest it would cost a penny to store enough electricity to power a 100 watt lightbulb for twelve hours. “We believe this prototype technology will be able to meet Department of Energy goals for utility scale electrical storage practicality,” he says.

The Department of Energy standard for grid-scale storage is the ability to store and discharge at least 20 kilowatts of power over a period of an hour over the course of at least 5,000 charge/discharge cycles and have a useful lifespan of 10 years or more. The target cost the DOE is looking for is $100 per kWh.

Steven Chu, DOE secretary during the Obama administration and a Nobel laureate says, “While the precise materials and design still need development, this prototype demonstrates the type of science and engineering that suggest new ways to achieve low cost, long lasting, utility scale batteries.” Chu is now a professor at Stanford but was not involved in this research program. Other rechargeable battery technologies being considered by researchers today “are easily more than five times of that cost over their life time,” Cui adds.

The Stanford water battery is not quite ready for prime time just yet. The researchers are using platinum as a catalyst, which is expensive, but Cui explains, “We have identified catalysts that could bring us below the $100 per kilowatt-hour DOE target.”

A lot of research and development remains to be done before the Stanford water battery is ready for commercial use. Only a small percentage of breakthroughs in the lab ever make it to actual production.The $100 per kWh price threshold is something every battery researcher is focused on. Even lithium ion batteries may crack that barrier one day. But if the water battery can withstand more charge/discharge cycles, its total overall cost will be lower.

Will the new technology from Yi Cui and his team be one of the ones that makes it out of the lab and into production? “We’ll see,” said the Zen master.