Happy New Year! This week, we have news on Volkswagen, the Sony/Honda AFEELA, State of Charging, and Mercedes-Benz & ChargePoint: Our Top EV News for the week of Jan 13, 2023
Check out the full newsletter for the week which includes more Electric Vehicle News, and also news about Autonomous Vehicles. Check out this week’s newsletter for more EV news.
Bio: John is the COO at EPG, a company focused on helping electric and autonomous vehicle companies hire the best talent. In addition to these services, EPG puts out an informative weekly newsletter dubbed Mobility EVo. You can sign up for the newsletter here.
Drivers Wanted
In 2022, Volkswagen delivered around 330,000 EVs, which represents a 23.6% YoY growth. The Volkswagen Group’s top electric world car was the ID.4, with around 170,000 units delivered to customers. The ID.4 saw success in multiple regions including China, where Volkswagen more than doubled deliveries of EVs from the ID family and, in North America, where the company delivered 22,700 ID.4s. The ID.4 was also the best-selling electric car in Sweden.
Volkswagen has already reached a milestone in its electric mobility campaign by delivering more than 580,000 models from the ID family worldwide since September 2020. Volkswagen’s latest addition to the ID family, ID.7, was shown earlier this month at CES, expanding the brand’s electric portfolio into the upper-middle-class, high-volume segment.
A FEEL YA
Sony Honda Mobility Inc. has unveiled a prototype of its new electric AFEELA brand at the CES 2023 event in Las Vegas. The prototype is equipped with 45 cameras and sensors, as well as 800 TOPS of maximum computing power for the electronic control unit with the goal being Level 3 automated driving.
SHM aims to turn the mobility space into an entertainment space by integrating the real and virtual worlds. The company has started a collaboration with Epic Games to create new value in mobility services and entertainment. Pre-orders for the AFEELA prototype are set to begin in the first half of 2025, with sales planned for the end of 2025, and delivery in North America in spring 2026.
We Need More
According to a report from S&P Global Mobility, the current charging infrastructure in the US is inadequate for supporting a rapidly expanding electric vehicle market. Even when home charging is considered, to properly match forecasted sales demand, the United States will need to see the number of EV chargers quadruple between 2022 and 2025, and grow more than eight-fold by 2030, according to S&P Global Mobility forecasts.
The report estimates that there are about 126,500 Level 2 and 20,431 DC fast charging stations in the US today, plus another 16,822 Tesla Superchargers and Tesla destination chargers. The good news is that the number of chargers grew more in 2022 than in the preceding three years combined. As more and more new EVs are expected to be released in the coming years, the market for charging is primed for significant growth.
2,500 Ports
ChargePoint, Mercedes-Benz, and MN8 Energy are working together to build more than 400 electric vehicle charging hubs in the US and Canada. The hubs will have more than 2,500 ChargePoint DC fast-charging ports and will be in major cities, along major highways, and close to retail and service destinations.
The charging hubs will be powered by ChargePoint’s industry-leading charging hardware and software solutions and will be financed and operated jointly by MN8 and Mercedes-Benz. They will be available to all electric vehicle drivers, but Mercedes-Benz drivers will have additional benefits such as preferential access via reservation and automatic authentication functionality.
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