One of the main issues with electrification is securing a large supply of batteries. In many ways, this explains why Tesla is the only volume electric car maker: they worked on their battery supply before it became a bottleneck. It's good to see Volvo and others working on getting enough batteries. They still have a long way to catch-up, but at least they are on their way.

All cars have brake connections in the hubs, so getting an electric connection isn't an insurmountable problem. The problem with in-wheel motors is unsprung weight. It's probably not a valid solution for light-duty vehicles, but it should be workable for trucks,

Harvey, The answer is in the article: "Between 43 and 61% of TNC trips substitute for transit, walk, or bike travel or would not have been made at all, adding traffic to the road that otherwise would not have been there." On a related topic, there was an article here last year explaining that autonomous cars will find it cheaper to continuously drive around if parking is expensive. That will certainly add to congestion: imagine hundreds or thousands of empty cars, driving slowly in circles all day. Sure, some of them will occasionally leave the city core, but the net number should be stable. At the end of the day they will ferry you home and drive around your residential neighbourhoods all night. The fact is, these cars have to be somewhere. They don't disappear when we don't need them, and transportation requirements are not random: most people need to get to work or school in the morning, and back home at night. Not much for autonomous cars to do in between these two peaks.

Autonomous cars will increase congestion even more, of course.

Can it be recycled?

To put it an other way, a handy (unverified) online converter tells me this is the equivalent of 0.84 million barrels of oil. It's not nothing, but it's also not a lot. Yet.

It's just a much more modern engine family than their old V8 and V6 which were left-over from Land Rover's Ford days (10+ years ago). The Ingenium engine family was first introduced with 4 cylinders in the smaller Discovery Sport and Evoque. It makes sense for a relatively small manufacturer to derive their 6 cylinder from their 4 cylinder, instead of tooling-up for a V6. The Range Rovers and bigger Jaguars have lots of space under the hood for an in-line 6, so the advantages of a V design would not be as relevant.

They seem to completely ignore externalities: pollution, health care to fix the effects of the pollution, exporting money to pay for non-renewables (coal, gas, oil). I don't doubt that many of these programs could be better, but that doesn't justify looking at only one side of the ledger.

They say it's a limited edition, but the real question is "could they build more if they had to?" Everybody but Tesla is struggling to procure enough batteries for their EVs, so they release low-volume halo models (Audi, Jaguar, Mercedes), or sub-compacts with a relatively short range (dozens of Chinese manufacturers, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Smart, GM, BMW). 6,000 units may seem substantial, but Tesla builds more than that every week. It seems obvious now that you can't build EVs without batteries. The problem is, the only way to get batteries today is to invest in battery manufacturing 6 or 7 years ago.

I guess this means that there's very little value in lease-return i3's. Probably because it has a tiny range. That's too bad, the i3 is BMW's only interesting/innovative design of the past decade. They should refurbish them using modern batteries. The carbon fiber structure is probably as good as new, so it's a shame to send these cars to the crusher because of an obsolete (but replaceable) battery.

I suspect that Toyota hasn't yet figured-out how to make/buy enough batteries for a full EV. That's where Tesla has a real market advantage. I'll repeat what I said about the last new Prius, and the one before that: there's barely any gains left to be made with hybrid technology. Fuel consumption is more-or-less the same as it was 15 years ago. I know that a lot of people here love to speculate that the next Prius will get "100mpg", but they are in the 50-60 range, just like every Prius since the second generation.

E-P, FYI, the problem is not "while the storage tank is being filled and air is being pushed out." In most jurisdictions, the air that is pushed-out is sent to the tanker to replace the equal volume of fuel that is pushed-in.

E-P, I think you are confusing the marketing with real life. It says Jeep on the front, but this is their small urban crossover. The target markets are families, and empty-nesters who can't get into low cars anymore. These people appreciate the space efficiency of the wagon shape. They will not be crossing the Darién Gap. As far as fuel efficiency is concerned, it's not much different from competing choices, which is to say that it is much better than almost anything available 20 years ago.

What is the real-world range if it spends all day parked with the air conditioning on?

One important question is "how many can they make?" It looks like Tesla is the only company that can produce 100,000+ battery packs per year. All the other electrics are limited to 10 or 20% of that volume. In a way, Tesla has no "real" competition yet. A 700kg, 2.28 meter battery pack... wow! No wonder they released a giant SUV, that monster pack won't fit in anything else.

Not sure it's a long-term trend. Add 8 years to the bump in the 2009 data and you get a corresponding bump in 2017. The years before the 2009 recession were characterized by easy credit, which fueled car sales. What the graph shows is that many of those cars are still on the road (and presumably paid-off!). There's a dip in the 2017 chart (around 5-8 years) that corresponds to the 2009+ sales collapse. Makes perfect sense: there aren't as many 2009-2012 cars on the road, because fewer were made/sold in the first place.

It's actually funny that the "Tesla-beater" Bolt sells as much in a quarter as the Model 3 does in a week. I wonder how many of those sales are made to people who don't want to wait for the Model 3 backlog to be filled.

The pipeline isn't for American pickups, it's for China and the rest of Asia.

What about recycling. Steel and Al are easy to recycle, but composites usually aren't.

E-P, one of the pictures on Volvo's site clearly shows a turbocharger.

The "new engines, plug-in hybrid versions" from the title did not make it into the article. Nothing against fragrancing options and massage seats, but GCC is usually more about the running gear.

Look on the bright side: these Ford/Lincoln barges are more efficient than GM, Nissan and Toyota large SUVs. Especially Toyota, the Sequoia gets 14MPG on gasoline, and 10 (TEN!) MPG on E85.

How is this different from having everybody in a neighborhood running maximum A/C and cooking dinner at the same time? Electric cars are less of an issue because they can be programmed to charge overnight.

Cheeseater, Bolt sales are lower than Tesla, and they always will be. LG Chem has (inadvertently) stated that they are only contracted to build up-to 30,000 Bolt battery packs per year. Bolt sales aren't high enough to reach that target, even if you take their highest sales month and multiply by 12 (ignoring seasonal variations).

It's still a net savings, and definitely better than buying 2 SUVs.