Electric Cars News

Volkswagen has added an all-new auto brand under its umbrella in China. Branded as SOL, it is a new low-cost electric vehicle brand specifically for China, under which the company will retail affordable EVs.

A partially camouflaged test mule of the much anticipated MINI Electric was recently spotted undergoing cold weather testing. The prototype model has lost a lot of camouflage from the last time we came across a spy image of the car and now we get to see a bit more of the car's actual skin.

Bookings for the car have already begun and the company is gaining good traction for the EV already. Audi confirmed that the e-tron has received 3700 bookings and all of them come from Norway.

Audi has teased the future of it's electric mobility plans at its annual press conference. The new concept car is a look into the future of Audi's sportier car range and has been christened Audi e-tron GT. The Audi e-tron GT will make it to production by 2021 or 2022 and will have the same underpinnings as the Porsche Mission E. This will be the third fully electric vehicle in the e-tron range after the Audi e-tron SUV and the Audi e-tron sportback that is due to be launched by the end of the decade along with a range of other hybrid vehicles.

Polestar has started accepting bookings for its first new car - the Polestar 1. The Polestar 1 is now available as a pre order by paying a deposit of "2,500 or $2,500 (20,000 Yen if you are in China) since there has been a huge demand for the hybrid coupe since its launch a few months ago. The Polestar 1 is currently only available in 18 countries - The United States, United Kingdon, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. The final price of the Polestar 1 will be about $150,000 to $170,000.

The Volkswagen Group is driving forward with the transformation to e-mobility and announced that it will be producing battery powered vehicles in 16 locations around the globe by the end of 2022.

The folks over at Lamborghini and MIT worked together to come up with a carbon fibre body shell that has the ability to self-heal if damaged.

Almost every electric car today is powered by a conventional Lithium-Ion battery pack. However, conventional Li-On batteries do have their limitation. These include charge times, weight, size and of course, the amount of charge that they can actually hold (depending on the size of the battery). The next step in the evolution of batteries will be the solid-state Lithium-Ion battery pack which in turn charges quicker, is much lighter and most importantly, is much safer than the current crop of battery packs. Manufacturers like Toyota have been wokring on solid-state battery packs for years now on prototype stage and now, the Renault-Nissan Alliance, of which automaker Mitsubishi is also a part of, has announced that it will move towards solid-state batteries by 2025. Toyota has also announced production versions of the solid state battery in their cars - both hybrid and fully electric by the year 2022.