IPOs, EV classic cars and 1,000 AMIs

The latest news from the world of EVs

Good morning! Welcome back to The Fast Charge, a British EV newsletter.

Now, this week’s edition is sadly going to disappoint many of you because I’ve not only had to rush it, meaning it’s quite scarce in material, but also what I’ve rushed it for.

So, the good news first is that in today’s email I’ve still linked to a lot of the great stories I’ve seen in the last week – of which there are many.

The bad news, the reason today’s email is rubbish is I’ve been spending many hours trying to help the people of South England from the current fuel shortage :0

Yes, you read correctly. As the fuel crisis has engulfed much of the South in the last week, both my brother and I – who have previously set up a successful crowdsourced map – decided to see if our skills were useful for the many thousands trying to work out which petrol station were shut or open. We created ‘Shortage Map’ on Saturday night and shared it with some Facebook groups. By Sunday evening it had been accessed 10,000 times and as I write now that number sits at over 25,000. As such, we’ve been fielding hundreds of updates from people mostly across Kent, Sussex and Surrey who are still stuck struggling for petrol.

At the end of the day, people not being able to reach hospitals, jobs and loved ones is bad for everyone. I just hope that once this is all over (fingers crossed this week) people will seriously reconsider their car’s fuel type. As an Uber driver told me on Saturday evening, “as soon as this is over, I’m getting one of these f***ing electrics!”

Anyway, I digress. Back to those ‘f***ing electrics!’

In the last week…

TESLA. At the weekend Tesla published their recent sales numbers, and they were HUGE. They managed to shift 241,300 cars in the last quarter. In addition, I think the latest SMMT figures covering registrations are released this week, so it’ll be interesting to see where their models appear on the leaderboard (my guess is high, if not on top)

MODEL Y. I’m told British punters should still be able to order a Tesla Model Y before Halloween. The starting price in the UK when you can is thought to be around £50,000.

IPO. The last week saw two automakers ready for a public listing. The first of which is the Swedish carmaker Volvo (owned by Chinese group Geely) who are reportedly going to be valued at $25 billion when they list. Another big name is the American EV start-up Rivian. The company has barely proved its worth yet but that hasn’t stopped it from getting valued pre-IPO at a stonking $80 billion. Read more about Volvo here and Rivian here.

CLASSIC. There’s a good feature on the BBC posted yesterday about the rise in classic car EV conversions. It’s not often the BBC publishes something like this so worth a read. Read more.

FT SERIES. The Financial Times have started a new written feature series on EVs. It will consist of four long articles looking at different parts of the industry I’ve read the first one which goes into highlighting ‘the revolution is finally here’. It includes quotes from major manufacturers who are all vying with each other for dominance. The other features in the series due out will cover: Part 2 How green is your EV? Part 3 Will Americans ever buy electric vehicles? Part 4 Batteries and China’s bid to dominate. No doubt a slight repeat of articles that have gone before but the fact they are dedicating this much resource to covering this is great. Read the first article (it may be behind a paywall.)

BEST PLACE. According to comparethemarket.com, EV owners in Coventry have access to the most chargers per vehicle in the UK. The wort place to be is Stockport – where there are apparently 35,000 EVs yet only 35 chargers. Read more detail and a full regional breakdown on Sunday Times Driving.

AMI. Last week I highlighted how the Citroen AMI is coming to the UK. Well, Citroen has now revealed that it’s received over 1,000 pre-orders for the small car already. Read more.

LUCID. The American EV maker, Lucid, which is led by a very nice British bloke Peter Rawlinson, has put its long-awaited ‘Air’ into production. The car has a range of 520 miles, will do 0-60 in 2.5 seconds but sadly will cost nearly £125,000. You can pre-order the car in the UK. Read more.

ROLLS. As teased last week, Rolls-Royce will launch its first EV in late 2023 and will phase out all ICE vehicles by 2030. The first EV off the line will be the ‘Spectre’. Read more.

By Tom Riley