Long after Ford and Chevy stopped making their own all-electric vans, a new company has stepped in to take their place. Sounds familiar. All this and more The morning shift for September 15, 2021.
1st team: Rivian has just received government approval for production, I had been waiting since mid-August
Okay, so the big news is that Rivian, the SU / pickup EV startup related to Ford and Amazon, has started building production cars for customers, as the head tweeted:
The deepest news is that Rivian got government approval to start shipping these trucks to customers, how Bloomberg reports:
Rivian Automotive Inc., the manufacturer of electric pickup supported by Amazon.com Inc., states that it has received full regulatory certifications and can begin delivering its first electric vehicle to U.S. customers.
“Rivian vehicles are fully certified by NHTSA, EPA and CARB and are on sale in all 50 states,” a Rivian spokesman wrote in an email.
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Depending on who you ask, Rivian was already ready to make these trucks in August and was waiting for federal approval …
From Electrek:
Rivian says its R1T electricity collection is basically ready for production and is now awaiting government approval to begin deliveries.
The R1T was due to be delivered earlier this summer, however Rivian has encountered some production issues as expected when launching a new vehicle program and, most importantly, from a new startup that has not delivered any consumer vehicles before.
Since then, the company has been guiding the start of deliveries in September.
… Or he was stuck waiting for components.
From Bloomberg:
Rivian Automotive Inc., the manufacturer of electrical collection with the support of Amazon.com Inc., pushes back the production of its debut vehicle two months in September due to bottlenecks in the supply chain.
The startup also changed the timeline of its second planned model, an electric sports vehicle, from August to an unspecified time in the fall, according to a letter to customers Friday. The company cited component shortages.
Both are probably true.
Anyway, Ford manufactured 1,500 all-electric Ranger vehicles from 1998 to 2002, and Chevy manufactured its own S-10 vehicles, but neither committed to its programs during the cheap gas era.
2nd Gear: Workhorse Guse Up On USPS Drama
This has been a strange thing, with a small company claiming corruption or, uh, unfair treatment in a large public contract that was intended for a large existing government contractor. This kind of thing never happens in the United States.
Anyway, the little one has given up, like David Shepardson reports to Reuters:
The electric vehicle company Workhorse Group fired voluntarily on Tuesday its legal challenge a U.S. postal service awards a multimillion-dollar contract to Oshkosh Defense for delivery vehicles The ten-year contract was announced in February it could be worth more than $ 6 billion and deliver between 50,000 and 165,000 vehicles. Workhorse had proposed building a fleet of all-electric vehicles for USPS, while Oshkosh plans a mix of internal combustion vehicles and battery-powered electric vehicles. U.S. Federal Court of Appeals.
Workhorse and Oskhosh did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday afternoon. USPS declined immediate comment.
3rd team: Apple provider Foxconn also resigns from the EV partnership
Speaking of quitting, the big Apple supplier has given up on its automotive aspirations Apple’s own path to car manufacturing has stuttered. From Reuters:
The electric vehicle project of Apple supplier Foxconn with Byton has been suspended due to the worsening financial situation of the Chinese startup, the Nikkei newspaper reported Wednesday, citing unidentified sources with knowledge of the matter.
“The project has not yet been officially completed, but it is very difficult to proceed at this time,” one source said Nikkei Asia.
4th gear: Germans can drive as fast as they want and continue to drive mostly Less than 80 MPH
I am always interested in the world of driver management. How we set speed limits, how we calm traffic and design own roads: all this seems to be already done wrong in America. But what about this lighthouse of automotive infrastructure, Germany, where the streets of the villages are filled with traffic calming measures and the main highways have unrestricted driving sections and no speed limits.
Perhaps surprising is that the Germans they don’t even take advantage of it, according to a new study, com The mirror reports:
[O]only a small proportion of people even have the need to run through the streets at a speed of more than 130 kilometers per hour.
This is the result of a analysis of the German Institute of Economics (IW) related to entrepreneurs in Cologne . According to the institute, the experts evaluated the real-time data of highway sections without a speed limit for the survey. The data comes from the automatic highway counting stations of North Rhine-Westphalia , from mid-May to late August. A total of 1.2 billion vehicle movements were included in the analysis.
This shows: even with no speed limit, 77 percent of highway cars were traveling at less than 130 km / h at the time of the show. Twelve percent drove at 130 to 140 miles per hour. Nine percent of drivers drove at speeds of between 140 and 160 kilometers per hour. According to the study, less than two percent of drivers were traveling at more than 160 kilometers per hour.
130 km / h is about 80 miles per hour, 160 km / h is about 100 mph. The truth is that there is not much unrestricted German highway even when it is you don’t always want to make more than a dollar.
5th Gear: This Feels Wrong
I’m not sure how bad it feels with this, but all my alert indicators are going up. From Detroit News:
Ford Motor Co. and Argo AI announced Wednesday that they are joining retail giant Walmart Inc. to offer an autonomous vehicle delivery service to three U.S. cities beginning this year.
The last mile delivery service, which companies say marks the first autonomous delivery partnership of several Walmart cities in the United States, is scheduled to begin in Miami, Austin and Washington, DC Walmart customers in the United States Defined service areas of cities will be able to order groceries and other items online, with delivery provided by Ford vehicles equipped with the Argo automatic driving system.
Reverse: It is only a few years before the railway is connected
From History:
On September 15, 1858, the new Overland Mail Company sent its first two stages, inaugurating the government mail service between the eastern and western regions of the nation.
Neutral: At least did the major manufacturers give up a first advantage?
It could be said that Jeep wasted an early lead in the boom of China’s SUVs, but that would only be if you hadn’t read the case study on corporate mismanagement that is Beijing Jeep.