Electric Land Vehicles

The event Hybrid and Electric Vehicle Forum consisted a conference with about 70 delegates and a small display area for a few organisations. Here we give some details of the presentations that particularly caught our attention.

The Reed Exhibitions event last week consisting of PV Expo, Battery Osaka and Smart Grid Expo successfully extended an event that started with photovoltaics last year.

Graphene could radically improve batteries and supercapacitors as explained in the new IDTechEx report Functional Materials for Supercapacitors/Ultracapacitors/EDLC 2015-2025.

IDTechEx's Supercapacitor Europe 2014 conference is bringing the best of supercapacitor developments in the region and internationally to Berlin on 1-2 April.

As the electric vehicle EV industry grows more than five-fold to well over $300 billion in 2024, those e-vehicles not bought primarily on up-front price will continue to dominate.

Analysts IDTechEx have recently pointed out that industrial and commercial electric vehicles (hybrid and pure electric) are now a bigger business than electric cars and will remain so for the coming decade, while making almost all the profit of the two put together.

A Tesla Model S was filmed burning in the road recently, allegedly having struck a metal object.

The Japanese are working very hard on thermoelectric energy harvesting from tiny forms for use on hot running electronics components the 1.5 kW versions for use on furnace flues etc.

For the next decade, the largest electric vehicle sector will be industrial and commercial electric vehicles on land. In great contrast to the hybrid and pure electric cars that come next in market size, industrial and commercial electric vehicles are almost never bought by private individuals. That means that they are almost never bought on up-front price, the criteria being cost-over-life, reliability and performance with any extra life over conventional versions much appreciated.

This article shares some of the research in the new IDTechEx report, "Range Extenders for Electric Vehicles Land, Water & Air 2013-2023" which covers all such vehicles, on land, on/under water and airborne.