Matthew Klippenstein, Contributor
Articles
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Yesterday, the Province of British Columbia announced the return of its Clean Energy Vehicle (CEV) incentive program, effective April 1.
The program's return was the culmination of months of...
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Plug-in Electric Car Sales In Canada, Feb 2015: Tesla May Be On Top, BC Incentives Back
After strong December and January sales, Tesla may "three-peat" atop Canadian rankings for plug-in electric car sales last month. Lower-than-usual Volt and Leaf sales mirrored lower-than-usual temperatures across most of Canada in February, meaning the Tesla Model S stood a good chance of taking...
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Plug-in Electric Car Sales In Canada, Jan 2015: Volt Bolts To Early Lead
The Chevy Volt bolted to an early lead in Canada's 2015 plug-in electric vehicle sales, with 71 sales. That's nearly double the Nissan Leaf's January total of 36. We'll see if the Volt can sustain this lead, as the Leaf outsold it by a margin of 393 to 372 during the last four months of 2014. DON'T...
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Plug-in Electric Cars In Canada: 10,000 Sold, Good News For 2015
This month, as millions of Americans count down to Super Bowl XLIX, a slightly smaller number of Canadians counted down to EV 10,000, celebrating the ten-thousandth plug-in electric vehicle on the country's roads. This milestone probably actually happened in November, but such celebrations need to...
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Plug-In Electric Car Sales For Canada In 2014: Steady Growth
While vehicle registration data won't arrive for another few weeks, we cautiously expect Tesla Model S to win December's Canadian plug-in sales sweepstakes. Both the Chevrolet Volt (at 62 range-extended electric cars sold) and Nissan Leaf (64 battery-electric vehicles) closed the year with modest...
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Plug-in Electric Car Sales In Canada, Nov 2014: L-E-A-F Spells Consistency
The Nissan Leaf seems to have won its second consecutive Canadian sales title in November, bringing fuel-free mobility to another 103 drivers. While down slightly from October's 113 units, this is about what one would expect, given that Canadian auto sales tend to tail off at the end of the year...
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Electric-car charging stations are still remarkably rare at gas stations, though a handful exist in the Pacific Northwest.
But earlier this year, the Petro-Canada station in Crossfield, Alberta,...
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Plug-in Electric Car Sales In Canada, Oct 2014: Tesla Outsells Leaf: UPDATED
Well, September vehicle registration data for Canada has now arrived, and the Tesla Model S simply crushed all competition with 194 sales. The September numbers no doubt got a tailwind from deliveries that would've taken place in August (a far-below-average 25 sales) but had to be delayed on...
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A Third Of This Dealer's Sales Are Chevy Volt Electric Cars: How'd They Do It?
Can any other franchised dealer in the world make the claim that full one-third of its sales are a single model of plug-in electric car? Bourgeois Chevrolet of Rawdon, Quebec, achieved that remarkable level in its sales this year of the Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car. Now the dealership...
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BC's Electric-Car Charging Stations: 2 Years Of Data And What It Tells Us
British Columbia's public charging stations got twice as busy in the past year, roughly tracking the increase in the Canadian province's plug-in electric vehicle population. The results were announced earlier this month by the Fraser Basin Council and Powertech Labs, two members of the Plug in BC...
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Plug-in Electric Car Sales in Canada, Sep 2014: Smart Deals Move Wheels
During September, another 145 Chevrolet Volts were sold in Canada--continuing the slow but steady arrival of plug-in electric cars onto the nation's roads. While this would ordinarily be enough to crown Chevy's range-extended electric car with another first-place sales finish for the month, the...
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When Electric Car Incentives Expire: A Case Study In Canada
In February, the Canadian province of British Columbia became one of few areas of the world to allow its plug-in electric vehicle purchase incentives to expire. The cause was simple: The initial allocation of funds ran out, and the incentive was not renewed with further funding. Five months of...
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In August, the Chevy Volt won the Canadian plug-in sales derby yet again – a category dominance that brings to mind the Ford F-150's 48-year-reign(!) atop truck sales, in the land of the... -
Plug-in Electric Car Sales In Canada, Jul 2014: Volt Victorious, Leaf Looms
The Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car remains Canada's plug-in sales champion, but the Nissan Leaf battery-electric--the best-selling electric car in history--is coming up fast in its rear-view mirror As consistently as the Toyota Camry tops the U.S. car sales charts, the Chevy Volt leads...
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Decoding Toyota's Electric-Car Disdain: A Role For Fuel Cells
While unveiling its fuel-cell vehicle last month–priced to undercut the Tesla Model S ever so slightly–Toyota's Global R&D Chief Mitsuhisa Kato offered some dismissive thoughts on battery-electric vehicles. As quoted in Automotive News, the 39-year veteran of the Toyota Motor...
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Plug-in Electric Car Sales In Canada, Jun 2014: 10,000 On Roads At Year-End?
To borrow from an old soccer saying, plug-in electric car sales in Canada are a game in which about a dozen models compete, and the Chevy Volt wins. But in the broader competition with combustion, based on current trends, the Canadian market looks ripe to hit a nice round milestone by the end of...
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Why An Electric Car Saves Fleet Operators $16,000 In Lifetime Cost
The average car spends about 95 percent of a 24-hour day parked. For the 5 percent that they're driven, they actually spend one-third of the time idling–at red lights, stuck behind leisurely left-turners, or even while the driver waits for the vehicle to warm up (or cool down) before getting...
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Plug-in Electric Car Sales In Canada, May 2014: A Pattern Of Progress
May was a great month for Canadian plug-in electric vehicle sales, as it was in the United States--where sales of 3,117 Nissan Leafs represented the second-highest monthly sales ever for any car that plugs in. On the Canadian side of the border, our tracking showed the nation's electric-car fleet...
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In Canada, the Chevy Volt's record-setting sales last month overshadowed the Tesla Model S's equally impressive deliveries the month before, in March.
Building on strong momentum in March, the Chevy... -
One Percent Of Norway's Cars Are Already Plug-In Electrics
Overshadowed by their spectacular sales success in March, electric vehicles hit a momentous milestone in Norway last month. Fully one percent of Norway's passenger-car fleet now consists of battery electric vehicles. And this isn't a case of rounding up, either – this is a full 1 percent. As...
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Plug-in Electric Car Sales In Canada For March: Volt Returns To Triple Figures
While the Nissan Leaf is gaining momentum, the Chevrolet Volt remains in the driver's seat for March in plug-in electric-car sales for Canada. The Chevy Volt returned to triple-figure sales in Canada for the tenth time in March, tallying 105 sales from coast to coast. That figure was up slightly...
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Plug-in Electric Car Sales In Canada, Feb 2014: Milestones, Millstones
While February's electric vehicle sales in Canada will have easily topped year-ago numbers, the plug-in market still faces headwinds in Canada during 2014. British Columbia hit a milestone of 1,000 plug-in vehicle sales earlier this year. With 4.4 million people, the province has about the same...
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Why A Gigafactory? Tesla Used 1/3 Of All Electric-Car Batteries Last Year
The 210,000 plug-in electric vehicles sold around the world last year used a lot of lithium-ion batteries. But if startup automaker Tesla Motors has its way, it will soon need as many lithium-ion cells (of the 18650 format it uses) as are now built worldwide. That's why the company plans to release...
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Tesla Patents Prepare For Common Cross-Country Electric-Car Travel Via Supercharger
This past week–almost exactly 500 days after Tesla Motors announced the first six stations in its Supercharger network–a father-daughter team in a Tesla Model S electric car became the first to cross the country by Supercharger alone. MORE: Elon Musk Talks Tesla Model X Details, Model S...
Matthew Klippenstein