We’re back for another installment of EV Morning. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and settle in for some news. We’ve a mixed bag for you from electric excavators to fuel shortages….stay tuned for the details.

Addison Lee goes electric 

Let’s talk about Addison Lee going all-electric. This company is a London-based private hire and courier company. They’ve committed to transforming their passenger fleet to EVs over the next couple of years. The investment will take about £160 million and will equate to adding about 200 EVs per month!  

They’re starting with an order of 450 iD.4s Now, we don’t know exactly which version they’re going for yet. We presume that it’s not worth their while splashing out on the top specs or the GTX! But they may well choose the Rear Wheel Drive model with the larger 82kWh battery. It has plenty of space and plenty of range. 

Production news  

We’re always a bit hesitant to talk about cars that are announced years in advance. So we were delighted to see that some new EV’s are in production. First up is the Lucid Air that has just rolled off the line. They will be prepared for customer deliveries toward the end of October. The first 520 cars to roll off the line will be the Dream Edition. And in case you’re wondering why it’s 520…well that’d be the number of miles that the EPA has given the car’s range rating. 520 miles, 837 kilometres…wow! 

We’re also seeing the Cupra Born rolling off the production line in Zwickau in Germany. It’ll be produced alongside the other MEB platform models such as the iD.3 and the iD.4. We’re looking forward to seeing how the car is received, especially the RWD 77kWh battery version that has a WLTP figure of 336 miles! How do you think it compares to the iD.3? 

Citroen Ami coming to the UK  

We just had to throw in this quick story when we saw it, because we love this car, quadricycle…whatever it’s called. The Citroen Ami has gotten a lot of attention and they have decided to bring it to the UK also. This city-runabout has a top speed of 45kmh, and a range of 74km from a 5.5kWh battery. 

Unlike in France where you can drive one of these from as young as 14, UK drivers will have to have a full license and be at least 17 to drive it. A £250 refundable fee gets your name on the list. We’re not yet sure how much it’ll cost, but in France you can buy one outright for just under €8,000. 

Volvo electric excavators  

We always love to bring you at least one story that doesn’t involve a Tesla or some other passenger car. So this one comes from California and Volvo’s Construction Equipment division. Although not new, the story rounds up a year-long pilot project. The project involved a combined 400 operating hours of an electric compact excavator and an electric compact wheel loader. 
Over the course of the pilot they saved 6 metric tonnes of Co2 and more than 500 gallons of fuel! Of course you can’t forget the added benefits of being able to use these vehicles without the worry of diesel exhaust fumes in a confined space. They also drastically reduce the noise pollution, and made communicating on site much easier. 

EV Interest spikes 

UK viewers will be all too aware of this story. We won’t go into the how and whys of this, but there is a massive fuel shortage in the UK at the moment. Days of panic buying by motorists have left fuel stations without…well…fuel. Footage recorded by people on phones show tailbacks at stations that snake down the road. Many people have been left without a means to get to work. It’s not a time to be smug, and thankfully many EV drivers are helping out neighbours and friends with lifts. 

And a by-product is that this has caused a massive upsurge in interest in Electric Vehicles. Data from Google searches show that interest in EVs spiked by 1,600% on September 24th! 

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