China’s demand for SUVs and electric vehicles keep increasing, which made Tesla’s Model X a very popular vehicle in the country despite its higher price due to import duties slapped on all of Tesla’s vehicles.

Now NIO, one of the most well-funded new Chinese EV startups, launched their first production vehicle this week, the NIO ES8, a cheaper all-electric SUV to try to capture the market. expand full story

Tesla is introducing a new ‘fair use’ policy for its Supercharger network today. This is to deter the commercial use of its charging stations, which has become a problem in some markets, and to focus on the original intended use of the Supercharger network: enabling long-distance travel in electric vehicles.

The automaker says that any new or used Tesla vehicles purchased after today and is used for commercial purposes cannot use any Tesla Supercharger worldwide.  expand full story

This week on the Electrek Podcast, we are discussing the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy, including Tesla being on track for record deliveries this quarter according to our latest report, Model 3 production increasing, Tesla Semi and its new competitor, and much more. expand full story

Renault and Nissan have a long-standing marketing partnership with Star Wars and with the release of the latest movie this week, Renault is unveiling a new limited edition ‘ZOE STAR WARS’ electric car, which they actually plan to sell. expand full story

In October, we reported on Elon Musk’s Boring Company deploying a staging area for its Baltimore-DC underground hyperloop project.

Now more details about the project are coming out as the company reportedly plans to start digging as soon as next month.  expand full story

Tesla started shipping a new mobile connector with the Model 3 earlier this year.

Today, Tesla made the device – pictured above – its new standard mobile connector for all its vehicles and they are calling it “Gen 2”. expand full story

Electrek Green Energy Brief: A daily technical, financial, and political review/analysis of important green energy news. Featured Image Source.

US solar deployment hits lowest level in two years (w/ charts) – According to the latest figures from GTM Research and Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) across the nation 2.03 GW of solar PV was installed, slightly below Q2 2016, which saw 2.05 GW. There are no simple answers to why the industry saw this slump, and instead a variety of factors can be seen. A 51% year-over-year decline from Q3 2016 has more to do with the volume of projects initially planned for completion before the 30% Investment Tax Credit (ITC) was extended to 2020, than it does with the weakness this past quarter. There’s a lot of complexity going on in US solar. Smaller utility-scale stuff is on hold because of the Suniva issues – larger utility-scale stuff won’t show up in report just yet. Commercial is actually up in volume, but it’s a smaller component. Residential is down overall – lease and cash dealing with separate complexities. Some of these things are temporary, some are permanent evolutions (less leasing as a percent of the total). Still though, expectations of 12GW of solar power is a lot of solar power. And it’ll grow again soon.

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Tesla appears to be increasing the rate at which it sends out batches of Model 3 configuration invitations to regular customers. expand full story

Bosch is the world’s largest automotive supplier and it is heavily investing in electric vehicle components to support the industry’s transition to electric vehicles.

But there’s one important electric car component that Bosch is not making: battery cells.

The company now says that it is considering a significant investment to start producing batteries. expand full story