Tuesday 17th April 2018. The current Model 3 Tracker from Tom Randall and Dean Halford, as updated on 16th April, shows 16,587 cars produced, and a current rate of 2,731 Model 3’s being built per week. Frist up a video recommendation, Fully Charged have a long YouTube video all about the Jaguar I-PACE. They get the drive that all the other car reviewers had around the cones, then they got a longer drive of it later, plus a lot of shots of both the static car and a cutaway of it – so you can see the batteries, motor, inverter and all the techy bits.      ARTICLE BY LI SHIFU A look today’s newspaper article by the Geely Chairman Li Shufu: “Carmakers need to realise the combustion engine is spluttering and grasp the future”   QUICKLY DOES IT WITH 175KW CHARGERS Everyone wants something quickly these days – from fast food to listening to podcasts on fast forward, so you can fit twice as many in! But when it comes to fast charging, it’s a double edged sword. When you need to rapid charge you want to do it quickly, but then again you don’t want to abuse your battery all the time. On the whole however the fast the better if you’re on a road trip, and everyone else will get a little taste of what Tesla owners have enjoyed with supercharging, plus a bit more. 350kW chargers are starting to be installed in Europe. And sitting somewhere between 50kW rapid chargers and those beasts are the 175Kw chargers being installed by Fastned. Clean Energy News reports: “Newcastle University is to be home to what could be the UK’s first public 175kW electric vehicle chargers under a new project with Dutch charging frm Fastned, which has won a tender from the North East Combined Authority (NECA) and the university. The contract will see two Go Ultra Low fast charging ‘filling stations’ constructed in the city centres of Newcastle and Sunderland. Each will offer six 50kW fast chargers while two of those at the university will be the latest 175kW chargers, which are enabled to be upgraded to 350kW in the future. The 350kW option was recently unveiled by Fastned as a result of its partnership with technology provider ABB, with the first units installed at the modular De Watering charging station near Amsterdam.”   SOLAR AND STORAGE FOR MITSUBISHI DEALERSHIPS Most EV buyers can return to a dealer under the umbrella of their manufacturer to charge their car for free – for example Nissan buyers can often stop off at a Nissan dealer to top up their LEAF. Not always, but it’s common. Now in Japan Mitsubishi want to take that a step further. Mitsubishi’s 28 showrooms throughout Japan which have solar panels and the ability to use an electric vehicle’s battery power as an emergency power source, via a Vehicle-to- Building (V2B) charger. However the new Omiya “Hyper Energy Station”, opened this week in Saitama City, has also been fitted with its own lithium-ion battery packs to provide substantial power back up to the local electricity grid” says Automotive World: “Featuring lithium-ion batteries with a capacity of 12kWh, the building can supply power for recharging electric vehicles (EV) in the event of a natural disaster or power outage, when normal power supplies are cut off. EVs have played a key role in transporting people and good in previous emergencies in Japan, when conventional fuel supplies have been severely disrupted. MMC has already opened 28 “DENDO Drive Station” showrooms across Japan, all featuring solar panels and V2B charging stations. It plans to increase this number to 200 by 2020.   FRANCE BREAKS EV RECORDS EV Sales were back up in France last month for March 2018. However it’s back with a bang to new highs. 4,214 EVs were registered in March in France which is up 41.6% year on year. If you count light duty vans as well, that’s 756 electric vans and 1,187 plug-ins. France likes to keep in domestic with strong sales for Renault Zoe, which led with 2,245. It’s over half of all electric vehicles sold. As for the new LEAF it did explode, a