Electric sports car roars into Japanese market

California-based electric sports car manufacturer Tesla has roared into the Japanese market with the opening of its first dealership in Asia.

The company's showroom is in the swish Minami-Aoyama district of Tokyo and opened earlier on November 12. And there has been a high level of interest in the first week of business, according to the company. And that is even more impressive given the number of high-performance vehicles that Japanese companies produce. Thanks to Nissan and Mitsubishi, Japan is a global leader in electric vehicles.

"There has been a lot of interest since our grand opening and we even sold several vehicles at the opening party," said Shin Io, sales manager for Tesla Japan.

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Toyota teams up with Tesla to electrify Rav4

Toyota and electric vehicle upstart Tesla Motors will work together to develop an electric version of Toyota's Rav4 medium SUV, with plans to begin selling it in the US in 2012.

Tesla already is working on the electric power system for the Rav4. The electric carmaker has built one prototype for testing and plans to deliver a fleet of them for Toyota to evaluate later this year.

The companies announced a partnership in May to develop and build electric cars at a recently closed automotive factory in the San Francisco Bay area.

Tesla, which last month began selling shares to the public, said it hoped to drive down the cost of electric vehicles so they become within reach of mainstream buyers.

Toyota has said it was investing US$50 million ($70 million) in Tesla, with the electric car company buying the New United Motor Manufacturing factory, known as Nummi, in Fremont, California, where the Tesla Model S electric sedan will be built.

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Toyota-Tesla plan to build electric RAV4 shows partnership is serious

Electric SUV is the first project announced by the companies since Toyota purchased about 3% of Tesla for $50 million this year, a move that had raised eyebrows.

A plan to sell an electric version of Toyota's RAV4 sport utility vehicle two years from now demonstrates that the alliance between Tesla Motors Inc. and the Japanese automaker is more than just window dressing, analysts said.
Tesla and Toyota Motor Corp. said Friday that they were developing the vehicle and that Tesla was working on a fleet of prototypes to begin testing.
The venture is the first project announced by the companies since Toyota purchased 3.2% of Tesla for $50 million this year.

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Tesla IPO: Will build electric cars for $178 million

Tesla Motors, whose $109,000 electric Roadster is vividly familiar to anyone who’s ever picked up a car magazine (or, recently, a business one) is trying to go public and raise $178 million (up from $100 million). My guess: They’ll do it, because Tesla is a very sexy business, with a great image. Who wouldn’t want to tell people at cocktail parties that they’re an investor in Tesla?

The harder part will be getting the company out of the high-end luxury niche it is in now. Tesla’s strategy is clear enough: It’s rolling out the Model S at $49,900 (inclusive of a $7,500 federal tax credit) late next year as a 2012 model, and with the money that better-selling sedan brings in will then prepare an even-more-affordable third car. At that point, a publicly traded Tesla Motors will go mainstream and get out of the niche.

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Electric Vehicles- The Clever Ten Year Strategies

The electric vehicle business is over $33 billion today at ex factory prices but cars are less than half of that. As the market nearly quintuples over the next ten years, cars will rise to nearly 55% of the business but the devil is in the detail. Last year, Mitsubishi expected to make its electric car business profitable by 2013 but then Nissan warned that governments may cut back subsidies for electric cars due to the ongoing global financial meltdown and profits may slip far into the future. Certainly, most of the profits in electric vehicles will remain beyond mainstream electric cars for the next ten years. In 2020, the car manufacturers will still be slogging it out to see which three end up with secure, profitable growing electric car businesses of tens of billions of dollars in the decade after that, when growth eases.

Many profitable electric vehicle manufacturers

By contrast, today there are already many profitable electric vehicle manufacturers with other strategies, including Linde in electric forklifts, Kongsberg in Autonomous Underwater Vehicles AUVs, Jinangsu Xinri Electric Vehicle Company in e-bikes, Pride Mobility in electric mobility vehicles for the disabled and Tesla in designer sports cars. Little wonder that more and more of them are expanding into several other, carefully chosen multi billion dollar EV sectors.

Profitable traction batteries

Much the same picture pertains with traction batteries, the largest single driver of cost and performance of most of these vehicles. Here there is even more horizontal selling but the savvy players choose their targets carefully. For example, Electrovaya of Canada recently showed its first profit of $549,000. A manufacturer of battery operated healthcare products, its entry into traction batteries has been in specialist vehicles such as the Hummer military vehicle, the Dodge Ram pickup truck and the Canadian Maya low speed car, Tata and Hero. Its batteries are the safer lithium polymer type.

 

The new IDTechEx report "Vehicle Traction Batteries 2010-2020" looks at all traction batteries and the winning strategies. The rapidly growing market for traction batteries will exceed $55 billion in only ten years. However, that spans battery sets up to $500,000 each with great sophistication needed for military, marine and solar aircraft use. Huge numbers of low cost batteries are being used for e-bikes but even here several new technologies are appearing. The largest traction battery replacement market is for e-bikes today and the value market for replacement batteries will not be dominated by cars when their batteries last the life of the car - something likely to happen within ten years. The trends are therefore complex and that is why IDTechEx has analysed them with great care.

 

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Report: Tesla won’t be developing electric-vehicles with Toyota

Tesla Model S

If you’re probably wondering whether or not Tesla and Toyota will jointly produce electric-vehicles as a part of their partnership, here’s your answer. In a recent filling with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Tesla said that it may never get to the point where it will jointly develop electric-vehicles with Toyota.

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