What We’re Reading

June 29, 2022

• Biden administration leans on Tesla for guidance in renewable fuel policy reform (Reuters, June 23, 2022)

  Despite not so subtle hints of animosity between the Biden Administration and Tesla, recent reports reveal that the two teams have been in contact since day one, when they reportedly scheduled a meeting to discuss incorporating EVs into the national Renewable Fuel Standard Program (RFS). To date, those standards have largely provided “a subsidy for corn-based ethanol.”

  According to this report, the U.S. EPA “which administers the RFS, is expected to unveil proposed changes to the policy sometime this year, defining new winners and losers in a multibillion-dollar market for credits, known as RINs, that has supported corn growers and biofuels producers for more than a decade. Early signs are that the administration is leaning toward a rule that benefits carmakers like Tesla, giving them the greatest access to so-called e-RINS, or electric RINs.”

  Such reforms would be consistent with the Administrations ongoing efforts to electrify American driving.

• Toyota will recycle electric vehicles batteries with Tesla co-founder’s project (The Verge, June 21, 2022)

  Redwood Materials is a battery recycling company run by Tesla’s co-founder and former CTO, J.B. Straubel. Read more about Straubel and the interesting projects he has entertained before and since leaving Tesla here.

  Through a recent partnership with Toyota, Redwood is looking to recycle vehicle batteries—currently from old Priuses—by refurbishing them or breaking them down to parts for new batteries. The goal is to “create a ‘closed-loop supply chain for electric vehicles.’”

  “Notably, Redwood’s tech and methods for recycling vehicle batteries aren’t exactly tried-and-true. The company just launched its program to deal with end-of-life electric vehicles in February, with Ford and Volvo as partners. While Redwood’s been planning to handle batteries from vehicles for a while, its capacity to do so at scale is relatively untested.” Nonetheless, as this article notes, OEMs have incentive to fund recycling efforts, with the cost of manufacturing EVs remaining so high and difficult to scale.

• IIHS survey finds consumers don’t fully trust semi-autonomous driving features (Repairer Driven News, June 27, 2022)

  An IIHS survey of 1,010 adult drivers in the U.S. shows a greater acceptance of partially automated driving features over full self-driving, even if the former requires hands-on-the-wheel engagement. “The survey found that 80% of respondents want to use lane centering, but more prefer versions that require their hands to be on the wheel (36%) than those that do not (27%). This was the highest acceptance level for any of the technologies in the survey. While 73% said they would use automatic lane changes, 45% said they preferred the feature to be driver-initiated, against 14% who wanted it to be initiated by the vehicle. More than three-quarters of respondents said they want auto lane change to have a hands-on requirement.”

  The survey also found that drivers are comfortable with driver monitoring features “although there was less enthusiasm for camera-based monitoring than for steering wheel sensor monitoring.”

  Find another take on the survey results from GM Authority here.