EuroWire November 2014

Transatlantic cable

As described by Mr Young, Tesla’s success derives from its conviction that special marketing would be needed to get consumers to accept electric vehicles, given that they are seen as experimental technology and associated with problems. Prospective buyers could be expected to worry about charging stations and maintenance facilities. The company tackled the problem by targeting the high end of the market, selling cars with a starting price of $70,000. The focus on wealthy consumers enabled Tesla to market itself as an elite brand and also to employ the most advanced and reliable technology. That strategy, wrote Mr Young, “has worked well in status-conscious China, where Tesla began taking orders only last year and made its rst high-pro le delivery in April at an event that coincided with the nation’s largest auto show.” The company then embarked on a slick campaign highlighting its state-of-the-art technology, deftly combined with an appeal to people wanting to be rst to own the latest and the best. As a result, a number of China’s high-pro le elite were among the rst to sign up as buyers, including the owner of the Lifan soccer team and the founder of Autohome, China’s largest auto website. Since then Tesla has worked hard to maintain that momentum and build up its order book, with the aim of selling thousands of cars in its rst year. † As part of a broader commitment to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on charging stations in China, Tesla and China Unicom will build such posts at 400 China Unicom stores in 120 cities. In Mr Young’s view, Chinese electric-car aspirants like BYD, SAIC and Geely would be wise to follow this example by allocating big money to forge partnerships and create Tesla-style marketing campaigns. Of related interest . . . † The 3 rd September announcement by Tesla Motors of its choice of Nevada as the site of its $5 billion lithium-ion battery factory occasioned a bitter outburst by California State Senator Ted Gaines, who emailed Bloomberg News : “I’m devastated for the 6,500 families who won’t have the chance at these jobs unless they move to Nevada.” In addition to California and Nevada, Tesla had been considering Arizona, New Mexico and Texas as potential sites, triggering an incentive ght among the Southwestern states. The projected factory is one of the largest new USA industrial projects. Tesla has a goal of eventually selling at least 500,000 electric cars a year, all powered by batteries of its own manufacture. It also plans to supply stationary battery packs to store power from solar panels for homes and businesses. The company will eventually need more than one battery “Gigafactory,” Tesla founder Elon Musk said in April – but this was scant consolation to California’s Mr Gaines in September. “Tesla is a California-born company that the state has invested heavily in and we want it to succeed,” he wrote to Bloomberg . “It makes complete sense for it to expand right here, close to its headquarters, yet they are headed out of state.”

solar cells comparable in e ciency to many commercial silicon cells. Because the compounds of the perovskite class of materials are comparatively cheap and easy to manufacture, they are of growing interest to solar photovoltaic researchers. In 2011 this column took note of a New York Times report that an increasing number of old car batteries are exported from the USA to Mexico for recycling, but that the work is done with crude methods that expose people to lead poisoning. In a research paper published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science , the MIT team spells out its multi-step process for giving the lead from all those batteries a second life – by synthesising perovskite solar material using the electrodes straight out of a used lead-acid battery. As briefed down by Mr LaMonica, lead from the anode is mixed with nitric acid and the lead oxide (made from the lead dioxide cathode) is mixed with acetic acid. Each compound is then mixed with potassium iodide and the solutions puri ed and deposited on a thin exible lm which acts as a substrate for the solar cell. Because each of the perovskite cells is just a half-micrometre thick, the researchers estimate that a single car battery could produce enough solar panels to provide electric power for 30 households. † MIT materials scientist Angela Belcher and Po-Yen Chen, the paper’s lead author, say they do not intend to exploit their technology. But the commercial potential of perovskite compounds has not escaped notice. Oxford Photovoltaics Ltd – a spin-out from Oxford University – is seeking to make and sell solar perovskite cells that can be applied as coatings on windows and other outdoor building surfaces. “The beauty is that this new process is pretty interchangeable with the current production method,” Dr Belcher told Mr LaMonica of IEEE . marketing creativity, infrastructure initiatives “As China struggles to meet its target to put hundreds of thousands of new-energy vehicles on the road by next year, American electric car maker Tesla has made remarkable progress selling its electric vehicles, despite arriving late to the market.” Writing in the Beijing-based daily Global Times , Doug Young asserted that Tesla Motors Inc (Palo Alto, California) has succeeded in the Chinese market through a combination of savvy marketing and clever initiatives to build the infrastructure to support its customers. (“Tesla Shows How Innovative Partnerships Pay O ,” 2 nd September) In its most recent initiative, in late August, Tesla announced a partnership with China Unicom to install charging stations at hundreds of the second-largest mobile carrier’s stores nationwide. As a result of this and similar e orts, the blogger about Chinese companies observed, Tesla has been the lone electric car maker to succeed in China’s consumer market, an area that will be critical to achieving goals the country’s government has set for itself. Automotive Electric car maker Tesla, of the USA, is commended to Chinese rivals for its

Dorothy Fabian – USA Editor

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November 2014