For perhaps the first time at a major international auto salon, the stars of the Paris Motor Show are electric cars.
This year’s show, open to the public through Sunday next week, also has the usual sampling of futuristic designs and prototypes.
However, this show might end up being best remembered as a tipping point for an electric car revolution poised to challenge the automobile industry’s internal-combustion “status quo” — although some of the excitement is still speculative.
Photo: Bloomberg
Volkswagen (VW), trying to move beyond the diesel emissions cheating scandal that has tarnished its brand, is displaying an all-electric concept car it calls the ID.
VW already sells the electric e-Golf, but its limited range between charges is a big drawback. The e-Golf is considered a “city electric” for short commutes, not a long-distance road warrior.
However, at next month’s Los Angeles Auto Show, Volkswagen plans to introduce a new e-Golf, with a range the company says exceeds 199km, measured using the US Environmental Protection Agency’s test protocols.
Photo: AFP
The company says it will have an electric self-driving car by 2025, which is why the ID on display in Paris features a steering wheel that retracts into the dashboard when the car is in autonomous mode.
Mercedes-Benz used the Paris show to announce a new sub-brand of electric cars, Generation EQ. The vehicles are scheduled to roll out in stages over the next three to seven years.
Almost every other manufacturer in attendance is offering at least one new model with full electric operation or a hybrid combination of gas and electric.
Exhibit A came from the Opel division of General Motors (GM), which unveiled the production-ready Ampera-e, which is supposed to go on sale late this year in North America.
The five-passenger subcompact Ampera-e promised the trifecta of electric car must-haves: considerable utility for a car its size, a mass-market price and an all-electric range of more than 500km.
Six years ago, when the Nissan Leaf, the industry’s first mass-produced electric vehicle, went on sale, the company said its range was less than 160km.
Four years ago, Tesla pulled ahead as the new standard-bearer, with electric cars that could go up to 426km on a charge.
The company said in Paris that its new Model S P100D was rated at 507km. However, its US$135,000 price puts the car well out of the reach of mainstream buyers.
Extending an electric car’s range has been GM’s goal since the demise of its ill-fated EV1, which it produced from 1996 to 1999. The EV1 had a range of barely 160km.
However, GM claims to have solved the problem. As evidence, the company announced in Paris that its engineers had driven the Ampera-e 417km from London to the Paris show via the Channel Tunnel.
“When we arrived, we still had a further 80km of range left,”the project’s executive chief engineer Pam Fletcher said. “That is substantially more than we just announced for this car two weeks ago.”
Another Paris debutant was a next-generation Renault Zoe EV, with a projected range of 400km.
However, the Zoe, the first generation of which made its debut in 2012, has been offered for about US$27,000 without a battery. Buyers then lease a battery pack from the manufacturer for about US$100 a month.
The sexiest concept model at the show is probably the Renault Trezor autonomous-driving electric car.
The aircraft-like flight of design fancy is likely never to see production — especially its cornea-scorching red Plexiglas cockpit. Renault said future production models based on the Trezor would appear only “beyond 2020.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day