EVwire newsletter #154

Before we get to the value-packed newsletter below, there’s an urgent matter I need to tell you about:

The discounted access to EVwire Insider membership is expiring soon.
I wouldn’t bug you with it, but we don’t really do discounts around here usually, so…

You can join over 150 of us through here:

And here’s why you should become an Insider:

This membership gives you an edge. Whether as a professional in the EV industry (really a tool then) or as an EV geek to level up your context of the EV world.

With EVwire Insider, you’ll get perks in our system like:

Alright, that’s the opportunity. Shall we?

The U.S. House has just officially passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill", and President Trump will now sign this bill into law.

This will have wide consequences on both EVs and overall energy in the US. And before you ask, no, the oil & gas industry subsidies were not cut to match. Quite the opposite, actually.

Here’s what you need to know about EVs in the final bill:

There are other ways this bill will impact EV ownership and supply chain in the US, too (link):

Note that this bill does not eliminate state-level incentive programs (like California HVIP, NY Truck Voucher Program, or other local incentives).

There is one caveat in the bill that might be beneficial for some automakers, including EV makers like Tesla: a deduction for car loan interest for American-made vehicles.

From 2025 through 2028, interest paid on loans for purchasing a personal-use vehicle will no longer be considered "personal interest" and can be deducted. To qualify for the deduction, the vehicle, in addition to some other rules, must have “final assembly” occur in the United States. Max deductible interest of $10,000 per year. Deduction phases out for taxpayers with income above: $100,000 (single) and $200,000 (joint).

Now, if you’re interested in how it also killed rooftop solar, geothermal heat pumps and other clean energy credits, and then some of my graphs on how China is completely taking over in the energy and US and Europe have the last chance to catch up coupled with some of my motivational-sounding rants, go for my full article:

Recapping what I put there on energy in short, by 2030, China will have the manufacturing capacity to build an entire US worth of generation from solar and storage alone - every single year. Meanwhile, solar power also topped coal power output in the European Union for the first time for 2024.

But with the new bill in the US, and seeing some similar anti-battery, anti-EV or anti-renewable (they tend to go hand in hand) directions play out elsewhere, I’m worried.

I don’t want to say it is us versus China — it kind of is us vs them, and kind of isn’t.

But holy frunk, do we not have the biggest competitive race to motivate us right this moment. How to win isn’t even a question really - how to stay in the race is. This is how:

Build and deploy batteries.
Build and deploy EVs.
Build and deploy solar, wind.
Build and deploy the software and hardware that connects it all.
Build and deploy safe AI.
Build and deploy smart energy systems.

Not only would we maybe catch up with China on this, we’d also win as the whole planet.

If you’re working on any of this, EVs, energy or related, no matter at which level, I applaud you. And I appreciate you. And I’ll appreciate those of you even more that will keep pushing this even as the US pushed through the bill and set obstacles in your path. Keep going!!!

Okay Jaan, get back to EVs, alright? Don’t mind if I do.

Tesla delivered 384,122 EVs and produced 410,244 EVs worldwide in Q2 2025, down 13% year-on-year, while production totalled 410,244 units.

This apparently beat analysts’ expectations, which had calculated for worse. Energy-storage deployments hit 9.6 GWh, the company’s highest quarterly figure to date. (evwire link)

As for the first half of 2025, Tesla has produced 772,859 and delivered 720,803 electric vehicles. Tesla reached 8 million EVs produced in early June. I put together a timeline of their past milestones: (evwire link). It’s rather wild to see the Energy arm of Tesla growing:

We’ll cover Tesla’s impact report (see tesla. com/impact) on our next newsletter.

Rivian delivered 10,661 EVs in the second quarter of 2025, a 22.6% drop versus the same period last year, while production totalled 5,979 units (-37.8% YoY). The company stays with its full-year delivery outlook of 40,000 – 46,000 vehicles (they estimated 46k-51k for the year after Q1).

As for the first half of 2025, Rivian has produced a total of 20,590 vehicles and delivered 19251 vehicles. (evwire link)

Lucid Motors delivered 3,863 EVs in Q2 2025, up 38% compared to last year and 6.4% more than in Q1 this year. As for the first half of 2025, Lucid produced 6,075 vehicles and delivered 6,418 vehicles.

I’m putting together a larger overview of the sales, both for countries and per automakers, for the first half of 2025 soon. First access to Insiders, then everyone.

BYD started production at its Camaçari plant in Bahia, Brazil, its first EV assembly facility outside China. The site’s inaugural build was a Dolphin Mini city car (called Seagull in China). It is currently a semi-knock-down (SKD) factory capable of producing 150,000 BEVs and PHEVs per year. (dig deeper with me on evwire, link)

BYD has nearly single-handedly pushed Brazil into the EV future in the past years: our EV sales tracking has shown that EV sales in Brazil grew a massive 219.1% year over year in 2024, after growing 136.8% in 2023. This led to 61,615 EVs sold in 2024. There is, of course, plenty of room still to go with a 2.48% EV market share last year.

Now, in May 2025, 6,969 BEVs were registered (another all time record) in Brazil, growing 35% YoY. BYD’s role in that is clear. 5,596 of these BEVs, or 80.3%, were sold by BYD. Volvo came in second place with 514 sales (7.4%).

Holy frunk. Now that's a legacy auto CEO that realizes the EV competition coming out of China.

I just watched through the full interview of Jim Farley at Aspen Ideas Festival.

Did you know Ford has been going to China, 5-6 times now, with the whole leadership team to test Chinese EVs and bring some back to Detroit?

Jim Farley, CEO of Ford:

“I go for a couple of reasons. I bring my whole leadership team, we don’t leave anyone behind. First thing we do is we get the last hundred cars that launched there and we drive as many as we can.

Then we pick the four or five that we love, and then we put them on the plane and fly them back to Detroit. And then we drive the crap out of them and we take them apart and we put them back together."

This is what Jim says about what he saw in China:

"It's the most humbling thing I have ever seen. 70% of all EVs in the world are made in China. They have far superior in-vehicle technology. Huawei and Xiaomi are in every car.
You get in, you don't have to pair your phone. Automatically, your whole digital life is mirrored in the car.

You have an AI companion you can talk to. Automatic payment is already there, you can buy movie tickets, it has facial recognition so it knows who’s in which seat and which media you like."

The interviewer, the great Walter Isaacson, asks why Ford cars don’t have that.
Farley says it’s because Google and Apple decided not to go into the car business.

“Beyond that, their cost, their [the Chinese] quality of their vehicles is far superior to what I see in the West. We are in a global competition with China, and it's not just EVs. And if we lose this, we do not have a future Ford."

Jim gives us a lot of details in the interview which I can't fit in this email.

So if you want to read his thoughts on
- Ford's autonomy approach (he sides with Waymo over Tesla approach for L4 by the way, and Ford only plans to solve highway themselves), or on
- Ford's focus on affordable EVs, plus commercial vehicles, and not SUVs, or
- how Ford approaches building that affordable EV:

All this reminds me of when Farley said back in October 2024 in a Fully Charged interview: “I have been driving the Xiaomi SU7 EV in Chicago for six months now, and I don’t want to give it up!”

Grounded, the maker of smart modular electric vans, unveiled the G3, its most advanced all-electric RV yet, built on the Chevrolet BrightDrop Zevo 400 / 600 chassis, and rated for 286 miles of range on a single charge. The prices start at $165k, and the G3 begins customer deliveries in July 2025. Read more on how they tackle both campers and office spaces in my deep dive here: (evwire link)

I couldn’t fit more EV model news in today (literally, the email can’t fit it in size)… consider joining the EVwire Insider to learn about 5-10 new EV models every week (link)

In New Jersey, Tesla has to remove 64 Superchargers that it already operates from the highway, because the New Jersey Turnpike Authority (NJTA) has decided not to renew Tesla’s contract and has chosen a sole third-party charging provider, Applegreen Electric, to serve the New Jersey Turnpike and is not allowing Tesla to co-locate. So Tesla has to rip up all the sites it designed.

Luckily Tesla says they’ve “been preparing for 3 years for this potential outcome by building 116 stalls off the New Jersey Turnpike, ensuring no interruption for our customers.”

Read more in the story I put together about this: (evwire link).

My take here is quite an obvious one. We need all the charging infra we can get. Ripping out so many just because one contract period ends… where will that get us?

A good coincidence — or perhaps not — is that just a few months earlier Tesla released a (welcoming) statement calling for the industry to adopt their approach of pushing non-exclusive charging sites.

Tesla’s Supercharging Director, Max de Zegher, says that when landlords offer Tesla exclusivity, as in Tesla being the only charging provider in their properties, they actively reject it and explain their reasoning. “We encourage them to install as much charging infrastructure as possible.”

Tesla also just shared a peek behind the curtain of their Supercharging arm and its utilization data. We learned both their historical performance, and got some additional details on how Supercharging utilization differs per region. (EVwire link)

For context, Tesla has now deployed over 70,000 Superchargers across the planet in over 7,400 locations.

Now, they’ve shared the graph below, which shows their average global utilization, with the Sessions per Stall per Day (SSD) steadily growing to over 8 per day, about doubling since mid-2021.

I looked it up and Tesla had "just" 26,900 Superchargers in mid-2021, with around 70k now. So we now know that they've nearly 3x'd their charger count while doubling their utilization within the last 4 years.

Given that Tesla also oversizes their infrastructure somewhat (e.g how they build to also count for holiday surges or to avoid no coverage areas across geos), it's especially significant they are still able to win in utilization at scale.

The Director - Charging @ Tesla, Max de Zegher, was kind enough to answer my question on how the utilization for Tesla Superchargers differs across the continents:

Tesla also just shared its Supercharging growth: the team opened 3,500 new Supercharger stalls in Q2, up 18% from last year. That's a new stall going live every 37 minutes!

It also means around 371 new locations (so 1.4 new locations every day), given they average at 9.4 stalls per site. Tesla delivered 1.6 TWh of energy in Q2 (+26% YoY), in 45 million charging sessions.

With the 67,316 Supercharging stalls at the end of Q1, Tesla should be at 70,816 Superchargers today (give or take), and ~7,533 locations globally.

Monta’s latest “EV Chargers Performance Score” for Q1 2025 ranks the Siemens SiCharge CC AC22 as the best-performing AC charger (score 85.21) and the Kempower C-Series as the top DC unit (score 90.85).

The quarterly benchmark draws on tens of thousands of live charging sessions logged on their platform, mostly across Europe. See the top 50 AC and top 10 DC through my deeper dive (evwire link). The final results were calculated on these three metrics:

Charge Success Rate – the proportion of sessions successfully launched and completed, without interruption or malfunction.
Uptime Rate – assessment of the time during which a charging station is technically operational and accessible to users.
User Satisfaction Rate – feedback, evaluations and comments submitted after each charging session.

The top three in AC chargers were:

The top three in DC chargers were:

(Alpitronic had four models in the top 6, actually!)
I’m keeping an eye out for more data from Monta, as they are uniquely positioned to give us data across the brands (they did over 15 million charging sessions in the past 6 months alone) and luckily they are very transparent about it.

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