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BMW Group wins major engine-delivery contract from INEOS Automotive Limited

Munich. The BMW Group has secured a major order from INEOS Automotive Ltd. for the delivery of petrol and diesel engines. The contract is a further important step in the BMW Group’s strategy to expand its business providing drivetrains to industrial customers. The powerful and efficient BMW TwinPower Turbo engines are destined for INEOS Automotive… Continue reading BMW Group wins major engine-delivery contract from INEOS Automotive Limited

A Strong Tesla Future Will Include More Female Engineers

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Published on March 17th, 2019 |

by Carolyn Fortuna

A Strong Tesla Future Will Include More Female Engineers

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March 17th, 2019 by Carolyn Fortuna

Women have increased their numbers in professions previously dominated by men, including law, business, medicine, and many STEM fields. However, the number of women in engineering in the US has not risen since the early 2000s. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates a large need for engineers and computer-related employees over the next 10 years due to job growth and replacement of those leaving the workforce. To meet this demand for new engineers and computer/information scientists, it is necessary for our nation to promote these professions among underrepresented groups, especially women.

An initiative at Tesla hopes to help.

Photo of part of an internal Tesla newsletter.

Recently, Tesla hosted about 200 middle school students at 8 of its facilities around the US for an event called “Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day.” 80 or so Tesla employees volunteered to lead the events, which were held in California and Nevada.

The students engaged in hands-on activities that illustrated the various fields of engineering: civil, electrical, and mechanical. When her team built a suspension bridge out of paper, Jacqueline Cerillo, 6th grade, seemed to already possess a facility for the scientific method. “You have to see your failures,” she said. “On the first project, our bridge fell, but on the second, we got better.”

The likely future female engineers fashioned simple motors from batteries and wire and built a tiny balloon-propelled car, offering glimpses into real-life applications of science and math principles.

This was only one part of Tesla’s commitment of $37 million in education in Nevada. “With females making up only a fraction of the engineering workforce in the US, Tesla is committed to increasing female students’ exposure to manufacturing and engineering,” a Tesla spokesperson said.

At Tesla Gigafactory 1, the nonprofit group Envirolution co-sponsored the event with Tesla, recruiting and coordinating young female students for a battery manufacturing operations tour.

The Fremont factory and locations in Livermore, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas also hosted aspiring female engineering students. Such instruction comes at a crucial time in young women’s lives, as one visiting student noted. “From a young age, you start planning your life. You start planning out what you’re going to do,” 7th grader Haley Felton explained. “So, if you’ve never done anything like this before, you’re not going to know about this kind of stuff.”

Without intervention strategies like this Tesla introductory engineering day, the current demand for technical talent combined with the projected increase in the need for engineers will result in a significant shortage of skilled US labor. Increasing the confidence and persistence of women in engineering at all stages of their careers is imperative to solving this talent shortage.

Industry growth presents the major challenge of educating future renewable energy and technology professionals. There is an essential need to build a conduit from the classroom to worksite. Even college students have a limited understanding of how to translate engineering theory into actual field practice.

While a variety of solutions are necessary to address the growing labor needs in the engineering industry and to attract and retain women in the profession, professional role models like these Tesla engineers who offer their personal insights and industry experience narratives can offset those gaps and create a robust and diverse engineering workforce.

Why Aren’t There More Female Engineers — at Tesla and Elsewhere?
Today, the digital transformation provides new avenues for the economic empowerment of women and can contribute to greater gender equality. Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that inventions arising out of mixed teams are more economically valuable and have higher impact than those in which only men are involved.

According to the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, job growth in the engineering industry will yield over 500,000 unfilled positions by 2024. Yet the current pipeline of engineering talent does not include the majority of college graduates: women represent over 57% of college graduates but only 22% of the engineers entering the workforce. Within the workforce, only 14% of engineers are women.

Coordinated policy action can raise awareness. It can tackle gender stereotypes and enable enhanced, safer, and more affordable access to digital tools for novice engineers. It can provide stronger cooperation across stakeholders to remove barriers to girls’ and women’s full participation in the STEM world.

Digital technologies provide new opportunities to make progress, but technological fixes cannot address the underlying structural problems that drive the digital gender divide. “It’s a systemic problem. Girls from a young age experience microaggressions. For example, asking a boy in the class to try the fix the VCR or fathers doing some things with their sons but not with their daughters. Little things like that discourage a good amount of the population [from pursuing engineering],” said Kristen Barclay, a Tesla engineer, in a 2018 interview.

Unconscious bias creates barriers and is one reason why fewer female engineers are hired in tech fields. “Here, I’ve started interviewing for technicians for my department,” said Barclay. “I’ve only ever interviewed two female candidates, and I hired them both because they were both awesome. Super relevant experience, super personable, seemed like they would fit in well. And the men who run the interview panel were like ‘Oh, I didn’t really get that vibe.” Slowly, they were like, ‘I liked her, too.’”

“Start early, because the world will slowly crush you out of it if you don’t find that interest in yourself early,” Barclay advised future female engineers.

Infographic courtesy of Society of Women Engineers

“It wasn’t so bad at the engineering faculty, where we were about 25%,” Alejandra Estanislao said, who holds a degree in mathematics and finance and is a software engineer at Google in Paris. “It was later, at work. When you find yourself one woman in a room of 30 people, that is when you feel lonely.”

Fewer females than males that earn an engineering degree end up working in the engineering profession, and more females than males leave the profession over time. Véna Arielle Ahouansou, whose Kea Medical company employs 15 people, said men still fail to see the strength of women in technology. “They need to change their mind-set that science is just for them,” she said.

“This is one of the most important issues of our time, and it is urgent,” said Lindsey Nefesh-Clarke, founder of W4, an organization that promotes girls and women in technology. “It has nothing to do with cognitive abilities, that has been proven. It is about consistent, deeply entrenched stereotypes.”

Final Thoughts
“I want to be an artist when I grow up,” 6th grader Cerillo added during her day at Tesla. “Engineering adds something to art. It’s creating our world.”

Research shows there are about 2.5 million women in the US with STEM degrees. Of this number, roughly 800,000 women (32%) have engineering and computer science degrees and 216,000 (27%) have left their technical fields. Approximately 54,000 (25%) of the women who left their technical careers did so to care for their families. It is estimated that the pool of technical women who are on career breaks at any given time is between 54,000 and 216,000.

A cultural shift is slowly underway in the STEM world in which women and other underrepresented groups are beginning to find voice. Programs like the “Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day” at Tesla highlight one of many mechanisms to strengthen overarching talent pathways.

Infographic courtesy of Society of Women Engineers

Unless otherwise noted, images via YouTube

About the Author

Carolyn Fortuna Carolyn Fortuna, Ph.D. is a writer, researcher, and educator with a lifelong dedication to ecojustice. She's won awards from the Anti-Defamation League, The International Literacy Association, and The Leavy Foundation. She’s molds scholarship into digital media literacy and learning to spread the word about sustainability issues. Please follow me on Twitter and Facebook and Google+

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Battery start-ups are raising millions in the battle to crush Tesla

Source: Tesla
Tesla's Roadster uses a rechargeable lithium battery that has been the standard for electric vehicles.

For powering your smartphone or your Tesla Model 3, there's currently nothing better than the lithium-ion battery. Since its introduction in 1991, the rechargeable lithium battery has been the standard for everyday tech devices and electric-vehicle power. Many of the world's more than3
million electric vehiclesrun on lithium-ion batteries. But as the world races toward an electric future, it needs something better than the lithium-ion battery in order to keep pace.

“Lithium is pretty much hitting a wall right now. If you really want to increase energy density, you have to go to a completely different paradigm,” said Yifei Mo, a materials science and engineering professor at the University of Maryland. More energy density means cheaper, lighter batteries that last longer on a single charge.

Fortunately, there are battery start-ups trying to build better batteries, ones with lower costs, improved energy densities and better performance for supercharged industrial products and consumer technology, as well as electric vehicles, which would charge more quickly and travel longer distances. Starting this year, several start-ups with batteries they believe are big improvements over current lithium-ion technology will introduce their cells to the commercial market.

“It's taken us eight years and probably 35,000 iterations of our material synthesis just to have something that's commercially ready,” said Gene Berdichevsky, CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies.

Sila Nanotechnologies
Sila Nanotechnologies'is building its first commercial production line for silicon anode batteries.

Sila is just one of several battery start-ups that recently received major funding to continue tweaking battery tech. Last year the Alameda, California-basedcompany took on $70 million in Series D financingfromseveral investors, including Siemens' global venture firm, to build its first commercial production line for silicon anode batteries. That's exactly one decade after being co-founded by Berdichevsky, a mechanical and energy engineer and the seventh employee at Elon Musk's Tesla, who led the development of the battery system in the Tesla Roadster (the car that SpaceX, also founded by Musk, launched into orbit in 2018).

ROI soon to come

Emerging variations of the current lithium-ion battery have taken about 10 years of research. Only now are start-ups gearing up for the commercial spotlight, a rollout that will take at least a few years, and possibly even another full decade.

“The material required for one car is the equivalent of 10,000 smartphones or 1,000 smart watches,” said Berdichevsky. “We'll be in consumer devices to start. Over the next five years, we'll scale up with automotive partners.” One of Sila's current auto partners isBMW.

Battery industry is just getting started, sector insider says
5:28 AM ET Thu, 20 Dec 2018 | 01:48

Current lithium-ion batteries are limited in their material parts and physical energy density. New battery technology seeks to improve both the safety and energy efficiency of lithium-ion batteries where there is no risk of fire if the battery overheats or becomes damaged.

Each lithium-ion battery is composed of four essential parts: the anode and cathode — the electrodes that bookend each lithium-ion cell — a liquid electrolyte and a separator. Positive and negative currents are created as the electrolyte carries lithium ions through the separator to and from the anode and cathode. It's this process that generates the charge that's stored in the battery.

If the chemicals making up the anode and cathode — respectively, graphite and some type of metal oxide — heat up too intensely, it can break down the physical separator, which leaves the highly flammable electrolyte exposed. Recall Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phones exploding and you can see, literally, the problem. And maximum lithium-ion energy density today is about 260 watt-hours per kilogram; by comparison, most current electric vehicles hold between 220 and 250 watt-hours per kilogram.

The next-generation boom

One new battery technology is solid-state, which replaces not only the graphite anode with one made up of lithium metal but also the liquid electrolyte and separator with one solid piece, usually ceramic, glass or flame-retardant polymer. Taking this approach is Solid Power, a Colorado-based manufacturer of solid-state batteries that received $20 million in Series A financing in 2018. According to company executives, the battery they're developing leads to at least 50 percent more energy density.

Secretive Stanford University spinoff QuantumScape is also developing a solid-state battery, in partnership with Volkswagen. Last year Volkswagen increased its stake with a $100 million investment. PitchBook data shows the San Jose-based start-up hasa valuation of $1.75 billion. According to a press release announcing the deal, QuantumScape's battery would allow Volkswagen's E-Golf to travel 466 miles — its current range is 186 miles — on a single charge, making it comparable to ranges achieved by conventional gas-powered vehicles. According to Volkswagen, QuantumScape's battery should be faster-charging and much lighter than current lithium-ion batteries.

“Lithium is pretty much hitting a wall right now. If you really want to increase energy density, you have to go to a completely different paradigm.”
-Yifei Mo, materials science and engineering professor at the University of Maryland

Yet solid-state batteries probably won't be available en masse until sometime next decade, as one Nissan vice president said last year. Even QuantumScape's press release states a commercial production target for 2025.

The longer timeline for solid-state technology is a symptom of how current battery factories are set up. They're built to handle lithium-ion production with liquid electrolytes, and switching to solid materials is more than a matter of just replacing processes on a factory floor.

Sila Nanotechnologies
Sila Nanotechnologies founders (left to right): CTO Gleb Yushin, CEO Gene Berdichevsky and VP of engineering Alex Jacobs

“It's an emerging technology in the very, very early stages of commercialization,” said Dean Frankel, Solid Power's head of business development. “It just takes time from a scale-up standpoint.”

While some start-ups work toward perfecting and scaling up the solid-state battery, others like Sila Nanotechnologies hope to take advantage of current lithium-ion manufacturing processes to bring batteries quickly to market. Instead of creating a solid-state battery, Sila just replaces the graphite anode with one composed of silicon, a material that absorbs lithium ions about four times faster than graphite.

What's more, most lithium-ion batteries with graphite anodes have a charge-rate, or C rate, of less than 1 percent. Start-ups developing new cells with silicon anodes say the C rates of their batteries are much better, a key differentiator to enabling an electric-vehicle future, since most people don't want to wait around more than an hour for a car to charge when pumping gas takes just minutes.

“We can sustain a charge rate 10 times as fast as a conventional graphite cell,” said Robert A. Rango, CEO of Enevate.

The Irvine, California-based company creating a next-generation lithium-ion batteries with silicon anodes is armed with $111 million in funding, which includes an investment made last year by South Korea battery company LG Chem. Rango said Enevate, whose batteries have been in the works for 10 years, is about a year and a half away from the first commercial deployments of its technology, most likely in electric bikes and scooters.

Still, silicon anode batteries have one potential drawback: Silicon material swells, which means every charge causes the battery to deteriorate. It's a problem both Berdichevsky and Rango said their respective companies have solved.

“Silicon does expand, and that's been one of the challenges of the industry,” Rango said. “In our cells, we've been able to contain the expansion. Our cells have specifications that meet electric-vehicle requirements.” Those requirements? That a battery is able to charge to 80 percent after it has been charged and discharged 1,000 times.

The long development timeline for these start-ups is a sign of how difficult pushing battery technology can be. And while improvements in the range of electric vehicles is certainly one of the major implications of a better battery, successors to the current lithium-ion battery will most likely be initially found in much smaller items.

“You're talking about a generational technological shift that has to happen,” Berdichevsky said. “In 150 years of batteries existing, there have been four commercially relevant chemistries to come to market. And every time you go to these new chemistries, they get harder.”

NewMotion Offers Access To 100,000 Public Charging Points In Europe

6 H BY MARK KANE Having a NewMotion card enables you to charge from more than 100,000 points NewMotion, acquired in 2017 by Shell, is the first in Europe to reach a milestone of 100,000 public charging points connected to the network. Part of those charging points are NewMotion network stations, while the others are available… Continue reading NewMotion Offers Access To 100,000 Public Charging Points In Europe

Electric Cars: Auto supplier ZF sees focus on e-mobility at VW critically

ZF Friedrichshafen However, the switch to an electric car is not possible for many customers overnight, said ZF CEO Scheider. It’s about the range of e-vehicles. (Photo: AP) Berlin boss of the automotive supplier ZF Friedrichshafen, Wolf-Henning Scheider, looks at the car manufacturer Volkswagen too much focus on pure electromobility in the future. “You can… Continue reading Electric Cars: Auto supplier ZF sees focus on e-mobility at VW critically

Oliver Blume: The Porsche boss holds the VW group together

Oliver flower “Where Porsche starts, we drive to victory,” quotes the Porsche CEO the company founder Ferdinand Porsche. (Photo: Bloomberg) StuttgartOliver flower is a passionate footballer and played in the club Libero. “A position that no longer exists today,” notes the tall figure PorscheBoss who makes his black shirts even slimmer than he is anyway.… Continue reading Oliver Blume: The Porsche boss holds the VW group together

Car manufacturer: BMW CEO Krüger sees no room for new jobs

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With the Model Y, Tesla launches a new challenge

Low profile. The lucky ones invited to the presentation of the new Tesla, Thursday night in California, were entitled to the “humble” face of Elon Musk. The whimsical boss of the Californian manufacturer had however planned a big show in the presence of investors and customers for introduce the Model Y , the SUV declination… Continue reading With the Model Y, Tesla launches a new challenge

Electric cars: Tesla plans no plant in Germany

US automakers Tesla obviously does not want to build a factory in Germany. Last year, there were statements from Elon Musk Speculation about appropriate plans of the company. March 16, 2019, 10:07 am, Andreas Donath Tesla Model 3 (Photo: Tesla) A Tesla spokesman has that News magazine Focus said he could “neither confirm that a… Continue reading Electric cars: Tesla plans no plant in Germany

Tesla Model Y Reveal: And The Biggest Surprise Was…

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Published on March 15th, 2019 |

by Frugal Moogal

Tesla Model Y Reveal: And The Biggest Surprise Was…

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March 15th, 2019 by Frugal Moogal

Tonight, Tesla revealed the Model Y, and thanks to the reveal of the Tesla Roadster as part of the Tesla Semi announcement, we were expecting some surprises.

The night started with Elon Musk walking us through the history of the vehicles that Tesla has delivered (first generation Roadster, Model S, Model X, and Model 3), the vehicles that Tesla intends to bring to market soon (the new Roadster and Tesla Semi), and how Tesla built the Gigafactories for those cars.

The next thing that Musk covered was the Solar Roof and Power Wall, and he mentioned that this would be the year of these products. Those who follow Tesla may have been mildly surprised by this, as the solar roof in particular got a lot of attention a few years ago, but has been almost completely overlooked lately.

A Supercharger update followed this, noting the great expansion that has already occurred, the expansion they expect to continue in the future, and a bit about the faster V3 Superchargers.

Musk then covered Tesla’s mission and how critical it is to what the company does. For anyone who questioned why the Model Y was unveiled now, this is your answer. Musk made a point to show how in the past ten years, the industry has changed from one opposed to the idea of electric cars, to many manufacturers doubling down on the transition year after year, and the role Tesla has played in that is massive. The point of the reveal tonight is to get those companies to challenge Tesla to create better electric SUVs faster than Tesla can, while signaling to people who may be thinking of purchasing an SUV in the near future that they may want to wait and get a Model Y instead of something else.

We finally got to the unveiling of the Model Y, and its look was not a surprise. In fact, it looked exactly like I expected it to — it’s a larger version of the Model 3 with an EPA range estimated to be 300 miles for the RWD variant. And just like Musk alluded to before the reveal, it is about 10% more expensive and 10% less efficient.

Production begins “late next year.”

The unveiling of Model Y went pretty quickly, and was light on details. And that brings us to…

The Biggest Surprise
To me, the biggest surprise of the night was that there was no giant surprise. The Model Y wasn’t hiding a truck, the Model S and X aren’t refreshed, and at the end of the event, it was just the Model Y.

This surprise, or lack thereof, may have been disappointing to a lot of people who expected something big and flashy. As I’ve reflected on it writing this article, however, I’m not disappointed at all about it.

Tonight we saw a confident Elon Musk announce production of a vehicle that Tesla knows it can deliver to market. The Model Y is expected to be the most popular vehicle that Tesla has produced yet, and one of the most popular in the world. Why overshadow that achievement with something else?

Unlike past announcements, there was no mention of “production hell” or what a challenge bringing the Model Y to production would be. The history of Tesla and its various problems led us to this point, where Musk expects that Tesla can confidently deliver on its production goals exactly as expected.

And that’s the surprise. Tesla acted like — and for perhaps the first time is — a major automaker announcing a new vehicle.

Stay tuned for much more exclusive content from the Model Y event. CleanTechnica had three reporters on hand.

About the Author

Frugal Moogal A businessman first, the Frugal Moogal looks at EVs from the perspective of a business. Having worked in multiple industries and in roles that managed significant money, he believes that the way to convince people that the EV revolution is here is by looking at the vehicles like a business would.

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