For Today: Revero delivered to dealers, Uber CEO wanted to partner with Tesla
Here comes the Revero: Karma Automotive’s Revero are showing up at dealerships around the country, with 10 of the $130,000 plug-in hybrid sports cars being loaded up and starting deliveries on Friday. The company has set up a sales network with dealers in Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Fort Worth (Texas), Miami, Montreal, Palm Beach (Fla.), Pasadena (Calif.), Philadelphia, and Toronto. Customers need to make an appointment at some of the dealerships for a test drive. The cars are being built at the Moreno Valley, Calif., assembly plant, and the batteries are coming from A123, another Wanxiang-owned company that had previously supplied batteries to Fisker Automotive.
Self-driving car partnership: A book coming out next week says that Uber CEO Travis Kalanick put in a call last year to Uber CEO Elon Musk to become partners in autonomous vehicle development. Kalanick said that Musk spent the rest of the call trying to convince him that the whole idea was too far out, and that Kalanick should stick to what Uber does best and stay focused. That was just a few days before Musk published his 1,500-word blog post outlining a series of very big moves, such as encouraging Tesla vehicle owners make income off renting out their self-driving Tesla instead of leaving the cars sitting around for hours in a parking space.
Light & Charge stations: BMW Group is bringing Light & Charge stations to North America through an alliance with BMW’s ReachNow mobility service, Woodland Park Zoo, and the City of Seattle. The system uses the city’s existing street and parking lot infrastructure through a smart city network. Existing light poles are set up with LED lighting, electric car charging, and a sensor unit. The partners opened the first of 20 charging locations Monday that will host both DC fast chargers and Level 2 chargers, bringing 100 new chargers to the city. BMW started up the Light & Charge system three years ago in Europe. The ReachNow fleet has the BMW i3 and other BMW vehicles in its fleet.
Pickens on succeeding: Boone Pickens, a founder of Clean Energy Fuels and an icon from the oil and gas industry, published “An Open Letter to This Year’s Graduating Seniors,” in LinkedIn. He gave graduates a few tips on succeeding in today’s economy, which he’s learned from several years out in the field. Pickens, who’s turning 89 years old on May 22, made a reference to being 68 years old and “basically starting my career over.” A reporter interviewing him came from the idea that Pickens was going to need to step aside – the old horse was going to have to step aside from the trough. “That’s simply not true: The feeding trough in America is endless. Step up, work hard, and everyone has the opportunity to succeed,” Pickens wrote.
Urban mobility terminology: Want to know the difference between carsharing and carpooling? Dynamic ridesharing and driverless driving? Audi announced that it has founded a working group together with city governments, business and scientific institutions. Together, they’ve put together a catalogue of terms for the city of the future. It comes from a DIN specification (Germany’s institute for standardization), with more than 200 related terms, for “intelligent individual urban mobility.“
Here comes the Revero: Karma Automotive’s Revero are showing up at dealerships around the country, with 10 of the $130,000 plug-in hybrid sports cars being loaded up and starting deliveries on Friday. The company has set up a sales network with dealers in Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Fort Worth (Texas), Miami, Montreal, Palm Beach (Fla.), Pasadena (Calif.), Philadelphia, and Toronto. Customers need to make an appointment at some of the dealerships for a test drive. The cars are being built at the Moreno Valley, Calif., assembly plant, and the batteries are coming from A123, another Wanxiang-owned company that had previously supplied batteries to Fisker Automotive.
