BRIEFLY: EV Sales Up 30%, Mercedes VLE, Long Range Coaches and more | 26 Sep 2025

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It's evening news briefly. For Friday, September 26, everything you need, less than five minutes. You haven't got time for the full podcast. Patreon supporters can go out free.

Stick on the link and see what it's all about. Volvo unveiling their new BZR coach chassis. This enables coach travel up to 420 miles, 700 kilometers, 720 kilowatt hour battery.

It's just gobbled up all of the batteries, isn't it? But it'll go a long way. And I think after traveling 400 miles in a coach, I'd quite like to get off and stretch my legs and do my business.

Thank you. Right, Mercedes-Benz are getting ready for series production at their Vittoria factory. But for now, pre-series production has begun of the new all-electric VLE,

where this is going to be a MPV style utility vehicle in terms of carrying up to eight people for families for shuttle runs, executive shuttles.

But with a limousine-like experience. So a full reveal of the VLE from Mercedes, their new van should be early next year. The factory they're making at Vittoria is ready for pre-series.

At new technology coming from 24M, they talk about electrode to pack, which I've never heard of before. Have you? Electrodes to pack technology, where it boosts the energy density by making sure that there's less just stuff inside your battery pack that isn't storing energy.

So the plastics, the space, the cooling, even just the materials around each cell by electrode to pack technology. They can increase the energy density by up to 50%.

That means an average mid-sized family EV with a 75 kilowatt hour battery could have 100 kilowatt hour battery in the same physical dimensions footprint of that battery. That's amazing.

Now researchers at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts developing a new solid-state battery technology, they say that overcomes some of the existing road blocks that are holding things up, making them more expensive and complex to make simplifying cell construction, making them more high performance.

The minute they're not going through, I think, more than 300 charged discharge cycles, which we want to do more than that for our EVs, right? So it's on its way, fascinating technology.

BP Pals and Moto are rolling out truck charging hubs in the UK using the MCS charging standard, 23 sites by the end of the decade covering the UK motorway network that is part of the European transport network.

Now, UK EV owners could save 170 million pounds collectively every year by going on to smart EV charging tariffs. According to this new survey, I find it unbelievable anyone who drives an EV isn't at least on a cheap overnight tariff already.

But yeah, I 100% recommend what I'm on works really well. I wouldn't recommend it if it didn't work. I know that they're one of their products, Octopus Electrover sponsors me, but the actual Octopus energy company.

I use their intelligent go tariff. Sure, the everybody is on some sort of cheap tariff, apparently not.

And Ovo Energy also in the UK, one of Octopus's competitors are launching a subscription program for your electricity. So flat fee 27 or 37 pounds a month, you get a fixed number of miles you can drive by charging it home or publicly, like 700 miles a month.

But how do they work that out because each EV does a different mile per kilowatt hour? So do you have to tell Ovo what car you've got? Can they just give it to us in kilowatt hours? Seems overly complicated. I'll look into it.

Europe, sorry, 30% jump in new electric car registrations in August. This can't be true because we're always told by the media or when car companies have to adjust their plans or lay people off or something. Oh, there's no demand for EVs.

Well, hang on. In the EU, they went up 30% year on year from August to August. So we're looking at year on year data.

Massive growth in place like Germany, UK, France, Spain was up 160% year to date. If you want to smooth it out over eight months up massively on the first eight months of this year compared to last year.

But that's from the car makers association themselves. So as if they can be trusting. Yeah, I think this is good data, but we're always told by the media. No one wants to buy these anymore.

What new Mercedes-Benz C-Class has been spotted looking like it's almost fully baked. We should see more of that soon. And congratulations to Renault's Ampere division made its one millionth electric powertrain now that briefly.

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Mercedes-Benz Cclass

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