DAILY: BYD To Develop Cars In Europe, Mazda Retreats To Hybrids and German Automakers Still Fighting Clean Air Targets | 13 May 2026

Welcome back to EV news daily today byd to develop cars in Europe for Europe Mazda retreats to hybrids and German automakers are still fighting clean air targets plus stay tuned later in the show I'll tell you why all the action is now in the used

Over an hour spin-off show EV news China today we're talking about byd adding flash charging to even small cars like the Ato 3 that's their 1,500 kilowatts 1.5 megawatt charging technology China set for 10 million EV exports and the SUV segment still being dominated by the big NEO ES 8.

Let's get into it byd say they'll launch a series of cars designed in Europe developed in Europe for European consumers in the next three years the executive vice president Stella Lee setting out the plan at the Financial Times event in London Lee

The shift starts with the Dolphin G now is a tiny plug-in hybrid they're gonna run Violet in June it'll make its first UK public debut at the Goodwood Festival of Speed that's going to be in July with a whole bunch of byd stuff like densers the Dolphin G is a plug-in hybrid super mini.

It serves as the combustion engine alternative to the all electric Dolphin surf byd says it'll be the smallest plug-in hybrid on sale.

She said that Chinese and European consumer preferences are actually diverging in China it's all about bigger is better wider larger three row SUV in European cities.

She says from Paris to Milan Rome to London byd says that that's not necessarily what they're seeing byd wants to stop adapting Chinese made models for Europe and then shipping them over here instead developing cars European spec for European cities purpose built in the region.

Lee said byd will keep separate b-segment and c-segment vehicle standards for Europe telling engineers to keep the European variants at or below 4.3 meters in length.

All right let's move on Mazda has pushed back their first EV by dedicated EV I should say by two years to 2029 and cut their EV investment by nearly half it shifted resources towards mild hybrids and Chinese made EVs that'll be re-badged as Mazda.

Mazda calls its EV strategy an intentional follower and that's OK Mazda is a small car company they haven't got endless pockets or deep pockets have they that reflects two things limited budgets and a deliberate wish to avoid getting ahead of demand.

Mazda would rather be late to the party but at least still in business to be at the party Mazda relies on Toyota licensed gas guzzling mild hybrid technology at the moment.

Their new hybrids would be a little more under Mazda's control even as it cuts back on their EV spending Mazda will still sell EVs before 2029 but they won't be their own they will export Chinese made EVs to Europe Australia and Southeast Asia.

They'll effectively be Changans badgers Mazda.

All right let's move on European automakers the likes of Volkswagen BMW and Mercedes Benz met with EU officials today in Brussels to argue for further concessions to the blocks aim to clean up lung busting pollution which puts all of our health futures at risk.

The German car industry won big concessions only months ago and they're not happy.

They now want even more flexibility to blow past the 2035 target to who knows when with their emissions generating vehicles which make them a lot of money but of course which shifts the burden of health care to government hospital budgets that will have to treat the effects of killer particulates years

and decades down the line when those auto execs have long since retired not their problem anymore but that push reflects where the industry thinks it has room to move.

The German car industry sees emissions regulation negotiation as the most immediate and viable lever that they can pull to make money.

The sector faces higher energy costs at home bureaucratic burden and a shortage of batteries that are made outside of China and at the same time Chinese rivals the likes of BYD MG which is SAIC and many more are keeping up the pressure.

Germany's automotive lobby the VDA warning today that the country's auto sector could shed 125,000 jobs by 2035 unless we ease up on the pollution rules and let them carry on making dirty gas guzzlers.

Of course it's difficult they have many vested interests and it's not their job to think about the way our kids health is.

It's our job as parents to hope that we leave a better planet behind not the CEOs nor to execs that they got to do what they got to do to make their money hit their bonuses and and sail off into the sunset and who knows what the regulators will do.

Let's talk about Opel slash Vauxhall. Opel has shown the first images of the Corsa GSE. It's an all-electric hot hatch some would say mild hatch but still they're calling it a hot hatch that will sit underneath the Mocha GSE.

Opel slash Vauxhall says it will be the fastest accelerating production car they've ever built. So how quick is it not 100 kph or 62 miles an hour? 5.5 seconds and it's not exactly going to rip your face off is it?

Probably says a lot about the kind of cars that they've been selling. That's fine. They're in the value oriented family market. No one expects Opel slash Vauxhall to be fire breathing but I was still surprised to see that they've never made a car that goes quicker than 5.5 seconds doing the dash.

That beats the Mocha's 5.9 second although not the top speed. The Corsa GSE will go to 180 kilometers an hour. The badge has changed with the car. GSE used to mean something else. It now means Grand Sport Electric.

The shift started with the Mocha GSE leading the electric performance of Opel slash Vauxhall. The Corsa now follows on Stalantas' ECMP platform. Front mounted permanent magnet motor. 207 kW upgraded the battery's thermal management.

With some new limited slip diff, lowered sport suspension, new axle tuning, new stabilizer tuning, new shock absorbers, new steering calibration and pedal calibration and new brakes as well.

Australia is next in the news.

The pause follows the high-course ruling that struck down Victoria's EV road charge. That decision forced Canberra to move with a little more care. A separate road user charge for New South Wales drivers is still on the cards for 2027.

The budget also reshaped support for EV buyers. The government confirming that its electric car fringe benefits tax discount will be restructured. It'll now be a permanent budget measure.

The full FBT exemption will narrow next April, applying only to EVs under $75,000 or below that that are purchased via innovative leases.

From April 29, all EVs under the luxury car tax threshold will get a 25% FBT reduction.

Here in the UK we are plowing ahead with an electric car paper mile road charge, which from most people I speak to is wildly unpopular.

And also what it's done is give the EV haters the never bevers and most of those in legacy newspaper media that have to either get clicks or sell papers, which increasingly fewer people do these days, but still a massive stick with which to hit EVs with our government.

Their EV strategy has been muddled ever since and some good things and some really bad things and paying for every mile that you drive is something that just seems to get people's back up.

My people don't mind paying. We don't want roads full of potholes, although we've got them and we don't want to avoid paying anything and EVs for a long time were given a free pass, no road tax or vehicle excise duty as we call it.

But yeah, work to do here. Well done, Australia. Hope the whole thing just goes away. We want to pay our fair share, but a lot of people feel very spied on when they have to declare where and when they've gone, that kind of stuff.

All right, to move on. We'll take a break. We'll come back in a second. We'll talk about some really big stories coming up on the podcast.

How about AI charging can help your battery last longer? How EV buses can support the grid and Lucid has obviously a big job to do and they've got a new CEO in place.

And what about making right hand drive cars? Because they sell them in Europe in left hand drive. But what about here? The UK is still one of Europe's biggest EV markets.

They're putting those plans back. I'll get onto those stories and a lot more. Stick around.

Hey, welcome back to the podcast. Okay, let's talk a little bit about a new German study by the Institute for Applied Ecology finding strong support for battery electric trucks.

They asked a bunch of companies that are already operating semi trucks if you want to call them those or heavy goods vehicles.

Obviously, a lot of people talk a lot about the Tesla Semi in America. A lot of my American listeners might not realize that actually over here in Europe, we've already got loads of electric trucks on the road.

No Tesla Semi's, but a bunch of trucks on the road. Tesla tends to take up a lot of the attention, but the other companies have quietly gotten with making some really good trucks and they're all in use.

Now they covered 57 transport companies over last winter that are running more than 300 electric trucks. They've been operating them for over a year. So they've got good insights. 93% of them are either satisfied or very satisfied.

I'm surprised it's not higher. 93% of those companies said that they have higher reliability compared to diesel, better driving comfort compared to diesel, and lower operating costs compared to diesel.

And funnily enough, the same amount, 93%, also expected electric trucks to just become the norm by 2030.

32% of them said technical problems came at a similar rate to diesel and 16% saw significantly fewer problems than running diesel trucks.

But the main pain points were elsewhere. Not the vehicles. They said there's a higher upfront purchase price, but of course they look at total cost of ownership.

Really, it's about depot grid connections. Most charging happens at base. I think a lot about charging electric trucks on the road, megawatt charging. How quickly can we charge these trucks?

The companies running them already said we charge them at the depot. And the average grid connection at the average survey depot was just over a megawatt. That was 1,115 kilowatt grid connection, which is nothing.

Across 40 of the companies, average installed charging power was only 629 kilowatts for the site, for the depot. Only 5% of charging sessions happened at public truck chargers.

And sometimes just difficulty integrating it into your fleets. So in short, the public network is working, but there is work to do. For now, let's get the depot connections sorted.

These permissions can take too long. It's very expensive to upgrade grid connections as well.

Well, average daily mileage. I found this in the report. This is interesting. The average daily mileage of a heavy goods vehicle in Europe right now is 268 miles. That's 432 kilometers.

I think it's an enormous number, by the way. That's the average. So there's some going a lot further. 40% of fleets go more than 310 miles. That's 500 kilometers per day.

They asked everyone driving everything from three and a half tons up to 18 ton long haul trucks. Okay, moving on. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden say they've developed an AI driven charging method that charges your battery how it wants to be charged and makes it last 23% longer.

The system uses learning to adjust charging to every battery, state of health and chemistry. That is a break from the current charging standards. Now largely, they will apply the same current and voltage to similar batteries regardless of age.

You're plugging your car. The charger says what do you want? The car says this and the charger says I can deliver that or they communicate and you get a charge. It's still largely though a one size fits all approach.

Using the same charging protocol regardless of your own personal battery can speed up wear and raise the risk of lithium plating. Lithium plating happens when metallic lithium deposits on the electrode go there rather than being stored correctly.

Now the team trained their AI models in simulations using digital digital twins. Now digital twinning is a huge thing in the automotive industry. You can build technology much quicker by building it all digitally.

And so they did this and the model learned to calibrate the charging current based on the exact parameters of each individual battery pack. The results comes with a few seconds of current charging speeds, but it reduces the internal wear that would make your battery last 23% longer.

Sounds like a win. Now let's talk about first bus in the UK launching a depot infrastructure project alongside our national grid. Now because I live on a small island, the UK has one national grid. We haven't got a patchwork of companies running the national grid like in large countries like the USA.

So easier to do stuff like this on a nationwide level. The scheme lets bus depots charge vehicles intelligently. They draw power when the grid needs load balancing wind power generated say in Scotland that would be otherwise curtailed can be channeled into commercial vehicle charging.

But it's all about scale. First bus has more than 1400 zero emission vehicles in service. The largest electric bus operator here and the companies depots have a lot of capacity. This is a bit like school buses in America.

Now the school bus culture isn't a thing here in the same way that yellow school buses are just part of the culture in America. We don't have that. So when school buses aren't running and there's a lot of school buses in the US, they should all be electric and they should all support the grid.

First bus argues that smarter use of capacity cuts costs cuts wasted renewable energy supports the grid improves the economics. We said this all the time about going electric. It's cheaper and it just makes more sense.

So a lot of the time the conversation around going electric gets tied up in well governments want us to do it. There's targets for 2035. It's all to do with pollution. I'm a tree hugger. I'm green going electric is so much cheaper.

Like forget all of that other stuff. It just makes way more sense to store energy intelligently. Your gas guzzling vehicles can't do that. That energy store is there. And by the way, fossil fuels obviously a very good energy store in terms of the chemistry of it all.

But it makes so much sense to get everything electric as quick as possible. Integrate everything. I can't wait. Lucid say that they are putting back their UK launch to 2028. That makes three delays now for their British plans.

European President Lawrence Hamilton confirming the new timeline to the independent outlet calling the UK a prime place for Lucid but that they must sequence their expansion with care for now Lucid sells in four European markets Germany Netherlands Norway Switzerland and they'll enter seven or eight

more European markets this year. Of course we want right hand drive vehicles that are not going to reengineer the Lucid air their current saloon and they won't reengineer the gravity SUV either the UK's right hand drive line up will come online with a new midsize platform

Production begins by the end of the year though on the midsize Lucid unveiling at their first investor day back in March the first UK model would be the cosmos that's a coupé style crossover then it'll be the earth a rugged variant third model is going to follow as well 800 of architecture then you Atlas Drive units and 30% fewer parts than the air and gravity as well.

Couple more stories. The UK government is going to remove some barriers for EV vans. So this is if you buy an electric van that weighs between three and a half and four and a quarter tons.

These new rules align those vans with gas guzzling equivalents. There's been years of lobbying from fleets that argue that battery electric vans are unfairly punished because battery packs big ones anyway.

It can be heavy and it can push those vehicles over three and a half tons which is the threshold when the vehicles size and job are exactly the same as replacing your old dirty expensive diesel three and a half tonner for an electric version but they can be heavier.

And under the new rules these new larger electric vans mean that they don't get treated has heavy goods vehicles HGVs because the HGVs here have a whole different testing regime a bit like pickup trucks in China.

They're not treated like cars they have a whole different set of regs is why China doesn't have pickup trucks like, you know, like the US has or Australian youth culture.

So that will move it into a different MOT framework. The MOT is our annual roadworthiness test. The first MOT on those kind of vans if they're combustion would be after three years because the vehicles aren't going to go wrong in the first three years.

Whereas the electric ones because they've been heavier they fall into a class of vehicle where the MOT happens after the first year which doesn't seem fair.

There's also on really heavy vehicles things like driver hours rules. Electric vans in that weight band will now move into the new framework which effectively removes the mandatory tachograph use and ends restrictions on operating distance stuff like that.

A sensible decision by our government. Finally, the used EV market is exploding around the world.

This should not be a surprise to anyone who's been a long term listener to this podcast because I've long talked about like what is basically obvious economics that if the new car sales have been flying and people are getting into 234 year leases over the last 234 years.

At some point those lease companies are going to just put them back into the remarketing circle and get as much money back as they can on those.

It might not be as much money as they thought they were going to get. They bought those cars three years ago.

However, in the UK, Q1 was a new record for used EVs according to the lobby organization SMMT over here, 32% up on Q1 last year, one in 23 used cars and now an EV.

And you might think, hang on, you told me the UK was at 25% one in one in four, but that's for new cars.

The used car market is playing catch up, but it's catching up quickly.

Strong new EV sales in recent years have increased the supply of used EVs like the electric car grant scheme kicking in.

That's probably a little too recent to affect the used market though.

Price is helping as well. Significant discounts in the used car market have lowered the barrier to EV ownership.

Lower used EV prices have been particularly useful for first time buyers and confidence improving.

Lower battery degradation than many people had assumed back in the day means that modern EVs have buyers who are more willing to consider an EV because they're obviously more reliable.

More new EVs sold in recent years mean more EVs unused for courts, independent dealers, lower prices, no fear over battery life anymore.

It's not like your mobile phone that gets rubbish after a couple of years, all that's gone.

And that convergence of positive factors is clearly moving metal.

And that's your podcast for today. Thanks to our premium partners as always.

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Have a good and sit-amara and remember there's no such thing as a self-charging hybrid.

DAILY: BYD To Develop Cars In Europe, Mazda Retreats To Hybrids and German Automakers Still Fighting Clean Air Targets | 13 May 2026

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