Tesla sales in China are relatively fine despite the added complexity of managing the production switch to the new Mode Y, Tesla’s best-selling model.

Model Y represents most of Tesla’s sales, and it is currently undergoing a design refresh that started with Gigafactory Shanghai, Tesla’s highest-producing factory.

The production shift will inevitably result in lower volumes this quarter, but the market is trying to track Tesla’s deliveries in China closely to see how much lower it will be.

The China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) has now released January sales volume and it reported that Tesla China sold 63,238 electric vehicles in January – including vehicles Tesla built in China and exported to overseas markets.

That’s down 11.5% from the same period last year and 32.5% compared to December.

While sales are down, those numbers are far from awful amid the Model Y changeover happening in China.

However, the impact is expected to be much more significant in February due to the Chinese New Year and Tesla is expected to shut down part of the Model Y production lines from January 22 to February 14.

This is going to result in lower inventory available in February and March.

We recently reported that Tesla has increased discounts on Model 3 vehicles. Model 3 is becoming more important this quarter amid the Model Y changeover.

Electrke’s Take

China is what is keeping Tesla going right now. Sales in Europe are falling off a cliff, and demand is also expected to be down in the US this quarter, but there’s still no data on it.

The new Model Y is having an impact everywhere, but Elon Musk’s meddling in politics and subsequent drop in reputation also has an effect, except in China, where they don’t care about that as much.

Elon could name his next kid “Adolf,” and it would probably not affect Tesla’s sales in China much.

On the other hand, this Model Y changeover at Gigafactory Shanghai will have an impact. If it goes wrong, it will badly affect sales, but if it goes smoothly, the impact should be mitigated.

So far, I think that being down 11.5% over last year is not bad.

Trump’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has issued a memo ordering states to suspend all state EV infrastructure deployment plans under the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program.

Trump’s FHWA orders NEVI suspension

The $5 billion NEVI program is the big rollout of EV charging infrastructure across the US that was funded by the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Act, and it’s already well underway.

Under the NEVI program, states have to send their plans to the FHWA annually, detailing how they’ll use the funds. During the Biden administration, the FHWA signed off on the first four out of five fiscal years of plans through 2025. However, not all of it has been “obligated” to EV infrastructure projects.

Trump’s FHWA has told states in this memo that they can’t commit funds that were already approved to new EV charging infrastructure. However, money that was already committed is not affected. 

The memo reads:

Therefore, effective immediately, no new obligations may occur under the NEVI Formula Program until the updated final NEVI Formula Program Guidance is issued and new State plans are submitted and approved. Instructions for the submission of new State plans for all fiscal years will be included in the updated final NEVI Formula Program Guidance. Since FHWA is suspending the existing State plans, States will be held harmless for not implementing their existing plans. Until new guidance is issued, reimbursement of existing obligations will be allowed in order to not disrupt current financial commitments.

Electrek’s Take

I asked Loren McDonald, chief analyst at Paren, what his thoughts were on this latest cancellation, and he, among others (myself included), doesn’t think the FHWA has the authority to stop the NEVI program with a memo – it would need a change in law from Congress – and then the courts will settle it. (Who else is beginning to see a Trump administration theme here?) McDonald said:

 I don’t believe FHWA has the authority to pause or rescind any aspect of NEVI. The Trump administration is clearly trying to stop or pause programs like NEVI for as long as they can, but I assume lawsuits from states will start soon, and this will go to court and Congress … but the Trump admin will succeed in just causing havoc and slowing things down for a while. In the end, the Trump administration will likely fail, as only Congress can fundamentally revise and stop the NEVI program.

But, as with everything else rolled back the last few weeks, this will cause chaos and delays. This will cause serious damage to businesses nationwide – from EV charging companies (including Tesla, one of the largest NEVI recipients) to convenience stores and other host sites – and will waste money and cost people jobs.

It should also be noted that NEVI is the very reason that the NACS charging standard exists in the first place.

NEVI was limited only to chargers that could serve multiple makes of vehicles – a reasonable step, that government wouldn’t want to do a giveaway to a single, proprietary company. This is what caused Tesla to release NACS as a standard in the first place, so that its chargers could access NEVI money.

Then, when the entire industry switched over to the NACS standard, that signaled a potential long period of leadership in EV charging for Tesla. The company could have been the primary energy provider for EVs in North America for years or even decades to come as a result.

Now, an administration that Elon Musk is involved in is killing the very program that could have led to his company’s dominance in energy delivery – after also firing the entire team that was responsible for making the NACS standard in the first place.

What an awesome way to make America great again.

Read more: Q4 2024 update: 12,000 more US EV charging ports in 3 months

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The ChargeX Consortium has figured out how to automatically restart failed EV charging sessions at fast chargers so drivers don’t have to.

Every EV driver has been there. You plug in, walk away to grab food or run errands, and expect your battery to be juicing up at a DC fast charger, only to return and realize nothing happened. Maybe the session failed, or maybe the charger glitched. Either way, you’re stuck unplugging, plugging back in, and now it’s going to take twice as long to charge.

The ChargeX Consortium (National Charging Experience Consortium), which is made up of researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Idaho National Laboratory (INL), and Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), along with industry stakeholders, has come up with a smart fix for one of the most frustrating parts of public EV charging: failed sessions.

Its new report highlights the benefits of what it calls “seamless retry” – a hands-free tech solution that automatically restarts failed charging attempts. In other words, the driver no longer needs to physically unplug and replug the charging connector when a charging session fails.

The consortium’s new tech is designed specifically for DC fast charging. The “novel mechanism” automatically resets both the EV and the charger, then restarts the session in the background, so drivers don’t have to return to the car – or even have to think about it.

Ed Watt, a researcher at NREL and lead author of the “Recommended Practice Seamless Retry for Electric Vehicle Charging” report, said, “With a seamless retry mechanism in place, an EV driver at a retail center can plug in a charging connector, provide user input data, leave to shop, and feel confident that they will return to a charged vehicle.” (Click on the report link to see the specifics of how the novel mechanism works.)

The researchers didn’t just focus on the perks of seamless retry – they also looked at potential downsides. One concern was the extra time it might take for the system to restart a failed session, which could leave drivers frustrated. To tackle that, the consortium suggests that the EV industry provide transparency in the form of real-time status updates, insights into what went wrong, and recommendations based on the type of charging failure and number of attempts made.

Going forward, as the user experience becomes clearer, more work will fine-tune seamless retry. The ChargeX Consortium will keep refining the system – developing smarter, more targeted retry methods, ironing out implementation details, and running verification tests to make sure everything works seamlessly in the real world.

Read more: The latest US EV sales and charger growth – in numbers

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