It is no surprise that the Tesla - Solar City merger has been approved by investors. Elon Musk will combine his two co-founded companies after paying $2.6bn dollars for SolarCity in an all-stock transaction. The merger will be completed before the end of the year, and save the companies $150 million in costs in the first full year after closing.

Pure electric short range trucks are rapidly becoming viable as they face much tougher local and global emissions regulations.

There is a frenzy of investment by in fully autonomous cars, some without even a steering wheel, but it is almost entirely supplier push. Virtually no private individual is interested in buying one. It is very different with fleets such as taxis where potential corporate purchasers such as Uber see many benefits including cost and space saving

Mexico is not widely adopting pure electric vehicles on its roads partly because of inadequate incentives but also because charging infrastructure is inadequate in such a large country and there is no payback from putting it in.

The saying is, "In a gold rush, get there first, sell shovels". The "shovels" of the EV business are covered in the unique new IDTechEx report, Industrial and Commercial Electric Vehicles on Land 2016-2026.

Daniel Boston and Alyssa Werthman of Ford Motor Company, Dearborn MI have recently published a study "Plug-in Vehicle Behaviors: An analysis of charging and driving behaviour of Ford plug-in electric vehicles in the real world".

To overcome the diverse charging landscape described in Part One, Continental acknowledges that it is a clever idea to equip the EV with all the charging interfaces discussed

Tesla is a leader in the design and commercialisation of pure electric cars. It lacks profit but has an orderbook that its competition can only dream about. Since last year Tesla has also been selling batteries based on Panasonic cells that can power homes and businesses copying several other companies that were there before

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have developed a new type of high-power integrated motor drive and battery charger for electric vehicles. Compared to today's electric vehicle chargers, the new system could shorten the charging time from eight to two hours, and to reduce the cost by around $2,000, according to the developers.

A novel axial field switched reluctance motor design is presented which intend to improve the output torque by single flux path distribution in C- core stator while exploiting the high power density of the switched reluctance technology.

Off-grid clean power is a big focus of attention nowadays as we seek clean propulsion of land, water and airborne vehicles and clean power for buildings and remote equipment off-grid.

An electric vehicle with three energy storage systems shows the complexity of commanding different control systems in only one vehicle. Both new systems can supply the required energy to propel the electric motor and the fuel cell system can also recharge the high-voltage battery.

Triboelectrics will only be a small part of the energy harvesting EH market projected by IDTechEx to be over $7 billion in global market value in 2027.

This paper first presented at EVS29 Montreal Canada provides an overview of the Fiscal Years 2015-2016 Hybrid and Electric Systems research and development activities - with emphasis on its advanced electric drive research -funded by the Vehicles Technologies Office of the U.S. Department of Energy.

A research team has developed a new approach to finding fields of helium underground, and with the first use of the technique they have discovered a massive reserve in East Africa according to a new report from Oxford University in the UK.

At last: the whole picture. Energy Harvesting: Off-grid Microwatt to Megawatt 2017-2027 embraces making electricity from humans, wind, sun, waves, tide, thermals and other ambient sources where it is needed and with no pollution.

The new IDTechEx report, Energy Harvesting: Off-grid Microwatt to Megawatt 2017-2027 concerns a system architecture that can be summarised as follows.

Following the trend to two or more traction motors per vehicle, the Technical University of Berlin with Infineon is merging their motor controllers and the on-board charger (OBC). Infineon now has a special chip to assist. At EVS29 in Montreal June 2016, Dr Martin Bruell of Continental AG, Germany, revealed progress on elimination of the OBC.

The new IDTechEx report, Energy Harvesting: Off-grid Microwatt to Megawatt 2017-2027 tells a remarkable story of these twelve magnitudes of green electricity production.

The unique new IDTechEx Research report, Microcontrollers and Single-board Computers 2016-2026, is the first to reveal the big picture developing from the close relationship between these devices. It provides newly researched forecasts leading to figures such as $300bn in 2026 for SBC alone.