Enlarge / An Electrify America charging location in Colorado recharges a Porsche Taycan. (credit: Electrify America)

We measure electric vehicle batteries in kWh, so if you're paying to charge an EV, you'd probably expect to be charged by the kWh. And now, if you use an Electrify America charging station in one of 23 states or the District of Columbia, you'll be able to do just that, as the charging company has rolled out a new pricing structure. For the remaining 27 states that require customers to pay by the minute for the electricity they use, the company has simplified its plans and dropped its prices.

When Electrify America started rolling out the first phase of a $2 billion charging network in 2019, it did so with a complicated payment structure . When you plug an EV into a fast charger, as part of the handshake process, the car tells the charger the maximum level of power (in kW) it can accept.

Electrify America used this to determine how much you'd pay, with three different bands (0-75kW, 76-125kW, and 126-350kW), each more expensive than the previous. And as I discovered , it was quite possible to pay the higher fee even if your car sucked in power at a much lower rate during the charging session—the theoretical maximum kW value is what set the price. (In practice, OEMs like Kia have signed deals with Electrify America so owners get discounted or even free charging for several years.)

Enlarge (credit: Tesla)

Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory was the target of a concerted plot to cripple the company’s network with malware, CEO Elon Musk confirmed on Thursday afternoon.

The plan's outline was divulged on Tuesday in a criminal complaint that accused a Russian man of offering $1 million to the employee of a Nevada company, identified only as “Company A,” in exchange for the employee infecting the company’s network. The employee reported the offer to Tesla and later worked with the FBI in a sting that involved him covertly recording face-to-face meetings discussing the proposal.

“The purpose of the conspiracy was to recruit an employee of a company to surreptitiously transmit malware provided by the coconspirators into the company’s computer system, exfiltrate data from the company’s network, and threaten to disclose the data online unless the company paid the coconspirators’ ransom demand,” prosecutors wrote in the complaint.

Enlarge / A law enforcement vehicle damaged in Wednesday's crash. (credit: North Carolina State Highway Patrol)

Police in North Carolina have filed charges against a driver whose Tesla crashed into a police car early Wednesday morning, Raleigh's CBS 17 television reports . The driver admitted to officers that he had activated the Autopilot technology on his Model S and was watching a movie on his phone at the time of the crash.

"A Nash County deputy and a trooper with the Highway Patrol were on the side of the road while responding to a previous crash when the Tesla slammed into the deputy’s cruiser," CBS 17 reports. "The impact sent the deputy’s cruiser into the trooper’s vehicle—which pushed the trooper and deputy to the ground."

Thankfully, no one was seriously injured by the crash.

Enlarge / The Nikola Two truck drives out on the stage at an April 2019 event. (credit: Megan Geuss )

Lidar startup Luminar is going public, the company announced on Monday. Instead of going with a traditional IPO, Luminar is jumping on the latest Wall Street fad: merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) . Merging with a SPAC allows a startup to go public more quickly, with less paperwork and more certainty about the sale price. The deal gives Luminar, which only expects to sell about 100 lidar sensors this year, a post-money valuation of $3.4 billion.

It's the latest in a string of companies connected to the electric and self-driving car revolutions that have gone public using a SPAC. Most have found strong interest from investors.

In March, electric truck startup Nikola announced that it would go public with help from a SPAC. By the time the merger concluded three months later, Nikola's value had shot up seven-fold. It has since settled down to four times the initial sale value. That values Nikola—a company that has yet to deliver a single vehicle to customers—at $14 billion, about half the value of Ford.

Enlarge / A Tesla facility in Lathrop, California. (credit: Andrei Stanescu / Getty Images )

Tesla's stock closed at a record high of $2,000 on Thursday, pushing the company's market capitalization to $370 billion. Tesla has been on a weeklong rally since announcing a five-for-one stock split. The split will be distributed to anyone who holds the stock tomorrow—Friday, August 21.

A little more than two months have passed since Tesla's stock first reached $1,000 per share. Last month, Tesla announced a solid second-quarter profit of $104 million . It was the fourth straight quarter of profits.

That could qualify Tesla for inclusion in the S&P 500 stock index. If Tesla wins a slot in the S&P 500, funds that track the index would need to buy Tesla shares. That could push the stock price up even further.

Enlarge / Here's what the lithium deposited at the anode looks like under a scanning electron microscope. Full charge in top row, depleted charge in bottom row. (credit: Louli et al./Nature Energy )

Electric vehicles have come a long way in terms of going a long way on a charge. But everyone is still seeking the next big jump in battery technology—a battery with significantly higher energy density would mean more range or lower costs to hit the current range. There is always some room for incremental progress on current lithium-ion battery technology, but there is a lithium holy grail that has remained out of reach for decades: ditching its graphite anode to shrink the cell.

A lithium metal battery would simply use solid lithium as the anode instead of requiring a graphite framework for lithium atoms to tuck into as the battery charges. The problem is that the lithium doesn't form an order surface during recharging, so the battery capacity drops drastically—declining to 80 percent within 20 charge cycles in some configurations. Rogue lithium also tends to build up dangerous, branching, needle-like structures that can pierce the separator between the anode and cathode and short-circuit the cell.

Last year, a Dalhousie University lab group with ties to Tesla developed a lithium metal battery with somewhat better performance. Lithium atoms electroplate onto a copper electrode as the battery charges and then move back into a conventional lithium-nickel-manganese-cobalt cathode as charge depletes. Through a new electrolyte, they were able to get this battery to last about 90 cycles before hitting 80 percent capacity to control the nasty short-circuit problem.