Jacob Hunka August 17, 2026 · 5 min read
A cherry farmer in New Zealand worked out what his own electricity costs him and landed at seven cents a kilowatt hour. Diesel would have run him about eighty. He never set out to build an all-electric orchard, either. The diesel machines just kept losing the argument on paper. That story opens the week. After it: BMW's cheapest Neue Klasse car, a home charger that pays you to stop deciding when to plug in, Berlin liveaboards building their own marinas because nobody else will, and Volkswagen quietly putting the buttons back.
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A Cherry Farm With No Diesel and the Spreadsheet to Prove It
Everything Electric TECH
Forest Lodge Orchard sits in Otago on New Zealand's South Island, six hectares of cherries on land that used to carry around 800 sheep. Mike, who runs it with his wife Rebecca, bought the farm after selling a Sydney technology company in 2019, planted 9,300 trees, and discovered a cherry operation needs roughly 21 machines. Going fully electric wasn't the plan. It took two or three years, because the diesel versions kept costing more to own. The generation figures are the part worth writing down. He reports 160 kW of solar across ground arrays, warehouse and barn roofs, and the house, producing about 200 MWh a year against consumption near 100 MWh, with 300 kWh of battery behind it. Counting panels, install, and wiring, he puts the delivered price near seven New Zealand cents a kilowatt hour, against roughly 26 from the grid and around 80 on diesel. He values the annual saving at NZ$40,000, which he describes as the earnings of another 1,600 trees. The tractor is a California prototype he says he talked a board into shipping across the Pacific, and he claims 55 electric horsepower matches a 90 horsepower diesel at roughly $2 an hour against $13 to $14. Frost fans still run overnight off the grid, leaving the farm 80 percent self-powered, and he's upfront about that rather than rounding up to a cleaner story. What makes this stick isn't the environmental case. It's that the capital goes in once and the output arrives for decades, and nobody in that arrangement gets to revise the number later.
BMW's Cheapest Neue Klasse EV Is Very Good and Very Busy
Throttle House
Throttle House frames the iX3 as the smaller, cheaper answer to the iX, built on a dedicated EV platform rather than adapted from the combustion X3. The numbers are strong: 400 kW peak charging, 698 km of range, 4.5 seconds to 60 mph, and a Supercharger session taking the pack from 10 to 80 percent in around ten minutes. The host who took it on a 500 km cottage run reports no range anxiety with the air conditioning going, and says it undercuts the petrol X3 M50 despite the new platform. Then the friction starts. His co-host describes fighting the driver assistance in city traffic, getting scolded for not checking a blind spot, and hunting through menus for climate controls. Both single out the door handles and the steering wheel graphics. The omission that stings most is ventilated seats, absent on a car that offers heating and massage, which the hosts read as a sign of a rushed launch. The climate controls living in the screen gets a blunter explanation: a screen is cheaper than engineering a physical switch. Neither of those absences was a trade the buyer got offered. One host spends much of the review switching things off to get back to the car underneath, which is a strange way to spend money on a premium vehicle. Throttle House says it's selling heavily regardless, and it probably will keep doing that.
The Home Charger That Pays You to Stop Choosing When
Andrew Till / Mr. EV
Andrew Till follows a swap from an old Pod Point to a tethered Solo 3S. Worth saying up front: the film is built around Pod's own hardware and rewards scheme, so treat the figures as the company's. Pod, which the video says is owned by EDF and has installed over 300,000 chargers, prices the unit at £999 untethered or £1,049 tethered. A subscription runs £99 up front plus £34 a month over 36 months, roughly £274 more, but adds two years of warranty and a 48-hour repair guarantee. The mechanism worth understanding is Pod Rewards. You set a target percentage and a ready-by time, and the charger picks the hours, favouring cheap or renewable-heavy periods. Payouts are cash from £10, capped at around £100 a year, and the video says it works on any supplier and any single or two-rate tariff. If you're on a supplier-managed smart EV tariff you're excluded, because the scheduling already happens there. Note the ceiling too: this is a 7 kW unit, and Pod doesn't make an 11 kW three-phase version. Five weeks in, the customer reports just under £12. That's not going to change anyone's life. What's interesting is the shape of the deal. You give up one thing, the decision about when to charge, and a company puts an actual number on what that flexibility is worth to it. Most of the industry takes that flexibility without mentioning it.
Two Berlin builders appear in a film produced around Victron Energy hardware, so read it as a supplier showcase. Eric builds aluminium catamarans and trimarans in Brandenburg and lives aboard one. His boat runs a 48-volt system with over 102 kWh of lithium iron phosphate storage, makes its own fresh water from the lake, and handles wastewater on board. He says it stays off-grid from April to September, and that a roughly 100 km move of a solar charging station to Berlin ran on solar alone. On a full-battery day he's charged his car from the boat, around 20 to 25 kWh, which he puts at 150 km of driving. Thorsten has the problem that decides whether any of this scales. He says the 24-hour moorings near him have no water and no electricity at all, so he's developing a floating solar charging lounge with a hotel room above it. His numbers are modest next to anything on the road: zero to 100 percent in about five hours, or an overnight top-up at 2.5 kW for a 30 kWh boat. The video notes Germany and other European countries are drafting rules pushing boats toward renewables, which puts a clock on that infrastructure gap. This is the part of electrification nobody funds. When the charging network doesn't exist and nobody is coming to build it, somebody ends up building it themselves and renting out the rooms upstairs to make the math work.
The facelifted ID.3, badged ID.3 Neo, is Volkswagen undoing its own decisions. Autogefühl counts physical climate switches, proper buttons for all four windows, and knurled metal controls where the previous car had touch panels. The car measures 4.29 metres, drives the rear wheels, and the version tested makes 231 horsepower with a quoted 7-second 0 to 100 km/h time. The channel measured a DC peak of 185 kW against a claimed 183, and 12 to 80 percent in a little over 28 minutes, with the curve falling away earlier than the host would like. The battery lineup is the real story. Two LFP packs are listed at 50 and 58 kWh, and the review states these are the same physical hardware, with the smaller figure set by a limit in software. The host doesn't hedge about it, calling it a scam on customers. That's his characterization, and you can take your own view, but the underlying admission is the interesting bit: the cells are no longer where a manufacturer differentiates. He recommends the 79 kWh NMC option instead, which returned a measured 320 miles at 100 km/h and 240 miles at 130. Prices run from €34,000 to about €45,000 for the big battery, with a fully optioned car reaching €57,000. The review also flags an intermittent CarPlay blackout and a sharp boot edge that cut the presenter's fingers on camera.
The week is yours. See you next Monday.
Jacob Hunka, Founder nexusEVnews.com
P.S. Know someone who follows the auto industry and ignores the electric side of it? Now is a good time to fix that.