Cars Archive

Nicolas Fremau, the hybrid architecture expert at Renault, used Lego to help build the prototype for the French car company’s E-Tech hybrid powertrain, as reported by Car and Driver:

On the brink of bankruptcy, the struggling automaker is facing a nearly $13 million lawsuit by the firm (a subsidiary of Bertrand AG) that developed the Pear crossover and the Alaska pickup truck. Fisker, which says the lawsuit is “without merit,” also apparently hasn’t paid its own automotive carpet supplier.

InsideEVs Editor-in-Chief (and former Verge contributor) Patrick George spoke to two recently laid off employees from Tesla’s Supercharger team about what’s going to happen to the company’s once-vaunted EV charging network now that it’s been gutted. They’re worried that broken chargers will take longer to fix, as the employees that are left race to respond to outages. In short, it’s going to short circuit.

On today’s Decoder, Verge transportation editor Andy Hawkins and I try to figure out Tesla. The company has been on a real rollercoaster these past two weeks — in terms of its stock price, its basic financials, and well, its vibes. With Elon Musk saying he’s going all in on autonomy and announcing a robotaxi event in August, it seems like we’re getting closer to a make-or-break moment for the company.

Chevy dealers are already catching flack from customers for GM’s decision to remove popular phone-mirroring services Apple CarPlay and Android Auto from their lineup of EVs. Maybe it would have gone down better if their native infotainment software didn’t immediately shit the bed, resulting in a stop-sale order for the Chevy Blazer EV? Just sayin.

The Treasury Department is set to announce later this week the final set of rules around critical minerals in EV batteries, that will likely target “foreign entities of concerns” — which is government jargon for China. The rules won’t kick in until 2025, at which point the list of EVs eligible for the $7,500 credit is likely to shrink even more.