Andrew J. Hawkins

Marc Whitten, who ran Amazon’s Fire TV and Kindle divisions and more recently served as president at Unity Create, is stepping into the role left empty by Kyle Vogt, who stepped down after a disastrous response to a driverless car crash incident. The GM-backed robotaxi company has been slowly deploying more vehicles after vacating San Francisco in the wake of the incident in which one of its vehicles dragged a pedestrian 20 feet.

“CDK GLOBAL CYBERATTACK” blares the headline on Automotive News’ landing page for all the site’s reporting on the ransomware attack, which is now in its seventh day. The cyberattack against the software provider to nearly 15,000 dealerships across North America has caused a massive outage that could ultimately affect vehicle sales. Naturally, AutoNews has been following the story closely — including this editorial calling for “creative defense strategies” against cyber criminals.

With electric vehicle investments, that is, according to this nifty visualization by Bloomberg. Of $206 billion in federal funding for environmental projects, 80 percent is going toward EV and battery manufacturing. And the vast majority of those projects — $161 billion — will be located in Republican districts. It puts Republicans in a weird — one could say intensely hypocritical — place of rallying against EVs while quietly raking in the investments and jobs.

Rad Power Bikes says that starting July 1st, prices on some of its models will increase $100-$200 due to the recent expiration of the tariff exemption for Chinese-made e-bike batteries. In a letter to customers, Rad Power CEO Phil Molyneux said the company was committed to affordability and would continue to offer free shipping in the US and free two-year warranties on every e-bike purchase. Still, this is just the first indication of what is likely to become an industry-wide problem soon enough.

Last month, we reported that Tesla had purchased $2 million worth of lidar sensors from Luminar, a surprising deal given Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s very public disparagements of autonomous vehicle companies that partly rely on the laser sensor. This week, a reader sent us this photo of a Tesla Model Y with Luminar’s Hydra sensors mounted on the roof. The back of the vehicle says “Engineering Vehicle,” which could mean the company is using lidar to validate its self-driving software (although Musk has claimed that wasn’t necessary “anymore”).