The Verge alum Sean O’Kane crunched the LinkedIn data to conclude that Ford’s secretive EV skunkworks has grown to over 300 employees, with 50 coming from Rivian alone. Ford has also poached workers from Tesla, Lucid, Canoo, F1, and Apple’s recently disbanded car project. The group, led ex-Tesla engineer Alan Clarke, is tasked with designing a lineup of low-cost EVs for the Blue Oval.
Last year, General Motors agreed to cover its electric vehicle battery manufacturing under the United Auto Workers’ master agreement as a precursor to settling the historic 45-day union strike. And today, the UAW announced that it has a tentative agreement with Ultium Cells, the joint venture between GM and LG Energy Solutions. UAW President Shawn Fain, who has expressed concern about how the EV transition will affect workers, said Ultium Cell employees “showed the world what it means to win a just transition.”
[UAW | United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America]
Take this guy, for example. He’s laying it on thick, celebrating Tesla’s Full Self-Driving as more capable than Waymo’s autonomous vehicles without all the sensors and precision mapping. Just nothing but pure, unencumbered fandom. And the car still tries to kill him.
The part where he goes “Fuck” after grabbing the wheel — and then still manages to praise the car as “pretty good” was my favorite.
InsideEVs has a good breakdown of how much each version of Rivian’s newly announced second-generation R1T and R1S vehicles is going to cost. Tellingly, the company has yet to put a price to its monster quad-motor trim, with 1,025 hp, 1,190 lb-ft of torque, and a 0-60mph time of under 2.5 seconds. I suppose the company wants to let the specs breath before clubbing you over the head with the amount.
The exterior design of the R1T and R1S may look the same, but ‘everything beneath the surface has changed,’ CEO says.
