Andrew J. Hawkins

The feature that allows women to adjust their settings to indicate a preference for a woman driver in all circumstances is coming to more cities, including New York, Philly, D.C., Atlanta, and Austin. Uber started piloting the feature in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Detroit in 2025 and is now expanding it after receiving positive feedback.

The Amazon-owned company with the toaster-shaped robotaxis is now testing its vehicles in Phoenix and Dallas. Zoox will start manually mapping with its retro-fitted Toyota SUVs before leveling up to fully autonomous testing with its purpose-built vehicles.

That is, the fastest EV product launch in US history. TechCrunch’s Sean O’Kane (who’s also a Verge alum) outlines how Rivian is staking its future on the launch of the more affordable R2 mid-sized SUV, predicting it will sell 20,000-25,000 by the end of this year.

Glenn Mercer of Car Charts has a new chart that shows EV sales ticking up slightly in the US, after all the chaos around the expiration of the tax credit has settled. We’re basically back to where we were around 2022-2023, with EVs capturing around 5-6 percent of total sales. So where are things headed? According to Mercer:

That’s Ford CEO Jim Farley to Car and Driver about the F-150 Lightning. The automaker recently discontinued the electric truck, after announcing a massive $19.5 billion write-down on its EV operations. “I mean, look, we didn’t know what we didn’t know,” Farley adds, admitting that Ford’s gas-engine “prejudice was so high that we hadn’t designed the [electric] cars right.” Now the company is betting that it can right-size its business with smaller, more aerodynamic EVs.

They even had to blur out the Ford logo in a couple of shots in this video. The best part of the press release is when Caterpillar says it was inspired by a deluge of AI slop in response to rumors that it was building its own pickup truck (it’s not; according to The Autopian, this is just a one-off).