Tim Stevens | The Verge

These retractable studded tires might save our roads, ears, and lungs

2026-04-13T12:35:42-04:00

If you want to feel truly invincible when driving in the snow, you need a set of studded snow tires. They’re illegal in some places, typically restricted to the frigid months of the year in others. Spring for a set, though, and they’ll see you through the worst, slipperiest, snowiest driving conditions you can imagine.

They come at a pretty substantial cost, though, and I’m not just talking about a financial one. Yes, quality tires with embedded tungsten tips are generally far pricier than your average bargain rubber with snowflakes on the sidewall. The bigger issue, though, is that they can be extremely loud and are substantially worse for the roads and even your lungs than regular rubber.

Nokian, the Finnish company that’s been making high-grip, Nordic-spec tires since the 1930s, has a novel solution that’s straight from a James Bond movie — or two movies, as it were. The company’s new Hakkapeliitta 01 tires feature studs that retract when not needed. Can they reduce the other studded snow tire headaches enough to make them worth the investment? Sadly my Aston is in the shop, so I put a set on my Subaru, a 2004 Impreza WRX STI, to find out.

Finnish Origins

Chances are you’re more familiar with a certain other, similar-sounding Finnish company: Nokia. That’s no coincidence. Both were born from the same business, Nokia Corporation, which has roots going back to the late 19th century.

Nokian, the tire company, has been making its Hakkapeliitta line of snow tires for 90 years now. The most recent was called the Hakkapeliitta 10, released in 2021, but now the Hakkapeliitta 01 resets the numbering scheme.

It makes sense because, while Hakkas have seen gradual improvements from one generation to the next, this latest marks a major shift. I can say that confidently because I’ve been personally running and racing Nokian tires for well over a decade, since the Hakkapeliitta 7, doing my best to ignore the snide comments from friends and family about how incredibly loud they are.

If you’ve never driven on studded snow tires, at lower speeds the sound is a little bit like popcorn kernels exploding in your fenders as you roll around through the parking lots. It’s loud and unpleasant, settling into a more subtle roar at highway speeds, but never going away.

For its electric-minded Hakkapeliitta EV tires, Nokian mitigated this with some success by putting a foam insulating liner inside the tire and reducing the number of studs. For the Hakkapeliitta 01, though, it’s a completely different ball game.

Construction

The hallmark of the new Hakkapeliitta 01 is, of course, its studs. Or, more specifically, what Nokian calls the “adaptive base” that sits beneath the stud. This is designed to allow the stud to retract into the tread of the tire when the temperatures are warm yet keep it protruding when it’s cold.

Interestingly, though, it’s not really about the ambient temperature. “The studs are out when the vehicle is standing still,” Mikko Liukkula, development manager at Nokian, tells me. “When the tire moves along bare roads at moderate to high speeds, the repeated contact between the studs and the road warms the adaptive base. Even in cold temperatures, this movement softens the adaptive base and retracts the studs into the tread.”

If you’re driving over frozen surfaces, like ice or snow, Liukkula says the colder temperatures will harden that base, keeping those studs extended.

The point of all this is partly noise reduction, to the tune of one decibel per Nokian’s tests, but it’s also about the reduction in road wear. Nokian says the Hakkapeliitta 01 offers a 30 percent reduced wear to dry roads over a typical studded tire. That may not seem an unimportant factor for a tire only used in the winter, but even in Minnesota, a study showed that drivers do roughly 70 percent of their winter driving on dry asphalt.

Reducing road wear substantially reduces your vehicle’s overall emissions. Airborne particulates are a major factor in lung cancer rates globally, and this airborne particulate matter generated when a metal stud strikes dry asphalt is particularly bad. Countries like Japan have outright banned studded tires, not because of the damage to roads, but because of the damage to lungs.

On the outside, the new studs do look quite a bit different than those found in the Hakkapeliitta 10 tires I’d most recently been running on my Subaru. Those studs are positioned slightly differently, too, placement in the tires algorithmically determined to reduce noise according to Liukkula.

Where the Hakkapeliitta 10 studs are small and self-contained, you can see a pad of sorts behind the studs in the 01s, which facilitates their magic disappearing act into the tread of the tire. The tire tread features fine slices, sipes in tire-speak, to increase surface area and make the most of the available grip on slippery surfaces.

But Hakkapeliitta tires have always excelled on slippery surfaces. For this test, I was far more interested in knowing whether they live up to their billing on dry asphalt.

Nokian’s Hakka 01 vs. Hakka 10. | Image: Tim Stevens / The Verge" data-portal-copyright="Image: Tim Stevens / The Verge" />

Tire Testing

Before I hit the road, I left one Hakkapeliitta outside on an 18-degree evening to make sure it was good and cold. The other I took inside, where it maintained an ambient 65 degrees. In the morning, I took a force gauge to each and measured the force required to compress the stud flush with the tread of the tire.

Sure enough, compared to the cold one, the studs on the warm tire presented roughly half the resistance. And, once compressed, they were in no hurry to come back out again.

So, early signs pointed to the science being legit, and that was verified when I put the wheels and tires on the car and drove away. That omnipresent popcorn sound that typifies the studded snow tire experience was not totally eliminated, but it was dramatically reduced. I could still hear the studs on dry asphalt, but only if I listened for them.

As I picked up speed, again, the improvement was noticeable. Before mounting the Hakkapeliitta 01s, I’d done a few laps of one of my test routes on my set of Hakkapeliitta 10s, and I could immediately hear the difference in the new tires.

Additionally, on wet roads, the new Hakkas felt more secure and planted, and while these tires sadly arrived too late for me to get them out on glare ice, I did get a quick blast in some late-season flurries, and they made my car feel as invincible as ever.

Rolling Quiet

So the technology actually works. While far from silent, Nokian’s new studded Hakkapeliitta tires are substantially quieter than those the company has released before. But they will come at a cost. Nokian hasn’t set pricing on the Hakkapeliitta 01 tires, but they’re sure to cost at least as much as the Hakkapeliitta 10 tires they replace, which cost around $200 per corner in the 17-inch fitment my Subaru demands.

Unstudded snow tires from brands like Dunlop or Falken can be had for less than half that. Worth the premium? You’ll have to weigh the quality of life and environmental improvements against your tire budget, but whatever Nokian winds up charging for them, it’ll surely be far less than what Q Branch would demand for a set.

In-hub motors make this humble Hyundai a monster on ice

2026-03-23T11:33:27-04:00

In-wheel motors have been around since the very beginning of electric motoring. Ferdinand Porsche developed one way back in 1900, and the US sent them to the moon in our Lunar Roving Vehicles in the early ’70s. But, outside of e-bikes, they’ve never really gone mainstream. It looked like Lordstown Motors would be their time to shine, but that never came to pass.

Lordstown’s truck, the Endurance, is now dead, doomed to haunt the ever-growing graveyard of failed EV startups. But the source of its motors, a Slovenian company called Elaphe, is still very much alive, refining its technology and installing it into all sorts of interesting projects.

Elaphe is promising EVs with better performance, greater control, more range, and a long list of other improvements. It’s hype I’ve been hearing for years, but after a day spent sliding around in the company’s prototypes, I’m beginning to believe.

Origins and Struggles

“It was a big blow,” Elaphe CEO Gorazd Gotovac says, of the Lordstown failure. “We set up all of the structures within the company to be able to support them.” The motors had gone through the full legal homologation process, a massive and expensive undertaking that didn’t entirely come to naught.

“Now we are building all of our future products on top of that. So I’m still very grateful that this project happened,” Gotovac says.

My time testing those products all happened on the ice, a stellar challenge for both car and driver. I started, though, with the fruit of someone else’s engineering: an Ioniq 5. Hyundai’s retrofuturistic EV is a great machine, but not exactly what I would choose for a day of sliding around.

Indeed, with the car’s stability control systems activated, the Ioniq 5 was safe and controlled, but far from fun. When I tried to start a slide, the car cut power dramatically and abruptly, resulting in a jerky, unsatisfying lap around a twisty handling course that had been plowed on the lake.

With those systems off, I could spin up the wheels without worrying about the car shutting down every time I went into a slip. But, in this mode, the car’s handling was unpredictable, its tail often coming around with little warning. When I tried to power out of a slide, the nose often just pushed forward, trying to usher me straight into the snowbank.

Quad Motor

Elaphe’s version of the same car evicts the car’s standard motors, differentials, and other accessories, replacing them with not two but four in-wheel motors measuring 188 hp and 1,254 pound-feet of torque each. This required little modification to the car itself, though a custom suspension setup from German tuners KW was needed to handle the extra weight at the wheels.

The overall weight of the vehicle, though, is within 30 pounds of the stock one, but it felt much more nimble. In Elaphe’s standard mode, the Ioniq 5 was still not particularly fun to hustle around the track. It was still reluctant to go fast, but now instead of jerkily cutting power at any sign of wheelspin, it gradually reduced the output of the four motors based on what I was trying to do.

As I tried to turn into a corner when going too fast, the car gradually cut power and even began applying recuperative braking on the inside wheels to pull the nose through. As I unwound the steering wheel coming out of the corner, the car smoothly added more power.

This smoothness is in part thanks to the ability to sample grip near instantaneously since the motors are right there in the wheel, with no driveshafts or differentials in the way. And since there’s one at every corner, Elaphe’s software can leverage that to dramatically change the car’s handling.

After a few laps of proving I knew my stuff on the ice, I was given clearance to try Elaphe’s drift mode. Here, the motors still provided some assistance to help the vehicle turn, again modulating power and regen from left to right. But, I had full access to the torque of the four motors, which was more than enough to light up the tires coming out of the turns. The car was a joy, pivoting and sliding and cleanly transitioning from one corner to the next.

Hybrid Pony Power

To get a taste for what a hub-motor hybrid might feel like, Elaphe brought out its latest prototype, a piece of American muscle with a 5.0-liter, 500-hp V8 augmented by a pair of Elaphe’s in-wheel motors. The car’s rear seat was replaced by a 9.0-kilowatt-hour battery pack and all the necessary electronics to control those front motors. Add in some complex vehicle dynamics software and you have a recipe for a very good time.

With those motors disabled, the thing struggled even to accelerate on polished ice, spinning its rear tires with wild abandon. Trying to execute a series of slow corners was a monumental challenge. With the front motors enabled, everything changed. Now, the car pulled cleanly away on that same stretch of shiny ice, and I was able to turn left and right without issue, front motors applying power or regen as needed.

On the handling circuit, the car was a handful, but a lot of fun. I again sampled all the various drive modes, and it just got progressively wilder but never uncontrollable.

Future Potential

In the case of the big American coupe, there’s a considerable increase in the car’s weight, since a battery had to be brought in. But Gotovac says EVs designed from the ground up for these motors could be smaller, lighter, and cheaper by removing the inboard motors and related drivetrain components.

While the overall vehicle would get lighter, there’s one area where weight will increase: the wheels themselves. Weight out there, called unsprung mass, makes the car’s suspension work doubly hard. This can have a negative impact on everything from handling to ride quality.

Interestingly, though, the precise control in wheelspeed enabled by placing those motors in the wheels means that Elaphe-powered cars could actually mitigate that problem themselves. “I can dampen my vibration with the in-wheel motor instead of the active damper,” Gotovac says, again cutting cost and weight.

But the big question, though, is when might we see this technology in something mass-market? Gotovac says Elaphe is working on projects with multiple OEMs, especially those focused on performance, and that we’ll see the first vehicles within a few years.

Some of the first Elaphe-powered cars will be hybrids, with bigger projects to come after 2030, including performance-oriented EVs. Unfortunately, the details of those are locked up tight in a web of NDAs.

I’ll need many more details before I can be bullish on the company, but I was certainly impressed by what I saw and experienced in Sweden. The performance of both cars was well beyond my expectations, and while there’s still the question of on-road ride quality, in terms of grip and handling, these things feel supernatural.

BMW brings back the i3 as a funky four-door EV

2026-03-17T12:37:30-04:00

BMW’s new class of EVs begins with the iX3 SUV, but you had to know it wouldn’t end there. The company’s engineers didn’t spend all that time working up a completely redesigned and substantially more efficient EV platform just for one crossover, and now it’s time for the second wave.

Meet the new i3, which takes the same basic motor, battery, and electronics package that powers the iX3, plus the Neue Klasse’s controversial styling cues, and applies it to a more familiar sedan shape, the sort of silhouette that BMW’s reputation was largely built upon.

It definitely looks a lot like the iX3, but with a slightly different intent. Sebastian Kroes, BMW’s head of interior design for the Neue Klasse cars, told me that the iX3 was designed with an “emphasis on verticality” to make it look taller. The i3, on the other hand, has an “emphasis on horizontality,” most directly seen in the series of lights that span virtually the sedan’s entire nose.

Now, before we get any further, it’s worth pointing out that this is not a reboot. It’s more of a retcon. Despite this new machine sharing a name with the quirky yet beloved electric i3 hatchback produced from 2013 to 2022, the new i3 is a wholly different proposition. The original i3 deserves a lot of respect for establishing BMW’s EV intentions, but little in terms of its design or architecture lives on in this new machine.

The new i3 is built on BMW’s Neue Klasse platform, which starts with a new battery design using cylindrical cells arranged in a cell-to-pack configuration that offers higher energy density than BMW’s prior packs. The company hasn’t quoted a formal capacity for the i3, but I’d expect it to fall somewhere around the 108.7kWh usable capacity of the iX3 SUV, enough for what BMW says is 440 miles on a charge. And 400kW charging should mean adding over 200 miles of range in about 10 minutes.

In this first i3 model, the i3 50 xDrive, that battery powers a pair of electric motors driving all four wheels. But BMW has already said that single-motor rear drive is a possibility on the platform, as is a wild quad-motor configuration.

We’ll see what the future holds, but to start, the dual-motor config will be the only option. Neither motor uses permanent magnets, which has a few advantages. First, you’ll find no rare earths here. Secondly, the i3 can disable its motors and coast without needing a disconnect system, like the sort found in the electric version of the upcoming Mercedes-Benz CLA.

A more advanced control system that BMW has built for Neue Klasse means the i3 can come to a complete stop exclusively relying on its regenerative braking system. This not only further reduces wear on the physical brakes, but enables what BMW calls a “soft stop,” where the sedan comes to a halt so smoothly you can’t even tell when its wheels have stopped turning.

Drivers will probably be more interested in how fast it goes, and the i3’s 469 horsepower is actually closer to the current BMW M3’s 473 horsepower than the base 330i’s 255. The i3’s 476 pound-feet of torque, meanwhile, is right on par with the top-shelf M3 Competition.

That’s a lot of twist, but it’s important to remember that the new i3 will be considerably heavier than its internal combustion counterpart. BMW hasn’t quoted a curb weight yet, but given the iX3 has gained more than 500 pounds over the current, gas-powered X3, it seems reasonable to expect a similar delta over the current 330i xDrive’s 3,752 pounds.

The new i3 is bigger, too, growing 1.8 inches in length over a current gas-powered 330i sedan, but crucially, the wheel base has grown by 1.9 inches, meaning BMW’s trademark short overhangs are retained. This should also lead to a much more spacious interior than BMW’s current sedan. I got a brief moment inside an early model at a prerelease event, and it seemed extremely roomy both front and rear.

That interior will be loaded with all the tech and displays that we’ve seen on the iX3, including the windshield-spanning Panoramic Vision system. There’s also a 3D heads-up display and a 17.9-inch, 3,340 x 1,440 touchscreen suspended from the dashboard. Like on the iX3, it’s a weird sort of parallelogram shape, but that leftward lean does mean a shorter reach from the steering wheel to get to some frequently used controls on the upper left of the display.

That wheel, by the way, relies on capacitive touch surfaces, which have proven problematic in many cars before. I didn’t mind them so much in my time behind the wheel of the iX3. The angular shape of the touch surfaces made it easy to tell where my thumb was when adjusting the cruise control, for example.

The i3 offers the same sort of driver-assistance system as the iX3, an approach that BMW creepily calls “symbiotic.” No, it won’t give you superhuman strength and a strange craving for brains. It means the car’s active safety systems are designed to work with you, not fight against you.

For example, the car offers hands-off automatic steering on the highway and will even change lanes automatically. However, if you want to change lanes yourself, you can just reach up, check your blind spot, and turn the wheel. The car won’t resist, and it will even automatically apply the turn signal.

All those features are provided by a suite of onboard “superbrains” from brands like Qualcomm and Samsung, powering a software-defined architecture that is ready for OTA updates. BMW promises more and more advanced functionality down the road.

One aspect of the car that will grow is its reliance on large language models to create a much more complex in-car voice experience than in current BMWs. The LLMs will be trained to know all the ins and outs of how to operate your current car, plus all the power of modern AI chatbots. BMW has partnered with Amazon to bring Alexa Plus into the car, opening the door to not only finding restaurant recommendations and reviews by voice, but even making reservations through OpenTable hands-free from the driver’s seat.

We still have a few big questions to answer on the i3, including how far it goes on a charge and exactly how much it costs. BMW says the iX3 will be rated for about 400 miles, so assuming the pack size stays the same, expect slightly more from the smaller sedan.

As far as cost goes, the iX3 starts at around $60,000, or roughly $10,000 more than a base X3 SUV. Since a base 330i xDrive Sedan costs about the same as a base X3, you’re probably looking at a similar $60,000 ballpark starting price for the i3 when it comes to the US. And yes, it is coming here, but BMW hasn’t said exactly when. We’ll have to wait until we get closer to the car’s start of manufacturing in August of this year for all the missing details.

Burritos from Heaven: Are drones the future of delivery?

2026-04-08T12:04:13-04:00

On a blustery afternoon late last year, on the lawn just outside City Hall in Rowlett, Texas, a strange-looking craft cleared the trees just before me. It hovered overhead for a moment before lowering a second craft on a thin rope all the way to a parched patch of grass. The little, white thing deposited a brown paper payload, then rode its tether back up to its waiting mothership, which turned and left. The experience lasted less than 30 seconds.

This wasn’t some UFO experience. This was a Zipline drone delivery, out in the real world, and that payload was my lunch. It was just one of the two million such deliveries this company has made since 2016, carrying everything from household supplies in rural America to lifesaving vaccines in remote Africa. And soon, those drone deliveries will be coming to even more places.

Uncrewed Evolution

Zipline is a California-based company that has only been slinging burritos and other items in the Lone Star State since 2025, but has been proving itself elsewhere in the world for nearly a decade now.

The company first started operations in Rwanda in 2016, delivering medical supplies in minutes to remote locations. Independent studies have shown the lifesaving nature of Zipline’s deliveries, making this the rare startup with a genuine feel-good story at its core.

In Africa, Zipline operates what it calls Platform 1, or P1, aircraft, fixed-wing, uncrewed machines that look like bigger versions of the toys your grandpa built out of balsa in the basement. Workers load four-pound payloads into the belly of these planes, then launch them into the sky via giant slingshot.

Once in the air, the P1s plot their own courses, up to 120 miles round-trip, reading weather data along the route and finding their own way around storms. They then deploy the payload via parachute before returning home for a cargo reload and a battery swap.

The delivery machines used in the US are rather more sophisticated but are likewise autonomous. Called P2, they rely on five motors and can transition midair from hovering to traditional, horizontal flight. This means they can launch and land vertically, or hover over a drop zone. What they give up in efficiency from the P1 (max range here is 24 miles) they gain in flexibility, making them better suited for the sorts of suburban areas Zipline is currently targeting.

The hallmark of the P2 is its tethered buddy, called a Zip. Each Zip has a single motor of its own plus room for an eight-pound payload roughly the size of a breadbox. Its propeller is there in case it needs to fight the wind as it’s lowered from the P2 aircraft hovering above.

The P2 is loaded with redundant sensors, even able to monitor nearby aircraft transponders. The bevy of sensors and smarts onboard means it’s an uncrewed aircraft capable of flying safely even in busy, urban airspace beyond the line of sight, or BVLOS in FAA-speak.

The Rowlett experience

The capabilities of Zipline’s aircraft is proven through a strong safety record with over 125 million miles flown. That’s reassuring, but I was curious how Texans have been responding to this whole thing. After all, this is a state full of people you wouldn’t think would appreciate automated, sensor-laden aircraft hovering over their homes.

“Generally speaking, compared to some things that we picture in our community, there was not as much opposition as you might expect,” Rowlett Mayor Jeff Winget told me. “I think most people were really pretty excited about it.”

Winget told me the approval and permitting process took about five months, helped by Zipline working to keep its footprint minimal.

After receiving my lunch, I swung by one of Zipline’s so-called Zipping Points, where bundles are loaded for delivery. This one happened to be in a Wendy’s parking lot, but they can be quickly and easily deployed wherever pickups are needed.

The Zipping Points are curious contraptions, odd white kiosks with a pair of metal arms reaching for the sky. In theory, these enable retail workers to load in a delivery and walk away. The P2 then hovers overhead, drops its little Zip buddy to retrieve the payload, and then wings off to its hungry recipient.

I say “in theory” because, when I was watching, some deliveries needed a bit of manual help from a small team of Zipline employees dashing between retailers to ensure pickups went smoothly. Some pickups needed a few attempts, but all were on their way quickly enough.

And, crucially, even on a blustery day when drones are typically at their loudest as they fight the wind, the traffic overhead made less noise than the nearby intersection. The P2 hovers high enough overhead while receiving or delivering parcels that it’s honestly hard to hear, far less noticeable than your average consumer drone.

I Want to Receive

While Mayor Winget said the feedback he receives from constituents is incredibly positive, the relatively low noise pollution should help keep everything copacetic as the service continues to expand. Still, there have been some less positive reactions to the rollout.

John Erik Ege, the state director of the Texas branch of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), said there have been a few reports from concerned citizens since Zipline began operating in Texas. One, filed in September, described a strange hovering object that lowered something that traveled straight down, then “re-docked” before disappearing.

He also told me of someone else who reported a similar “mother ship” deploying a smaller object straight down. “She was frustrated that folks at work and friends ridiculed her. This is unfortunate. She did actually witness something,” Ege said.

That something, of course, was a delivery drone. This is hardly a repeat of last year’s New Jersey drone scare, but MUFON representatives in Houston and Phoenix would do well to prepare. Those two cities will be next to receive Zipline service over the next few months.

Fresh From Above

And how was my lunch? I must confess, it was fresher and hotter than any burrito delivery I’ve ever received, a noticeable step above what I’m used to from myriad terrestrial food delivery services. Ordering through the Zipline app was no more complicated than Uber Eats. My burrito had a delivery fee of $0.99, plus a 20-percent service fee (that’s capped at $6). And no, you don’t need to tip the drone. If you’re not feeling Chipotle, you can currently place orders through Blaze Pizza, Buffalo Wild Wings, Crumbl, Little Caesars, Walmart, and Wendy’s.

In the retail drone delivery space, Zipline’s primary competitor is Alphabet’s Wing, which also works with Walmart. While Wing has managed an impressive 750,000 deliveries, that’s fewer than half of Zipline’s tally. Amazon Prime Air, meanwhile, recently suspended its testing after a pair of crashes. For the moment, nobody looks set to challenge Zipline’s early lead, especially as it expands into Houston and Phoenix. That lead just netted the company a $7.6 billion valuation in its most recent $600 million raise.

Yes, this is yet another attack by robots on human jobs, but honestly it’s one I can get behind. In a town like Rowlett, if you get food delivered, it’s going to come to you by car, and the idea of a human being driving a 4,000-pound vehicle to carry a burrito in a paper bag is just a bit excessive.

Photography by Tim Stevens

Is this the world’s first solid-state battery?

2026-01-11T15:03:48-05:00

CES is a land of bold announcements of amazing, innovative products and technologies that will revolutionize the world, often set for release in two years’ time. Twenty-four months seems to be about the right hype window: close enough to generate excitement and investment, but far enough that everyone forgets about your promises before that deadline quietly comes and goes.

It was CES 2018 when Henrik Fisker made such a proclamation, saying that his team of gurus had cracked the code of solid-state batteries. By 2020, he said, those batteries would be in mass production. The car was the EMotion, which never did come to market. By 2021, the company had given up on the solid-state dream, and by 2024, the whole operation went bust.

In Las Vegas at CES 2026, it’s time for another bold proclamation about a small team of engineers that have figured out solid state. This time it’s Marko Lehtimaki, cofounder and CEO of Donut Lab, an EV technology startup that spun off from Verge Motorcycles (no relation to The Verge). Naturally, I’m skeptical, but there’s one key difference that’s giving me hope: Lehtimaki says the Donut Battery isn’t 24 months away. It’s in production right now.

Solid hype

If you’ve not been riding the hype wave around solid state, the promise is for a battery cell that is cheap, light, fast-charging, cool-running, energy-dense, and combustion-free. They’re still conceptually the same battery design as the past couple-hundred years. That means an anode on one side and a cathode on the other, separated by an electrolyte across which charge-carrying ions can scurry back and forth as the cell is charged or discharged.

In a traditional lithium-ion cell, the electrolyte is a liquid of some sort. In a solid-state battery, it is, of course, a solid. That may sound like a small shift, but it has huge ramifications, the biggest being effective durability. Like solid-state electronics, there’s nothing that wears or breaks down, which means a massive increase in durability, charging speed, and energy density.

For its solid-state batteries, Donut Lab is listing some incredible figures. To start with, there’s an energy density of 400 Wh/kg, which is about a third greater than that of a modern lithium-ion pack. In other words, 30 percent more range in an EV with the same weight battery pack.

It has huge ramifications, the biggest being effective durability

Despite that boost, Lehtimaki says these cells are actually cheaper to manufacture. These batteries will appear first in the Verge TS Pro, and Lehtimaki told me that swapping to these hyper-advanced new cells actually reduced cost.

“The bill of materials went down, and it is going down with every other vendor buying at the rate that we are selling them,” Lehtimaki says.

Donut says the batteries can take a full charge in as few as five minutes, which would finally mean an EV that charges as fast as you can fuel up a car.

For this first application, though, it’s a bit slower: 10 minutes in the Verge TS Pro. The company is also being a little conservative when it comes to the lifespan of the cells. Where Donut Lab promises 100,000 charge cycles before the battery is worn out, Verge says 10,000.

Even that is a radical improvement over the roughly 1,500 cycles that you might expect out of a typical lithium-ion EV battery pack. 100,000, though, is a total game changer, creating a battery that will easily outlast the car it was created to power.

“The cycle life, the residual value of the battery, is actually 100 percent after the lifetime of the car. So it becomes the only component that keeps its value, and you can use it as a home battery, or whatever,” Lehtimaki says.

Thermal stability

There are other implications, too. Lehtimaki says that Donut Batteries are extremely thermally stable, offering nearly full capacity, even down to -22 degrees Fahrenheit. That means it will also require less cooling. I spoke with Neil Yates, founder and CEO at Watt Electric Vehicle Company, an EV platform maker that uses Donut Lab’s hub motors in its products and is looking to adapt the new batteries onto its platform as well.

“There will be no real active cooling requirement at all,” Yates says, thanks to the Donut Battery’s thermal resiliency. “We do a little bit to manage the enclosure in which they are, but that’s enclosure management, rather than specific battery management.” No active cooling means less plumbing required in the car, saving even more weight.

“There will be no real active cooling requirement at all.”

And, again, this is all said to be happening now. Lehtimaki says that the cells are actively in production in Finland, with initial production capacity of roughly one gigawatt-hour. But, he says Donut Lab can quickly spin up new factories in the U.S. if there is sufficient demand from American car manufacturers.

That’s aided by a battery chemistry totally free of any sort of conflict or difficult materials that might be subject to tricky import or export regulations or tariffs.

That might point to something like a sodium-metal construction, but Lehtimaki wasn’t willing to talk specifics. In fact, there are many details that we’ll have to wait for clarity on, including how Donut Lab managed to solve the so-called dendrite issue. This challenge has stymied many solid-state startups, a battery flaw that’s a little like a microscopic stalagmite growing from anode to cathode across the solid-state electrolyte. When they bridge across, you get a catastrophic short and, potentially, a lot of smoke and fire.

How did Donut Lab solve this issue where many major companies have failed? He credits having a small, agile team. “The party that has the capability and then iterates faster is the one that obviously makes the innovation,” Lehtimaki says. “I’ve always said that 20 engineers beat 2,000 engineers.”

Sourcing innovation

There has been speculation online that Donut Lab is using technology from another Finnish startup, Nordic Nano, a renewable energy company that Donut Lab has invested in. Lehtimaki even serves as a board member at Nordic Nano, but says that’s not the source of this product. “It’s not from them,” he says.

Lehtimaki says that Donut and Verge Motorcycles’ engineers have been quietly working on battery designs since 2018, and this is the fruit of all that labor. Where are the patents? They’re coming, Lehtimaki says, and promised to have a lot more details to share within the next few months once they clear.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical here. There are some uncanny parallels between Lehtimaki’s claims and those that Fisker made back in 2018, including talk of smaller versions for phones. But unlike Fisker and all the many other solid-state prognosticators and promisers of mega-range, insta-charging EVs, Lehtimaki isn’t giving himself that 24-month window to milk investors before fading into the sunset. He says all will be proven in just a matter of weeks. That alone gives me reason for optimism, but at the very least I won’t have to wait long to be disappointed.

Photography by Tim Stevens

BMW iX3 first drive: a ‘New Class’ is in session

2025-12-28T12:02:00-05:00

BMW has been peppering us with teasers and bits and pieces about its next-gen EV platform, Neue Klasse, for so long — fully two years now — that I confess I’ve become a bit numb to the hype. I’d seen the dashboard-filling displays, talked to engineers endlessly about the completely retooled active safety suite, and even got a go behind the wheel of a prototype machine.

All this for the launch of a crossover SUV, typically the most milquetoast of all the automotive classifications. But after spending the better part of a day wheeling around the final version of the iX3, I’m surprised to say it was all worth it. This little(ish) SUV really is a game changer on multiple fronts, a major step forward for BMW’s electric efforts, and a machine that might even be good enough to beat the EV sales slump.

Platform basics

For carmakers, platforms are key. They’re the core elements that allow relatively quick and inexpensive development of multiple new models without having to completely reinvent core elements like chassis, engines, suspension, and software. Neue Klasse (German for “New Class”) is BMW’s latest and greatest new platform, intended to form the foundation of a series of EVs to come.

The iX3 is the first of those, a compact SUV that’s more or less the same size as BMW’s existing X3, offering similar amounts of cargo and space for five passengers. This new platform tucks the battery down low and pushes its two motors to the front and rear. None of that is novel in the EV space, but most of BMW’s previous EVs have relied on platforms designed for internal combustion. This one’s optimized for EVs from the beginning.

There’s a 108.7kWh usable battery pack in there, powering the pair of motors that, combined, offer 463 horsepower and 476 pound-feet of torque through all four wheels. Maximum range will be around 400 miles (EPA testing has not yet been completed), 40-odd more than Tesla’s longest-range Model Y.

BMW’s engineers told me that the iX3’s new electrical architecture is really the key, including more efficient motors and silicon-carbide inverters. It charges faster, too, at up to 400kW if you can find a plug backed by enough juice. That’ll be a NACS plug, by the way, as this will be BMW’s first to support the Tesla-style connector.

Tech boost

A quick glance in the cabin of the iX3 reveals the SUV’s biggest tech upgrade: the pillar-to-pillar Panoramic Vision display. Think of it like an ultra-widescreen heads-up display that acts as a gauge cluster on the left, but has six customizable sections in the middle and the right where you can display anything from efficiency information to whatever’s playing on Spotify.

Enough never being enough, the iX3 also has an actual 3D heads-up display that projects above the Panoramic Vision, plus a 17.9-inch, 3,340 x 1,440 rhomboid-shaped touchscreen for good measure. It’s display overload and a little overwhelming the first time you get in the car, but I found it to be seamless enough to not be a distraction. If it all seems like a bit too much for you, it’s easy enough to disable the more expansive or attention-grabbing display sections.

The in-car experience is paired with an upgraded My BMW app that not only lets you remotely park the car from outside and get a 3D view of the inside or outside of the car; you can even queue up playlists on your phone or give your passengers control to do the same from their own devices.

To experience the more important tech upgrades, though, you need to be behind the wheel.

Next-gen active safety

Taking back control from many of today’s more advanced active safety systems in cars can sometimes feel like wrestling. Often, a firm yank of the wheel is required to override a lane-centering system, which can result in a disconcertingly jerky experience for your passengers.

The iX3, on the other hand, is designed to be totally seamless. If you have BMW’s Highway Assistant enabled, it’ll steer itself in most situations on the highway, but you can just reach up and grab the wheel whenever you like. There’s no resistance to overcome, and if you let go the car just takes over again.

Even if you want to change lanes the car can help you there. When prompted, glance in the mirror and the car will change lanes on its own. Or, if you grab the wheel and change lanes yourself, the car will apply the turn signal for you automatically.

BMW’s system will also stay enabled if you hit the brake pedal. You can come to a complete stop if you like, then release the brake and the car will smoothly bring itself back up to speed. The system stays engaged until you turn it off — or hit the brakes more aggressively — working with you instead of against you.

The drive experience

This new safety system feels a bit odd at first. It took me some time to figure out when it was on and when it was off. But, after a few minutes on the highway, I got into the groove of things. It really did feel more like working collaboratively with the car instead of having its systems constantly turning on and off. The hands-off system worked extremely well, too, cleanly moving through traffic.

It wasn’t until I hit some secondary country roads that I could get a feel for just how good the iX3 was to drive, though. That dual-motor setup means full-time all-wheel drive, but the power split between those two motors changes depending on what drive mode you’re in. The car feels safe and secure in Personal, the regular drive mode. Drive it as aggressively as you want and it just has a calm, predictable nature that makes it easy to keep pointed in the right direction without too much input from the driver.

To experience the more important tech upgrades, you need to be behind the wheel

Switch over to Sport, though, and the tail kicks out just a bit under hard acceleration, making the iX3 feel like a traditional, rear-driven BMW. This isn’t a rocket ship, but it is quick and the suspension strikes a great balance between predictable, comfortable handling and sporty response. Even the steering feels sharp and has respectable feedback, just like BMWs of old.

In a lot of ways, this wholly new package feels like a return to form, a new SUV that has engaging driving and safety at its core but blends in enough luxury and refinement to keep its premium cachet. But it isn’t a sure-fire success. For one thing, there’s the look. BMW has been pushing boundaries with many of its latest designs, and the iX3 certainly has an edgy style. After initially hating it, I have to admit that after a day behind the wheel I quickly warmed up to the iX3’s appearance, particularly when viewed from the rear.

Even if you like the SUV’s style, there’s still the question of cost. BMW hasn’t set formal pricing for the 2026 BMW iX3 yet, only that it will start around $60,000. That puts it at least $10,000 more than a base, gas-powered X3 SUV. With federal EV incentives no longer at play, that delta could be a difficult one for many shoppers to stomach.

But, despite sharing most of a name, these two SUVs feel worlds apart. With enough range and fast enough charging to obliterate range anxiety, plus with an abundance of volume, handling, and comfort, the EV is the obvious play for those with room in their budget.

Photography by Tim Stevens

The Czinger 21C is a halo car for the future military-industrial complex

2025-11-05T16:50:31-05:00

Countless cars have received military-grade marketing over the years, their performances likened to some form of ordnance or another. Saab was notorious for leaning on its aeronautical origins, and it’s hard to imagine what kind of state Jeep would be in today without literally parading its olive drab roots at every opportunity.

But not since World War II’s requisitioning of automotive factories have we had such a direct crossover between a civilian machine and defense devices as we have in today’s 1,250-horsepower, $2.35-million Czinger 21C. The car’s components are formed, layer by microscopic layer, in the very same machines that spin out precision-guided munitions and uncrewed military aircraft, components designed and manufactured by Czinger’s parent company, Divergent 3D.

This makes the 21C something of a halo car. But where other halo cars, like Cadillac’s $360,000 Celestiq or the dearly departed Dodge Viper, have served as aspirational machines projecting the personalities of their respective brands, the 21C is the embodiment of a new era of manufacturing as a service. As I learned in a visit to Divergent 3D and Czinger’s conjoined headquarters, this tech takes lethality to new heights.

Additive advancements

I had a hard time knowing what to focus on when touring the manufacturing floor at Divergent 3D’s headquarters in Torrance, California. Over here sat an ornately sculpted suspension component for an unannounced hypercar. Over there, the angular body of a next-gen cruise missile. Both shared the same satin patina typical of a part made from laser sintering, the additive manufacturing technique at the core of Divergent 3D’s business, where high-power lasers melt layers of alloy dust into complex shapes.

CEO Lukas Czinger gave me a tour of the combined Divergent 3D and Czinger facilities, starting with the former, which not only houses additive manufacturing machines but also a polymers lab for mixing up adhesives, milling machines for finishing parts, and even a semicircle of towering robotic arms responsible for sticking everything together.

Czinger stopped by the tapered body of a cruise missile, part of the Rapidly Adaptable Affordable Cruise Missile (RAACM) system. “A system like this, made with our technology, we can develop from clean sheet of paper to fully flight-worthy airframe within about two to three months,” he says. “Usually, it would be two to three years. We’re saving, usually, about 30 to 40 percent in mass, and this structure would typically be about 200 parts. We’re taking it down to usually between four to 10.”

The 21C is the embodiment of a new era of manufacturing as a service

This quantum leap in manufacturing was the initial brainchild of former CEO Kevin Czinger, who founded Divergent 3D in 2014. His son Lukas left a career in investment banking to join his father, founding Czinger Vehicles in 2019. Lukas took over as Divergent 3D CEO earlier this year, with Kevin Czinger now serving as lead inventor and executive chairman.

Laser sintering is hardly a novel technology in 2025. Where Divergent 3D differentiates itself is by integrating design, iteration, production, and even durability testing all in-house. Czinger says this enables much faster iteration on development.

That integrated process is, today, largely built around industry-standard printers from German company SLM Solutions. These are commercial printers that anyone can buy, here running software customized for Divergent 3D’s needs to boost output. But in pursuit of performance — and to avoid increasingly complicated import / export headaches — Divergent 3D is beginning to roll out its own.

The Divergent Evolutionary Printer is a towering machine designed and assembled in-house, enabling even larger prints done faster with finer details. This new printer will also enable multi-material capability, printing in aluminum like most laser sintering machines, and also bringing nickel alloys to the party for particularly high-end aerospace applications.

Divergent 3D also has its own suite of tools capable of rapidly shaping parts optimized for weight and strength, a process called generative design. Bring all that together, and you have something like a one-stop shop for advanced manufacturing as a service. And what better way to flaunt your tech than by creating an ornately sculpted, 3D-printed, record-setting hypercar?

Drive time

There is no graceful way to enter the Czinger 21C. Despite all its technology, power, and performance, I was left awkwardly shuffling and scooting my posterior into the driver’s position. You sit square in the middle of the 21C, literally front and center, a layout made famous in the McLaren F1 of the ’90s but rarely seen since.

That iconic supercar set numerous speed records throughout the ’90s. In 2025, the 21C is continuing that legacy, most recently by going on a 1,000-mile road trip, visiting five racetracks in five days across California, setting new records at each.

From the searingly aqua-blue driver’s seat, I had a wonderful view straight ahead, peeking between the swelling fenders that arc over the 20-inch front wheels and carbon-ceramic brakes within. Cruising through town, the wildly powerful 21C made barely any sound, relying on a combination of its three electric motors.

There is no graceful way to enter the Czinger 21C

With them offering some 500 horsepower, even when silent, the 21C is far from slow. But, with a press of the 21C’s Mode button, the twin-turbocharged V8 behind me fired up. Suddenly, things got a lot more interesting, with 1,250 horsepower now delivered to all four wheels.

Given this car can sprint to 60mph from a standstill in less than two seconds, it didn’t take long to hit some multiple of the speed limit on the public roads where I tested the thing. Common decency had me lifting off the throttle just as the 21C felt like it was reaching its stride.

And it’s a long stride. My drive was in the V Max-equipped car, a more aerodynamic shape with a top speed of 253mph. Moving through traffic in pursuit of open roads outside of town, the 21C felt a bit like a nervous thoroughbred mingling with the ponies at a birthday party.

But, once the traffic subsided and the roads opened up, the 21C revealed itself as a glorious mix of effortless power and extremely sharp handling.

Business modeling

The 21C is like nothing else on the road, raw and unrefined and, yes, more than a little weaponlike. Czinger has shipped 10 cars so far, which represents a good bit of revenue considering each one’s seven-figure price tag.

But the majority of Divergent 3D’s business is in the aerospace and defense industries. And business is good, enough to earn the company a $2.3 billion valuation after a recent $290 million raise.

Automotive projects are in the minority, but Divergent 3D’s list of clients is growing. Aston Martin, Bugatti, and McLaren all offer cars with the company’s sculpted hardware. For now, the 21C holds its position as the brand’s most visible product, but Czinger says that could change as his new printers raise the speed and volume stakes.

“Over the next decade, we’re going to keep developing these machines to be faster and faster and faster,” Czinger says. “And I do think by then, you’ll see us doing millions of parts for high-volume vehicles for the Fords, the VWs.”

But it won’t all be mass market. Czinger said they’re already pondering what the company’s next hypercar might be, and how much further they can push additive manufacturing into its very core.

Battling for the lead at an IRL version of Mario Kart

2025-09-16T08:51:02-04:00

When it comes to mainstream gaming appeal, it’s hard to beat Mario Kart. Break out some controllers at a party and you’ll likely get a grid full of eager racers. The game’s seamless way of balancing disparate levels of skill and aggression creates an addictive experience for just about everyone.

Real-world karting, on the other hand, remains more of a niche affair. Sure, plenty of people race karts at theme parks and putt-putt parking lots, but this style of racing isn’t on the radar for your average group of friends looking for a Friday diversion.

What if you could do Mario Kart IRL without risking life and limb at some questionably safe theme park in China? That’s basically the question that RPM Raceway is answering with the launch of Kart Klash. Debuting today at three of RPM Raceway’s tracks in the northeast (Stamford, CT, and Long Island, NY), RPM has developed a way to bring a taste of Nintendo into reality. It’s only a taste, and it has room for improvement, but after getting an early go behind the wheel, I’m itching for more.

Software meets hardware meets racetrack

Kart Klash is a new experience at RPM’s existing indoor tracks running electric Sodikart RSX2 karts. These machines offer variable levels of performance but can hit a maximum speed of 45 mph, which I can assure you feels pretty quick when your posterior is two inches from the floor.

They’re light-years more advanced than the smoky, lawnmower-engined rigs that you’ve probably experienced at some roadside tourist trap.

As someone who’s raced two-stroke performance karts in the past, I’m always skeptical at venues like this, but RPM’s karts did not disappoint. While not as fast as my old racer, in full-power mode, the Sodikart is plenty quick enough to make the tight, twisting, two-level track at RPM a real challenge in a straight race.

But things got way more fun when adding in rockets, land mines, and EMP bursts. After two races to learn the track, it was time to enable Kart Klash. While the team at RPM loaded up the prerelease software and rebooted the course, I was given a run-through of how to play.

While a typical race is based on lap time — which is to say that you can finish last on the track but still win with the quickest lap — in Kart Klash, whoever crosses the finish line first after eight laps wins.

A plethora of power-ups

Racers grid up for a standing start, but starting up front isn’t necessarily an advantage. As in Mario Kart, the farther from the lead you are, the better the power-ups you receive. What kinds of power-ups? Well, they might sound a little… familiar.

Boost — a quick shot of extra speed (mushroom)
Missile — tracks and hits the kart immediately ahead of you (red shell)
Top shot — a more powerful missile that tracks and hits the leader of the race (spinyblue shell)
EMP — slows down every kart on the track except yours (lightning)
TNT — an explosive surprise dropped behind your kart (banana)
Shield — protects you from attacks
Hyper — gives you both a boost and a shield (star)

Is the arsenal in Kart Klash fresh and original? Absolutely not. It’s basically a one-to-one copy of the weapons you can find in Mario Kart, suitably changed to (hopefully) avoid any copyright concerns. But, if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

To collect these power-ups, you drive over a spot beamed onto the race track by an overhead laser projector. The result is little more than a spinning icon on the track, far from the dramatic floating 3D object shown in RPM’s promo videos. Still, you do at least get a notice on the LCD display on your kart’s steering wheel telling you which power-up you received, and then you can mash the right button on the steering wheel to fire.

When you’re hit with a weapon, your kart slows down dramatically for a few seconds, just long enough to be intensely frustrating. You also get a little notice on the LCD display, telling you not only what weapon hit you, but who shot it.

That makes your eventual revenge all the sweeter.

The on-track experience

What’s missing is visual cues for the weapons. You won’t actually see rockets firing ahead of you or TNT dropping behind, but the track uses a system of positional speakers sprinkled around, so you will hear the rocket roaring its way to the next target. Meanwhile, those watching the action trackside have an animated view that overlays the weapons on the track.

So the mechanics are all very familiar, but what I quickly learned after getting behind the wheel is that the video game experience doesn’t really translate to the real world. That’s primarily because this track isn’t anything like those in Mario Kart. RPM’s circuit may be twisty and lit with technicolor LEDs, but it’s no Rainbow Road.

For one thing, a single lap takes around 30 seconds, which is far shorter than your average Mario Kart track. It’s also significantly narrower, which dramatically changes the equation of most of the power-ups.

For example, if you get hit with a shell in Mario Kart, it’s very difficult to maintain your position. In Kart Klash, blocking is all too easy. If you get hit, you can just move to the middle of the track. You really need to time your shots perfectly to make a clean pass.

The other big change from Mario Kart is just how manic Kart Klash is. You can collect three or four power-ups per lap, which means one every 10 seconds or so. And, since your next power-up overrides your last one, you’re heavily incentivized to just mash that fire button.

Those who save the most desirable power-ups in Mario Kart for the perfect moment, then, will be a little disappointed with the spray-and-pray nature of Kart Klash.

Different, but still damned fun

Despite those significant changes, Kart Klash still captures the core fun of the Mario Kart experience. It’s nowhere near as finely honed or perfectly balanced as Nintendo’s iconic race, but Andrew Farage, CEO of RPM Raceway, told me that his team will be eagerly listening to player feedback and adjusting details like weapon spawn rates and power-up positioning.

To provide that feedback, though, you’ll need to go out and try it for yourself. I went in as a skeptic, thinking there was no way the joyous, accessible fun of Mario Kart could possibly be replicated in real life. And to some degree that’s true. At its best, Kart Klash doesn’t quite achieve the same humorous heights as the game, if only because you can’t look your opponent in the face when your perfectly timed shell strikes true, but the added thrill of driving for real makes this far more exciting.

And it had better be, as it’s a lot more expensive. The game launches today at $30 per race for RPM members and $40 for nonmembers. That’s about $10 more than a regular kart race, a premium well worth spending with the right crowd.

BMW iX3 prototype drive: your next-gen EV is nearly here

2025-06-11T09:35:10-04:00

There’s a fight for control going on inside the cockpits of many modern cars. Enable all the active safety systems in a Tesla, and it’ll do most of the steering for you. But if it makes an errant turn or meanders a little too far this way or that in the lane (and trust me, it will), you’re left wrestling the wheel out of Autopilot’s virtual hands.

Assistance systems from other manufacturers do better at ceding control whenever you feel like taking over, but BMW is about to take that to a new level with the first car built on its upcoming Neue Klasse platform. It includes an advanced driver assist system that the company says is a proper symbiosis, where the car’s sensors and systems don’t fight with or yell at you but instead work with you to make driving safer and less stressful.

I sampled this suite in a prototype of BMW’s iX3, the first electric SUV on the Neue Klasse platform, designed from the ground up to offer more range, better handling, and way more smarts. BMW is promising 400 miles of range from a new battery architecture that can charge at up to 400 kW. That means adding something like 200 miles of range in 10 minutes, but there’s a lot more to it than that.

Better brains

At the core of the iX3’s safety system is a computing platform that BMW calls a “superbrain.” That’s an evocative term for a Qualcomm Snapdragon Ride chip, but it does offer far more power than anything the company has put on the road before. That’s paired with a more advanced sensor suite, with better cameras and higher-fidelity radar sensors, all combined to give a better view of the world around.

One of those key sensors is the driver monitoring suite, which can detect where you’re looking and whether you’re paying attention while behind the wheel. Plenty of cars offer some degree of monitoring like this, usually nagging you with beeping and blinking unpleasantries when your eyes linger on a roadside distraction for too long. The iX3 goes beyond that by using eye-tracking technology to not just complain, but actually improve your experience.

If you’re driving down the highway and BMW’s highway assistant is active, it’ll steer itself and even change lanes. In some current BMWs, you can just look in the mirror to initiate a lane change. The iX3 takes that a step further by proactively putting on the turn signal for you should you take the wheel and change lanes yourself.

Yes, finally, a BMW designed to tackle the most common preconception about BMW drivers: they never signal before changing lanes.

Try to change lanes manually without checking the blind spot, the lane-keep assistance system will resist the change and try to keep you where you are. But, if you’ve looked first, the car won’t resist your control at all, as you’ve proved to it that you’re doing your part.

The car will detect your attention in other ways, too. I had a chance to drive next to a dummy pedestrian standing partially in my lane. Without any input from me, the car came smoothly to a stop. But, when I tried again, steering slightly to the left and showing that I was paying attention, the car allowed me to move out of the lane without resistance.

Smooth driving, smoother stopping

I also got a chance to sample the other brain inside the new iX3, which the company has unfortunately labeled “Heart of Joy.” This in-house developed processor aggregates all the traction, stability, and electric motor management functions that are typically handled by a dozen different processors sourced from a dozen different suppliers and scattered throughout the car.

Unifying all that has some significant implications. The car can more quickly and seamlessly manage power to the dual motors that give it 400 horsepower and all-wheel drive, so when I was sliding the camouflaged prototype around a wet test track, it felt like the stability and traction control systems were working to help me, rather than just trying desperately to slow me down.

But when it was time to pause the action, something almost magical happened. On a test track, I was told to close my eyes and let the iX3 bring itself to a stop. That process of deceleration was so smooth that I genuinely couldn’t tell when the wheels had stopped rolling. The new systems controlling those electric motors allow more precise application of the regenerative braking function. That not only means smoother one-pedal driving, but the kind of perfectly controlled stop that’ll keep your passengers from getting jostled at every red light.

An irresistible EV?

Ultra-smooth stopping is a small thing, but it really does increase the comfort of driving around in the iX3. By the end of the day, I was blown away by everything BMW’s new EV brings to the table. And that’s on top of the big, dashboard-spanning Panoramic Vision display, which runs from one pillar to another to provide a customizable and interactive information display.

The big question, though, is whether any of this will be enough to convince the largely EV-skeptical luxury car buyers out there that all this is good enough to finally make the switch away from internal combustion. The company’s gas-powered X3 is consistently one of its top sellers, and while that isn’t going away, BMW clearly has high hopes that the iX3 will bring that kind of sales success to its battery-powered efforts.

But it’s just the first of multiple models planned on this Neue Klasse platform, all with the same combination of tech and finesse. If they’re successful, maybe the world can finally put that BMW blinker stigma to bed for good.

Slate Truck FAQ: answering all your questions about the barebones electric pickup

2025-05-31T16:32:28-04:00

Alright, we get it. Y’all are excited about Slate. We thought the little Slate Truck was cool, but based on the number of clicks and comments on our Slate Auto articles so far, you’d like to know more. Many of you wrote in with questions and more than a few people raised some doubts.

So, we wanted to address as many of those as we could. Here’s your one-stop shop for Slate answers based on your questions — plus a few of our own.

What are the Slate’s full specs, and how does it compare to a Ford Maverick or F-150?

The Slate is clearly a vehicle built for everyday utility, and while it’ll make for a handy machine for hauling a lot of things, big towing and heavy cargo were clearly not a top priority. Here are the key specs, compared against the four-wheel drive hybrid Ford Maverick with the 2.5-liter engine and a Ford F-150 4×2 with a 2.7-liter EcoBoost V6.

	Slate Truck	Ford Maverick	Ford F-150
Horsepower (hp)	201	191	325
Curb weight (lbs)	3,602	3,674	4,171
Max payload (lbs)	1,433	1,500	1,775
Max towing (lbs)	1,000	2,000	8,400
Bed length (ft)	5	4.5	5.5, 6.5, or 8
Bed width (max / min, in)	50 / 54.9	42.6 / 53.3	50.6 / 66.9
Seats	2	5	5

It’s worth noting that these Ford numbers vary widely based on configuration. For example, you can get a “4K Tow Package” on the Maverick that boosts towing to 4,000 lbs, and the F-150 has hundreds of variations depending on need. Max towing on an F-150 is 13,500 lbs. The numbers above represent the figures quoted by Ford for a base, option-free vehicle.

And one final note: towing substantially reduces the efficiency of the tow vehicle, due to the weight of the trailer and its additional aerodynamic drag. For an electric vehicle like the Slate, that will surely result in reduced range, perhaps by as much as half depending on the trailer.

Where will the vehicle be manufactured?

Slate has confirmed manufacturing will take place in a former catalog printing facility in Warsaw, Indiana, which closed in 2023. Slate hopes to renovate the facility and eventually employ 2,000 workers, with an annual production volume of 150,000 vehicles. And the company is seeking tax abatements on the factory site from the county government to begin construction. Full details on that here.

That domestic production should mean that vehicles produced by Slate are eligible for the full $7,500 federal rebate — if the credit still exists late next year when the Truck enters production.

Does the Slate Truck have a cellular connection?

No, the Slate Truck does not have built-in cellular connectivity. LTE is an increasingly common feature in new cars, enabling auto manufacturers to do all sorts of stuff, including good things like software updates and some perhaps not so good things like selling your driving data.

For the former, o-the-air updates will still be possible via the Slate smartphone app. Updates will be downloaded to the phone and then pushed to the Slate Truck via USB cable. As for the latter, that leads us to our next question.

Will Slate harvest and sell my driving data?

Not your driving data, no, but you can upload data about the health of your vehicle. Jeff Jablansky, Slate Auto’s head of public relations and communications, gave us this example:

“A ‘check engine’ light comes on: if the driver has their phone plugged in and has opted in to data movement, the company will send a notification to the Slate app so they can be aware of potential service needs.”

Jablansky confirmed that no data will be sold to third parties.

Can I precondition my Slate Truck?

One of the joys of owning a modern EV is easy preconditioning. Regardless of where your car is parked, you can get the interior warmed up or cooled down from just a few taps on your smartphone, all without having to worry about filling your garage with carbon monoxide.

Can you do that in the Slate Truck? Maybe. The lack of cellular connection means you won’t be able to wirelessly connect to your Truck from anywhere, but Jablansky didn’t rule it out entirely, saying, “This is something we are working on through the app.”

Will Slate make models available for designing 3D-printed accessories?

Ready to download some STL/3MF files today and start designing your ultimate cupholder? Us, too, but we’ll need to be patient for a little bit. “The Maker community is incredibly important to Slate, and we are on track toward delivering on this commitment closer to launch,” Jablansky says.

So stay tuned on that front. Jablansky says this will also include details on third-party accessory providers and licensing.

Why didn’t Slate use standard DIN slots for ease of installing audio?

The DIN slot, also known as the ISO 7736 or Deutsches Institut für Normung 75490 slot, has long been the standard for in-dash audio. Why, then, are there no DIN slots on the Slate Truck? Slate says it was to offer greater flexibility. “We wanted to allow the customer to pick and choose their accessories without forcing combinations of options together in packages. This comes to life in our audio strategy to allow customers to choose to install anything from a Bluetooth speaker to a full audio system,” Jablansky says.

So the bad news is if you want to use a standard DIN receiver, then you’ll need to DIY an enclosure for it. The good news is if you just want to mount a Bluetooth sound bar, then you won’t have to worry about filling any gaping rectangular holes in the dashboard.

Is a more advanced active driver assistance system in the works?

No. “Consistent with our broader approach, we focused our engineering to make a Slate a great truck to drive,” Jablansky says.

Keep those hands on the wheel, folks.

Why choose a Truck to start instead of a sedan or compact SUV?

Cost and simplicity, it turns out. Jablansky says that “a two-door form factor meant less material, less complexity, lower cost.” He adds that the lockable frunk means there’s sedan-like secure storage for your stuff, with the added benefit of a big bed out back. And, of course, you can add on the SUV kit if you need more seating or more covered storage.

Will any special tools be required for any of the DIY upgrades and add-ons?

Per Jablansky, special tools are not expected to be required.

Will this thing really sell for $20,000? What about tariffs? What if the EV incentives go away?

It’s a dynamic world and dynamic industry out there right now, but Slate isn’t backing down. “We are committed to our expected price point of $20,000 after federal incentives,” Jablansky says, which implies an MSRP of roughly $27,500. “If incentives go away, Slate will remain well-positioned in the U.S. with a strong proposition of value, safety, and customization.”

Will those attributes be enough to woo people away from a Ford Maverick, which starts at just over $28,000? We’ll have to wait and see.

Jablansky says that Slate is also committed to US manufacturing, which should fend off most of the tariff fears, and that the company is still on track to start manufacturing in 2026.