The future of transportation is electric. Tesla proved with the Model S that customers would want to buy luxury vehicles powered by lithium-ion batteries. Other EV startups like Faraday Future, Byton, Lucid Motors, and SF Motors are chasing after Elon Musk. And major automakers like Jaguar, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz have each released their own Tesla challengers. There are obstacles, such as the need for a more robust charging network. But battery-powered cars are here to stay.
That’s according to BMW SVP Bernd Körber, speaking to Motor1.com. BMW announced the new i3 EV on Wednesday, but it appears that the i4 won’t be around much longer.
[Motor1.com]
Raffi Krikorian, who now serves as Mozilla’s CTO, writes in The Atlantic that he’s rethinking the relationship between humans and machines after a near-death experience in his Tesla.
Full Self-Driving works almost all of the time—Tesla’s fleet of cars with the technology logs millions of miles between serious incidents, by the company’s count. And that’s the problem: We are asking humans to supervise systems designed to make supervision feel pointless. A machine that constantly fails keeps you sharp. A machine that works perfectly needs no oversight. But a machine that works almost perfectly? That’s where the danger lies.
The styling won’t work for everyone, but 440 miles of range could make this an attractive package.
The R2 arrives in a segment already dominated by the Model Y. But ultimately Rivian needs to do more than just beat Tesla if it’s going to survive.
Cosmos and Earth. Paging Carl Sagan! The EV company announced the names at its Investor Day in New York City today. Both are expected to be mid-sized crossover SUVs, with an estimated starting price of $50,000. That makes the Lucid Earth and Cosmos incredibly important to the company’s long-term future — sort of similar to the Rivian R2. If Lucid wants to break into the mainstream, it needs to sell more affordable vehicles.
The EV maker has been granted a license to supply electricity to British households and businesses, mirroring its similar business in Texas. The approval doesn’t include dual gas/electric fuel contracts, however, and local supplier Octopus Energy already allows Powerwall battery owners to sell energy back to the grid.
The companies aim to launch a pilot program in Tokyo by late 2026, allowing Uber riders to book robotaxis based on the Nissan Leaf EV, powered by Wayve’s autonomous driving tech. In its press release, Uber said:
“The announcement reinforces a shared ambition to scale safe, intelligent autonomous mobility globally, by combining Wayve’s AI technology, Nissan’s cutting-edge vehicles and Uber’s network, the partners aim to bring autonomous mobility to more cities.”
The EV company started rolling out the functionality for its luxury SUV via an over-the-air software update on Wednesday. After the update, the Gravity will support phone mirroring wirelessly or through an USB hookup.
They joined a new initiative called Utilize that aims to use strategies like battery storage and virtual power plants to make more use of the electrons already available to the grid. It’s a plan that’s supposed to make electricity more affordable as opposition grows to data centers blamed for higher utility bills.
The new Cayenne S Electric slots between the entry level Cayenne Electric and the high performance Turbo Electric, both of which were released late last year. The dual-motor S Electric will have an output of 536 horsepower, which jumps to 657 hp when using Launch Control. And it will start at $126,300 when it goes on sale this summer, as compared to $165,350 for the Turbo Electric. Giddyup.
Plug-in hybrid owners rarely actually plug in their vehicles, practically negating the climate advantages of the technology.
Chevy’s hybrid sports car is a sweet deal compared to its Chinese, Italian, and German competitors. And its performance specs underscore the inevitability of electric propulsion.
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.
If it succeeds, it will pull off something that only Tesla has done with the Model Y — and in a much more challenging environment. Rivian is expected to announce the R2’s price (previously estimated to start at $45,000) at SXSW next week.
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:
As the saying goes, we will eventually “solve for the equilibrium.” Which might in the near term be something like diesel-powered duallies on the ranches, gas-burning pickups in the ruburbs (rural suburbs), BEV runabouts in most urban areas, and PHEVs and HEVs in the closer-in suburbs. Not to mention a diverse zoo of person- and cargo-carrying e-bikes and scooters everywhere.
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.
You may never be able to drive the Vision GT concept — except when it arrives in Gran Turismo 7 — and there’s nothing to prove the model at Xiaomi’s MWC booth is even a functioning EV. But hey, you can’t say it doesn’t look the part.
The Vision GT was designed to split the difference between performance on straights and corners, with a chassis that was “sculpted by the wind.” Apparently it’ll be on display at the MWC show floor, where hopefully I’ll get a better look at it.
Despite Elon Musk’s public statements that Tesla was close to getting “regulatory permission” to launch a robotaxi service in the Bay Area, the company has yet to apply for any of the required permits, Reuters reports. It also logged zero miles of autonomous test driving on California roads. Seems like a strange position for a company staking its future on robots and self-driving cars.
The Italian automaker cancelled the Lanzador, which was supposed to be its first crack at a pure battery-electric supercar, to focus instead on plug-in hybrids. Lamborghini CEO Stephan Winklemann told the Sunday Times that the “acceptance curve” for EVs among the company’s target demographic was “close to zero”. Yipes!
[The Sunday Times]
The parent company of Jeep and Dodge just took a $26.5 billion hit on its EV investment. But its problems run much deeper than that.
The EV company says the staff cuts are intended to “improve operational effectiveness and optimize our resources,” TechCrunch reports. An internal memo added that the company is still focused on “further expansion into the robotaxi market,” following the launch of a robotaxi collaboration with Nuro and Uber last year.
The EV tech startup rocked the auto industry with its CES announcement of a production-ready solid-state battery. Since then, there’s been a lot of skepticism and some out-right denials that the battery is even real. Now, Donut Labs is pushing back with a cleverly titled new video series, “I Donut Believe,” and independent test results that verify its claims. The first report is expected to drop next week.
A federal jury in Florida last year found Tesla partly liable for a deadly 2019 crash involving the company’s Autopilot driver assist software, and ordered the company to pay the families $243 million. Tesla appealed the ruling, but now a judge has dismissed that effort. In her ruling, US District Court Judge Beth Bloom stated that Tesla’s arguments “were already considered and rejected” and that the evidence at trial “more than supports the jury verdict and does not find it committed any error.”
An update to the Rivian mobile app released today introduces a companion app for the Apple Watch. From your wrist you can lock and unlock doors, vent windows, activate the alarm, adjust the cabin temperature using the Apple Watch’s crown dial, and monitor your vehicle’s battery status from your watch face.
The SUV pioneer owned by Volkswagen won’t start production on its first EVs, the Terra truck and the Traveler SUV, until 2028, not 2027 as originally planned, German publication Der Spiegel reports (as noted by The Drive). Given the dour mood around EVs these days, a one-year production delay isn’t the worse news.
We can’t really tell from the photo whether it has a steering wheel, which was probably a deliberate choice. Elon Musk has said that the fully driverless vehicle will go into volume production in April.
