Tag: evs and hybrids

Polestar Is Bracing for the EV Tariff Wars. It May Not Emerge Unscathed

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After major investor Volvo decided to decrease its stake and cut funding for Polestar early this year, the EV company went in search of $1.3 billion of new funding. It raised a $950 million lifeline three-year loan from a banking syndicate led by BNP Paribas, and told investors it has plans to continue raising the rest of the funds this year. Volvo parent company Geely Holdings, a Chinese company whose investment portfolio includes Levc, Lotus, and Smart, became the second-largest shareholder of the company, while Volvo retained 18 percent and is still owed $1 billion through an outstanding convertible loan.

The plan, Polestar told investors, is to target double digit margins by the end of the year, and in its latest earning call, investors were told that the company is “working intensely” to improve cashflow and still has plans to break even by the latter part of 2025. The company’s new facility in South Carolina will play a big part in whether this can be achieved: Analysts expect that it will help with production volume and would qualify its EVs for the US EV tax credit of up to $7,500 depending on the specs of the vehicle, which would hopefully appeal to its customer base. Questions have been raised about whether Polestar will decide to hold off selling the Polestar 4 in the US until it can swap its production over to South Korea in 2025, and therefore avoid the China tariffs.

“There is increased competition, and interest rates have increased significantly, which is why a lot of these companies like Polestar are still having challenges ramping up,” says Andres Sheppard, senior equity analyst at financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

Yet Polestar’s adjusted financial results for 2023, released on Friday after a long delay, somewhat dampen its prospects: Its net losses grew to $1.17 billion, operating losses ballooned by more than 11 percent from $1.29 billion to $1.46 billion, and its revenue dropped by 3 percent to $2.38 billion. These losses were not offset by a 6 percent uptick in car sales. Polestar missed its sales target of 60,000 vehicles (lowered from 80,000 earlier in 2023), delivering 54,600 vehicles last year.

The late arrival of these results was itself a warning sign: If their release had extended into July, Polestar was at risk of being delisted on Nasdaq, a consequence of missing required financial deadlines. The delays have been linked to accounting misstatements.

The company’s share price has suffered a steady decline in the past year, and at premarket open Tuesday had dropped by 8 percent, which Ingenlath said is “not fair.” “We see our current share price does not reflect the value of our company—not now and in the future,” he told investors.

This means that the gap between where Polestar is and where it wants to be is wider than expected. Projected revenue figures collated by market analysis firm Pitchbook show the company is targeting £3.51 billion ($4.43 billion) in revenue this year, and growing that by 145.5 percent to £8.62 billion ($10.9 billion) by 2026. This would be an ambitious feat for the current global head of sales, Kristian Elvefors, the former managing director of Volvo in the UK who took over from Mike Whittington earlier this year. Elvefors has a plan to expand the company’s retail footprint across Asia, Europe, and Latin America in 2025, and to allow customers to configure and order cars online. Troubling, though, is the news that car rental giant Hertz has pressed pause on plans to buy tens of thousands of cars from Polestar this year, rowing back an estimated $3 billion agreement bartered in 2022 that promised to make up a quarter of its fleet with Polestars by 2024.

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Jeremy White, Natasha Bernal

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July 2, 2024
Audi Q6 E-tron Review: AI-Enabled, Serious Comfort

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The operating system has been developed well, and is largely easy to use, but there is a lot going on. And that’s not all. The Edition 1 model comes with an additional 10.9-inch display for the passenger, which can stream YouTube, show the navigation, or change the music. We found this to be novel but a bit limited. The navigation, for example, works well but is pointless when it shows on the main screen next to it.

Photograph: Audi

Photograph: Audi

Then there’s the HUD, which now comes with augmented reality. Part of the “Sound and Vision pack,” an expensive option, it overlays directions onto the road you see in front of you, moving as you do, all the while showing your regular HUD features including speed, speed limit, and turn-by-turn signals.

With the driving assistance systems turned on, it also displays in “danger red” when you’re getting too close to the side of the road, when you need to brake for upcoming speed limits, as well as brake warnings to ensure you don’t drive into the car in front.

With use we’re sure this all becomes less distracting, but the overall feeling was more overwhelming than helpful. The Chat GPT-integrated Audi voice assistant might be able to teach you how to use it, but this reviewer would rather turn it all off and enjoy the sweet ride comfort.

The interior is an otherwise pleasant place to be, although there is too much cheap-feeling plastic. The doors in particular feature a large plastic inlay where you control the windows, as well as a plastic storage section, which feels very out of place. The SQ6’s as-standard nappa leather, diamond-stitched seats are very attractive. But the cost is less so.

Speaking of which, prices start at £64,200 ($81,200) for the Q6 e-tron and jump sharply upwards to £92,950 ($117,500) for the top-of-the-range SQ6.

Photograph: Audi

The Q6 and SQ6 e-tron don’t reinvent the wheel, and while quick in a straight line, they aren’t as sporty as they make out. Where they shine is with the effortless ride comfort and class-leading range, which if we’re being honest is perhaps more important, shifting the goalposts slightly but assuredly.

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Charlie Thomas

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July 1, 2024
Fisker Went Bankrupt. What Do Its EV Owners Do Next?

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It was the last week in June, and José De Bardi hadn’t gotten much sleep. The trouble had really kicked off on June 18, about a week earlier, when the electric vehicle company Fisker announced it had filed for bankruptcy protection. Now some 6,400 Fisker owners like De Bardi wondered: What will happen to their cars in the future?

The bankruptcy “lit a fire,” De Bardi says. “We had to get organized if we had any chance of representing owners’ interests.” Within days, he and a handful of other Fisker vehicle owners had established a nonprofit organization called the Fisker Owners Association, dedicated to keeping their cars running. (Hence, the lack of sleep.) By the end of the month, 1,200 owners—representing nearly a fifth of total Fisker cars sold—had registered through the group’s website, De Bardi says.

Fisker vehicle owners’ questions are mostly practical. Fisker began shipping the Ocean, its electric SUV—priced to start at $41,000 and ranging up to $70,0000—last year. Immediately, the vehicles were found to have serious build quality shortcomings and software issues, including a less-than-responsive central touchscreen. (WIRED’s reviewer declined to rate the vehicle entirely, calling it “just not ready yet.”)

Owners reported that some of the most serious issues, including a difficult-to-use brake hold and Bluetooth connectivity problems, were ironed out through software updates. But owners sometimes complained that it was tricky to get their vehicles serviced or repaired, because there weren’t enough certified Fisker repairers and technicians. Fisker initially launched with a Tesla-like “direct to consumer” model that eschewed the traditional “middleman” dealerships often seen in the US. But in January, the company began to sign dealerships to a new Fisker network, citing ballooning costs associated with the direct model.

Even now, as the carcass of Fisker gets picked over, the EVs still have niggling problems—window cracks, dysfunctional key fobs, sudden connectivity blackouts—and will unquestionably need servicing and spare parts to keep them running into the future. Without Fisker, the company, to provide that, what are owners to do?

The FOA is still in the early stages of figuring it out. A small band of volunteers have worked around the clock to define the problems owners might face down the road—legal questions about their vehicle financing; issues with the car’s app; finding parts—and start solving them. These people have full-time jobs, too. De Bardi, for example, who lives in the UK and has headed up the European owners’ efforts, is also the CTO of a telecommunications firm.

Experts say Fisker owners’ situation is looking increasingly tricky. Automotive companies have a playbook to handle bankruptcies, developed during the 2008 financial crisis, which led General Motors and Chrysler to file for Chapter 11 protection, as Fisker has. Thanks in part to support from the US government, those automakers were able to honor their vehicles’ warranties as the companies restructured.

But in legal proceedings in Delaware this month, Fisker’s situation looked more dire. Lawyers for the firm’s creditors argued that Fisker should have filed for bankruptcy late last year. And Fisker plans to sell its remaining inventory, some 4,000 vehicles, to a firm that leases electric vehicles to New York City Uber and Lyft drivers, lawyers told the court.

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Aarian Marshall

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June 30, 2024
Bugatti’s $4 Million Hybrid Hypercar Has the Craziest Steering Wheel We’ve Ever Seen

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The resurrection of Bugatti is one of the 21st century’s most notable automotive stories. Aristocratic, artistic, and more than a little arcane, Bugatti was a prewar marque that mastered luxury, design, and motorsport, the creator of Grand Prix winners, and arguably the most lavish motorcar ever made, in the shape of the early 1930s Type 41 Royale. Then it faded away.

It was the late Ferdinand Piëch, the monomaniacal kingpin of the Volkswagen Group, who bought the rights to the name and returned the brand to glory with 2005’s Veyron and its successor, the Chiron. The Super Sport version of the latter remains the world’s fastest production car, having achieved a top speed of 304.773 mph in the hands of racing driver Andy Wallace at a German test track in 2019.

How do you follow that—especially in a world in which 2,000-horsepower electric hypercars have comprehensively rearranged expectations?

As fate would have it, Bugatti is now controlled by Croatian EV powerhouse Rimac, as a result of a complex 2021 contra-deal with VW and Porsche. So you’d be right to wonder what kind of encore wunderkind Mate Rimac would devise for the 114-year-old French legend.

The result is the Tourbillon, an imperious super-coupé hybrid that sees Bugatti looking a hundred years ahead as much as it’s invoking its storied past—but not in the ways you’d expect.

The Tourbillon is Bugatti’s latest hybrid hypercar, the first to reveal Rimac’s influence on the manufacturer.

VIDEO: Bugatti

“Icons like the Type 57SC Atlantic, renowned as the most beautiful car in the world, the Type 35, the most successful racing car ever, and the Type 41 Royale, one of the most ambitious luxury cars of all time, provide our three pillars of inspiration,” Rimac says. “Beauty, performance, and luxury formed the blueprint for the Tourbillon; a car that was more elegant, more emotive, and more luxurious than anything before it. And just like those icons of the past, it wouldn’t be simply for the present, or even for the future, but pour l’éternité–for eternity.”

Yep, it’s safe to say Bugatti is pretty excited about it’s new creation and has an eye on the pristine lawns of the Pebble Beach or Villa d’Este concours events a century hence, positioning its new hypercar as both head-spinningly high-tech and as an artful riposte to built-in obsolescence.

Reskinning Rimac’s own brilliant and fully electric Nevera hypercar was surely one option, but Rimac is respectful enough of Bugatti’s history to know that would never fly. “So I came up with a proposal to make a completely new car,” he says. He’s come an awfully long way since being the sole employee of Rimac back in 2009.

Instruments of Success

The name Tourbillon will be familiar to adherents of haute horologie. Rather than honor a former Bugatti racing driver—as in Pierre Veyron and Louis Chiron—the new car references the most elaborate mechanism in watchmaking, a machine for the wrist whose complexity counteracts the effects of gravity in order to maintain the most accurate possible timekeeping.

The steering wheel of the new Bugatti Tourbillon spins around the central fixed instrument cluster.

VIDEO: Bugatti

Bugatti’s designers and engineers were seduced by the idea of mechanical timelessness when they were conceiving the new car, and thus the Tourbillon largely rejects large digital touchscreens in its interior in favor of machined components and a fully analogue skeletonized (another watch world reference) instrument cluster—though a small screen does slide into view if you want it, for Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.

The cluster consists of more than 600 parts, uses titanium, sapphire, and ruby in its construction, and remains fixed in place allowing the steering wheel to rotate around it. Two needles on the center dial display the engine’s revs and speed. On the left are analogue readouts for battery and oil temperature; on the right there’s a display showing the power drawn from the e-motors and engine.

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Jason Barlow

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June 20, 2024
Fisker Is Dead

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Fisker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection late on Monday, ending months of speculation over the future of the company. Now the EV maker is looking to sell its assets and restructure its debt after pausing production of is sole car model back in March.

To anyone familiar with the Ocean all-electric SUV, the news of Fisker’s bankruptcy may have been predictable. WIRED tested the Fisker Ocean in July 2023 but, due to the obviously unfinished nature of the test car, was left in the unprecedented position of being unable to score or rate the EV. Our own test Ocean was plagued with squeaky pedals, an inoperative California mode (where the EV drops all its windows save the windscreen) forcing a switch in car mid-test, and poor handling.

After manufacturing issues and cash flow problems, Fisker admitted during its quarterly earnings in February that it might not have enough money to survive another year, and decided to pause car production, initially for six weeks. Reports began claiming it had been considering a possible bankruptcy filing. Fisker reported that it made $273 million in sales last year but was more than $1 billion in debt. It also issued a warning that there was “substantial doubt” about its ability to stay in business. It never resumed production.

The company, founded by car designer Henrik Fisker, was looking for a potential lifeboat. This resulted in negotiations with “a large automaker” for investment, joint development of one or more electric vehicle platforms, and to fund its North America manufacturing.

Such negotiations, reportedly with Nissan, failed to conclude positively, an outcome signaled even at the time by Fisker itself as it issued a statement saying “any transaction would be subject to satisfaction of important conditions, including completion of due diligence and negotiation and execution of appropriate definitive agreements.” The collapse of these talks reportedly resulted in a loss of $350 million in funding.

In the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in Delaware, Fisker has estimated assets of $500 million to $1 billion, and liabilities of $100 million to $500 million, and among its 20 largest creditors named Adobe, Google, and SAP.

Fisker’s rapid decline is a far cry from recent success in 2020, when the company went public with a valuation of $2.9 billion, affording the EV maker more than $1 billion in cash.

Since then, EV sales in the US have slowed more broadly, but Fisker has been especially badly affected. The company inevitably lost a degree of quality control when it ceded manufacturing to Canada-based supplier Magna, and subsequently build and software issues of its Ocean SUV surfaced. Since launch, the model has been dogged by quality problems, with owners citing sudden power losses, glitchy key fobs and sensors, and even allegations of hoods flying open.

The Ocean’s myriad issues embarrassingly caught out Fisker staff, too, with board member Wendy Greuel losing power on a public road shortly after taking deliver of the EV. Similarly, according to a cache of internal documents viewed by TechCrunch, Geeta Gupta Fisker, the company’s chief financial officer, chief operating officer, and cofounder Henrik Fisker’s wife, also experienced a shutdown in power while driving an Ocean.

Indeed, Fisker has had a checkered history beyond the Ocean. It was more than a decade ago when its eponymous owner, previously of BMW, Ford, and Aston Martin, last presented a car bearing his name. The Karma, a range-extender sports GT was dogged by problems, including a disastrous Consumer Reports test and fires. Fisker Automotive filed for bankruptcy in 2013.

Initially choosing to operate a direct-to-consumer sales model, after handing over to customers less than half of the more than 10,000 vehicles it produced last year, Fisker reverted to a traditional dealership sales model in January. Then in March the company drastically cut prices on its Ocean models in a desperate attempt to shift inventory.

Yesterday’s bankruptcy filing comes only a year after Fisker launched its Ocean all-electric vehicle to customers.

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Jeremy White

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June 18, 2024
McLaren’s Artura Spider Hybrid Is All Performance, and All Party

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While the world awaits Ferrari’s first all-electric car—due next year—archrival McLaren insists that the technology doesn’t yet exist to deliver an EV worthy of its name.

Power clearly isn’t the problem, but weight is the enemy in Woking, McLaren’s UK headquarters, and batteries aren’t getting lighter fast enough. Going fully electric results in unacceptable compromises to a car’s dynamics, McLaren says.

Light weight isn’t just a philosophy to these guys, it’s dogma, and, like all such things, that doesn’t suggest much in the way of progressive thinking. Until you arrive at a corner at, shall we say, a committed velocity in the new Artura Spider.

Few cars are as fluid, balanced, and rewarding as this, a lissome-looking machine, which soon has you thinking like a racing driver: Plotting entry, apex, and exit, dallying with a trailing throttle or trying to dial out understeer. It gets right under your skin.

McLaren doesn’t even rate fully electric steering as pure enough, and the Artura’s precision feel is undoubtedly helped by an old-school hydraulic setup. Apparently, it’s almost identical to the steering configuration in the 600 LT, which is nothing less than one of the greatest-handling cars ever made.

Pimped P1 Power

Photograph: McLaren Automotive

Yet it would be a grave error to mistake McLaren for a tech refusenik. Far from it. Core to the Artura’s astonishing athleticism is its carbon-composite chassis (MCLA for short), which delivers both tremendous structural integrity and impressive lateral bending stiffness.

It’s made in the company’s dedicated UK facility in Sheffield, and McLaren’s use of carbon fiber throughout its model range puts one over on Ferrari, Lamborghini and Porsche, all of whom reserve this costly material for their most expensive hypercars.

The Artura is also a hybrid, deepening the company’s expertise in an area it first explored on 2013’s ground-breaking P1. The combustion engine is a 3.0-liter twin turbo V6, harnessed here to an axial flux e-motor, which is integrated into the gearbox’s bell housing.

Improvements in the engine mapping have increased the overall power output to 690 brake horsepower, a rise of 20 bhp over Artura v1.0. Rather than a 90-degree V, the cylinders sit at a 120-degree angle, which reduces pressure losses in the exhaust. The twin turbos sit within in a “hot vee” configuration, which means they can spin faster with helpful consequences for throttle response.

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Jason Barlow

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June 16, 2024
Tesla Shareholders Approve Elon Musk’s Big Payday

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Under CEO Elon Musk, Tesla has been credited with revolutionizing the auto industry, jump-starting the electric revolution, and racking up billions in profit in the process. Now Musk is set for a record payday worth around $50 billion, after the electric car company’s shareholders approved a compensation plan that had been previously blocked by a federal judge.

The preliminary outcome of the vote was announced Thursday afternoon during an annual shareholder meeting at Tesla’s newest auto and battery factory in Austin, Texas.

The setting was apropos: Shareholders also approved a measure to move Tesla’s corporate registration away from Delaware and to Texas. The company’s board argued that Delaware’s court system—where a judge struck down Musk’s pay scheme in January—has been unfair to Tesla.

“Hot damn, I love you guys,” an ebullient Musk told shareholders from the stage of the meeting in Austin, after the pay package approval was announced.

This vote was a referendum on Musk’s leadership at Tesla, as some shareholders argued the CEO has grown more visibly distracted with his other companies, which include SpaceX, the tunneling venture the Boring Company, the social media site X, and the artificial intelligence firm xAI. The electric car company has also lost more than half its value since its highest heights, when it was worth some $1.24 trillion in late 2021. Slower car sales, increased competition in the electric car market, and a pivot to robotics and autonomous vehicle technology have left some shareholders confused about the future of Tesla.

In a letter published before the vote, the proxy advising firm Glass Lewis said it was concerned that the compensation package would give Musk too much power over Tesla by making him the company’s largest shareholder “by a healthy margin.”

But proponents for the package—who prevailed in Thursday’s vote—said the compensation was fair payment for Musk’s performance at Tesla. “If Tesla is to retain Elon’s attention and motivate him to continue to devote his time, energy, ambition and vision to deliver comparable results in the future, we must stand by our deal,” board chair Robyn Denholm wrote in a letter to shareholders ahead of the vote.

Musk’s compensation package, tied to a series of ambitious financial targets, was first approved by more than 70 percent of Tesla shareholders in 2018. But a group of investors challenged the package in a Delaware court, and in January a state chancery judge threw it out, ruling it should be undone. The package, she wrote, was an “unfathomable sum” and had been approved by a board of directors made up of less-than-impartial members.

Now, Musk will have even greater control over his electric car company. What he does with that power remains to be seen.

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Aarian Marshall, Morgan Meaker

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June 13, 2024
Ford’s New Mach-E Rally Is Ideal for Gravel Noobs

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Is there a more natural place for someone to really floor it for the first time in an electric car than the ballyhooed DirtFish Rally School outside Seattle, Washington? With the gravel wet from a day of cool, classic, spring Pacific Northwest rain? Surely there must be.

And yet, here I am, behind the wheel of the 2024 Ford Mustang Mach-E Rally, politely—and clearly all too slowly—following directions as a very patient rally instructor asks me to “really punch it this time.” Shortly after this instruction, and nearly on purpose, I drive sideways.

If this sounds fun, then, sure, absolutely. The Mustang Mach-E Rally, arguably Ford’s best foot forward in the controversially-named electric car series in 2024, shows the Detroit automaker is ready to entertain. (Controversial because not everyone is convinced that a crossover should ever be called a Mustang, plug or not.)

The future of Ford’s electric business may be murky, or at best complicated—more on that later—but the Mustang Mach-E Rally shows the automaker willing to throw in a few tricks to persuade a new audience to put down the gas pump and pick up the plug.

Dirty EV

The Rally edition of the Mach-E can go from 0 to 60 in 3.4 seconds with its dual motors.

Photograph: Ford

This is Ford’s first rally-inspired electric. Note the phrase “rally-inspired”—those interested in such a car sadly won’t get something akin to Ari Vatanen’s record-setting 1988 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb ride, made legend in Climb Dance (skip to 3:08 to see Ari’s casual genius at work).

What you do get, compared to the Mach-E GT version, are a few trim tweaks to make the EV friendlier on rocky, slippy surfaces: suspension raised by an inch, protective shielding for front and rear motors, rally-style wheels covering Michelin CrossClimate2 tires (designed to slide), two front hood racing stripes, and of course, a rear spoiler. At the Ford event at DirtFish, nice men lovingly wiped the mud off the Rally’s windshield and driver door between laps, though this does not come standard.

Trim tweaks include rally-style wheels …

Photograph: Ford

… and, of course, a rear spoiler.

Photograph: Ford

The Mach-E Rally does come with RallySport Drive Mode, made off-road friendly with added yaw (more sideways sliding) and aggressive damping to better navigate gravely turns. Linked to that extra inch of ride height is the addition of Ford’s MagneRide suspension system, which is designed to adapt to changing road conditions. It’s powered by embedded sensors and pistons equipped with magnetic damper fluid, which produces firmer or softer shocks, depending on what the road demands.

In practice, RallySport Drive Mode creates a notably looser ride, with the SUV much more willing to slide. Still, the vehicle didn’t let a Rally noob convict, much less kill, herself—which meant the whole thing was really very fun. Even in the muck, I felt I picked up the trick quickly. (Granted, an instructor called out extremely specific braking directions.)

One of the advantages of driving electric is the immediate power you get without having to mess with gears, which—for a red-blooded American who can’t remember the last time she was in a manual transmission car, much less behind the wheel of one—is appreciated.

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Aarian Marshall

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June 5, 2024
Biden Is Trying to Buy EVs Time With New Tariffs on China. It Might Not Work

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Today, the Biden administration announced a near-unprecedented 100 percent tariff on Chinese-made electric vehicles, a move the White House said would protect the American industry from “unfairly priced Chinese imports.” Previously, tariffs on Chinese EVs sat at 25 percent.

Electric vehicle batteries and battery components will also be subject to new tariffs—Chinese lithium-ion battery tariffs rise from 7.5 percent to 25 percent, and rates for Chinese critical minerals, including manganese and cobalt, will move from 0 percent to 25 percent.

The move, just the latest in a flurry of actions taken by the Biden administration against Chinese vehicles and their components, comes at a delicate time for the US electric vehicle industry, which lags behind China not only in vehicle price but quality.

China’s lead in electrics, experts say, stems from years of investment in vehicle software, battery, and, critically, supply chain development. BYD, which briefly overtook Tesla as the world’s top EV seller last fall, has been manufacturing electric vehicles since 2003.

Meanwhile, the prospect of catastrophic global climate change hangs not only over the US auto industry, but the entire world. Motor and diesel fuel consumption in the US transportation sector accounted for nearly a third of the country’s energy-related carbon dioxide emissions last year, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

The tariffs reflect the US government’s unfortunate bind: It hopes to rev up sustainable energy sources while tamping down on imports from a country that happens to produce sustainable energy sources very well.

The tariffs are also meant to start the clock on the US’s own domestic electric vehicle development, which will need more and cheaper electric cars, but also the batteries and battery supply chains to make them go.

Or, maybe not start it. “The clock started 10 years ago, and we’re behind. We’re way behind,” says John Helveston, an assistant professor in engineering management and systems engineering at George Washington University who studies electric vehicle development and policy. The tariffs, he says, will not insulate the US against competition from Chinese cars forever. “They’re not going to make us better at making things.”

Will the effort work? In a written statement, John Bozzella, president and CEO of the US’s main auto lobbying group, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, was sanguine: “US automakers can outcompete and out innovate anyone on the EV transition,” he said. “No doubt about that. The issue at this moment isn’t the will … the issue is time.”

But even with more time, the future will be complicated. Automakers and auto suppliers selling in the US will have to figure out how to stay afloat even as they continue to pour billions into electric vehicle and battery development. And while US electric vehicle sales are going up, their growth has slowed.

Meanwhile, another influential US policy, the Inflation Reduction Act, directs billions to building up domestic supply chains for electric vehicles and other renewable energy sources. But those efforts could take years.

“The administration is trying to walk a line,” says Susan Helper, a professor of economics at Case Western Reserve University, who worked on electric vehicle policy in the Biden administration. “One goal is a strong auto industry with good jobs and clean production methods, and the other is fast action on climate change. In the long-term, they’re consistent with each other. In the short term, there’s conflict.”

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Aarian Marshall

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May 14, 2024
An Innovative EV Motor Used by Lamborghini, McLaren, and Ferrari Is Being Mass-Produced by Mercedes

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Car enthusiasts mourn the commoditization of propulsion. Once petrolheads would have chosen a BMW for its sonorous straight-six or a Mercedes-AMG for its thunderous V8. Now many believe that distinctiveness is rapidly diminishing. Electric cars might provide mad, silent thrust, but a common complaint is they are mostly indistinguishable for the character of their drivetrains.

Carmakers worry about this too. Their engineering DNA is less apparent in the EV age, leaving them more reliant on design, brand power, and other types of technology to differentiate their cars and keep their customers. There’s no point trying to trump the competition on power when the quickest Teslas and Lucids already have far more than you can ever deploy on the public road. More isn’t better when you already have too much.

But soon there’ll be a choice again: between the conventional radial-flux motors that have powered almost every EV until now and something radically different.

Axial-flux motors won’t necessarily offer more power, but they are so much lighter and smaller that their proponents say they have the potential to transform almost every other key measure of an EV’s performance—and the entire architecture of a car designed around them.

By fitting axial flux motors into the wheels, the spaces in a car’s body currently occupied by motors could be largely vacated, clearing the way for more batteries, people, or stuff, and permitting the sort of design exuberance that EVs have long promised but never quite delivered.

More importantly, this new design of motor might help address the growing public backlash against overweight, expensive EVs. They might reduce the weight of a typical EV by around 200 kilograms (440 pounds)—half in the motors themselves, and half from the mass-compounding effect which allows you to reduce the weight of other systems such as batteries and brakes as a result.

By sending mass into a virtuous downward spiral, carmakers could increase range, decrease cost, and perhaps even preserve the agile handling of lightweight cars, which enthusiasts also worry might disappear with the advent of the EV.

Flux Capacity

The principle isn’t new. The axial-flux motor was first demonstrated by Michael Faraday in 1821, but in the intervening two centuries nobody had figured out how to mass-produce one reliably.

British academic Tim Woolmer, however, likes a challenge. He devoted his Oxford PhD to designing the optimum motor for an electric car. An axial-flux motor would make more sense than the almost ubiquitous and easily mass-manufactured radial flux design, he decided. But not only had his chosen design barely made it out of the lab in nearly 200 years, there simply wasn’t a market for it when he started in 2005: GM’s EV1 had long been canned, and the Tesla Roadster was still three years away.

In an axial-flux “pancake” motor, the stator (the stationary part of an electric motor) and rotors are discs, sitting alongside each other less than a millimeter apart, the flux flowing through the stator axially or parallel with the shaft, and acting on the permanent magnets in the rotors on either side to turn them.

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Ben Oliver

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May 12, 2024
As Elon Musk Abandons the $25K Tesla, This EV Costs Just $4,400

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As Elon Musk steps away, yet again, from the idea of a $25,000 Tesla, let’s take this opportunity to zoom out and appreciate what a truly affordable EV can be. For this we need to ignore the Nissan Leaf—currently the cheapest EV in the US at $29,280—and skip over Europe, home to the adorable but flawed $10,000 Citroen Ami, and head to China.

Here you’ll find the equally cheap BYD Seagull, a small electric hatchback styled by ex-Lamborghini designer Wolfgang Egger and with a 200-mile range—four times that of the Ami.

But what if even that is too expensive? Then allow us to present the Zhidou Rainbow. This is a compact city EV priced from 31,900 yuan before subsidies—that’s just $4,400. For a new electric car. WIRED literally recommends ebikes that cost more that this.

The Rainbow has three doors and four seats, and an interior with a 5-inch digital driver display and a 9-inch touchscreen for the infotainment system. There’s even a connected smartphone app, charge scheduling, and the promise of over-the-air (OTA) software updates.

Splash out on the flagship Color Cloud Edition (which costs $5,800, or about half the price of Porsche’s fanciest bicycle) and you can have each panel of your Rainbow painted a different color. A bit like Volkswagen did with the somewhat mad Polo Harlequin in the mid ’90s.

Cheaper Than an Ebike

There are two models on offer. The first has that headline $4,400 price tag and is powered by a 20-kW (27-horsepower) motor with 85 Nm (63 ft-lbs) of torque and fed by a tiny 9.98-kWh battery. Spend 39,900 yuan ($5,500) and your Rainbow is fitted with a 30-kW (40-horsepower) motor with 125 Nm of torque and a 17-kWh battery pack. Range is between 78 and 127 miles using China’s generous CLTC testing standard.

Be under no illusion here, these are tiny numbers. Even the larger battery is the same capacity of that of a plug-in hybrid Honda CR-V, which also employs a 2.0-liter engine to help it get around. But the range isn’t terrible. Even if the testing standard is generous, and the larger battery has a more realistic range of 100 miles, that’s about the same as the Honda e, which cost a whopping £37,000 ($46,000) before it went off sale at the end of 2023.

There are two Rainbow models: One powered by a 20-kW (27-horsepower) motor fed by a tiny 9.98-kWh battery; and a pimped 30-kW (40-horsepower) motor version with 17-kWh battery.

Courtesy of Zhidou

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Alistair Charlton

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May 5, 2024
As Questions Swirl Around Tesla’s Superchargers, the Race Is On to Fill the Power Gap

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Familiar says Revel is less concerned about the material effects of the Tesla layoff than the “cultural impact, tacking onto pessimism around EVs recently.”

New York City officials seem confident someone will fill in the Tesla-sized charging gap. City programs ensure “that any provider doing business in NYC has a reliable, growing customer base, and one provider backing out of a lease is a great opportunity for another to snap it up, especially if that site is power-ready,” a spokesperson for the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission, Jason Kersten, said in a statement.

In Maspeth, Gordon says he’s already heard from several charging companies interested in leasing the land once intended for Superchargers.

Power Puzzler

In recent months, the Tesla Supercharger network has been cited as a bright spot in a company troubled by new competition from Chinese car companies and legacy automakers, questions around the slackening electric vehicle market, falling revenues, and most recently, a series of rolling layoffs. Tesla customers have said the company’s public charging stations are generally reliable and well maintained, and a huge selling point for Tesla-curious buyers. Last summer, the energy research organization BloombergNEF predicted that Tesla could bring in $7.4 billion in charging revenue by the end of the decade, constituting some $740 million in profit—not a shabby side hustle for an auto manufacturer.

At the time of the reported layoffs, Tesla’s charging team had just pulled off a decisive coup by convincing the entire US auto industry to use its plug. In return, Tesla dangled to other automakers—and their customers—a public charging network that’s remarkably reliable and well developed, especially when compared to the shoddier records of their closest charging rivals.

In financial filings submitted just last week, Tesla previewed its expansion plans for its charging network. As other automakers adopt the Tesla plug, “we must correspondingly expand our network in order to ensure adequate availability to meet customer demands,” the company wrote.

Tesla last fall officially handed over work on the plug standard to the Society of Automotive Engineers, a global standards organization. Jeff Laskowski, a spokesman for the group, said that work to finish that plug standard was “well underway” and expected to wrap up by the end of this year.

It is not unusual for companies given government grants to change direction or give them back, sources involved in government grantmaking told WIRED. In statements and interviews, those involved in building, selling, and developing electric vehicle charging said that Tesla’s sudden about-face on charging might affect the short-term future of public charging infrastructure, but not the long-term electric transition.

A spokesperson for the federal Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, the authority overseeing electric vehicle infrastructure in the US, said that, because each individual state runs a competitive process to choose who will build charging networks, “we don’t expect individual business decisions to impact EV charging projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law,” the 2021 federal legislation that earmarked money for the charging infrastructure.

Industry players said that while Tesla’s move was very unexpected, it could signal that the automaker believes other charging firms have caught up to it and are ready to take on the responsibility—and the capital costs—of building out the network that will make electric cars go.

Competitors said the abrupt shift might even be an opportunity. In a statement, Sara Rafalson, the executive vice president of policy and external affairs at the charging company EVgo, said her company would soon begin to build Tesla plugs onto its chargers. “We welcome the opportunity to serve more Tesla vehicles and remain steadfast in our commitment to serve all electric vehicle models,” she said.

UPDATE 5/1/2024 9:30 PM ET: This story has been updated to clarify the status of Revel’s lease talks in New York City.

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Aarian Marshall

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May 1, 2024
Elon Musk Can’t Solve Tesla’s China Crisis With His Desperate Asia Visit

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Elon Musk will be pleased that his surprise jaunt to China on Sunday garnered many glowing headlines. The trip was undoubtedly equally a surprise to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who had been scheduled to offer Musk the red carpet on a long-arranged visit.

The billionaire blew off India at the last minute, citing “very heavy Tesla obligations.” Indeed, Tesla has had a tumultuous couple of weeks, with federal regulator slap-downs, halved profits, and price-cut rollouts. Yet, in a very public snub that Modi won’t quickly forget, the company CEO made time for Chinese premier Li Qiang.

And well Musk might. Tesla needs China more than China needs Tesla. After the US, China is Tesla’s second biggest market. And ominously, in the first quarter of the year, Tesla’s sales in China slipped by 4 percent in a domestic EV market that has expanded by more than 15 percent. That’s enough of a hit for any CEO to jump in a Gulfstream and fly across the Pacific for an impromptu meeting with a Chinese premier.

Globally, Tesla has lost nearly a third of its value since January, and earlier this month, Tesla’s worldwide vehicle deliveries in the first quarter fell for the first time in almost four years. As they are wont to do, Tesla investors continue to complain over repeated delays to the company’s rollout of cars with genuine driverless capabilities.

One of Tesla’s stop-gap technologies—a now heavily-discounted $8,000 add-on—is marketed as Full Self-Driving, or FSD. But, like the similarly confusingly named Autopilot feature, it still requires driver attention, and may yet still prove to be risky.

Among the deals said to have been unveiled at Sunday’s meeting with Li Qiang was a partnership granting Tesla access to a mapping license for data collection on China’s public roads by web search company Baidu.

This was a “watershed moment,” Wedbush Securities senior analyst Dan Ives said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. However, Tesla has been using Baidu for in-car mapping and navigation in China since 2020. The revised deal, in which Baidu will now also provide Tesla with its lane-level navigation system, clears one more regulatory hurdle for Tesla’s FSD in China. It does not enable Tesla to introduce driverless cars in China or anywhere else, as some media outlets have reported.

Press reports have also claimed that Musk has secured permission to transfer data collected by Tesla cars in China out of China. This is improbable, noted JL Warren Capital CEO and head of research Junheng Li, who wrote on X: “[Baidu] owns all data, and shares filtered data with Tesla. Just imagine if [Tesla] has access to real-time road data such as who went to which country’s embassy at what time for how long.” That, she stressed, would be “super national security!”

According to Reuters, Musk is still seeking final approval for the FSD software rollout in China, and Tesla still needs permission to transfer data overseas.

Li added that a rollout of even a “supervised,” data-lite version of FSD in China is “extremely unlikely.” She pointed to challenges for Tesla to support local operation of the software. Tesla still “has no [direct] access to map data in China as a foreign entity,” she wrote.

Instead, Tesla is likely using the deal extension with Baidu as an FSD workaround, with the data collected in China very much staying in China. Despite this, Tesla shares have jumped following news of the expanded Baidu collaboration.

Furthermore, Li said there’s “no strategic value” for Beijing to favor FSD when there are several more advanced Chinese alternatives. (We’ve tested them.)

“Chinese EVs are simply evolving at a far faster pace than Tesla,” agrees Shanghai-based automotive journalist and WIRED contributor Mark Andrews, who tested the driver assistance tech available on the roads in China. The US-listed trio of Xpeng, Nio, and Li Auto offer better-than-Tesla “driving assistance features” that rely heavily on lidar sensors, a technology that Musk previously dismissed, but which Tesla is now said to be testing.

Although dated in shape and lacking in the latest tech, a Tesla car is nevertheless more expensive in China than most of its rivals. Tesla recently slashed prices in China to arrest falling sales.

Musk’s flying visit to China smacked of “desperation,” says Mark Rainford, owner of the Inside China Auto channel. “[Tesla] sales are down in China—the competition has weathered the price cuts so far and [the Tesla competitors have] a seemingly endless conveyor belt of talented and beautiful products.” Rainford further warns that the “golden period for Tesla in China” is “at great risk of collapsing.”

Tesla opened its first gigafactory in Shanghai five years ago, and it is now the firm’s largest—but the automaker has been playing tech catchup in China for some time. In addition to Xpeng, Nio, and Li, there are other Chinese car companies competing with Tesla on autonomous driving, as Musk will see if he visits the Beijing Motor Show, which runs through this week.

Beijing is now arguably the world’s preeminent automotive expo, but Tesla is not exhibiting—a sign that it has little new to offer famously tech-hungry Chinese autobuyers. Pointedly, the Cybertruck is not road-legal in China, although that hasn’t stopped Tesla from displaying the rust-prone electric pickup in some of its Chinese showrooms.

Likewise, Tesla has just announced plans for a European Cybertruck tour. But, just like in China, the EV pickup cannot be sold in the EU, either—and according to Tesla’s lead on vehicle engineering, it likely never will be.

Speaking on tighter pedestrian safety regulations in the EU compared to the US, Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering, Lars Moravy, told Top Gear that “European regulations call for a 3.2-mm external radius on external projections. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to make a 3.2-mm radius on a 1.4-mm sheet of stainless steel.”

The “Cybertruck Odyssey” tour—as Tesla’s European X account calls it—may titillate Tesla fans, but it could prove to be about as useful as shooting a Roadster into space.

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Carlton Reid

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April 29, 2024
We Tested the BYD Seal—the Car That Explains Why Tesla Just Cut Its Prices

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A compact, family-size car, the BYD Seal is unapologetically aimed at taking on the Tesla Model 3. That said, it’s bigger than the American in every dimension, most notably in both length (4,800 millimeters versus 4,694 millimeters for the Model 3) and wheelbase (2,920 millimeters versus 2,875 millimeters). The result is a roomier car with interior space similar to that of a vehicle in a class above.

Sleek, and with a Model 3–beating drag coefficient of just 0.219 Cd, the Seal is the production version of the Ocean-X concept from 2021. That concept is where BYD revealed the eplatform 3.0 that underpins all of its current cars.

Better Blades

As we wrote about in our review of the BYD Atto 3, the company’s patented “blade battery” pack design aims to set it apart from other manufacturers. It’s a key component of the Seal’s platform and arranges lithium iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries in a bladelike design.

BYD claims its use of LFP as the cathode material makes for a safer battery than conventional lithium-ion alternatives. It also boasts of improved thermal stability and a higher energy density than its rivals. The Blade design also means that puncture damage to the battery pack in a collision is less likely to cause thermal runaway and the potential for fire, BYD says.

Also featured in the Seal is what BYD claims to be the world’s first 8-in-1 electric powertrain system, with an overall efficiency of 89 percent. This combines the drive motor, inverter, transmission, onboard charger, AC/DC, power distribution unit, vehicle control unit, and battery management system. The platform is also capable of 800-volt charging (like Kia and Hyundai), but while in other EVs this often means the possibility for ultrafast DC charging, the Seal is limited to a middling 150 kW.

There’s also a direct heating and cooling system for the battery, which increases thermal efficiency by up to a claimed 20 percent. BYD also says improved thermal efficiency can mean a 20 percent improvement to range in cold weather, too.

Interestingly, the Seal’s blade battery forms an integral part of the Seal’s eplatform 3.0 architecture and allows for a cell-to-body (CTB) construction, where the battery pack itself is incorporated within the vehicle structure, improving rigidity.

CTB means that the batteries are no longer a dead weight in the car, and now form part of the load-bearing structure, with the top of the battery pack effectively being the floor of the car. This means torsional rigidity can be 40,500 Nm/degree, which is about the level of a luxury car.

Refined Ride

Low-speed ride quality can be a touch lacking, but once up to speed the Seal is fun to drive.

PHOTOGRAPH: BYD

All this translates into good handling with a comfortable, somewhat refined ride at speed. Those fairly conventional but not unattractive looks are somewhat beguiling, since there’s 50/50 weight distribution and double wishbone suspension at the front to give a sporty setup.

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Mark Andrews

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April 22, 2024
You Can Clamp Your Phone Into Razer’s Fancy New Game Controller

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Given everyone’s sustained interest in playing games on their phones, companies are eager to offer an experience that works better than just jabbing your fingers on a touchscreen. Razer, the maker of unapologetically robust and garish gaming devices, has a new offering that does just that.

The new Razer Kishi Ultra is a souped up controller that adds pro-level thumbsticks, buttons, and triggers to just about any mobile device. It’s the latest in Razer’s Kishi lineup of portable gaming devices, which launched in 2020. The two handles pull apart, allowing you to slide your phone in between them. Let the spring-loaded clamp grip your phone, and you’ve got something like a DIY Nintendo Switch. It uses a USB-C port to connect to the phone. In addition, it can handle an iPad Mini and any Android tablet measuring up to 8 diagonal inches as long as it has a USB-C port. The Kishi Ultra only works with USB-C iPhones, so it’s limited to iPhone 15 and beyond. (It can even handle some folding phones.) The Kishi Ultra can also connect to your PC via USB-C cable. Like nearly everything Razer makes, the Kishi Ultra is loaded up with RGB lighting options which you can change via the associated app, so you can have your fill of customizable flashiness.

The Kishi is unlike the Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck, which are fully fledged portable gaming machines on their own. But gaming devices with more specific use cases are gaining popularity, like Playstation’s Portal device, which only lets you stream games from your existing PS5. Razer has been making gaming handheld devices since 2013, and has its own Steam Deck-style Razer Edge handheld. But more and more companies are eager to make devices that work with the screen you already have in your pocket. Devices like Razer’s latest and those from the gaming company Backbone are meant to strap controllers to the side of your device and enhance your mobile play time.

Here’s some other consumer tech news from this week.

Meta Adds an AI Images to WhatsApp

Meta has added AI Image generation capabilities to its WhatsApp messaging platform. As part of its rollout for its Llama 3 large language model that came this week, the company has juiced up its Meta AI in-app offerings.

The AI image generation option in WhatsApp works like sending a text message. You can go into a private chat with Meta AI and type out a prompt. The keyword in the input field is “imagine,” so if you type that and a description of the image you want to create, the AI assistant will generate a visual representation of your prompt. And it happens nearly instantly. The image pops up on screen as you’re typing, and you can see the image change and generate in real time as you add more words to your prompt. This can get … quite weird as you add more parameters to your request, but the more descriptive you are, the more detail the generator can work into a picture. The resulting images are about what you would expect from any AI art source these days—weird proportions, humans with too many fingers, misplaced eyeballs. Still, it’s both neat and very strange to watch an AI generate your description of something as you’re writing it.

Meet GMC’s Hulking New Denali EV Pickup

Photograph: GMC

There is a deluge of new EVs coming out this year, ranging from tiny three-wheeled smart cars like the Nimbus One to revved-up supercars like the upcoming electric Dodge Charger. Pickup trucks are a slightly more niche space in the EV market, aside from popular models like the Ford F-150 Lightning, Rivian’s offerings, and Tesla’s floundering Cybertruck (every one of which was just recalled.)

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Boone Ashworth

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April 20, 2024
Review: Range Rover Evoque Plug-In Hybrid

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The Range Rover Evoque changed Land Rover forever. Before its launch in 2012, the 4×4 maker’s SUVs were attractive, but in a functional, boxy sort of way. After it, the British brand was as much about the latest trends and fashion as off-roading and country estates.

Speaking at the launch event in 2012, Victoria Beckham spoke about her hand in creating it. “I’ve designed a car that I want to drive,” she said at the time. Since then, however, chief creative officer Gerry McGovern has corrected matters somewhat, stating that Posh Spice exaggerated her role in the creation of the Evoque.

Still, by 2016, more than half a million Evoques have been sold globally in more than 180 countries, with Land Rover describing it as its “greatest sales success story.”

It’s hardly surprising, then, considering the model’s history, that the designers of the latest Evoque opted to take an evolutionary approach in terms of technology to the urban-orientated SUV.

This iteration comes in four different models; Range Rover Evoque S, Dynamic SE, Dynamic HSE, and finally Autobiography, all of which have a plug-in hybrid option. WIRED got its hands on the top-end Autobiography model on a brand-hosted drive in the Champagne wine region in the northeast of France. But will it be a vintage year for JLR?

On the surface the changes are subtle; inside is where the overhaul has really happened. That said, the Evoque’s exterior presence is enhanced by a new grille and revised super-slim Pixel LED headlights with signature DRL (daytime running lights), which deliver a technical, jewel-like appearance. New exterior accents also complement the characteristic “floating roof” that defines Range Rover’s design DNA.

The new super-slim Pixel LED headlights aren’t just for show, either—they house JLR’s new advanced headlight tech. Each light has 26 individual LED segments, which switch on or off automatically to supposedly provide the most effective forward beam at all times. These segments are also home to sensors, which scan the roads ahead and at each side. When another vehicle is in sight, the LEDs within the section it’s covering shut off, ensuring that you are not blinding any oncoming vehicle.

Speed-capturing cameras placed within the headlights pick up speed warning signs, instantly letting you know what speed you should be going on any given road. However, when driving down the freeway, the cameras would occasionally pick up side road signs, and in doing so show an incorrect reading on the dash.

All About the Inside

Photograph: Land Rover

The interior is where we see the big changes. The Evoque does channel its big brother, the flagship Range Rover to good effect inside, with comfortable seats, high-end materials, and a slick touchscreen infotainment system that’s consumed all the tech around it from previous examples. More on that in a bit.

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Oliver Hazelwood

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April 13, 2024
Review: BYD Atto 3

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BYD also isn’t chasing straight-line performance goals, with the Atto 3 accelerating to 62 mph (100 km/h) in 7.2 seconds. Leisurely by today’s EV standards, but perfectly quick enough for a car like this. Remember, it’s supposed to be a good-value family car designed to slot into your everyday life; too many EVs have the sort of rocketship performance that your passengers, dog, and groceries simply won’t stand for. The Atto 3’s acceleration is adequate, and we’re here for it.

Range, of course, is far more important. BYD’s claim of 260 miles (WLTP) is 25 short of the Kia Niro EV and 23 behind the £45,000/$44,000 Tesla Model Y, but 11 ahead of the similarly-priced Škoda Enyaq. Take driving style and temperature into account, and you should expect a real-world range closer to 220 miles. Not bad, but you’ll still long for faster charging every time you plug in.

The brakes are fine, although the pedal is spongy, and the switch from regenerative braking to using the discs and pads is nicely judged. There are two strengths of regeneration to pick from, via a toggle switch on the center console or by diving into the touchscreen, but neither is particularly strong and, sadly, one-pedal driving isn’t an option.

This being a new car built to comply with Europe’s latest safety standards means the usual frustrations are all present and correct. You are told off every time you exceed the speed limit, even by just 2 mph, and because the road sign recognition system makes mistakes, you’ll sometimes be scolded by the car’s voice assistant when it has misread a sign. Bafflingly, sometimes the navigation screen and the driver display disagree on what the speed limit is; other times they don’t show a limit at all.

There’s no Tesla Autopilot-style hands-off driving, but the Atto 3 still has lane-keep assist among other driver assistance systems. It usually issues a bit of gentle feedback if you stray over a lane marking, but on two occasions during our 90-minute drive the car grabbed the wheel like a panicked driving instructor. The first time it happened was a real shock, as the steering wheel was tugged at for no obvious reason, and, as with these systems on almost all new cars, the first intervention plants a seed of doubt that never really goes away. As ever, it’s best to turn these systems down to their least invasive setting.

Taste of Things to Come

What to make of the BYD Atto 3? The question could equally be, what to make of the approaching flood of electric cars built by Chinese firms who are giants at home but unheard of in the West?

This is not a car for driving enthusiasts, clearly. And while also not groundbreaking, the Atto 3 is perfectly good at being an electric car. It has a fun, spacious, and nicely designed interior that’s packed as standard with kit often hiding in the options lists of pricier German cars.

The touchscreen software needs some work, and permanent climate controls are a must in our book. Performance and range are both fine, and ride quality is decent, but we wish all that battery expertise had resulted in faster charging.

Ultimately, the Atto 3 does little to stand out from what is quickly becoming a crowded segment of the EV market. It feels well made and represents good value, but while that glittering Mayfair showroom promises a lot, the unknown badge asks buyers to take a leap of faith.

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Alistair Charlton

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April 8, 2024
Here Comes the Flood of Plug-In Hybrids

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Last week, the Biden administration made it official: American cars are really going electric.

The US Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule, long in the works, that will require automakers selling in the United States to dramatically boost the number of battery-powered vehicles sold this decade, putting a serious dent in the country’s carbon emissions in the process. By 2032, more than half of new cars sold must be electric.

Automakers will have more leeway in choosing how to reach the government’s new tailpipe emissions goals, thanks to changes made between when the rules were first introduced in draft form nearly a year ago and now. One big, important shift: Plug-in hybrids are part of the picture.

In the draft of the rule, auto companies could only meet the gradually ratcheting zero-emissions goals by selling more battery-electric cars. But after lobbying from automakers and unions, which both argued that the EPA’s proposals were unrealistic, manufacturers will now be allowed to use plug-in hybrids to meet the standards.

This means that now carmakers can satisfy federal rules by ensuring that two-thirds of their 2032 sales are battery electric—or that battery-electric vehicles are just over half of their sales, and plug-in hybrids account for 13 percent.

Expect automakers to take advantage of these types of hybrid vehicles—which are powered primarily by electric batteries but supplemented by a gas-powered engine once the batteries deplete—as they race to meet the nation’s most ambitious climate goals yet.

There will be a lot of these things on the road. But the technology has a climate hitch: It’s only as emission-free as its drivers choose to be.

Gateway EV Drug

In recent months, executives for manufacturers including Audi, BMW, the Chinese EV-maker BYD, General Motors, Mercedes, and Volvo have suggested that the “compromise” cars could be a springboard that launches more cars and customers into the electric transition. And the policy shift could be vindication for Toyota, which has bet that customers will flock to gas-electric hybrids and plug-in hybrids rather than following Tesla down a fully electric path.

Globally, sales of plug-in hybrids are growing faster than battery-electrics (though this is partly because the hybrids have further to climb). Sales of plug-in hybrids jumped by 43 percent between 2022 and 2023, to almost 4.2 million, according to figures provided by BloombergNEF, a market research firm. Sales of battery-electric vehicles increased by 28 percent in the same period, to nearly 9.6 million.

The tech has some powerful upsides. The average US driver only puts in about 30 miles of driving each day, meaning most could get by most days using only a plug-in hybrid’s electric battery, and only using gas on longer trips.

Plug-in hybrids also make some automakers less nervous, manufacturing-wise: They’re more expensive to build than pure battery electrics (the whole two-motor thing), but the tech can sometimes be retrofitted into existing, gas-powered cars. This means less work, short-term, an exciting prospect for an industry that has to rejigger both how it builds its cars and how it sources the materials that will make their batteries go in the next few decades, as they move towards electrics.

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Aarian Marshall

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March 25, 2024
Fisker Suspends Its EV Production

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Following recent reports that Fisker has been preparing for a possible bankruptcy filing, today the embattled automaker announced that it is suspending all manufacture of its electric vehicles.

“Fisker will pause production for six weeks starting the week of March 18, 2024, to align inventory levels and progress strategic and financing initiatives,” the company said in a statement.

Fisker further said that it has secured a financing commitment from an existing investor of “up to $150 million.” The money would be organized in four tranches, but is by no means guaranteed; Fisker said it is subject to “certain conditions,” including the filing of the company’s 2023 Form 10-K, a comprehensive report filed annually by public companies about their financial performance.

WIRED asked Fisker’s PR representative to expand on what exactly the “certain conditions” are to secure the new investment. They declined to provide additional detail.

EV sales in the US have slowed more broadly, but Fisker has had an especially rocky run. Arguably, it lost a degree of quality control when it ceded manufacturing to Canada-based supplier Magna. Moreover, Fisker seemingly prioritized style over substance, as borne out by build and software issues of its Ocean SUV. These issues have fueled the view that in the car world there’s simply no substitute for the experience gained from making vehicles for a century, like, say, BMW has.

Likely looking for a potential lifeboat, Fisker has also confirmed it is in negotiations with “a large automaker” for investment in the company, joint development of one or more electric vehicle platforms, and North America manufacturing. That company is reportedly Nissan, according to Reuters. However, it sounds like these negotiations are far from completion, as the Fisker statement also says “any transaction would be subject to satisfaction of important conditions, including completion of due diligence and negotiation and execution of appropriate definitive agreements.”

WIRED tested the Fisker Ocean in July 2023 but, due to the unfinished nature of the test car, was left in the unprecedented position of being unable to provide a rating for the EV. Our test Ocean was plagued with squeaky pedals, an inoperative California mode (where the EV drops all its windows save the windscreen) forcing a switch in car mid-test, and poor handling that was supposedly to be fixed with a software update. Simply put, too many features were missing or “coming soon,” making the Ocean SUV an EV we just couldn’t rate properly.

Since launch, the Ocean has been dogged by quality issues, with owners complaining of sudden power losses, glitchy key fobs and sensors, hoods flying open, and brake problems.

Indeed, shortly after Fisker board member Wendy Greuel took delivery of her own Ocean SUV, it lost power on a public road. Similarly, according to a cache of internal documents viewed by TechCrunch, Geeta Gupta Fisker, the company’s chief financial officer, chief operating officer, and cofounder Henrik Fisker’s wife, experienced a shutdown in power while driving an Ocean.

Fisker has a checkered history beyond the Ocean. It was more than a decade ago when its eponymous owner, previously of BMW, Ford, and Aston Martin (where he was design director), last presented a car bearing his name. The Karma, a range-extender sports GT, was ahead of its time in many respects, but it was dogged by problems, including a disastrous Consumer Reports test and fires.

The company’s current situation looks bleak. Fisker states that it has approximately 4,700 vehicles in its inventory, carried over from 2023 and including 2024 production, and believes the completed vehicle value for this inventory is in excess of $200 million. It has delivered 1,300 vehicles in 2024 and shipped 4,900 to customers in 2023.

In February, Fisker reported that it made $273 million in sales last year but was more than $1 billion in debt. It also issued a warning that there was “substantial doubt” about its ability to stay in business. The prolonged pause in production seems to reinforce that doubt even further.

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Jeremy White

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March 18, 2024
China’s Best Self-Driving Car Platforms, Tested and Compared

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I experienced the City NGP function under XNGP in a P7i in Shanghai, and later in a G6 in Guangzhou. With my second experience I soon realized it was a tale of two cities. In Shanghai it was quite smooth, and at least one of the interventions made was due to me being disoriented rather than the car. In a few other cases it was me being overly cautious.

While in Shanghai the system appeared to cut out for no obvious reason only once or twice, this happened far more frequently in Guangzhou. One possible reason for this is that the torque in the system is unable to overcome the hand on the wheel, and so the system might think you are making an intervention. Nonetheless, in Guangzhou it got stuck behind a stopped car, and on one occasion seemed to be heading for an ebike waiting to cross the road rather than entering the road it was turning into.

Two-wheeled traffic in Guangzhou in general seemed to present a challenge for the system. Unlike in Shanghai, the roads of Guangzhou do not have good separation between cars, bicycles and mopeds. At the best of times in China these road users are unpredictable, usually paying scant regard for traffic lights, road regulations, or their own safety. With the absence of dedicated or segregated lanes for them, XNGP seemed to struggle. But this was last year, of course, and the system may well have been significantly improved since then.

Forward Thinking

Moving forward, data will be the deciding factor in both the speed of change and also the capabilities of the systems, and it is here that Li might have the winning advantage. XPeng’s XNGP is available on only the Max versions of four models. In the case of Nio, all second-generation cars have the necessary hardware, but users need to pay the equivalent of $530 per month to use the system.

In contrast, Li does not charge for its system, and all L9 and Mega cars have it as standard. For the L7 and L8, there are AD Max and AD Pro versions, with the latter missing lidar but still offering NOA Highway. Factor in that Li has sold nearly 500,000 of its second-generation cars—and in December sold 50,035 cars versus 20,115 and 18,012 for XPeng and Nio respectively—and this may help the company build leadership thanks to the sheer volume of data captured.

However, in December, Nio unveiled its first in-house-developed autonomous driving chip, which will be in its ET9 flagship sedan coming 2025. The 5-nanometer chip, called the Shenji NX9031, has more than 50 billion transistors, supports 32-core CPUs, and is supposedly comparable to four Nvidia Drive Orin X chips.

Fighting back in January, Li Auto announced that it will be using Nvidia’s Drive Thor autonomous driving chip in its 2025 next-gen EVs, as a successor to the Drive Orin. Drive Thor supposedly has 2,000 TOPS of performance, eight times that of Drive Orin.

Finally, aside from such advances in chip technology and autonomous coverage rollouts in China, Asian brands will clearly not be content to stay in their home countries. Last month, XPeng, already expanding into Europe, confirmed its intentions to bring its self-driving tech worldwide in 2025. “We look forward to enabling overseas users to access XPeng’s autonomous driving already available in China,” Xiaopeng He, the firm’s founder and CEO, said.

XPeng’s ambitions are not confined to its own cars, either. In July last year, Volkswagen announced an investment of $700 million in XPeng, purchasing a 4.99 percent stake in the company. The plan is to collaborate with XPeng to develop two VW-brand electric models for the midsize segment in the Chinese market in 2026.

The contrast between XPeng and Apple’s now defunct Project Titan, both founded 10 years ago, could not be more stark.

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Mark Andrews

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March 12, 2024