• Dmitry Medvedev says Moscow's primary objective now is "inflicting maximum damage" on Ukraine.
• The Trump administration paused US military aid to Kyiv this week.
• There are Western fears that the suspension could hinder Ukraine's vital fighting capabilities.

Russia's former president, Dmitry Medvedev, said the Kremlin should press the attack on the battlefield as the US suspends arms supplies to Ukraine.

"Inflicting maximum damage to the enemy on the ground remains our primary objective today," Medvedev wrote in a social media post on Wednesday.

Medvedev noted that President Donald Trump had on Monday paused American aid.

However, he said Ukraine's disadvantage from the US aid pause would exist only for a limited time window.

"As soon as the deal is concluded, American arms supplies will likely resume (especially since Europe has already increased them)," Medvedev wrote.

"Russia is advancing," he added. "The enemy resists and is not yet defeated."

Medvedev, who was Russia's president from 2008 to 2012 and then its prime minister for eight years after, still holds a key position in the Kremlin's top military decision-making body.

He's now the deputy chairman of the Security Council, ranking behind only Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

The former president is no stranger to hawkish rhetoric toward Ukraine and the US, previously threatening nuclear attacks on Western cities if NATO deployed soldiers in Ukraine. He's also called for a "maximum reward" bounty on such troops.

His new post comes as Ukraine's air force reported that Russia attacked with three Iskander ballistic missiles on Tuesday, alongside Moscow's regular daily barrage of over 100 Shahed attack drones.

Russia's ballistic missile attacks are rarer than its drone assaults and typically come every few weeks. This time, it launched a salvo on the same evening as Trump's address to Congress.

In a report on the military's Tuesday operations, the Russian Defense Ministry posted on Telegram that it had attacked Ukrainian airfields, an oil depot, drone production workshops, and other military assets in 150 districts.

It's still unclear how Ukraine's warfighting capabilities might be affected by a loss of continued US support. But there are fears in Kyiv that the move will scupper the effective use of critical American weapons, such as Patriot air defense systems and HIMARS long-range artillery.

"My guess is if US aid does not restart, then Ukrainians could hold out two to four months," Mark Cancian, a senior advisor on defense and security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, previously told Business Insider.

The CIA's director, John Ratcliffe, and Trump's national security advisor, Mike Waltz, both said that the US had also rolled back the amount of intelligence it shares with Ukraine.

Analysts from the Institute for the Study of War wrote on Wednesday that losing US intel would hurt Kyiv's ability to find and hit Russian ammo depots and air defense systems, giving Moscow more options to strike Ukraine and allowing its pilots to get closer to drop bombs.

The move would also hurt Ukraine's chances of detecting incoming drone attacks so it can warn civilians and troops, they added.

"Russian forces exploited the previous suspension of US military aid in early 2024, including by trying to seize Kharkiv City in May 2024 before US military aid resumed flowing to Ukrainian forces on the frontline," the analysts wrote.

US military aid to Ukraine was paused for several months last year amid resistance from congressional Republicans.

Infineon Technologies has partnered with CDIL Semiconductors to tap into emerging business cases including light EVs and battery storage solutions in India.

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• Elon Musk's involvement with the Trump administration and DOGE has drawn public ire.
• Protests are growing at Tesla showrooms across the country.
• Policy experts say it's unlikely public pressure can force Musk to change his behaviors.

The streets in Berkeley's Ocean View neighborhood are usually lined with outdoor diners and shoppers on weekends, but things have taken a turn lately. A Tesla showroom sandwiched between a furniture store and a Sephora has drawn a growing number of protesters every week over the past month.

Four weeks ago, Kathy Sprague, a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, was the lone protester in front of Berkeley's Fourth Street Tesla showroom. By Saturday, March 1, donned in a bear costume and a picket sign depicting Tesla's declining shares, she became one among a crowd of more than 300 people.

"We've not voted for Elon Musk through any electoral process or referendum, and I feel the need to show up and disapprove even if it's just by myself," Sprague said. "I have friends who bought Teslas a couple of years ago to do right by the environment, but they certainly won't be getting new ones — that would feel very wrong."

"There are so many other EV options out there," she added, gesturing at the VinFast showroom, a Vietnamese EV company next door to Tesla.

The protest in Berkeley started small, then quickly swelled past noon. A 10-foot Cybertruck made of cardboard was paraded down the block and placed in the middle of the road for participants to spray paint. A six-piece Mariachi band spread out in front of the showroom with guitar, violin, and trumpets. Two protesters showed up with a raccoon puppet on a picket sign reading, "This is trash," referencing an internet meme that the Cybertruck looks so much like a trashcan that raccoons would attempt to dig through it. People driving Teslas down the street faced chants of "sell your car" and, on a few occasions, were intentionally blocked by banners and forced to turn back.

Alex Winter, one of the main organizers behind the Tesla protests and the creator of the Tesla Takedown website, told Business Insider that the movement against Musk started on Bluesky between friends and activists and snowballed when he created the webpage to help centralize the effort.

The Los Angeles-based director and writer said that while he was initially not expecting a significant response, thousands of people now visit the website every hour, and they have hundreds of events planned globally.

"Online disinformation and the rise of the far-right has been a peak area of interest for me for a long time in my work," Winter said. "I've been concerned about Elon Musk back since he was at PayPal, and then with the purchase and dismantling of Twitter, and now it has reared its head in a way that I think the rest of the world has woken up to."

The scene at this California showroom was just one of many protests scheduled at Tesla retail locations across the country, all part of a broader display of discontent against Musk over his involvement with the Trump administration and DOGE's efforts to decrease the size of the federal workforce. Many are also critical of a gesture Musk made during Trump's inauguration festivities that is widely interpreted as a Nazi salute, which Musk said was "misunderstood."

The sole Tesla showroom in San Francisco has faced at least five sizable protests within two weeks, while Tesla cars, showrooms, and service centers are being defaced and vandalized in major cities across the country.

On social media, Tesla owners lament being flipped off and cut off on freeways. Many have purchased bumper stickers reading "I bought this before Elon went crazy" to avoid negative perceptions, with thousands of such sticker sales on Amazon alone. A group of TikTokers has also been tailgating Cybertrucks at night and projecting anti-Musk messages onto the flat trunk of the vehicle, such as "I wonder if everyone who's passing me thinks I'm a Nazi?"

The California New Car Dealers Association reports that registrations of Tesla vehicles in the state have been declining over the past five quarters, falling by 11.6% in 2024 compared to the year before.

Brian Maas, president of the California New Car Dealers Association, said that though Tesla's decline has put pressure on the state's green energy transition as the manufacturer with the largest market share, other zero-emission car makers are ready to step in.

"What's happened to Tesla, among many, many other factors, is there's robust competition now in the zero-emission vehicle market that just didn't exist 10 years ago," Maas said. "A number of manufacturers out there have really spent incredible time, money, and effort to carve out and build a niche in the EV market."

Across the Atlantic, Tesla also suffered a decline in sales. According to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association, Tesla sold 9,945 vehicles in Europe in January, down 45% from last year's 18,161 in January 2024.

The German drugstore chain Dirk Rossmann GmbH and energy company LichtBlick also announced a few months apart that they would no longer purchase Tesla vehicles for their company fleets, citing Musk's support for Trump and right-wing parties.

Charles Cho, a California resident who bought a Tesla Model Y in 2022 for around $60,000, including tax, told Business Insider that despite having had to fix the vehicle 15 times within two years because it frequently experienced failures, Musk's behavior made him determined to get his money back.

"Recently, with all of Elon Musk's antics and doing the Nazi salute, it is just not a good look," said Cho, "I don't even want to drive this Tesla anymore, and I don't want to be seen with it in public. So I got a lawyer who helped me negotiate a full buyback."

Cho said he originally bought the car to be mindful of emissions and because its technology seemed revolutionary. After giving up the Tesla in February, he put in an order for a Rivian R2 that will be released in 2026.

Experts in management and policy have told Business Insider that public pressure is unlikely to change Musk's behavior. Still, his days as a close aide to Trump may be numbered if anger against him spills over to Trump's poll numbers.

"Based on what I know of Musk, he is not one to give in to public pressure and may even see this as a fun challenge," said Larry Gerston, professor emeritus of public policy at San Jose State University. However, he added that "if his policies at DOGE generate a sufficient backlash, and that backlash piggybacks onto resentment for Trump, then Trump will cut him loose, and his megaphone may be diminished."

"I don't think anybody's about to send or chase Musk away because he is Tesla, and there is little separating the two," Gerston added.

Dr. Kellie McElhaney, an expert in organization management and a distinguished teaching fellow at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business said that as the wealthiest man in the world, Musk is diversified enough in assets that a boycott against Tesla is insufficient to prevent him from doing as he pleases, but such a movement allows people to feel empowered during a time when it's easy to feel completely powerless.

"The individual consumer truck sales or car sales can be down, but if the current government can promise to buy a fleet, there will probably be no negative impact on Tesla," McElhaney said. "But maybe we focus too much on the financial impact on the brand when the right focus is the human impact of feeling like we have powers, which is a better metric."

• Robinhood CEO says prediction markets are the "future of not just trading, but also information."
• Vlad Tenev said he wants Robinhood to play a 'leading role' in developing them.
• Prediction markets are bets on the outcome of a future event, like an election.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said his company is going all in on prediction markets, saying they're the "future."

Tenev discussed prediction markets and his financial services company during Friday's episode of "Hard Fork," a podcast produced by The New York Times. Tenev — who's worth over $3 billion — shared his opinion about how the prediction market differs from sports betting.

"I think that mechanically there's some similarities, but they're different things," Tenev said.

"First of all, I think prediction markets are the future of not just trading, but also information," he said. "I've been a big believer in the power of prediction markets for a long time — kind of a student of them — and I think prediction markets should be live for everything."

Prediction markets are essentially bets on the outcome of future events. Traders place bets based on what they believe will happen. If enough people participate, the collective input could be a strong indicator of what might actually happen.

Tenev compared prediction markets to traditional news models like newspapers and broadcast news.

"People pay for broadcast news, too, indirectly in the form of advertising. So, what prediction markets are is the news faster, right?" Tenev said. "In some cases, you get it even before it happens. So, the economic value of that as a product and service should be at least as high, and I would argue strictly greater, than the news after it happens."

Robinhood had some success with its prediction market for the 2024 presidential election, which largely predicted Donald Trump would win though Kamala Harris made a late surge after an influential Iowa poll wrongly predicted the state would land in the Democrat's column. Prediction markets on various betting platforms — normally a realm for sports — exploded in popularity during the election.

Robinhood also launched Super Bowl event contracts earlier this month but stopped the rollout after a request from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

"At the end of the day, I think what you'll see is prediction markets are here to stay," he said. "I think some of the details around what types of prediction markets are classified in what category I think will be worked out, but Robinhood will play a leading role in that because I think this is like incredibly important technology."

Tenev talked about the potential prediction markets have for Robinhood's business during its 2024 fourth-quarter earnings call this month.

"So we were one of the few platforms that offered the ability to trade the election and that was very successful for us," Tenev said. "We had over half a billion contracts traded in right around a week leading up to the election, and so what you should expect from us is a comprehensive events platform that will give access to prediction markets across a wide variety of contracts later this year."

Road rage has been around for a while. A newer phenomenon that’s cropping up is EV charging rage — the feeling when a fellow EV owner cuts the line to grab one of the only working charge ports. It’s common enough that people posted altercations between EV drivers on social media and forums. In at […]

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Hydrogen electric trucking startup Nikola Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Wednesday after it failed to find a buyer or secure additional funds to maintain operations.  Nikola was once a Silicon Valley darling, valued at $30 billion in June 2020 after it went public through a special purpose acquisition merger. But a series of […]

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Monolinguists wanting to communicate with the global masses have never had it so easy. Trusty old Google Translate can convert the content of images, audio, and entire websites across hundreds of languages, while newer tools such as ChatGPT also serve as handy pocket translators. On the back end, DeepL and ElevenLabs have have reached lofty […]

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In November 2019, I was overjoyed to drive a new Jaguar I-Pace off the dealer's lot. Five years later, I'm waiting for Jaguar to drive the car away.

After two recalls for software updates, the car's range is now permanently restricted to 80 percent of what it was new. And along with owners of over 2,700 2019 I-Paces, I'm waiting for Jaguar to buy the car back. That's because the company has decided that purchasing the cars is cheaper—and likely easier—than identifying and replacing defective battery packs. It's a frustrating situation to be in, and not just because I can no longer drive a car I have grown to like.

Why did I buy an I-Pace? Good question—after all, Jaguars are not renowned for being paragons of reliability. 2019 was also the first year for the I-Pace, and buying a car in its first model can be a risky move as unanticipated manufacturing and parts problems rear their heads. One example: The original wiring harness in the I-Pace was poorly designed, so Jaguar ended up replacing many of them (including mine), which the mechanic told me took 11 hours and involved disassembling the front of the car.

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BMW has pledged to continue investing in combustion engine and hybrid technology as it warned of a “rollercoaster ride” in the US transition to electric vehicles following the return of Donald Trump as president.

Board member Jochen Goller said the group remained optimistic about sales of petrol and plug-in hybrids in the US even if demand for EVs slowed over the next few years on the back of policy changes under the new administration.

“I think it would be naive to believe that the move towards electrification is a one-way road. It will be a rollercoaster ride,” Goller, who is in charge of customer, brands, and sales, told the Financial Times at BMW’s headquarters in Munich.

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A wave of automakers and battery makers — foreign and domestic — have pledged to produce North American–made batteries before 2030.

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• The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N is the new high-performance variant of the Korean compact EV SUV.
• I recently drove a 2025 Ioniq 5 N with an eye-catching "Soultronic Orange" paint job.
• I was impressed by the EV's retro, rally car styling, supercar performance, and advanced tech.

The Hyundai Ioniq 5 has been a popular compact EV amongst consumers over the last couple of years, with sales up 31% to more than 44,000 units in 2024.

This year, Hyundai introduced two new Ioniq 5 flavors: the off-road-capable XRT trim and the high-performance N.

I recently tested a 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N in Soultronic Orange with an as-tested price of $67,685. I was impressed by the EV's retro rally car styling, supercar performance, and its advanced suite of driving and infotainment tech.

11 stand-out features help make it an incredible high-performance EV rally car.

Rally car styling

Despite being labeled an SUV, the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N is a hot hatchback in the truest sense. It evokes classic rally racers from the 1980s and early 90s, like the Lancia Delta Integrale.

The N's revised front fascia features aerodynamic elements like wings and active air flaps for improved cooling. Out back, the N is equipped with a large spoiler up top and a diffuser that protrudes from the bumper to optimize airflow.

Compared to the standard Ioniq 5, the N is about an inch lower, two inches wider at the bottom due to wider tires, and over three inches longer due to the rear diffuser.

Dual motor power

The N is equipped with a 233-horsepower permanent management synchronous electric motor up front and a more powerful 378-horsepower unit out back. Together, they produce 601 total system horsepower, nearly double the 320 horsepower of the regular AWD Ioniq 5.

N Grin Boost

The Ioniq 5 N features an 'N Grin Boost' feature that unleashes a temporary boost of extra power. By pushing the orange "NGB" button on the steering wheel, the Ioniq 5 N's total power output jumps from 601 to 641 horsepower in 10-second bursts.

Simulated rally car driving experience

The Ioniq 5 N takes everything that's wonderful about high-performance EVs, instant torque, and mind-bending acceleration and stuffs it into a package with the visceral pleasures of an internal combustion rally car.

When the right performance settings are engaged, a tachometer appears, and the car revs like it has a turbocharged four-cylinder engine under the hood, thanks to Hyundai's N Active Sound+ system.

Launch the EV, and its N e-shift feature allows you to work your way through simulated gears designed to mimic the feel of an eight-speed dual-clutch transmission.

It delivers a simulated ICE experience that feels slightly surreal but is like no other vehicle on the market.

Incredible acceleration

Hyundai claims the 4,900-lb SUV can go from 0 to 60 mph in 3.25 seconds and reach a top speed of 162 mph. Motor Trend was able to go even quicker with a 0-60 time of just 2.8 seconds.

Fast charging

According to Hyundai, the Ioniq 5 N can charge from 10% to 80% in just 18 minutes at a rate of over 250kw. With a 240V level-two charger, its batteries can charge from 10% to 100% in about 7 hours.

The SUV also has bi-directional charging capability, which means it can power small appliances outside the vehicle.

Performance wheels and tires

The N gets upgraded 21-inch wheels with sticky 275mm wide Pirelli P-Zero tires. Behind the rims are massive 15.75-inch front brakes and 14.2-inch units in the rear.

Special performance tech

Hyundai loaded its EV with an extensive array of tech that was designed to maximize the Ioniq 5's performance potential on the race track.

For example, drivers can manually tune torque distributed between the front and rear axles. There's also an electronic limited-slip differential for improved cornering performance and an upgraded thermal management system for its battery pack to limit power loss due to excessive heat.

The battery management system also allows drivers to pre-condition their batteries before driving for different types of racing, like a "Drag" mode for short bursts at full power or a "Track" mode that prioritizes sustained performance lapping a race course.

The Ioniq 5 N also has N Brake Regen, which maximizes the regenerative braking ability of its EV drive system to assist the vehicle's mechanical brakes to limit brake fade.

Finally, there's the N Drift Optimizer, AKA drift mode, which helps the driver maintain a drift through a corner.

Light-up N-branded seats

The Ioniq 5 N's special lightweight sport bucket seats come with light-up "N" logos. The heated and ventilated faux leather bucket seats are well bolstered and proved exceptionally supportive in the corners. However, they are manually adjusted, which can be a bit of an annoyance when getting into and out of the vehicle.

Excellent infotainment

The Ioniq 5's 12.3-inch touchscreen runs the latest version of Hyundai's corporate infotainment system, which is easy to navigate and loaded with features.

The screen also houses the N's many performance feature menus and a surround-view camera.

The Ioniq 5 N comes standard with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.

Impressive standard safety tech

The Ioniq 5 N comes standard with pretty much every piece of safety and driver's assistance tech in Hyundai's arsenal, including a surround-view monitor, blind spot view monitor, blind spot collision avoidance, navigation-based smart cruise control, lane-following assist, and lane-keeping assist.

Social media changed everything, from news consumption to shopping. Now, Dub thinks it can do the same for investing through an influencer-driven marketplace where users can follow the trades of top investors with a few taps. Think of it as TikTok meets Wall Street. Founded by 23-year-old Steven Wang — a Harvard dropout who began […]

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• Elon Musk brought up fairy tales, trains, and toddlers during Tesla's fourth-quarter earnings call.
• The carmaker's CEO also touched on telescopes, Superman, and inventors shouting "Eureka!"
• Scroll down for Musk's nine best quotes from the call.

Elon Musk touched on everything from fairy tales and toddlers to trains and telescopes during Tesla's fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

The automaker's CEO nodded to "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," joked about people shooting lasers out of their eyes like Superman, and said he wanted to "make manufacturing cool again."

Here are Musk's nine best quotes from the call:

1. "Some of these things I've said for quite a long time, and I know people have said, 'Well, Elon is the boy who cried wolf like several times.' But I'm telling you, there's a damn wolf this time, and you can drive it. In fact, it could drive you. It's a self-driving wolf." (Musk was joking about how he'd repeatedly pushed back the release of Full Self-Driving.)
2. "For a lot of people, they, like, their experience of Tesla autonomy is like — if it's even a year old, if it's even two years old — it's like meeting someone when they're like a toddler and thinking that they're going to be a toddler forever. But obviously they're not going be a toddler forever. They grow up. But if their last experience was like, 'Oh, FSD was a toddler.' It's like: 'Well, it's grown up now. Have you seen it? It's like, walks and talks.'"

3. "It's one of those things where I think long term, Optimus will be — Optimus has the potential to be north of $10 trillion in revenue, like it's really bananas. So, that, you can obviously afford a lot of training compute in that situation. In fact, even $500 billion training compute in that situation would be quite a good deal." (Musk was discussing how much it might cost to train Tesla's humanoid robots and how lucrative they could be for the company.)

   

4. "Now, with Optimus, there's a lot of uncertainty on the exact timing because it's not like a train arriving at the station for Optimus. And like, we're literally designing the train and the tracks and the station in real time."
5. "There is no company in the world that is as good at real-world AI as Tesla. I don't even know who's in second place. Like you say, like, who's in the second place for real-world AI? I would need a very big telescope to see them. That's how far behind they are."

6. "The Hollywood thing is like, it's like some lone inventor in a garage goes 'Eureka!' and, suddenly, it files a patent and, suddenly, there's millions of units. I'm like, listen guys, we're missing really 99% of the story.

   "Hollywood shows you the 1% inspiration but forgets about the 99% perspiration of actually figuring out how to make that initial prototype manufacturable and then manufactured at high volume such that the product is reliable, low cost, consistent, doesn't break down all the time, and that is 100 times harder at least than the prototype."

7. "Obviously, humans drive without shooting lasers out of their eyes — I mean, unless you're Superman."
   (Musk was explaining why he doesn't believe LiDAR is the best technology to enable autonomous driving.)
8. "Well, at Tesla, obviously, we think manufacturing is cool. SpaceX, we think manufacturing is cool. But in general, for talented Americans, they need to — beyond my companies, beyond me and my teams here, in general, we need to make manufacturing cool again in America. And like, I honestly think people should move from like law and finance into manufacturing. That's my honest opinion. We have too many — this is both a compliment and a criticism. We have too much talent in law and finance in America, and there should be more of that talent in manufacturing."
9. "But yeah, we're in this perverse situation where people will turn the car off autopilot so the computer doesn't yell at them, check their text messages while steering the car with their knee and not looking out the window."
   (Musk was discussing how Tesla's autopilot warns drivers not to look at their devices for safety, leading some to enable manual driving and then check their texts and emails.)

Tesla earnings day is upon us — the quarterly check-in with one of the world’s largest EV makers and its controversial CEO Elon Musk. Tesla’s fourth-quarter and full-year earnings are expected to be released Wednesday after market close. A webcast, in which Tesla management will answer questions from analysts and retail investors, is scheduled to […]

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Owners of the electric Lucid Gravity SUV will gain access to Tesla’s Supercharging network starting January 31.  The Gravity is Lucid’s second vehicle model in its lineup after its flagship Air sedan series, and the first to be built with charge ports compatible with Tesla’s NACS (North American Charging Standard) charge plugs. Lucid Air owners will […]

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• President Donald Trump moved to axe Biden-era tax incentives around electric vehicle purchases.
• Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe told BI EV companies like his face uncertainty but aren't doomed.
• Scaringe said a lack of an EV tax incentive has pushed Rivian to explore lower-priced vehicles.

The CEO of electric vehicle startup Rivian said President Donald Trump's move to revoke EV subsidies isn't keeping him up at night.

In an interview with Business Insider at Rivian's new San Francisco flagship store on Thursday, CEO RJ Scaringe said the EV industry faces a "high degree of uncertainty" in the next few years, but that Trump's step to axe the Biden Administration's Inflation Reduction Act, which included a $7,500 tax incentive for EV purchases, is "less impactful than people believe."

"I don't think removing a $7,500 credit is going to change the end state," he said. "The end state's still clear. It's still going to be electric."

Scaringe said the removal of the credit creates an opportunity for Rivian to explore lower-priced vehicles.

In March, Rivian announced its R2 SUV, which will have a $45,000 starting price point. The company plans to begin production in 2026.

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that signaled his intention to eliminate what he calls the "electric vehicle (EV) mandate and promote true consumer choice." The order said it would remove "state emissions waivers" and other "ill-conceived government-imposed market distortions that favor EVs over other technologies and effectively mandate their purchase."

Stocks for smaller EV companies fell shortly after, with Rivian falling more than 6%. The CEO shrugged it off.

"It wasn't like market values dropped by 50%. They dropped by 5, 10%," he said.

Scaringe called the Biden-era subsidies a "tailwind," but he said Rivian's business wasn't designed to rely on incentives and his company didn't expect them to last forever.

"It's not like the business has some deep fundamental design around IRA," he said, referring to the Inflation Reduction Act. "It was there — that was nice. It's not going to be there now, but it's okay."

EVs have become a hot-button political issue in recent years. Former President Joe Biden pushed electric vehicles as part of his administration's broader goal to combat climate change. Trump has repeatedly bashed the technology, once calling them "too expensive," and criticized their range at a rally in Detroit in 2023.

Scaringe said his vehicles have attracted customers across the political spectrum. He also said the best way to combat the controversy around EVs is to create a product people want.

"I think we have to be really careful that it doesn't feel like people are being forced to make a decision," he said. "And so the best way to do that is to make products that are so cool and so desirable that it's not something that you're buying purely because it's sustainable, you're buying it because it's exciting."

It can be challenging for developers of fintech apps to integrate repayment, balance transfer, and bill pay functionality. Devs often have to deal with a patchwork of brittle screen-scraping APIs to extract data from users’ financial institutions — or worse, tools to process mounds of physical checks and paperwork. Three friends and entrepreneurs — Jose […]

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• CATL's cochair said EVs in China have gotten a new label: EIV.
• The term stands for "electric intelligent vehicles," Pan Jian said Tuesday at a Davos panel.
• China's EV industry has seen an influx of affordable vehicles packed with AI technology.

There's a new buzzword in China's electric-vehicle industry.

Pan Jian, a cochair of the battery manufacturer and key Tesla supplier CATL, told a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday that China's automakers were shunning the traditional term EVs for "EIVs," or electric intelligent vehicles.

"We actually no longer call it EV. We call it EIV. 'I' stands for intelligent," Pan said at a session moderated by Jamie Heller, Business Insider's editor in chief. Rio Tinto CEO Jakob Stausholm and South Africa's science minister, Bonginkosi Emmanuel "Blade" Nzimande, also spoke on the panel.

Pan said the reason China's EV market is booming is that there's a "perfect marriage between E and I."

"E enables I, so that offers a whole suite of new features to consumers, which cannot be offered with traditional combustion-engine cars," he said.

A spokesperson for CATL said that the term "EIV" was not yet widespread in China but growing in popularity.

In recent years, China's booming EV market has seen an influx of affordable models packed with high-tech extras.

In March, the smartphone maker Xiaomi rolled out its $30,000 SU7 sedan, which comes with advanced autonomous-driving features and voice recognition that allows drivers to control household appliances from their car, while the EV startup Xpeng described its $26,000 P7+ electric car, which was released in November, as the world's first "AI-defined" vehicle.

Not to be outdone, other automakers have invested heavily in intelligent technology, with the Tesla rival BYD announcing last January it would spend $14 billion on artificial-intelligence and self-driving technology for its vehicles.

Zoe Zhang, an analyst at the energy consultancy Rho Motion, told BI the term "EIV" had become broadly common in China, with automakers battling to stay relevant in the country's brutally competitive EV market by offering more advanced cockpit systems and software.

"I think more and more, the car manufacturers are going to be really competing over the user experience," Zhang said.

She said that Chinese automakers were investing heavily in making their EVs more intelligent and building their own hardware, such as chips.

"It's easier to incorporate those intelligent functions on EVs than traditional combustion-engine vehicles because of the chips," Zhang said, adding that this was one of the reasons Chinese consumer-electronics companies like Xiaomi and Huawei pivoted into EVs.

At Davos, Pan also hailed China's talent pool of software engineers, nurtured by homegrown companies like Xiaomi, Alibaba, and Tencent, saying it has given China's EV industry an edge.

His comments come as EV sales in China are set to rise 20% this year to more than 12 million, with them outpacing conventional-car sales for the first time.

• Ivanka Trump wore diamond jewelry with a total value of $1.1 million at Donald Trump's inauguration.
• She wore the jewelry with gowns designed by Oscar de la Renta and Givenchy.
• Her diamond pieces came from Leviev, a jewelry brand owned by Israeli diamond magnate Lev Leviev.

Ivanka Trump wore over $1.1 million worth of diamond jewelry from Leviev at events held in honor of President Donald Trump's inauguration.

At a dinner the night before the inauguration, Ivanka Trump wore a custom Oscar de la Renta dress embroidered with crystals and pearls along with diamond and platinum pear-shaped drop earrings from Leviev. The 18.08-carat earrings retail for $900,000, a Leviev representative told Business Insider.

At the Liberty Inaugural Ball after the swearing-in ceremony, Ivanka Trump wore two more pieces from Leviev: a diamond necklace totaling 50 carats and 10-carat diamond cluster earrings. The necklace retails for around $180,000 and the earrings cost $60,000, the representative said.

Ivanka's Givenchy haute-couture gown was inspired by a dress the fashion house created for Aubrey Hepburn's character in "Sabrina" in 1954.

Between the two events, Ivanka Trump's inaugural jewelry totaled just over $1.1 million in value.

The jewelry brand was founded by Lev Leviev, an Israeli diamond magnate with ties to Ivanka's husband, Jared Kushner.

In 2015, Kushner bought four floors of the former New York Times headquarters from Africa Israel Investments, of which Leviev is the controlling shareholder, and its partner, Five Mile Capital, for $295 million.

Kushner will reportedly continue to advise his father-in-law on Middle East affairs in an unofficial capacity, while Ivanka Trump has made clear that she's done with politics.