TOKYOβRacing is hard. It's hard on the teams, it's hard on the owner's bank account, it's hard on the cars, and it's especially hard on the drivers. Driving at the edge for a few hours in a vehicle cockpit that's only slightly wider than your frame can take a toll.
The A2RL (Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League) removes one of those elements from its vehicles but, in doing so, creates a whole new list of complexities. Say goodbye to the human driver and hello to 95 kilograms of computers and a whole suite of sensors. That setup was poised to be part of a demonstration "race" against former F1 driver Daniil Kvyat at Suzuka Circuit in Japan during the Super Formula season finale.
But again, racing is hard, and replacing humans doesn't change that. The people who run and participate in A2RL are aware of this, and while many organizations have made it a sport of overselling AI, A2RL is up-front about the limitations of the current state of the technology. One example of the technology's current shortcomings: The vehicles can't swerve back and forth to warm up the tires.
Yesterday, US Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Joshua Hawley (R-MO) sent letters to the heads of Ford, General Motors, and Tesla, as well as the US heads of Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Stellantis, Subaru, Toyota, and Volkswagen, excoriating them over their opposition to the right-to-repair movement.
"We need to hit the brakes on automakers stealing your data and undermining your right-to-repair," said Senator Merkley in a statement to Ars. "Time and again, these billionaire corporations have a double standard when it comes to your privacy and security: claiming that sharing vehicle data with repair shops poses cybersecurity risks while selling consumer data themselves. Oregon has one of the strongest right-to-repair laws in the nation, and thatβs why Iβm working across the aisle to advance efforts nationwide that protect consumer rights."
Most repairs arenβt at dealerships
The Senators point out that 70 percent of car parts and services currently come from independent outlets, which are seen as trustworthy and providing good value for money, "while nearly all dealerships receive the worst possible rating for price."
HEALDSBURG, Calif.βEarlier this summer, Ars got its first drive of Audi's new Q6 e-tron on some very wet roads in Spain. Then, we were driving pre-production Q6s in Euro-spec. Now, the electric SUV is on sale in the US, with more power in the base model and six months more refinement for its software. But the venue change did not bring a change of weatherβheavy rain was the order of the day, making me wonder if Audi is building its new electric vehicle on the site of an ancient rain god's temple?
Of all its rivals, Audi appears to have settled into a nomenclature for its vehicles that at least makes a little sense. Odd numbers are for internal combustion engines, even numbers for EVs, although it also appends "e-tron" on the end to make that entirely clear... and give francophones something to snicker about. (Yes, the e-tron GT does not fit into this schema, but nobody's perfect.)
The Q6 e-tron is also the most advanced EV to wear Audi's four rings. Built on a new architecture called PPE (premium platform electric), at its heart is an 800 V powertrain with a 100 kWh (94.4 kWh useable) lithium-ion battery pack that powers a permanently excited synchronous motor driving the rear wheels, and in the case of the quattro versions, an asynchronous motor. The electric motors have 30 percent less energy consumption than those used in the Q8 e-tron, and are smaller and lighter.
Today, the US Environmental Protection Agency granted a pair of waivers to California, allowing the Golden State to continue regulating vehicle-caused air pollution within its borders. The first is for the California Air Resources Board's Advanced Clean Cars II regulations, which apply to light- and medium-duty vehicles like passenger cars, SUVs, and smaller trucks. The second waiver is for regulations that control the amount of nitrogen oxides (NOx) that can be emitted by heavy-duty vehicles as well as off-road vehicles.
The Clean Air Act allows states to apply for a waiver from the EPA to set their own emissions standards in cases where the federal regulations are insufficient to prevent deleterious pollution. The state applied for the latest waivers late in 2023, and after a public comment period and then a review by the agency, the EPA decided to approve them.
"California has longstanding authority to request waivers from EPA to protect its residents from dangerous air pollution coming from mobile sources like cars and trucks," said EPA Administrator Michael Regan. "Today's actions follow through on EPA's commitment to partner with states to reduce emissions and act on the threat of climate change."
The fact that Honda was working on a new Prelude coupe was not entirely secretβnot after the automaker unveiled a show car at this year's Long Beach Grand Prix. This morning, the Japanese automaker confirmed that the new Prelude will go on sale here in the US late in 2025.
"The return of the Honda Prelude as a hybrid-electric sports model demonstrates our continued commitment to offer a variety of exhilarating products to meet the needs of our customers," said Jessika Laudermilk, assistant vice president of Honda Auto Sales. "The first three products in the Honda lineup in the 1970s were Civic, Accord, and Prelude, and soon all three will be back together again in our passenger car lineup as hybrids."
Honda has often used the two-door Prelude coupe as a testbed for new technologies, including torque vectoring and four-wheel steering, and was praised by the late automotive writer LJK Setright, who owned several Preludes across the years.
The incoming Trump administration has even more plans to delay electric vehicle adoption than previously thought. According to Reuters, which has seen transition team documents, the Trump team wants to abolish EV subsidies, claw back federal funding meant for EV charging infrastructure, block EV battery imports on national security grounds, and prevent the federal government and the US military from purchasing more EVs.
During the campaign, candidate Trump made repeated references to ending a supposed EV mandate. In fact, policies put in place by current US President Joe Biden only call for 50 percent of all new vehicles to be electrified by 2032 under EPA rules meant to cut emissions by 56 percent from 2026 levels.
More pollution
Instead, the new regime will be far more friendly to gas guzzling, as it intends to roll back EPA fuel efficiency standards to those in effect in 2019. This would increase the allowable level of emissions from cars by about 25 percent relative to the current rule set. US new vehicle efficiency stalled between 2008 and 2019, and it was only once the Biden administration began in 2021 that the EPA started instituting stricter rules on allowable limits of carbon dioxide and other pollutants from vehicle tailpipes.
Following the Czech Cybertruckβs example, now thereβs a rubber bumper-pimped Tesla truck attempting to be certified for use on British highways. This time, however, the chances of success look slim.
PHOENIXβDodge gave its development team a relatively simple brief for the new Charger: It had to look, drive, and sound like a traditional Dodge muscle car. "If we don't make people uncomfortable, where are we going," asked Matt McAleer, Dodge and SRT's CEO. And you can see what he means: customers will have a choice of battery-electric or, from next year, an inline-six gasoline engine. For now, there is no throbbing V8 version, and those options will surely make some Dodge muscle car purists a little uncomfortable.
But the new car certainly looks the part. According to Scott Krueger, vice president for exterior design at Dodge, the stylists' aimed for "heritage, not retro," and they achieved that with a sedan shape that certainly evokes the classic 1968 Charger without directly copying any of its lines. It's a car that looks great in the metal, and features like the LED strip of daylight running lights and the so-called "R-wing" at the front ensure that the design feels thoroughly modern and not a pastiche.
The Charger Daytona name is just for the BEV variantβwhen the straight-six Charger debuts next year it won't be a Daytona.
Credit:
Jonathan Gitlin
It's not exactly compact, thoughβat 206.9 inches (5,248 mm) long, 78.1 inches (2,028 mm) wide, and 58.9 inches (1,497 mm) tall, the Charger was built with American roads (and parking spaces) in mind, and is in fact 2 inches (50 mm) wider than the outgoing Charger Hellcat widebody.
Vogt, who resigned from the company in 2023, posted on the social-media platform X following GM's announcement that it would stop funding Cruise and fold it into the company's other driver-assistance efforts: "In case it was unclear before, it is clear now: GM are a bunch of dummies."
Vogt did not immediately respond to an interview request.
The automaker has been trimming costs all year as demand for electric vehicles slows, and the company reckons with a longer road to profitability for these vehicles.
"Cruise was well on its way to a robotaxi business β but when you look at the fact you're deploying a fleet, there's a whole operations piece of doing that," GM CEO Mary Barra said on a conference call, according to CNBC.
Ending investment in Cruise's robotaxi business is the latest blow for the self-driving division. Commercial robotaxi rides have been on pause since October 2023, when one of its cars injured a pedestrian.
Vogt's departure last year came just weeks after the company suspended all autonomous operations. The company has since resumed autonomous-vehicle testing with safety drivers in Arizona and Texas.
Still, some investors seemed to welcome GM's decision to pull Cruise's funding in favor of $2 billion in annual savings, sending GM's stock price up more than 3% in after-hours trading Tuesday. Shares fell more than 4% in trading Wednesday.
"While some bulls may have hoped for external funding to give Cruise a life extension, we strongly believe that most investors did not want to see GM commit more capital to Cruise," Joseph Spak, a UBS analyst, wrote in a note to clients.
After spending more than $10 billion to try to develop an autonomous robotaxi, General Motors is now calling time on the endeavor. On Tuesday afternoon, the automaker announced that it is done investing in Cruise's robotaxi development and will instead combine the startup's technical team with its internal efforts at GM.
After several years, GM has accepted the inevitable: Given the costs, there's no way to build a profitable robotaxi business. This year, GM will have spent around $2 billion on Cruise.
"GM is committed to delivering the best driving experiences to our customers in a disciplined and capital efficient manner," said Mary Barra, chair and CEO of GM. "Cruise has been an early innovator in autonomy, and the deeper integration of our teams, paired with GMβs strong brands, scale, and manufacturing strength, will help advance our vision for the future of transportation."
Amazon started selling new cars today. The online retailer and Internet giant has had its sights on shifting metal for some time now, and if you live in one of 48 cities in the US, and you're looking for a new Hyundai, it's ready for your business.
Hyundai has been working with Amazon for several years on its digital experience, adding Alexa to its cars and showcasing its products at Amazon.com. But now, with Amazon Autos, customers can go ahead and buy the car, not just learn about it so they can go to a dealer well-informed.
In fact, the dealerships remain part of the process even with Amazon Autosβhence the fact that the service is not rolling out nationwide.
The Lucid Air sedan's base Pure trim can manage 420 miles (676 km) of EPA-estimated range from just an 84 kWh battery pack. At 5 miles/kWh (12.4 kWh/100 km), the Pure is the single most efficient EV in the world, with pricing that undercuts the Tesla Model S. Yet the general public is largely unaware of Lucid as an automaker in the first place. The new Gravity, which just entered serial production last week, aims to bring more recognition to the company as a whole while achieving a similarly impressive level of efficiency in an SUV form factor.
The day after the new model began production at Lucid's factory in Casa Grande, Arizona, I spent a morning testing a pre-production Gravity in the hills of Malibu. I had previously climbed around a static concept car about a year beforehand in a small photo studio, but under the wide-open Southern California skies, the shape actually looked smaller in person than expected.
Low drag, low friction
The long and low roofline helps to reinforce that perception while maintaining Lucid's commitment to aerodynamics. Lucid's head of design, Derek Jenkins, told me that with a few more improvements to the underbody's design to help wrap airflow around suspension components like tie rod ends and ball joints, the Gravity will dip below its current 0.24 coefficient of drag. That's important because despite my visual perception, the Gravity is not a small vehicle by any means. In fact, it measures 198 inches (5,029 mm) long and 87 inches wide (2,210 mm), including the mirrors, and it's 65 inches (1,651 mm) tall.
Although there's been a whole lot of pessimism recently, electric vehicle sales continue to grow, even if it is less quickly than many hoped. That's true in the commercial vehicle space as wellβaccording to Cox Automotive, 87 percent of vehicle fleet operators expect to add EVs in the next five years, and more than half thought they were likely to buy EVs this year. And where and when to plug those EVs in to charge is a potential headache for fleet operators.
The good news is that charging infrastructure really is growing. It doesn't always feel that wayβthe $7.5 billion allocated under the Inflation Reduction Act for charging infrastructure has to be disbursed via state departments of transportation, so the process there has been anything but rapid. But according to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, the total number of public charging plugs has doubled since 2020, to more than 144,000 level 2 plugs and closing in on 49,000 DC fast charger plugs.
There are ways to throw off a planned timeline when building out a station with multiple chargers. Obviously you need the funds to pay for it allβif these are to come from grants like the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, that had to wait for the states to each develop their own funding plans, then open for submissions, and so on, before even approving a project, for example.
The original Urus was an SUV that nobody particularly wanted, even if the market was demanding it. With luxury manufacturers tripping over themselves to capitalize on a seemingly limitless demand for taller all-around machines, Lamborghini was a little late to the party.
The resulting SUV has done its job, boosting Lamborghini's sales and making up more than half of the company's volume last year. Even so, the first attempt was just a bit tame. That most aggressive of supercar manufacturers produced an SUV featuring the air of the company's lower, more outrageous performance machines, but it didn't quite deliver the level of prestige that its price demanded.
The Urus Performante changed that, adding enough visual and driving personality to make itself a legitimately exciting machine to drive or to look at. Along the way, though, it lost a bit of the most crucial aspect of an SUV: everyday livability. On paper, the Urus SE is just a plug-in version of the Urus, with a big battery adding some emissions-free range. In reality, it's an SUV with more performance and more flexibility, too. This is the Urus' Goldilocks moment.
Car people, like most flavors of enthusiasts, are often given over to ideological purity tests. Car X is better than car Y because it's naturally aspirated, not turbocharged. Hybrid Q is a pure series hybrid and is thus better than hybrid R, which sometimes operates as a parallel hybrid when that's more efficient. That kind of thing. And we definitely see that attitude when it comes to electric cars, with some people saying that a dedicated BEV will always be better than an electric version of a powertrain-agnostic platform. It's just that these kinds of purity tests rarely stand up when the actual rubber meets the road. That's true with today's car, the 2025 BMW i5 M60 xDrive.
When it was time for BMW to develop its fifth-generation EVs, it made more sense, as a smaller automaker, to create a vehicle architecture that could be equipped with internal combustion engines, plug-in hybrid powertrains, or a fully electric setup of battery plus electric motors. Purists will tell you this results in a lesser vehicle, but if that's true, why is the new i5 so much better than similar electric sedans from rivals like Mercedes, which use dedicated EV-only platforms?
In low-light conditions, the i5 M60's grille gets illuminated.
Credit:
Jonathan Gitlin
The i5 actually has a lower drag coefficient than the smaller i4.
Credit:
Jonathan Gitlin
The rear is rather reminiscent of the current Honda Accord.
Credit:
Jonathan Gitlin
Today's tester is the range-topping i5 M60 version, which boasts a hefty 593 hp (442 kW) and 586 lb-ft (795 Nm) from a pair of electrically excited synchronous motors fed by its 84.3 kWh (useable) lithium-ion battery pack. There's now a PHEV M5 that exceeds this battery EV in both performance and MSRP, but with a 0β60 time of 3.7 seconds and a starting price of $84,100β$95,395 as configured, the i5 M60 is still pretty superlative.
Sodium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage are moving toward the mainstream. Wider use of these batteries could lead to lower costs, less fire risk, and less need for lithium, cobalt, and nickel.
On November 18, CATL, the worldβs largest battery manufacturer, announced its second-generation sodium-ion battery, mass production of which would begin in 2027. The China-based company said the new battery has an energy density of 200 watt-hours per kilogram, which is an increase from 160 watt-hours per kilogram for the previous generation that launched in 2021. Higher energy density in an EV battery translates into more driving range.
On Nov. 21, a consortium of seven US national laboratories announced a new initiative in which they would spend $50 million to foster collaboration to accelerate the development of sodium-ion batteries. The partnership is led by Argonne National Laboratory in the Chicago area.
Today, Rivian announced that it is opening up the Rivian Adventure Network of fast chargers to drivers of all other makes of electric vehicles, beginning with its location in Joshua Tree, California. The Joshua Tree Charging Outpost, which has 12 DC fast chargers, is now accessible to any EV with a CCS1 charging port, as well as any Tesla or EV equipped with a native NACS (J3400) port using an adapter. A planned hardware upgrade in the future will add native NACS cables. (Rivian is switching the plugs on its own EVs from CCS1 to NACS in 2025.)
Rivian revealed its plans in early 2021 to build charging stations, a few months before it let us loose in the R1T electric pickup. The Rivian Adventure Network currently has deployed banks of fast chargers at 91 sites across the US, with another 12 in the works. (A separate Rivian Waypoint Network is building out level 2 chargers with J1772 plugs.)
All but one of the Adventure Network sites have at least six DC fast chargers, although until now, all have been the preserve of Rivians alone. In total, the automaker plans to have 3,500 DC fast chargers in the Adventure Network.
