In 2021, Hertz announced that it was going to order 100,000 electric vehicles from Tesla by the end of 2022. Turns out the car rental company is far from being able to reach that number still, and it may take a while to get to 100,000, if it even gets there, because it's slowing down its plans to electrify its fleet. During the company's third-quarter earnings call (PDF), CEO Stephen Scherr said Hertz's "in-fleeting of EVs will be slower than [its] prior expectations."

Hertz reported a 13 percent margin for the quarter, which Scherr said would've been "several points higher" if not for the cost challenges associated with EVs. One of the factors that affected the company's margins was depreciation, compounded by the one-third drop in retail prices of the electric cars in its fleet. Tesla had implemented several price cuts over the past year, slashing the Model S and X prices by nearly 20 percent in September.

In addition, the CEO said that EVs are costing Hertz "about twice in terms of damage cost repair than a conventional internal combustion engine vehicle." He said the company is working directly with Tesla to look at its cars' performance and lower the risk of damage, as well when it comes parts procurement and labor. The company disclosed in its earnings report that 80 percent of its EVs is made up of Tesla vehicles, which means it has 35,000 Tesla in its fleet out of 50,000. As CNBC explains, EVs come with their own set of maintenance challenges, potentially brought about by their heavier weight. Aside from those two factors, moving a portion of its EV fleet from ridesharing use to leisure had affected its margins, as well. Hertz rents Tesla EVs to Uber and Lyft drivers, and it's now planning to move the vehicles it removed from the pool back to its ridesharing business.

Scherr said Hertz remains committed to its long-term plan to electrify its fleet, but it's going to pace itself while it looks for solutions to its EV-related issues. The CEO talked about how taking on EVs by other manufacturers like GM could address some of the problems it's facing. He expects Hertz to be able to purchase them at an "appreciably lower price point" than the prices it paid for its Tesla vehicles. He also thinks that those cars "will likely speak to lower incidence of damage," as well as to "a lower cost of parts and labor." GM and other traditional automakers have a broad parts supply network nationwide established over the decades, which will make it easier — and potentially cheaper due to aftermarket availability — to procure components.

Cruise has paused all its driverless operations, the company has announced on LinkedIn and X. The GM-backed self-driving firm explained that it's taking time to examine its "processes, systems and tools" and that it will "reflect on how [it] can better operate in a way that will earn public trust." Cruise has been thrust under the spotlight recently after the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) suspended its permits to operate driverless vehicles in the state due to several safety related issues. The California Public Utilities Commission also suspended the license giving Cruise the right to charge passengers for robotaxi rides. 

One of the latest incidents involving a Cruise vehicle happened in early October when a woman was hit by another car and was hurled in front of one of the company's driverless vehicles. Cruise's robotaxi stopped on top of her leg and pinned her underneath until first responders arrived and could extract her. The DMV suspended the company's permits a few weeks afterward. 

As CNBC notes, this move comes shortly after GM CEO Mary Barra said the automaker will support Cruise's expansion with "safety" as its "gating factor." TechCrunch says it also comes just a day after an all-hands meeting, wherein CEO Kyle Vogt told his staff that Cruise hasn't paused operations outside of California. To note, the company has driverless fleets in Phoenix, Austin, Houston, Dallas and Miami, as well. 

The company didn't elaborate on what examining its tools and systems entail and how exactly it intends to "rebuild public trust." For now, Cruise will only be deploying autonomous vehicles with drivers behind the wheel. 

Spotify's royalty model will get a massive revamp next year to give "working artists" a bigger cut, according to Music Business Worldwide. Starting in the first quarter of 2024, Spotify will reportedly implement three changes meant to "combat three drains on the royalty pool." The first one is establishing a minimum number of annual streams a track must reach before it starts generating royalties, which is supposed to demonetize tracks that earn less than 5 cents a month.

Apparently, while these tracks make up a tiny percentage of music on the platform — 99.5 percent of all monetized content will still be earning money after this change — their royalties still cost Spotify tens of millions of dollars a year. Based on Music Business Worldwide's computations, a track has to generate 200 plays a year to be able to earn 5 cents. As The Verge notes, the company is already getting flak for this particular change, because there are a lot of indie tracks that don't reach that threshold. Smaller artists might see their already meager earnings dwindle so that popular artists could get paid more. 

Meanwhile, the second change coming to the platform will leverage its anti-fraud detection technology. If it detects illegal activity, such as the use of AI tools to repeatedly stream tracks and artificially boost their play count, the company will slap their distributors with financial penalties. Spotify is hoping that by enforcing a per-track penalty, it could deter people from committing streaming fraud in the long run. How effective this move is, of course, depends on the accuracy of the company's fraud detection technology. 

The third and the last change in the service's royalty model will affect creators of "non-music noise content," such as white noise and binaural beats. At the moment, there are a lot of noise tracks on Spotify that are only 31 seconds long, uploaded that way because the platform pays for every play that's longer than half a minute. With the change that's supposedly coming, though, Spotify will require these noise tracks to meet a minimum length of time before they can generate royalties. 

While this move can potentially cut noise creators' earnings significantly, Spotify originally wanted to take even more drastic measures. According to a previous Bloomberg report, the company considered removing white noise content from its platform altogether and prohibiting future uploads in the category, because doing so would raise its annual gross profit by as much as $38 million. Spotify neither confirmed nor denied these changes — "We do not have any news to share at this time," a spokesperson told Music Business Worldwide — so we'll have to wait for its official announcement to know if they're real and when they will be implemented if that's the case.

Ford has called its 20,000 employees back to work now that it has reached a tentative agreement with the United Auto Workers (UAW). The two parties have agreed on a new four-year labor contract that include a 25 percent pay increase for employees over that period, according to Reuters and The New York Times. With the cost-of-living wage adjustments the union has also successfully negotiated, the total pay hikes would amount to 33 percent, the UAW said. In addition to a wage hike, the contract also has stipulations for higher pensions and the right to strike over company plans to close factories. 

Based on those rates, the highest-paid employees at Ford will ultimately be earning more than $40 an hour, up from $32, and have a base pay of $83,000 for a 40-hour-a-week workload. Meanwhile, recent hires will see their pay double over the next four years. As The Times notes, Ford initially offered to pay its workers 23 percent more, telling the union that it's what the company could afford without making big changes to its business. However, the UAW pushed for a bigger percentage and managed to reach this agreement with Ford by having thousands of its workers walk out over the past few weeks. 

Approximately 8,700 personnel at the company's largest truck plant in Kentucky had stopped working, along with another 10,000 in Illinois and Michigan. Around two weeks after the strikes began, Ford suspended the construction of a Michigan battery factory for electric vehicles "until [it's] confident about [its] ability to competitively operate the plant."

Ford, like other automakers, are taking steps to electrify its fleet in hopes of having an all electric vehicle lineup over the next 10 years or so. The automakers affected by the strike, which also include GM and Stellantis, previously said that their electrification efforts currently costing them billions of dollars would be affected by the union's demands. "Toyota, Honda, Tesla and the others are loving the strike, because they know the longer it goes on, the better it is for them," Ford executive chairman William C. Ford Jr. said. Tesla and the Japanese automakers aren't unionized, but the UAW argued that its success with the current strikes could give it the momentum it needs to expand and organize at other companies. 

Nissan has introduced a new concept vehicle at the Japan Mobility Show, and it looks like a slightly pared back Batmobile with its sharp lines and scissor doors. The automaker has been introducing one concept vehicle per week since the beginning of October, with the Hyper Force being its newest and last entry. Nissan envisions the Hyper Force as an all electric vehicle designed for both racing enthusiasts and gamers. In fact, it's supposed to come with an augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) driving experience. 

The idea is to give owners the option to drive their vehicle in the virtual world — while it's not moving, of course — through a special VR helmet with blind visors. That helmet will give users access to a gamified driving experience, where they can race against the clock or against other online racers, including their friends and "professional drivers' digital ghosts" on a circuit. 

As for the car itself, Nissan designed it to have an all-solid-state battery that can produce an output of up to 1,000 kW. It's also supposed to come with advanced autonomous driving capabilities, thanks to its LIDAR system and an array of sensors meant for sports driving.

The Hyper Force has two driving modes, one of which is the R or the racing mode that bathes the cabin in red light and extends panels on the dashboard toward the driver seat to enhance the feeling of being in a cockpit. Meanwhile, in GT or grand touring mode, all the screens and panels glow blue and move away from the driver seat. By the way, if the vehicle's panels, cockpit and graphical user interface look familiar in the video below, that's because Nissan designed them in collaboration with Polyphony Digital Inc., the developer of Gran Turismo. 

Since it's just a concept, nobody will be driving the Hyper Force anytime soon. Nissan president and CEO Makoto Uchida described the concept cars the company showcased at the event as "symbols of the future [that] embody [the company's] founding spirit of 'daring to do what others don't.'"

In addition to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and the Snapdragon X Elite, Qualcomm has also introduced the S7 and S7 Pro Gen 1 at the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii. The company said its new chips deliver six times the compute power of their predecessor's, along with on-device AI capabilities. More intriguing, perhaps, is the S7 Pro's micro-power Wi-Fi connectivity, which will apparently allow users to "walk around a home, building or campus while listening to music or making calls." 

As The Verge notes, the chip uses Qualcomm's Expanded Personal Area Network (XPAN) technology that can automatically switch a device's connection. When a user strays too far from their phone while their earbuds are connected to it via Bluetooth, for instance, XPAN switches the connection to a Wi-Fi access point. It can deliver 96kHz lossless audio via earbuds, Qualcomm's Dino Bekis told the publication, and it works with 2.4, 5 and 6GHz bands. Bekis also said that users only have to click on a prompt once to connect their earbuds powered by the chip to their Wi-Fi.

Outside of the S7 Pro's Wi-Fi connectivity, the platforms' on-board AI enable better responsiveness to the listener's environment if they want to hear ambient sounds. But if they want to block out their environment completely, the chips are supposed to be capable of Qualcomm's "strongest ever ANC performance" regardless of earbud fit. 

These features will only be enabled when headsets, earbuds and speakers powered by the S7 and S7 Pro are paired with devices equipped with the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile platform and Snapdragon X Elite, though. That means we won't be seeing products with the new sound chips on the market anytime soon. When they do come out, they'll most likely be meant for Android devices, seeing as Apple has its own ecosystem.

"Right to repair" advocates probably couldn't have imagined that Apple would be one of the biggest names on their side a mere five years ago. But that's precisely what's happening here: The tech giant has officially came out in support of having federal right to repair regulations at an event hosted by the Biden administration. Apple VP Brian Naumann proclaimed at the event that the company "supports a uniform federal law that balances repairability with product integrity, data security, usability, and physical safety." He also said that the company intends to "honor California's new repair provisions across the United States" even though national regulations have yet to be established. 

Apple has a lengthy history of opposing attempts at passing right to repair rules. The company once said that Nebraska was bound to become a "mecca for hackers" when a bill was introduced in the state. It changed its tune in the past few years, however, and started selling parts and tools to consumers, as well as offering them access to repair guides so they could fix their iPhones and Macs on their own. Apple also backed Senator Susan Talamantes Eggman's right to repair bill in California in August before Governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law. 

Under California rules, device makers are required to stock replacement parts and tools and offer repair documentation for three years for gadgets that cost between $50 and $99. For devices that cost over $100, they're required to provide parts, tools and documentation for seven years. Apple already sells parts and repair tools across the US, but if it's following California provisions nationwide, that means those items and its repair guides would be available for years to anyone in the country.

In addition to promising to honor California's right to repair provisions across the nation, Naumann also talked about what an ideal federal law should have. "We believe that a uniform federal repair law should do the following: Maintain privacy, data and device security features which help to thwart theft; Ensure transparency for consumers about the type of parts used in a repair; Apply prospectively, to allow manufacturers to focus on building new products that can comply with the proposals; And finally, create a strong national standard that benefits consumers across the US and reduces the confusion created by potentially conflicting state approaches," he said. 

Google has disabled live traffic updates for Israel and Gaza in Maps and Waze, a spokesperson has confirmed to Bloomberg. "As we have done previously in conflict situations and in response to the evolving situation in the region, we have temporarily disabled the ability to see live traffic conditions and busyness information out of consideration for the safety of local communities," the spokesperson said. Israeli blog GeekTime reports that Apple has switched off the same feature in its Maps app, as well.

Google told The Hill that people can still use Maps and Waze to get route and ETA information that "take current traffic conditions into account." They just won't be able to see real-time traffic data in the apps like they could in the past. It's unclear if Apple is also retaining some of its Maps' navigation capabilities. 

This move, made by both companies, comes just ahead of the Israeli military's anticipated ground invasion into Gaza, wherein it reportedly plans to deploy tens of thousands of soldiers to capture the city. One of Bloomberg's sources said Google disabled live traffic to comply with a request made by the Israel Defense Forces, likely because the feature could reveal its troops' movements and tip off Hamas, which the US and the EU recognize as a terrorist organization. The Hill says Apple also removed live traffic in the region to comply with the IDF's request. 

Prior to this development, one of the most recent examples of Google disabling the ability to see live traffic conditions "in conflict situations" happened in 2022. The company deactivated Maps' live traffic data in Ukraine back then, following Russia's invasion of the country. It explained at the time that it implemented the change to protect the safety of locals, and that it came to the decision to do so after consulting with Ukranian authorities. 

NASA has revealed that it has already processed 70.3 grams of rocks and dust collected by the OSIRIS-REx mission from asteroid Bennu. That means the mission has way exceeded its goal of bringing 60 grams of asteroid samples back to Earth — especially since NASA scientists have yet to open the primary sample container that made its way back to our planet in September. Apparently, they're struggling to open the mission's Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) and could not remove two of its 35 fasteners using the tools currently available to them. 

The scientists are processing the samples inside a specialized glovebox (pictured above) with a flow of nitrogen in order to keep them from being exposed to our atmosphere and any contaminants. They can't just use any implement to break the container's fasteners open either: The tool must fit inside the glovebox, and it also must not compromise the samples' integrity. NASA has sealed the primary container sample for now, while it's developing the procedure to be able to open it over the next few weeks. 

If you're wondering where the 70.3 grams of rocks and dust came from, well, NASA collected part of it from the external sample receptacle but outside TAGSAM itself. It also includes a small portion of the samples inside TAGSAM, taken by holding down its mylar flap and reaching inside with tweezers or a scoop. NASA's initial analysis of the material published earlier this month said it showed evidence of high carbon content and water, and further studies could help us understand how life on Earth began. The agency plans to continue analyzing and "characterizing" the rocks and dust it has already taken from the sample container, so we may hear more details about the samples even while TAGSAM remains sealed.

Amazon, the biggest e-commerce website in most countries, now supports passkeys. That gives users access to the new login solution that's considered more secure than passwords, allowing them to access their account using the biometrics or PIN they use to unlock their devices. The company started rolling out the capability a few days ago but has only just announced the feature, which is now available on browsers and is gradually making its way to all users accessing Amazon through its iOS app. Passkey support is also "coming soon" to Amazon's Android application. 

Passkeys are resistant to phishing, the effects of data leaks or social engineering, because there are no passwords to steal or give away. Instead, the technology uses cryptographic pairs, one of which is a public key saved on a particular service's servers, while the other one remains private and is securely saved to a user's device. These pairs are unique for every service, and they must match for someone to be able to log in. It's also a lot less involved than two-factor authentication, though for some reason, Amazon will not automatically switch it off for those who turn on passkey support. 

In its FAQs, Amazon says that those who have two-factor switched on will still need to verify their identities with a one-time code even after they activate the new login option. It's unclear if users will no longer have to key in two-factor codes after their initial login with a passkey, but upon trying it out, we weren't asked for one the next time we signed in. To switch on passkey login, users only need to go to Login & Security under Your Account on Amazon and then choose "Set up" next to the new Passkeys option.