Tesla owners are already grappling with overcrowded Supercharger stations at times, and the company is taking extra steps to minimize those long lines during the Christmas travel period. According to Electrek, Tesla has made Supercharging free at some stations during off-peak hours (7PM to 10AM local time) between December 23rd and December 26th. The stations tend to be near major routes and urban centers, and are limited to 11 states including California, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

The EV maker has tried discounting off-peak Supercharger rates before, but there have still been significant waits at some stations. Free charging during these hours is relatively new, though, and might entice owners willing to leave early (or late) to save recharging costs.

The promo underscores a growing problem for Tesla: its Supercharger network is straining to handle an ever-larger customer base. Tesla has acknowledged the issue and vowed to triple the size of the network within two years, but even that might have its limitations when the company is piloting support for non-Tesla EVs. Don't be surprised if free off-peak charging returns on occasion to help Tesla manage growth.

Nio's soon-to-arrive ET7 is practically tailor-made to challenge Tesla's Model S, and now the company appears to have a (partial) answer to the Model 3. Electreksays Nio has introduced the ET5, a more affordable "mid-size" electric sedan. It starts at RMB 328,000 (about $51,450), or well under the roughly $70,000 of the ET7, but offers similarly grandiose range figures. Nio claims the base 75kWh battery offers over 341 miles of range using China's test cycle, while the highest-end 150kWh "Ultralong Range" pack is supposedly good for more than 620 miles. You'll likely pay significantly more for the privilege and may not see that range in real life, but the numbers could still tempt you away from higher-end Model 3s if long-distance driving is crucial.

You can expect the usual heapings of technology. The ET5 will have built-in support for autonomous driving features as they're approved, and drivers get a "digital cockpit" thanks to Nreal-developed augmented reality glasses that can project a virtual screen equivalent to 201 inches at a 20-foot viewing distance. Nio has teamed with Nolo to make VR glasses, too, although it's safe to say you won't wear those while you're driving.

Deliveries are expected to start September 2022. That's a long way off, but Nio appears to be on track with its EV plans as it expects to deliver the ET7 on time (if only just) starting March 28th.

This launch also dovetails with Nio's tentative steps outside of China. The brand only expanded to Norway in 2021, but it aimed to begin sales in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden in 2022. You should see the badge in 25 countries and regions by 2025. While Nio still won't count as automotive heavyweight by that stage, it could easily put pressure on other EV makers within a few years.

Automakers have been struggling to produce an EV that looks futuristic but not pretentious. Starting at $39,700, the Hyundai Ioniq 5 seems to toe that line with a mixture of retro and futuristic design elements combined with technology that actually works as advertised.

The hatchback-esque SUV doesn’t just look cool, it’s a pleasure to drive and is the culmination of the technology Hyundai has been adding to vehicles for years. We got a chance to drive it around Southern California and suffice to say, Hyundai has produced a winner.

FedEx has received it's first five GM-built electric delivery vans out of an order of 500, the company announced. The move represents an important landmark for FedEx in its stated goal to be have an all-electric delivery fleet and be carbon neutral around the world by 2040. 

 "The delivery of the first BrightDrop EV600s is a historic moment, born out of a spirit of collaboration between two leading American companies," said FedEx's chief sustainability officer Mitch Jackson. "[T]ransforming our pickup and delivery fleet to electric vehicles is integral to achieving our ambitious sustainability goals announced earlier this year."

FedEx

FedEx was announced as a key customer for the Brightdrop EV600 vans and has been testing Brightdrop's electric EP1 pallets over the last while. GM, which owns Chevrolet and Cadillac, spun out the Brightdrop business unit early this year. "The EV600 combines the best attributes of a traditional and a step-in van into one vehicle, keeping driver safety, comfort, and convenience top of mind," said Brightdrop CEO Travis Katz. "It’s also the fastest built vehicle, from concept to market, in GM’s history."

The all-wheel-drive EV600 has 600 cubic feet of cargo space and can go up to 250 miles on a charge. Inside, drivers get a security system in the cargo area, auto-locking doors and motion-activated interior lighting. They also benefit from automatic emergency braking and parking assistance. The EP1 is a kind of trolley often found in stores an warehouses, with 23 cubic feet of space and an electric motor that makes it easier to move heavy objects. 

The first five EV600s are being delivered to FedEx's Express facility in Inglewood, California. To support them FedEx is building charging stations across its network of facilities, including 500 already installed across California. It's also working with utility companies to evaluate electrical grid capacity required for its charging infrastructure. 

While FedEx has thrown its electric delivery lot in with GM, rival UPS has ordered 10,000 electric delivery trucks from UK-based Arrival Ltd. Amazon, meanwhile, placed an order for 100,000 Rivian electric delivery vans and even owns a 20 percent piece of the company. Amazon is ahead of both FedEx and UPS, having already started Rivian electric deliveries in both Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Following months of speculation, electric transport startup Rivian shared where it plans to build a second factory. In the summer of 2022, the automaker will break ground on a facility about an hour east of Atlanta, Georgia, it announced on Thursday. Once the plant is complete sometime in 2024, the company hopes to eventually produce 400,000 electric vehicles there. It also plans to build a battery production facility nearby.

Rivian says the EV facility will cost approximately $5 billion to build and will employ more than 7,500 employees. The company will pay for it with proceeds from its recent November 10th IPO. Once complete, the facility will significantly boost Rivan’s manufacturing capacity. The automaker claims its first and currently only factory in Normal, Illinois can produce about 150,000 cars annually. It plans to eventually manufacture about 200,000 there every year.

That might seem like a lot but Rivian is still in the process of scaling production and meeting demand for its vehicles. As of December 15th, 2021, the company said it had produced 652 of its R1 vehicles. As of that same day, it had a total of 71,000 pre-orders from customers. It also needs to produce at least 100,000 trucks for Amazon. In other words, it has its work cut out for it.

Arrival, the Anglo-American startup which is hoping to revolutionize the design and manufacture of electric vehicles, is ready to talk about its first car. The Arrival Car, as it is known, is designed, first and foremost, to be used by rideshare drivers during their working day.

Much as the company doesn’t want to call it a taxi, this is more or less what the Arrival Car is, an electric update to the London black cab for cities of the future. But with a number of tweaks that mean it’s smaller and more efficient than current cars, but still has buckets of room inside.

The (capital-C) Car has been teased for a while, and back in May, Arrival announced that it had teamed up with Uber to create a “purpose-built vehicle for ride-hailing.” It’s a project with an ambitious deadline, too, with the first models expected to roll off the production line in Q3, 2023.

Visiting Arrival’s Oxfordshire HQ, I was able to look at, and sit in, the Alpha prototype, but the company is a little leery about sharing too many images of the same. That’s, in part, because it doesn’t feel the first model, built in about six months, is fully representative of what’s to come. I wasn’t allowed to take images of the car in all of its glory, and instead was supplied with a mixture of renders and close-up shots of various components.

Arrival

Part of the reason that Arrival feels confident that it can turn a car around in such a short space of time is that it’s standing very much on its own shoulders. After all, the Car uses the same integrated EV skate platform that was developed for the van and the bus. It means that Arrival can, effectively, cut its skate to the right size and plonk any cabin structure on top.

The Arrival Car is deeply uncool, a box on wheels with an emphasis on maximizing the internal space for passengers. It has the same silhouette as a French-made minivan; you could easily imagine a line of these parked outside a Saturday-morning under 15’s soccer match. But, because it wholly rejects the need to be aesthetic for the sake of aesthetics, it’s also quite cool.

And despite the sci-fi styling, there’s something quite humane about its design, something quite organic. Because the propulsion is on the floor, there’s no need for a pronounced bonnet, so the windshield just melts into the chassis. There’s a cambered glass roof stretching over the cabin, making the interior space airy and roomy.

One big focus, naturally, was on maximizing the interior space and legroom, and I’ve seen visitor centers that are more cramped. Despite sitting on (roughly) the same footprint as a VW Golf, the Car probably has more legroom than a (famously-roomy) London Black Cab. The front passenger seat can also be folded down and pushed slightly forward, should you need extra room. The height, too, means that you can easily step up and into this vehicle rather than awkwardly crouching down, which should help folks with mobility issues.

The only issue with this first version, which is likely to change in the second prototype, is the luggage space. This first model has a fairly small luggage compartment, designed for two large and two small suitcases and little else. But Tom Elvidge, EVP of Vehicle Platforms, believes that changes will be made to improve this for the second prototype.

Arrival

Arrival’s custom software platform drives the system, and the Car has a Tesla Model 3-esque 13-inch screen mounted in the middle of the dashboard. That’s good for localization, given that this will need to be made available in left and right-hand-drive models. But it also helps clear out some of the clutter that rideshare drivers sometimes have cluttering up their view.

Another driver-focused benefit is the fact that the Car has been designed to be comfortable but not full of delicate materials. Of course, a lot of this remains in flux, but the prototype uses brightly colored woven fabrics for seat covers and something spill-resistant on the floor. Given the risks of passengers dirtying up the vehicle, reducing the amount of time drivers can be on the road, ease of cleaning is a key priority.

It’s early days, and Arrival has still got the better part of two years to answer many of the key questions we have about this vehicle. Facts about battery capacity, range, speed and cost are all left blank since the company is, right now, focused on ironing out the design. We know that it won’t be speed-capped to only go around city streets, given that 10 percent of rideshare journeys are to the airports. And that it has to at least pass as a family hatchback for when drivers aren’t working and want to use the car as their own ride.

Arrival

And, of course, the cost will be a big factor to help drivers ditch their existing vehicles. Arrival thinks that many of the innovations it has already developed will help it there, but there are no concrete figures yet. Given how many taxi fleets adopted Priuses (and other Toyota hybrids) to help squeeze more range from their fuel budgets, you can imagine this becoming a hit.

What we do know is that Arrival’s EV platform makes for an extraordinary driving experience and one that’s very fun to use. I was allowed to drive one of the test vans around the company’s car park-cum-test-track and it’s wild. This thing is a heavy-ass UPS-style package van that drives with the ease and precision of a go-kart. I’m sure that plenty of professional drivers will enjoy the feeling of connection to the road that this particular system offers.

For now, Arrival is working on identifying which elements from this first model don’t work, and refining them for the second prototype. There’s plenty of work to do between now and the end of 2023, however, and so we’ll wait and see how this shakes out in the end.

As part of its recently announced 2022 lineup, Volvo subsidiary Polestar introduced a new single-motor variant of its Polestar 2 electric sedan. If you were waiting on an EPA estimate before reserving one, wait no more. You can expect to get about 270 miles of range on a single charge from the car’s 75 kWh battery, Polestar announced on Wednesday.

That puts the FWD model in the company of vehicles like the Volkswagen ID.4 and Model 3. With the entry-level models of those two cars, you can expect 249 miles and 263 miles of range, respectively. That’s not bad given the Polestar 2’s $47,200 starting price, but not nearly as good as the 303 miles of EPA-rated range Hyundai will offer with the $44,875 version of its Ioniq 5.

The automaker also announced today it’s rolling out an over-the-air update for all Polestar 2 vehicles. The new software allows you to schedule when you want your car to charge, so that you can take advantage of off-peak pricing. The update also includes refinements for the car’s driver-assist systems. In the coming months, Polestar plans to release a software upgrade that will allow owners of the dual-motor Polestar 2 to unlock additional torque and horsepower from their car for a fee.

Toyota now aims to roll out 30 electric vehicles by 2030, expanding on its plan to sell 15 fully electric models by 2025. It gave a taste of the future by previewing a broad range of EV concepts during a presentation.

Among those is a pickup, which could compete with the likes of Ford's F-150 Lightning and Rivian's R1T. As Autoblog notes, the Toyota Pickup EV looks very much like the Toyota Tacoma. As such, there could be an electric option for the next version of that pickup.

Toyota

Other models include a Sports EV and an FJ Cruiser-style Compact Cruiser EV. There are commercial models too, such as the Micro Box and Mid Box. Toyota once again showed off the self-driving e-Palette, which was used to transport athletes during this year's Summer Olympic and Paralympic games. The company pulled them from use at the Paralympics after the EV hit a visually impaired athlete. 

At the higher end of the spectrum, Toyota also revealed a lineup of Lexus electric EV concepts. It said the Electrified Sport should be able to go from 0-60 MPH in just over two seconds and have a range of about 435 miles. The brand also showed off an Electrified Sedan and Electrified SUV.

Toyota

Although Toyota has now committed to spend around $70 billion on electrifying its vehicles, its medium-term projections for EVs are relatively conservative. It expects to sell around 3.5 million EVs per year by 2030, which is around a third of its current volume of vehicle sales. 

By contrast, Volkswagen estimates that, by that time, half of its vehicle sales will be electric models, and by 2040, the majority of its sales in major markets will be EVs. After becoming an early leader in hybrid vehicle tech, Toyota is playing catchup with other automakers in the EV market, so making comparatively muted projections shouldn't come as too much of a surprise.

Meanwhile, Toyota recently announced plans to build a $1.29 billion EV battery factory in North Carolina by 2025. The company last month declined to join other automakers, including GM and Ford, in pledging to phase out fossil fuel-powered cars by 2040. However, Lexus plans to only sell EVs by 2035.

Ford's autonomous delivery experiments now include potentially vital services. The automaker is launching a six-month pilot project that will have self-driving shuttles bring fresh food to residents of a Detroit senior living center, the Rio Vista Detroit Co-Op Apartments, that might otherwise have challenges fetching groceries. The free-of-charge offering will have the "low-speed" vehicle drive a fixed route between a Ford facility and Rio Vista, with a safety driver and a remote team ready to take over if necessary.

Notably, the shuttle doesn't involve Ford's partner Argo — this is a distinct effort between Ford's in-house autonomy team and the company's Quantum Signal AI subsidiary. The two have modified the shuttle to help with packing and unloading food, but it's otherwise a stock machine (as far as autonomous shuttles go, at least).

There's certainly a degree of publicity grabbing involved — Ford is conducting a pilot that doubles as a goodwill campaign. This will help Ford study slower self-driving technology and remote control, though. It also hints at a future where driverless vehicles help seniors maintain their quality of life when travel is impractical.

Ford CEO Jim Farley tweeted that it's been tough keeping up with the "incredible demand" for the company's all-electric Mustang Mach-E, but the automaker's going to try. In the tweet, he said Ford is increasing production of the Mach-E to 200,000 vehicles per year in the US starting in 2022 and in Europe by 2023. That's triple the units the company manufactured in 2021. While Farley didn't detail how Ford plans to make that happen, Automotive News has reported that the company will delay its Explorer and Aviator EVs to make way for Mach-E production. 

According to the publication, Ford sent a memo to suppliers telling them that the electric vehicles would be delayed by 18 months. Further, the EVs will no longer be manufactured at Ford's Cuautitlan, Mexico plant, which will now be dedicated to manufacturing the Mustang Mach-Es. The Explorer and Aviator EVs were supposed to be the company's next major EV launch after the F-150 Lightning and were scheduled to start production by mid-2023. The 18-month delay means it won't be rolling off the production line until December 2024 — Ford also has yet to announce which factory will manufacture the new vehicles. 

Farley previously said the Ford has decided to double its EV output to 600,000 electric vehicles per year by the end of 2023 as part of its efforts to become the biggest EV manufacturer in the US. Back then, Automotive News reported that production will be spread across the Mustang Mach-E, F-150 Lightning and E-Transit.