Rivian impressed car reviewers (and us) with its R1T pickup, and its R1S electric SUV is no different. The slightly smaller vehicle continues the automotive startup’s trend of building no-compromise electric vehicles meant for outdoor adventure.
Living the life of an extreme camper, kayaker or cyclist doesn't come cheap: The R1S has a bank-busting price tag starting at $78,000. It might not be the most efficient EV on the market, but it has a healthy range of up to 316 miles, which should be enough to satisfy those looking to go outdoors with a vehicle that’s solidly built. The R1S also now ships with a new Camp Mode feature that levels the cabin so overnight stays can be a bit more comfortable.
Designing a desirable EV is not something Rivian has struggled with to date, though: its real issue is mass-producing cars to keep up with orders. Watch the video below for the full story.
As the 2022 Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) trade show kicks off Monday in Las Vegas, Mopar — Stellantis' OEM accessory division — unveiled a trio of intriguing concept vehicles, led by an electrified Jeep CJ. Even more exciting, the battery electric technology behind it could portend a restomod revival of classic American muscle cars.
Stellantis
“The Jeep CJ Surge concept explores a future zero-emission propulsion system kit and supports the Jeep brand’s mission to become the leading electrified SUV brand in the world," Mark Bosanac, North America senior vice president, Mopar service, parts and customer care, said in a prepared statement Monday. "Separately, our Ram 1500 Backcountry X and TRX Gold Shot concepts showcase a truckload of innovative Mopar accessories for our award-winning full-size trucks."
The CJ Surge is what's known as a restomod (a portmanteau of "restoration" and "modification"), in that they cleaned up an late model CJ7 (the resto part) and swapped out the internal combustion engine for battery-electric propulsion (the mod part). Restomods aren't strictly electrifications — we've been doing them with crate engines for decades — but with automakers swiftly transitioning to battery power from gas, demand from the classic car community for similar capabilities has grown in recent years. In response, Ford has begun prototyping a BEV restomod system called the Eluminator. The Surge is Mopar's first steps in the same direction.
Stellantis
So rather than an inline-six or v-eight that the CJ7s originally came with, Mopar has dropped in a "scalable 400-volt, 200-kW Electric Drive Module" that provides four-wheel drive capabilities. That powerplant is backed by a 24-module Li-ion battery that sits in a "custom shell mounted in the rear of the passenger cabin," which you can see as the giant silver box dominating the trunk space in the image above. And rather than a traditional manual transmission, the Surge replaces the stick shift with a Wrangler JK center console and rotary shifter knob.
Stellantis
There's no word on performance numbers, much less when — or even if — this will ever come to market. If you want to check out the Surge for yourself, you'll need to get to the Las Vegas Convention Center before November 4th.
The Department of Justice is reportedly investigating whether Tesla has misled customers and investors by claiming that its Autopilot technology enables full-fledged self-driving capabilities. According to Reuters, the DOJ launched the probe last year following over a dozen crashes, including fatal ones, in which Autopilot was activated. Prosecutors in Washington and San Francisco are examining if Tesla had made unsupported full self-driving claims about the technology, and they could ultimately pursue criminal charges or seek sanctions. But they could also shut the probe down without doing anything if they determine that Tesla hasn't done anything wrong.
Back in August, reports came out that the California DMV had filed complaints against the automaker with the California Office of Administrative Hearings. The state's DMV had accused Tesla of using advertising language on its website for its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving products that aren't based on facts and made it seem like its vehicles are capable of fully driverless trips. One example is part of the Autopilot page on Tesla's website that says "All you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go." In the same page, there's a video that starts with a note that reads "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He isn't doing anything. The car is driving itself."
But at the same time, Tesla explicitly states in its support page that "Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel." Those currently enabled features, the company added, "do not make the vehicle autonomous." Its sources told Reuters that Tesla's warnings that drivers should keep their hands on the wheel could complicate any case the DOJ may bring.
Aside from the Justice Department, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is also looking into Tesla's Autopilot system. The agency initiated a probe in 2021 following the report of 11 crashes with parked first responder vehicles since 2018. Those crashes results in 17 injuries and one death. In June this year, the NHTSA upgraded the probe's status and expanded it to cover almost all Tesla vehicles sold since 2014.
General Motors has been in business for more than a century, but in its 112 years, the company has never faced such challenges as it does in today's rapidly electrifying and automating industry. The assembly line jobs from Detroit's heyday have been replaced by legions of automated industrial arms, almost as quickly as the era of internal combustion engines has been supplanted by EVs. Since 2014, it's been Mary Barra's job as CEO of GM to help guide America's largest automaker into the 21st century.
In Charging Ahead: GM, Mary Barra, and the Reinvention of an American Icon, author and Bloomberg automotive journalist, David Welch, recounts Barra's Herculean efforts to reinvent a company that has been around since horses still pulled buggies, reimagine the brand's most iconic models and bring EVs to the masses — all while being a woman in the highest echelons of a male dominated industry. In the excerpt below, Welch examines some of GM's earliest electric initiatives, like the popular but short-lived EV1 or the loss leader Bolt, without which we likely wouldn't have many of Ultium-based vehicle offerings.
Battery-powered cars had captured the imagination of wealthy, tech-minded drivers. Tesla was the first to tap into that, becoming a hot brand in the process. Its cars began stealing customers away from the likes of Mercedes-Benz and BMW. But in 2017, when Barra was weighing up her own plug-in play, EVs were still only about 1 percent of car sales. They were still too expensive for most consumers and even at fat prices, they lost money. EVs sold by Tesla, GM, and Nissan could take hours to charge and only Tesla models could go more than 300 miles on a charge.
GM had been working on electric batteries and developing vehicles that would run on them. In no way was Barra flat-footed. But spending billions on cars with an uncertain group of buyers was seen as speculative and risky. Internally at major car companies, there were still voices saying that EVs were a costly science project. They assumed Tesla would run out of cash one day and carmakers could carry on as they always had.
Internally, GM was weighing uncertain demand for EV sales against the risk that Tesla and Germany’s Volkswagen group and even Ford would capture the buyers who made the switch. That threatened to completely reset customer loyalties and shake up the industry. Tesla already sold most of the electric vehicles on the market. Elon Musk threatened to upend the auto industry the way Apple’s iPhone did to ’90s mobile phone kingpins Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, and Siemens. GM’s future hinged not only on Barra’s courage to make a move, but also on her being wise enough to get the timing right.
Caution was understandable. At the time, Tesla was by far the top seller of electric vehicles with 100,000 sold globally and losses of about $2 billion on sales of its Model S sedans and Model X SUVs. Those Teslas typically sold for more than $100,000 apiece, which is triple the price of the average gasburning family SUV. With Tesla’s $100,000 cars losing money the challenge for companies to make a buck selling EVs was daunting.
GM knew it all too well. In the 1990s, the company had sold the famous EV1, an aerodynamic two-seater priced at $34,000 that was leased to EV enthusiasts from 1996 to 1999. That was an expensive car back then. GM spent $1 billion developing it and would lose more money selling the vehicles, said [then-GM CEO G. Richard] Wagoner in an interview. I remember seeing a presentation for the car at the Detroit Auto Show in 1997. GM’s then vice chairman, Harry Pearce, talked about electric cars like the EV1 and also about hybrids that ran on gasoline engines and electric motors. For GM, it was a display of what the company’s engineers could do and a glimpse of the future, he told me. But it would be decades before it would be a real business.
The EV1 would bring GM serious credibility with environmentalists, but after leasing 1,100 of them, the company lost a lot of money. A few Hollywood actors like Ed Begley Jr. leased one and promoted it as often as he could. Francis Ford Coppola had one, and when GM ended the program and demanded that lessees return the cars, he refused to give it up and kept it. The company crushed all the cars that it had leased after retrieving them, which then made GM a pariah with the same environmentalists who loved the car.
The economics of electric cars weren’t very good twenty years later. Chevrolet started selling the Bolt in 2016 and lost a whopping $9,000 on every one of the $38,000 plug-in cars it sold. Before that, GM sold the Volt plug-in hybrid, which uses a gasoline engine and an electric motor in tandem to get forty-two miles per gallon. The Volt lost even more. Those nasty numbers would drive serious resistance to electric cars inside GM and at other major carmakers, too.
One big reason GM sold the Bolt was to meet government regulations. In California and a dozen coastal states that followed its lead, automakers had to sell electric vehicles or other super-efficient cars like hybrids to be able to sell their profitable gas guzzlers. Selling green vehicles earned ZEV credits. GM could also buy ZEV credits from Tesla, which many automakers did. But that just meant that they were helping fund Musk’s effort to eat their lunch.
In the EV race, Tesla already had the advantage of a tremendous amount of investor patience for Musk’s losses. Even though Tesla lost $2 billion that year, his company’s market capitalization ended 2017 with a total value of $52 billion. That was just $4 billion less than GM’s even though Barra brought in near record profits that year. In other words, the market would continue to fund Musk’s money-losing operation, but Barra had to fund her own vehicle development with profits from the very gas guzzlers she was seeking to replace.
That put GM and the mainstream car companies under pressure from three sides. Shareholders wanted profits from pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles. But in the car market, Tesla was stealing buyers, gaining a technological advantage in battery development, and building an Apple-like brand for making the cars of tomorrow. Meanwhile, governments were putting the squeeze on with new clean-air rules.
Tesla faced increasing transportation costs paired with "raw material cost inflation," continued component shortages and a strengthening dollar in Q3, all of which which ate into its quarterly revenue ($21.45 billion vs $21.96 billion expected). Yet the EV automaker still managed to set production records at each of its factories. According to the company's quarterly production report published at the start of the month, Tesla built 365,923 vehicles in Q3 and delivered just 343,830.
Revenue from automotive sales reached $18.69 billion this past quarter, a 55 percent increase year-over-year. Values in Tesla stock have dropped more than 17 percent since that report's publication, CNBC reports, and have fallen more than 5 percent since the close of market Wednesday when Tesla's earnings were released. Despite these most recent losses, Tesla did see its profits double over the past year to $3.29 billion and "it looks like we'll have an epic end of year," CEO Elon Musk said during the investor call.
Tesla had previously targeted a 50 percent annual vehicle sales growth over the next few years. In 2021, Tesla delivered some 936,000 vehicles and has delivered delivered 908,573 vehicle to date in 2022. So in order to meet the 50 percent growth goal, the company will need to sell roughly 1.4 million vehicles in total, this year, as Autoblog notes, with 490,000 of those coming in Q4. Tesla also recommitted to beginning deliveries of its Semi starting in December.
It's a big day for huge EV investments in the US. The Biden admin announced it's awarding $2.8 billion to companies developing EV battery materials earlier today, and now BMW says it'll be investing another $1.7 billion towards building electric vehicles in America. $1 billion will go towards expanding its Spartanburg, South Carolina manufacturing plant to build EVs, while the remaining $700 million is earmarked to build a high-voltage battery facility in a nearby town called Woodruff.
Plant Spartanburg, as the company calls the manufacturing facility, is the home of the company's popular "X" vehicles. Now, according to BMW's US group chairman Oliver Zipse, it's going to become the home of BMW's electrification strategy. He announced the company intends to build at least six electric BMW X vehicles by 2030, which is also when the Biden administration is aiming to make EVs half of new US car sales.
BMW also plans to build sixth-generation battery cells using technology from Envision AESC, which will build the aforementioned battery plant. The company claims the new batteries offer 20 percent more energy density than its current technology, as well as 30 percent faster charging and longer range. Additionally, they'll involve around 60 percent less CO2 emissions by using secondary minerals and renewable energy during production.
Rolls-Royce has officially begun its transition to electric cars. The luxury British manufacturer has unveiled its first ground-up EV, the Spectre coupe. The "spiritual successor" to the Phantom looks much like its stately gas-powered counterparts (apart from a low 0.25 drag coefficient), but promises to be even quieter and smoother thanks to its powerplant. The brand is still finalizing specifications. However, it expects the all-wheel drive machine to make a 0-60MPH dash in 4.4 seconds and achieve an EPA range of 260 miles. Those aren't exceptional figures, but the emphasis here is on a pampered ride, not absolute performance.
That decision is reflected in the interior. The design includes the now-obligatory instrument and infotainment displays, plus a digital fascia for the passenger. In keeping with Rolls-Royce's bespoke design philosophy, you can even have the company customize the color of the on-screen dials. An "Eleanor" assistant can handle in-car tasks, and a Whispers app can both send curated location recommendations (such as restaurants) as well as remotely control basic car functions like the locks and heating.
This isn't just a reworked version of the company's existing designs, either. The Spectre uses a new aluminum platform (the "Architecture of Luxury") tuned for EVs, and boasts "starlight" doors with 4,796 points of light. It's very large for a coupe at 16ft long and 6.6ft wide, and even required the company's first 23-inch wheels in over a century. This is for leisurely soirées and trips to the golf club, not all-out blasts down country roads.
The Spectre is available to order now, with first deliveries expected in the fourth quarter of 2023. Pricing starts at $413,500 in the US, but that's before the customization process — expect to pay considerably more to get the design just so, right down to the colors of the signature in-door umbrella. Even more so than rival ultra-luxury EVs like the Cadillac Celestiq and expected Mercedes-Maybach EQS, this is aimed at customers who will spend whatever it takes to get their dream car.
Cadillac has finally provided more details for the Celestiq, and it's evident the EV prioritizes luxury over raw power. The custom-built sedan is now known to include a dual-motor 600HP powertrain, all-wheel drive and a 111kWh Ultium battery pack. The combination delivers a 0-60MPH sprint in 3.8 seconds with an estimated 300-mile range. That makes it one of the quickest cars "in the segment," according to Cadillac, referencing cars like the Mercedes-Maybach S Class. It won't make Lucid Air or Tesla Model S Plaid owners seethe with envy. Instead, the focus is on comfort — this may be one of the gentler-riding electric cars you'll find.
The Celestiq combines the softness of adaptive air suspension (a familiar sight in luxury cars) with the fast-reacting Magnetic Ride Control borrowed from the CT5-V Blackwing. A "Cadillac-first" Active Roll Control system produces a more stable ride during turns, while special 23-inch wheels and tires promise both precise handling and less road noise. There are nods to performance, such as an active rear spoiler and "out-of-phase" rear steering that improves low-speed agility, but this machine isn't meant for track days.
As referenced in July, the interior is not-so-subtly meant to spoil drivers who'd otherwise spring for vehicles like the Mercedes EQS. The 55-inch dash display and variable-tint "smart glass" roof remain the signature features, but you can also expect a 38-speaker AKG sound system with spatial audio, three external speakers and active noise cancellation to hush the outside world. You can also expect the previously-touted Ultra Cruise hands-free driving, 12.6-inch seatback passenger displays, elaborate LED lighting and a new camera system that offers crash recording and theft detection. Google services like Assistant, Maps and the Play Store are built-in.
The Celestiq is now expected to enter production in December 2023, with a price "north" of $300,000. Even moreso than the Hummer EV, this is aimed squarely at very wealthy buyers who want to make a statement — including people who might have a chauffeur do the driving. You'll have to turn to the Lyriq if you want a relatively accessible electric Cadillac. GM is also making more affordable Ultium-based EVs like Chevy's upcoming Silverado pickup and Equinox SUV, so you're not left out if the Celestiq and other models are well beyond your budget.
As part of its ambitious electric vehicle plans, Mercedes has taken the wraps off its latest model, the EQE SUV — along with a bonus high-performance AMG version. Highlights of the new models include slippery aerodynamics, a large 90.6 kWh battery and very quick 0-62MPH times on the AMG model.
Mercedes calls the EQE SUV a "multipurpose variant of the EQE executive sedan" that launched recently. As such it looks very much like an SUV version of the EQE, though it's actually 3.5 inches shorter than the sedan. Size-wise, it's somewhere between the EQ-B and EQS SUVs.
Mercedes-Benz
It's one of the more aerodynamic SUVs out there, with a very slippery 0.26 coefficient of drag — even with the running boards. Along with the large 90.6 kWh battery, that helps contribute to an expected 342 miles of WLTP range (likely less on the EPA scale). Mercedes didn't detail power or performance on the regular EQE model, but instead talks about battery efficiency, thermal cooling, energy recovery, noise and vibration comfort and more in its extremely detailed press release.
The interior has a mix of natural and synthetic materials like NeoTex and leather. Front and center is a curved Hyperscreen that features three separate displays for the infotainment system, vehicle controls and more. The automaker said it has now integrated more streaming services (Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Music) into the MBUX infotainment system. There's also a front passenger display that's designed to allow the front passenger to watch TV without distracting the driver.
Mercedes-Benz
The AMG version is Mercedes first performance SUV, and takes everything on the regular EQE to 11. The front and rear motors put out 617HP, or up to 677 from a boost function with the optional AMG Dynamic Plus package. The Race Start feature lets you put full power to the wheels (complete with sound emitted inside and outside the vehicle), getting from 0-62 MPH in 3.5 seconds.
Other performance features on the AMG include an AMG-adapted air suspension, lowered ride height settings for Sport and Sport+ modes, an active anti-roll bar, carbon-ceramic front brakes and rear-axle steering as standard.
Mercedes-Benz
Some exterior touches include digital headlights that project the Mercedes and AMG logos when the vehicle is shut off, large 21 and 22 inch wheels and an AMG logo on the hood in place of the usual Mercedes one. Inside, lucky buyers can choose from four interior options, with leather seating as standard. The Hyperscreen also gets custom AMG graphics, including a performance readout in the center display.
More details for the EQE like powertrain options will be announced closer to launch. Mercedes-Benz didn't detail pricing or availability, but did say that the standard version of the EQE SUV will start production in December at its US facility in Alabama. Unlike the EQS SUV that starts at $100,000, the EQE SUV may have a shot at getting under the $80,000 threshold to quality for a $7,500 federal tax credit.
Sony and Honda have announced (PDF) that they're planning to start accepting pre-orders for their first electric vehicle model in the first half of 2025. Their joint venture, which they've simply named Sony Honda Mobility Inc. (SHM), is hoping to start deliveries in the United States by spring of 2026. In Japan, deliveries are expected to begin in the second half of 2026. According to Reuters, the companies are considering a European launch, as well, but they have no solid plans for the region at the moment.
The companies didn't give us a glimpse of the vehicle they're working on during the event, and they didn't mention anything about its pricing or its battery technology and range. They did say, however, that they're planning to focus on online sales like Tesla does and that the first model will have a "somewhat high price range." Honda will manufacture their first model at its facility in North America, while Sony will be in charge of developing the vehicle's software system and sensors. SHM is aiming to develop a Level 3 autonomous driving system, which means its cars will eventually have the capability to drive itself in certain conditions.
Reuters also said that Sony's software system will offer a monthly subscription for entertainment and other services, providing SMH with recurring revenue. The company is even looking into providing new types of in-vehicle entertainment, including those based in the metaverse. SMH Chairman and CEO Yasuhide Mizuno said during the event that the joint company is "speedily" developing its first vehicle. He said that SMH can't miss taking pre-orders in 2025, as the firm believes that year will be a turning point for vehicle electrification.
