In the future, Waymo's robotaxi fleet in the US will feature electric vehicles build specifically for the service by Chinese automaker Geely. The Alphabet company has teamed up with Geely to create a version of its recently launched all-electric Zeekr vehicle that's custom-built for autonomous ride-hailing. Waymo has detailed and shown renders of the modified EV, which was designed in Sweden, in a blog post. 

It has no steering wheel or pedals, as you'd probably expect by now from a purely autonomous vehicle — where the traditional cockpit would be is a tablet that most likely serves as the navigation and infotainment system. Waymo said they modified the vehicle and gave it a flat floor for more accessible entry, generous head and legroom, reclining seats and chargers all around. The company will then incorporate its Driver technology, which includes its software and hardware components like cameras and sensors, into the vehicles.

Waymo's current ride-hailing fleet consists mostly of Jaguar I-Paces and Chrysler Pacifica hybrids also modified with its technology. While it didn't specifically mention its vehicles, a spokesperson told TechCrunch that its team-up with Geely will not affect its current partnerships. The company also didn't mention when passengers will be able to ride the Geely vehicles, only that they will be added to its fleet in the US over the coming years.

The desire to make or at least market an electric vehicle as a performance vehicle is strong. The benefit of EV torque makes anything with some wheels and a little bit of power an off-the-line joy. But sometimes the performance vehicle in a lineup is best used at lower speeds. For example, the Arcimoto Roadster.

The companion vehicle to the Arcimoto FUV, the Roadster is the more performance-oriented vehicle from the automotive startup. Instead of a car sitting position, you ride it like a motorcycle. In our tests we realized, that likes its roofed sibling, the Roadster is more fun around town taking care of errands and turning heads.

The modern electric vehicle renaissance has been hampered from day one by the physical limitations imposed by the current state of battery technology. Inefficiencies in the form of heavy battery packs and low power densities have long limited not just the range and performance of EVs but the very forms they can take — there’s a reason Tesla started with a Roadster and not a Cybertruck. But steady advancements in power systems over the past few years — alongside skyrocketing demand for larger, electrified vehicles which cater to the US market — has led to a watershed moment in 2021: the emergence of EV pickups and SUVs.

Yes, we all know the Model X exists and Tesla “did it first” — spare me your tweets — however, the sheer number and variety of new, pure EV pickup and SUV models either ready to hit the showroom floor or in active development is staggering compared to just a few years ago. Let’s take a look at some of this year’s standouts.

GM is betting big on its proprietary Ultium battery technology, investing $35 billion in self-driving and EV technologies through 2025. The company has also announced that it intends to sell 30 EV models by the end of 2025 and EVs exclusively after 2035 with the 1,000 horsepower GMC Hummer EV serving as its vanguard offering.

Jonathan Ernst / reuters

The Hummer EV has been a surefire hit since its debut last October. More than 10,000 potential buyers had placed down payments on the $112,000 Hummer Edition 1 by last December. Similarly, the Hummer’s EV SUV variant revealed in April had its pre-orders sell out in minutes — not bad for a vehicle that won’t actually hit the streets until Fall 2023. Deliveries for the Hummer EV pickup are slated to begin this month. There have even been rumblings about adapting the Hummer EV frame and power system to military applications, though no firm decisions on that proposal have yet been made.

Hummers are only the start. In April, GM confirmed that its second EV model will be an electrified Silverado. We still don’t know a whole lot about the Silverado beyond that it will leverage GM’s Ultium battery tech, that the company is aiming for a 400-plus mile range, and that the EV pickup will offer four-wheel steering, which shortens turn radius’ at low speeds and increases cornering stability at high speeds — especially when towing loads. 

We’ll have a full accounting of the Silverado’s capabilities once it makes its official debut during GM’s CES 2022 keynote address. What’s more, GM teased its third upcoming EV in July — a full-size GMC pickup, according to CNBC. Virtually nothing else is known about it at this time, not even if it will use the existing GMC Sierra branding. Hopefully, we’ll get some more hints in the new year.

Not to be outdone, the Stellantis Group (formerly FCA and umbrella company to Chrysler, Jeep Dodge, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Maserati and a host of others) announced in July that it, too, will be investing $35 billion towards its electrification efforts through 2025 and will have 55 electrified vehicles (40 BEVs, 15 PHEVs) available in the US and European markets by the end of that year. What’s more, Stellantis is working on an all-electric Ram EV to compete with the Silverado and Ford F-150 Lightning, though the Ram isn’t expected to be released until 2024. For its part in 2021, Jeep showed off a slick-looking Wrangler BEV concept in March, released its “light hybrid” Wrangler Sahara 4XE in May and debuted its PHEV Cherokee 4XE in September ahead of the vehicle’s 2022 release.

Ford also had a year worthy of honking its own horn about, starting with the February release of the Mustang Mach-E. The EV was met with a bit of trepidation to start but cemented its position with the release of the performance-focused GT edition. In all, Ford had sold more 21,000 Mach-E units through this past October, despite a handful of recalls for loose bolts and “deep sleeping” software bugs. That’s not bad for a first-year crossover SUV working to get past deeply ingrained customer nostalgia, but the Mach-E’s numbers are nothing compared to the hype Ford’s upcoming F-150 Lightning EV has garnered.

The company’s F-150 electrification efforts have hardly been an industry secret but when Ford debuted the Lightning on May 19th (or May 18th if you were watching President Biden’s speech), America’s car-buying public just about lost its mind with nearly 45,000 people signing up to preorder the EV pickup within the first 48 hours.

Interest in Ford’s upcoming light hybrid Maverick pickup has been no less rampant. The Detroit News reported in August that more than 100,000 people had allegedly signed up to preorder the mini-truck, a large portion of which were California residents. Granted, those folks weren’t obligated to place a down payment so whether all those pre-orders translate into actual sales — or folks just decide to restomod their existing ICE Fords with the eluminator system instead — remains to be seen.

Some of the biggest headlines in the 2021 EV truck space came from stellar startup, Rivian. While competitors like Lordstown Motors found themselves critically low on cash and the subject of Justice Department fraud investigations, Rivian has already hit its first production milestone: actually producing vehicles (despite having to push its initial delivery window from July to September). But that’s not the half of it. 

This year, the company also announced plans to install 10,000 charging stations across North America by 2023, unveiled a membership plan for owners offering both Roadside and off-Roadside Assistance as well as exclusive OTA software updates, and outlined its Remote Care program which would offer remote diagnoses and on-site repairs for the electric trucks. The startup has big plans for the future as well. It announced plans to invest $5 billion in a second US-based production plant and is reportedly eyeing the UK as the site for its first international battery facility.

Some of those future plans will involve partnerships with other companies such as Amazon — which owns a 20 percent stake in Rivian, purchased 100,000 vehicles from the startup in 2019 and has already begun making deliveries in San Francisco and Los Angeles with them — but they won’t include Ford. Despite investing half a billion dollars in the EV startup two years ago, Ford announced in November that the two companies will no longer collaborate on an upcoming EV. Looks like that rumored electric Lincoln will likely stay dead for the time being.

FREDERIC J. BROWN via Getty Images

On the other end of the headline spectrum is, surprisingly, Tesla. Despite the company’s massively profitable year, the development of its Cybertruck has been slow going. While CEO Elon Musk announced in January that “volume production” of the EV SUV will begin in 2022, it’s increasingly looking like that will happen later in the year — after Ford’s F-150 Lightning and GMC’s Hummer EV hit the roads, both of which debuted well after the Cybertruck did.

Of course, American automakers are far from the only ones getting in on the EV game. Mercedes announced in April that its EQB compact SUV is nearly ready for production and will go on sale in the US next year. Its “Sustainer” delivery van concept, however, might take a bit longer to reach the market. Hyundai, on the other hand, unveiled its Ioniq 5 SUV in February with plans to release it this winter alongside promises that its Genesis line of vehicles will go entirely electric by the middle of this decade. Meanwhile, Kia’s Niro EV continues to be a low-key sleeper hit.

We’ve seen much hype and grandiose promises about EV pickup trucks and SUVs over the last few years but 2022 will be the year when everything comes out in the wash. Consumers will finally be able to see these vehicles on the streets, in their neighborhoods, and likely breathing down their necks while stuck in traffic, rather than just on a showroom floor or livestream presentation stage. This is a huge opportunity for automakers to further evangelize the benefits of battery electrics over their internal combustion predecessors — this time using America’s favorite type of vehicle.

The close of 2021 finds Tesla wealthier than ever — and, in CEO Elon Musk’s case, wealthier than everybody else. The electric vehicle manufacturer notched records for both deliveries and profits this year despite a global chip shortage that decimated supply chains worldwide, effectively kneecapping the rest of the automotive industry’s production capacity. However its financial successes were often overshadowed by Tesla’s continuing production quality issues, multiple NHTSA and SEC investigations, high profile failures of its vaunted “Full Self Driving” system, as well as numerous vehicle recalls and delays for upcoming models. And with existing industry stalwarts like Ford, GM, Honda and the Volkswagen Group making concerted efforts to electrify their own offerings, could 2022 be the year that Tesla’s reign as top EV automaker finally ends?

The Good

2021 was, without a doubt, a banner year for Tesla’s bottom line. The company entered this year having met its 2020 goal of producing a half-million vehicles (of which it delivered 499,550 to customers), a nearly 133,000 unit increase over 2019. By April, Tesla had produced a record 180,338 vehicles and delivered 184,800 of them. Demand remained strong throughout the first half of the year thanks, in part, to price cuts on both the Model 3 and Model Y.

The company then broke its same record in July, having built 200,000 vehicles over the past three months, earning Tesla $1.1 billion in net income during the same period. “Public sentiment towards EVs is at an inflexion point and, at this point, I think almost everyone agrees that electric vehicles are the only way forward,” Musk said during the Q2 earnings call.

Unsurprisingly, Tesla’s record-breaking trend continued unabated through Q3 with the company rolling 237,823 vehicles off its production lines — nearly all of which were of the Model 3 and Model Y varieties — and delivering 241,300 of them. The company also began taking pre-orders for the UK version of the Model Y in October and announced that those Model Ys destined for the Chinese market would be receiving upgraded AMD Ryzen chipsets.

Tesla capped off its stellar financial year with announcements from Hertz that it plans to order 100,000 vehicles (though there remains uncertainty about how that deal will actually play out) and from Uber Eats that it intends to rent as many as 50,000 Tesla vehicles to its drivers.

The Bad

While Tesla enjoyed unabashed sales success with its core lineup, the company often struggled to meet release deadlines for a number of its yet-to-be-released models. Both the Cybertruck and Semi have both been pushed back to 2022 while the Tesla Roadster reportedly won’t be arriving until at least 2023. Tesla also took the strange tack of releasing an “entry-level” standard range Model Y for just a few weeks before discontinuing the trim level. Similarly, Tesla pushed back the release of its $130,000 Model S Plaid edition to June 10th, debuting it mere days after Musk unilaterally announced that the Model S Plaid+ was canceled outright,

The company was also beset by a wide array of production woes and vehicle recalls this year. In February, Tesla bowed to pressure from the NHTSA and recalled 135,000 Model X and S vehicles on account of faulty touchscreens. That same month, Tesla was forced to issue a recall for another 12,300 Model Xs on account of loose trim panels. In April, customers reported that the company had double-charged them for their vehicles, up to $71,000 in some cases, though Tesla was quick to reimburse the affected buyers and even threw in a $200 gift certificate for the company store.

June saw yet another recall, this time for 6,000 Model 3 and Ys over faulty brake caliper bolts, and in October, Tesla had to recall another set of Ys and 3s because their suspensions kept separating. Just last month, the company had to pull nearly 12,000 vehicles from across its product line on account of software issues — that’s not to be confused with the recent Tesla App outage that locked drivers around the world out of their own vehicles.

Tesla’s parade of crises also extended to the production lines themselves with the Fremont factory facing a sizeable COVID outbreak shortly after reopening in March. Musk complained often and loudly throughout 2020 over California’s quarantine lockdown laws and finally made good on threats to take his toys and go home, officially moving Tesla’s headquarters to Texas in October.

The company was also ordered to pay $137 million to former employee Owen Diaz after a San Francisco federal court jury found Tesla liable for the unconscionable racial bigotry Diaz faced while working at the Fremont plant. That lawsuit has been followed up by another, filed in November by Jessica Barraza who alleged “rampant sexual harassment” as well as continued verbal and physical abuse while she worked at the Fremont location.

Tesla’s Full Self Driving beta also turned out to be a mixed bag for the company in 2021. Following its debut in October of last year, beta 8.3 rolled out in May, doubling the size of the test program, before releasing beta 9 in July. Version 9’s rollout coincided with a new FSD subscription program charging customers $199 a month (or $99 a month if they’d previously purchased the now-discontinued Enhanced Autopilot feature) — assuming they already had the $1,500 FSD computer hardware installed in their vehicle.

However, Tesla’s decision to abandon radar-based autonomation sensors in favor of an optical-only setup in May led to a backlash from the NHTSA which subsequently forced the company to remove some of its driver-assist designations such as forward collision and lane departure warnings. In an effort to counter claims that the use of the Autopilot feature can cause drivers to become inattentive and less responsive once they resume control of the vehicle, Tesla activated its in-car driver monitoring cameras in late May.

FSD beta 10 arrived to great fanfare in September with owners noting smoother turns on city streets, improved display visuals and an overall improvement in the vehicle’s off-highway navigation. Those feelings were short-lived when, in October, the company was forced to revert its beta 10.3 implementation after becoming aware of "some issues," per Musk, including a "regression" with left turns. Users also reported phantom forward-collision warnings and auto-steering bugs.

The company’s FSD faults — which have been implicated in multiple crashes where Teslas inexplicably rammed into first responder vehicles and other civilian drivers as well as a widely-reported wreck in Houston with nobody behind the wheel — has led to calls for increased scrutiny from and by the NHTSA, NTSB, the US Senate, and even the California DMV.

The FSD feature also prompted a 300,000-unit recall at the behest of the Chinese government over the ease in which FSD can be activated, though that was far from the only issue Tesla faced with the nation. In April, China banned Tesla vehicles from its military bases and “key state-owned companies” over fears that the cars’ myriad cameras could be leveraged for espionage. After nearly a month of wrangling and appeals to social media, Tesla finally caved to China’s cybersecurity demands and established a local clearinghouse for that data.

The Musk

And what would a Year in Review of Tesla be without a look back at CEO Elon Musk’s unique brand of shenanigans? Last October, Musk unilaterally disbanded Tesla’s PR department, thereby making his personal Twitter account the first, last and only stop for confirmation of the company’s decisions. This January, Musk reversed course slightly and, instead of reforming the department, began hiring people to respond to customer complaints made toward him on the social media platform.

Speaking of tweets, Tesla was also sued this year for allegedly breaking a previously struck deal with the SEC by allowing Musk to continue sending unapproved, "erratic" tweets as well as for the company failing to obtain a neutral general counsel to reign in its CEO. The National Labor Relations Board also went after Tesla in 2021, finding that the company had illegally fired a union activist. The NLRB consequently demanded that the worker be rehired and Musk delete a 2018 union-busting tweet related to the case.

2021 was also the year that Musk leaned hard into crypto. Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of the stuff in February and briefly toyed with the idea of allowing customers to use the currency to purchase its vehicles, though those plans were quickly canned over concerns about Bitcoin mining’s environmental impacts. Musk also took time out of his Saturday Night Live hosting duties in May to crash the value of Bitcoin rival Dogecoin, though his later tweets helped the price of Dogecoin rebound, to a degree.

And then there was the whole Tesla “Robot” debacle, which I can’t even, I mean, it was literally just an actor in a spandex jumpsuit dancing around while Musk made a bunch of wildly unsubstantiated claims.

What’s Next

Looking ahead to 2022, Tesla appears to be on track for continued success. Its Berlin Gigafactory is nearly ready to start production and is expected to do so by the end of this month – barring any unforeseen setbacks. The company’s stockpile of chipsets and aggressive maneuvers to shore up supplies of battery precursor materials will insulate Tesla from many of the production bottlenecks that many other EV automakers are likely to struggle with throughout the new year.

However, even with Tesla’s record-breaking production figures from the past couple of years, the number of vehicles it delivers annually is still a small fraction of what more established automakers sell. BMW, for example, sold 2.3 million vehicles worldwide in 2020. In the same year, GM sold 2.5 million in the US alone. And as those companies increasingly turn their attention to the EV market while leveraging economies of scale that Tesla cannot match, Musk’s company could soon find itself relegated back to being a niche EV brand rather than an industry titan.

Tesla's big holiday update for the year has started making its way to the automaker's fleet of electric vehicles, and it adds quite a large list of improvements and new features. For those addicted to scrolling on TikTok, perhaps the biggest addition is the TikTok app on Tesla Theater. According to the update notes posted by Electrek, they'll now be able to scroll the platform's short-form videos — on repeat, if they want — right on their vehicle's screen, so long as their car is parked. 

In Toybox, owners will now also find the Light Show feature that Tesla introduced as an Easter Egg on the Model X back in 2015. For the Model X, a choreographed light show includes both flashing lights and opening falcon wing doors, but other models will have to make do with the former. Tesla has made its app launcher customizable, letting owners drag and drop their favorite apps onto the bottom menu bar. It's also simplifying navigation to make most the common primary controls, such as charging and windshield wipers, easier to access.

To automatically see a live camera view of their blind spot when they activate their turn signal, drivers can activate the new "Automatic Blind Spot Camera" option under Autopilot in Controls. Plus, drivers can now edit Waypoints to add stops or to initiate new navigation routes with updated arrival times. The holiday bundle has updates that fit the season, as well, including automatic seat heating that can regulate the front row seat temperatures based on the cabin environment, along with other cold weather improvements. 

In addition, drivers can now delete dashcam clips directly from the touchscreen and hide map details to remove distractions if they want. Finally, in the entertainment department, Tesla has added Sonic the Hedgehog and Sudoku to its Arcade — though we strongly suggest playing any Arcade game only while parked. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that Tesla allowed drivers to play some games in moving cars, a concern that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is discussing with the company. The agency told Engadget in a statement: "Distraction-affected crashes are a concern, particularly in vehicles equipped with an array of convenience technologies such as entertainment screens. We are aware of driver concerns and are discussing the feature with the manufacturer."

Current Toyota drivers might not be thrilled about having to subscribe just to remotely start from their key fobs, but what about new buyers? There's mixed news. The automaker told Roadshow in a statement that remote starting won't be available on key fobs for new vehicles. You'll have to use the brand's mobile app, in other words. With that said, you might not mind the cost.

You may not ever have to pay for the feature. While it was previously clear 2018 to 2020 vehicles were limited to a three-year Connected Sevices trial, some 2020 model year and newer vehicles include a 10-year trial. There's a real possibility you'll have moved on to another car by the time the freebie expires.

This still won't please anyone who prefers the simplicity of a fob, or owners who intend to keep their vehicles for a long time. You may have to pay extra just to keep the functionality your car had for a large part of its lifespan. We wouldn't count on Toyota backtracking, mind you. Like many companies, Toyota is turning to services to provide a steadier revenue stream than it would get through sales alone. Remote starting isn't likely to represent a windfall when it will only collect $80 per year a decade from now, but it hints where Toyota's strategy is going.

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.

Ken Block’s Gymkhana series is ready to go electric. On Wednesday, the rally driver showed off his new Audi S1 Hoonitron, a purpose-built EV the automaker designed specifically for Block. Audi didn’t share many details on the prototype, but as you can see from the photo above, it pulls more than a few design cues from the company’s iconic Sport Quattro S1. That’s not by accident; it was that car that inspired Block to pursue his career.

Block promised to show off what the EV can do in a future video tentatively called “Elektrikhana.” It’s unclear if Travis Pastrana will join with a custom-built Solterra from Subaru. If you’ve not seen a Gymkhana event, they involve some of the most skillful driving you’ll see on a closed course. The S1 Hoonitron could significantly change how Block tackles the annual series. 

The instant torque of an EV should help with the constant drifting that’s involved in Gymkhana courses. The lower center of gravity could also make cornering a lot tighter. One thing we’ll have to see is if the S1 Hoonitron replicates the sound a rev limiter makes in a traditional internal combustion engine car. After all, that sound is part of the fun of watching rally car driving.

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.