Cars

An update on how the extremely public political breakup is going today, as protestors face off with federal immigration agents in Los Angeles.

It’s the closest we’re likely to get to a global release for Xiaomi’s souped up EV, which last year set a record lap time for a four-door car at the Nürburgring, albeit using a stripped-out prototype to do so. There’s no release date just yet for the car’s addition to Gran Turismo 7 though.

Did something happen today?

The ship, operated by UK-based Zodiac Maritime, was abandoned off the coast of Alaska after sailors were unable to contain the blaze. According to The Register, the ship was loaded with around 3,000 vehicles, 800 of which were EVs. Nearly two dozen sailors were rescued by the US Coast Guard. I’m reminded the last time this exact thing happened in 2022.

Yesterday I wrote about Elon Musk’s fall from power. Today he is beefing with the president on X, instead of picking up his phone to make a call. Hm!

It will also be able to add 250 kilometers (155 miles) of charge in just 15 minutes of DC fast-charging, according to a new video from the Japanese automaker. Nissan already revealed that the new Leaf will come with a native NACS charging port, enabling it to charge at Tesla Superchargers. The addition of Plug and Charge appears to fit in with the narrative that Nissan aims to address charging headaches with the new Leaf.

The Blue Oval aims to tackle America’s mountain with a new Mustang Mach-E derived demonstrator with French racing impresario Romain Dumas behind the wheel. This is the third consecutive year that Ford is competing with an electric demonstrator at Pikes Peak, following the SuperVan 4.2 and F-150 Lightning SuperTruck.

Elon Musk says the company has been testing self-driving Model Y cars around Austin without anyone in the driver’s seat for the “past several days.” That’s good news for the company’s fledgling robotaxi business, which may launch as soon as June 12th. Though as Electrek points out, a few weeks of driverless testing is a far cry from the six months Waymo worked through before its Austin launch this year.

The original deal between Amazon and Stellantis, first announced in 2022, was to create a “digital cockpit” for “millions” of Jeep, Dodge, and Ram vehicles — similar to how Google has developed operating systems for a handful of key automakers. But after three years, the two companies are now “winding down” that aspect of their partnership, Reuters says. (The e-commerce company also said it would purchase electric Ram ProMaster delivery vans; no word on whether that deal went through.) And it’s not looking good for a future Amazon in-car experience, as Reuters notes that most of the company’s Digital Cabin staffers have resigned or left the company.

Well, as Jalopnik points out while referring its readers to the below video of a Volvo EX90’s Lidar scanner wrecking a camera sensor on the iPhone 16 Pro Max filming it, doing so can be “the technological equivalent of staring directly into the sun.”

GOP lawmakers passed resolutions rescinding federal approval of California’s plans to require that all car sales be zero-emission by 2035, as well as policies limiting nitrogen oxide emissions and other pollutants from trucks.

Rivian’s smaller, more affordable electric SUV may not arrive until the end of 2026, but the company is getting geared up to start testing development versions of the R2. But before they get released into the wild, they need to disguise themselves in camouflage so prying eyes (and phone cameras) can’t perceive their full awesomeness. To that effect, the company was eager to show off its custom wrap, which looks a bit different from the industry standard black-and-white design. Yes, there’s a Yeti in there.

After outdoing Tesla’s global revenue last year, Chinese auto manufacturer BYD just outsold it in Europe for the first time too.

During an interview with CNBC, Elon Musk laid out some of the details for next month’s robotaxi launch in Austin, Texas, most of which was already known. It will be a small number of vehicles, only 10-20, in the first week, but will increase in size week by week. It will be geofenced to the parts of Austin “that we consider to be the safest,” Musk said. And the vehicles will be monitored by remote operators who can intervene in case of emergency. “We’re going to be extremely paranoid about the deployment as we should be,” he added. “It would be foolish not to be so we’ll be watching what the cars are doing very carefully.” The rest was the standard bluster about “over a million Teslas doing self-driving in the US” and why he thinks Waymo’s use of lidar is fundamentally flawed.