Enlarge / Jaguar is the latest automaker to negotiate a switch from the Combined Charging Standard to the North American Charging Standard. (credit: Jaguar)

The North American Charging Standard has another new convert. On Thursday, Jaguar announced that it's the latest automaker to decide to change its charger plugs on its battery electric vehicles to the Tesla-style NACS port, securing all-important access to the Tesla Supercharger network in the process. As with all the other NACS announcements we've seen since May, when Ford went first and opened the floodgates, native NACS ports will appear on Jaguars in 2025.

Coincidentally, that's when the next new electric Jaguar will appear, too. The British brand was an early entrant to the long-range electric vehicle segment with the I-Pace, a bespoke BEV that wowed road testers in 2018. But despite a big order from Waymo to use I-Paces as robotaxis, the I-Pace's relatively small interior and high purchase price put off potential private customers, making it a relatively rare sight on North American roads outside of the Bay Area.

The I-Pace got a mild midlife refresh at the beginning of this year, but it remains the sole EV in Jaguar's lineup for now. We were supposed to see an electric replacement for the venerable Jaguar XJ sedan, and development of the car was at an advanced stage when it was suddenly canceled in 2021, mere months from its debut.

Enlarge / Hyundai's well-rated Ioniq 6 could go into production in the US, which would make it eligible for a $7,500 tax credit. (credit: Hyundai)

Hyundai Motor Group is pushing the accelerator pedal when it comes to its newest North American factory. The company broke ground on the multibillion-dollar site in Bryan County, Georgia, last October with the aim of beginning production of electric vehicles in 2025. But on Tuesday, Hyundai president and CEO Jose Munoz revealed that timeline has been brought forward.

"We try to accelerate as much as possible, the project. And we are confident that the original date of January 2025 would be probably pulled ahead maybe three months or so. If we can, even more," Munoz said.

The main motivation for building EVs locally in the US is the new clean vehicle tax incentives. Created as part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, these came into effect at the beginning of this year and address criticisms of the previous EV tax credit by adding income and price caps, allowing dealers to claim the credit if they immediately apply it to the price of the car and creating a tax credit for buying a used EV.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Toyota, the world's largest automaker, has a problem. Although the company is famous for pioneering lean methods of manufacturing and being an early pioneer of hybrid electric powertrains, the switch to battery electric vehicles caught it somewhat unprepared. As rivals locked up contracts for critical minerals and formed joint ventures with battery makers (or built their own), Toyota has appeared to fall behind.

Now, it has released a new roadmap showing how it will regain competitiveness and sell 3.5 million EVs by 2030.

After some early experiments with electric-converted RAV4s (including a partnership with Tesla), Toyota has finally released a modern BEV, the bZ4x. The car had a difficult launch—a recall for wheels falling off will lead to that—but a week's test of a bZ4x exceeded our low expectations. A look at the car's specs makes clear Toyota's problem, though: There are different battery packs for the single-motor and dual-motor versions, made by Panasonic and CATL, respectively.

Enlarge / The Ultium platform is the foundation of GM’s EV strategy, including the battery cells, modules and pack, plus drive units containing electric motors and integrated power electronics. It underpins GM’s EV architecture and was developed with a common set of components, providing energy for nearly every segment on the road. At least that's if it can ramp up production. (credit: General Motors)

Last Thursday, the United Auto Workers went on strike at a trio of factories owned by Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. Negotiations to replace an expiring contract reached a stalemate, leading to thousands of UAW members stopping work in Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio. The strike has been targeted to disrupt profitable production lines like Ford's Bronco, but there might be a silver lining to the strike for General Motors.

That curious idea appeared over the weekend in Reuters. You see, GM has been having somewhat of a production problem. The automaker has publicly committed to going all-in on electrification, developing a new battery platform to be shared across Brightdrop, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC.

An Ultium-shaped headache

Known as Ultium, the new batteries are meant to be far cheaper to produce than the batteries that power the Chevy Bolt; when Ultium was first announced, CEO Mary Barra said that costs would drop below $100/kWh "early in the platform's life."

Enlarge / The US auto workers' union announced the start of a strike at three factories just after midnight on Friday, September 15, as a deadline expired to reach a deal with employers on a new contract. (credit: Photo by MATTHEW HATCHER/AFP via Getty Images)

Almost 13,000 workers are on strike at three US car factories today after a midnight deadline came and went without an agreement between the United Auto Workers and Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. It's the first time in the UAW's history that it has initiated strike action at all of the Big Three domestic car companies simultaneously, as negotiations on a new contract failed.

UAW's strike action has been narrowly targeted. Although the union represents about 146,000 members, most of them are staying at their jobs. But 5,800 Stellantis workers at the company's Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio, are now on strike, as are 3,600 GM workers at a plant in Wentzville, Missouri, plus 3,300 at Ford's factory in Wayne, Michigan.

The union and automakers had been trying to reach a compromise before the 4-year-old contract between them expired on Thursday night. Among other things, the union has been looking to end the tiered pay structure in the industry where new hires into a job earn less. It is also seeking the restoration of cost-of-living increases and an end to automakers subverting union jobs with temporary workers.

Enlarge / This is muc22, and it set a new record for electric vehicle range on a single charge, driving for six days inside this hangar. (credit: TUfast Eco Team)

It must be the season for student-set world records. Earlier this week, we learned that a Swiss team of student engineers set a new world record for the fastest electric vehicle 0–62 mph (0–100 km/h) time. Today's story features another EV designed and built by students, this time from the Technical University of Munich, and they took a lot longer to set the record.

The car, called muc22, looks more conventional than the Swiss speedster, if only a little. The diminutive coupe in this case was built for efficiency, and in a six-day test at Munich airport, it set a new distance record on a single charge (for a non-solar EV): 1,599 miles (2,574 km), with less battery capacity than many plug-in hybrids—just 15.5 kWh.

The specs for muc22 are extreme, but they're on the far other side of the scale compared to something like a Pininfarina Battista hypercar. For one thing, the streamlined EV has a top speed of just 26 mph (42 km/h) and weighs just 374 lbs (170 kg) without a driver. The airflow-optimized shape has faired-in rear wheels and a drag coefficient of just 0.159; more importantly, though, it has a pretty tiny frontal area (it's only 39.4 inches/1,000 mm tall and 47.2 inches/1,200 mm wide).

Enlarge / Electrify America promised a lot when it first arrived, but now it mostly promises frustration and broken hardware. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

On Wednesday the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation announced it is accepting applications for grants to improve electric vehicle charger reliability. The Joint Office has $100 million to spend in this area to fund grants to repair or replace malfunctioning or broken EV chargers. The money was set aside as part of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program, which allocated $5 billion for a national network of EV chargers by 2027.

"We know that people expect public EV chargers to work the first time, every time," said Joint Office of Energy and Transportation Executive Director Gabe Klein. "That's why we have a multi-pronged approach to create a seamless charging experience by building a capable workforce, tracking reliability metrics, and convening industry to ensure they can meet the performance standards for federally funded chargers set earlier this year."

"This funding to repair and replace non-operational chargers combined with the efforts of the ChargeX Consortium should increase reliability significantly over the next two years,” said Klein.

Enlarge / There's a new grille for the F-150, among other tweaks for 2024. (credit: Ford)

Ford has just revealed the mid-life refresh for its popular F-150 pickup truck. Among the changes to the F-150 lineup are standard LED lights, a new grille, new wheel designs, and standard Sync 4 infotainment across the range.

Ford has dropped the naturally aspirated 3.3 L V6 as the entry-level motor, replacing it with a turbocharged 2.7 L V6 EcoBoost. But from our perspective, the most interesting news to come from this update is that there's now no price difference between the best-selling turbocharged 3.5 L V6 EcoBoost engine and the hybrid 3.5L V6 PowerBoost.

"We're making hybrid more accessible to our customers, giving them the power of choice by offering it at the same price as the 3.5-liter EcoBoost. This is the latest example of Ford democratizing technology for all truck customers," said Andrew Frick, vice president of sales and trucks at Ford Blue, the division of the company responsible for internal combustion engine-powered vehicles.

Enlarge / You don't need 2,000 hp to set a world record for the fastest time to 62 mph. (credit: ETH Zurich / Alessandro Della Bella)

There's a new world record for the fastest 0 to 62 mph (0–100 km/h), courtesy of a team of students at the Academic Motorsports Club Zürich and the Swiss universities ETH Zürich and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. The team did so with a scratch-built EV, designing everything from its chassis to its circuit boards, and bested the existing record—set last year by students in Stuttgart, Germany—by more than a third.

The near-instant torque of an electric motor means that even a relatively low-powered hatchback like the Mini Cooper SE or Chevrolet Bolt feels quick off the line. In the days before electric propulsion's recent renaissance, a 0–60 mph time in the three-second range was the stuff of unobtainium. Now, you can buy a Tesla Model 3 that will hit 60 in 3.5 seconds for less than $50,000.

As the price point goes up, the 0–60 time comes down. Anything starting with a 2.x is quick enough that it overcomes even the most jaded road tester in a way that taking 1 second longer to get there doesn't. Tesla will sell you a Model S that will get you there that quick, and Porsche's Taycan Turbo S is designed to do hard launches all day long until the battery is drained.

Enlarge / No, this is not a screen grab from the movie Logan. It's Parallel Systems' second-generation autonomous electric rail vehicle. (credit: Parallel Systems)

Platoons of driverless cargo trucks cruising across highways is one of those tempting technocrat ideas that doesn't look like it will pan out. As autonomous driving technology matured in the middle of the last decade, we saw trials of the concept, but human truck drivers do more than just throttle, steer, and brake, and they aren't likely to be replaced soon.

A better idea would be to shift some of that cargo to our underutilized railways—here, the idea of platooning is an old one, better known as a "train." Parallel Systems hopes to do just that with its second-generation autonomous battery-electric freight railcar.

"Our goal is to transfer more of the trucking traffic onto the railroad. In order to do that, the railroad needs to be far more flexible," explained John Howard, co-founder and vice president of operations at Parallel Systems.

Enlarge / If luxury means having stuff that makes your life easier or more pleasant but which isn't absolutely necessary, then the Genesis Electrified GV70 is very much a luxury car. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Among the definitions of "luxury" are descriptions such as "great comfort," and something that adds pleasure of comfort that isn't absolutely necessary. Those seem like perfect descriptions of the Genesis Electrified GV70, a handsome electric vehicle that maintains the Korean brand's seemingly perfect hitting streak.

That may come as a surprise, because some electric vehicle purists have a tendency to look down on EVs like the Electrified GV70. That's because it uses a platform that was designed to be powertrain-agnostic rather than riding on a bespoke EV architecture. Genesis has access to one of those—one of the best in the industry in fact, called E-GMP. It underpins the quirky-looking GV60 crossover, as well as some very good EVs from Hyundai (which owns the Genesis brand), but not the GV70.

That hardline take might feel intellectually rigorous, but it's misguided. Both BMW and the Korean OEMs have developed rather fine platforms that can be used to build pure EVs or cars with combustion engines, and I'll go as far as to say the Kia Niro EV, BMW i4, BMW i7, and Genesis G80 are each better than their hybrid or gas-burning variants, albeit more expensive.

Enlarge / A BMW worker installs a seat in an i4. The company will no longer install hardware in its cars and then ask for a fee to unlock it at a later date. (credit: BMW)

BMW's experiment with offering in-car subscriptions for hardware features installed at the factory is over. Earlier this week, a BMW board member told Autocar that while it will still pursue some subscription features in the future, those will only be software-based services.

The last decade or so has seen the auto industry get tech fever. Wide-eyed executives and shareholders looked at the profit margins and market value of software companies and their "recurring revenue streams" and decided they wanted a slice of that, particularly since a modern car is just so many computers on wheels now. But it turns out—surprise, surprise—that consumers don't really want any more monthly payments attached to their vehicles.

Indeed, in 2019 BMW earned a degree of consumer distrust after making Apple CarPlay a subscription-only feature for a while before backtracking.

Enlarge / Lotus has developed a new architecture for electric vehicles. The second EV to use this new architecture will be this, the Emeya four-door GT, which follows the Eletre SUV, released earlier this year. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

NEW YORK—After languishing with a lack of serious investment for decades, Lotus Cars is now starting to show the results of its 2017 acquisition by Geely. After building a low-volume electric hypercar and then its last gasoline-powered sportscar, it debuted an all-new electric vehicle, an SUV called the Eletre. And next year another new EV goes into production, a new four-door GT called the Emeya that uses the same Electric Premium Architecture platform as that SUV.

Despite sharing a corporate parent and a very similar design brief, the Lotus Emeya is unrelated to the Polestar 5 four-door GT that we rode in a few weeks ago. Both cars clearly target the Porsche Taycan, offering high power outputs, very rapid charging, and an engaging driving experience. But there's nothing shared between the Polestar and the Lotus, which, unlike the Polestar 5, uses a more conventional chassis construction that's a mix of different strength steels and aluminum.

"This is a Lotus like you've never seen before," said Lotus Group Vice President of Design Ben Payne. "We've built on everything Lotus has achieved so far, creating a luxury performance car for the drivers, designed to inspire confidence, exhilarate with raw emotion and pure joy—connecting them to the road."

Enlarge / When the Acura ZDX goes into production next year, the cars will feature CCS ports. But Honda and Acura EVs launched from 2025 onward will feature NACS ports instead. (credit: Honda)

On Thursday morning, Honda became the latest automaker to announce that it is switching away from the Combined Charging Standard port for fast-charging its electric vehicles. Since May of this year, beginning with Ford, multiple OEMs have signed on to the North American Charging Standard, which uses a plug of Tesla's design.

Perhaps more important than the plug itself is the fact that Honda has negotiated access for its customers to use Tesla's Supercharger network. These are far more numerous than CCS fast chargers in North America, and they're far more reliable—although much of that reliability is down to the tightly integrated Tesla ecosystem, and there are no guarantees that third-party vehicles will find the process as friction-free.

That's particularly true since some of those vehicles—including Honda EVs—will have to use a CCS-to-NACS adapter. Each automaker announcement has followed the same pattern, with NACS ports only appearing on cars from 2025 onward. EVs built before then will need adapters, which are supposed to be available sometime in 2024.

Enlarge / Ford's latest Mach-E variant is designed for fun on or off the tarmac. (credit: Ford)

Ford has a long and successful history with rallying, having won numerous races with motorsport-modified versions of more mundane machines like the Escort, Sierra, and Fiesta. Now it's applying some of that know-how to the electric Mustang Mach-E with a new version that goes on sale early next year, the Mustang Mach-E Rally.

Until now, the Mustang Mach-E to purchase if you were looking for some fun has been the Mach-E GT, particularly if you opted for the $64,900 Performance Edition, which comes with magnetorheological dampers and better tires. Ford reckons the Mach-E Rally will cost about the same as that version, and it, too, rides on those magnetic fluid-filled dampers, together with new springs that give it a 20 mm higher ride height than the Mach-E GT.

There are big front brake discs and 19-inch wheels shod in Michelin CrossClimate2 tires that have bigger sidewalls (and therefore absorb more bumps) than the 20-inch wheels and tires fitted to the GT. Ford has also added some underbody shielding to protect the front and rear motors from rocks, and there's protective film to help prevent stone chips on the doors and wheel arches.

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Toyota's 14 Japanese factories all shut down for about two days last week due to a production order system malfunction caused by a lack of disk space, the company announced today.

According to Toyota, its Japanese factories and their 28 assembly lines were halted due to "some multiple servers that process part orders" becoming unavailable and causing Toyota's production order system to malfunction on August 28.

The problem began during maintenance work on August 27. Toyota's press release said:

Enlarge / Your car's maker can collect data on you from many different sources. (credit: Getty Images)

Today, the Mozilla Foundation published its analysis of how well automakers handle the privacy of data collected by their connected cars, and the results will be unlikely to surprise any regular reader of Ars Technica. The researchers were horrified by their findings, stating that "cars are the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy."

Mozilla looked at 25 car brands and found that all of them collected too much personal data, and from multiple sources—monitoring not just which buttons you push or what you do in any of the infotainment system's apps but also data from other sources like satellite radio or third-party maps. Or even when you connect your phone—remember that prompt asking you if you wanted to share all your contacts and notes with your car when you connected it via Bluetooth?

While some gathered data seems innocuous or even helpful—feedback to improve cabin ergonomics and UIs, for example—some data is decidedly not.

Enlarge / When you see a brightly colored triceratops by the side of the road you should probably check it out. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

DENVER—A car's midlife refresh is, more often than not, a mostly cosmetic affair—new light clusters or a changed front fascia, perhaps a new interior. Truth be told, the styling tweaks to the model year 2024 Polestar 2 are subtle—you might notice new wheel designs, and the ersatz front grille has been replaced with a body-colored panel. Instead, Polestar concentrated on tweaking the bits you can't see, making the car more efficient and, in the case of the cheaper, single-motor version, a lot more fun to drive, too.

When Polestar first launched the Polestar 2 in 2020, it did so with a dual-motor all-wheel drive version, followed by a more affordable single-motor model. Although the more expensive, more powerful version was faster, as is often the case with electric vehicles, I found the supposedly lesser car the one to go for. It's this version that has had the most attention paid to it in the refresh, most notably the fact that its single motor now powers the rear wheels, not the front.

Polestar has developed a new electric motor that's significantly more powerful than the one it replaces, outputting 299 hp (220 kW) and 361 lb-ft (490 Nm). That's a 29 percent boost in power and 48 percent more torque than the previous single-motor model.

Enlarge / The BMW Neue Klasse won't look exactly like this, but details like e-ink will appear in production. (credit: BMW)

Some car manufacturers are easing their way into electrification by taking existing products and swapping engines and fuel tanks for motors and batteries. Others are taking a more radical approach, rebooting and refreshing to take advantage of the new design flexibility afforded by electric drivetrains.

BMW has done a little bit of both, starting with the radical i3 and i8 but lately offering things like the i4 and i7, visually and conceptually quite similar to their gas-powered counterparts. For its next generation of EVs, though, it looks like BMW is committing to the reinvention approach. Meet the all-new-everything Neue Klasse.

Neue Klasse, which simply means "new class" in German, is a reference back to a line of coupes and sedans that BMW launched through the 1960s and early '70s. These are the cars largely responsible for establishing the brand identity we think of today when we think "BMW." With this neue Neue Klasse, BMW is reinventing itself again, this time with a focus on sustainability and electrification—plus a wild design that's unlike any previous production car.

Enlarge / It's recognizably a mini, but with a bold, modern look. (credit: Mini)

The 2020 Mini Cooper SE showed that an all-electric Mini could deliver big electric vehicle fun in a little package. However, the real-world viability of that wee bundle was saddled with terminally short longevity: just 110 miles (177 km) of range. For 2025, Mini is leaning into electrification in a big way. Next year's Cooper E and SE carry on that emissions-free legacy, now with some decent range to match.

Mini has done some re-shuffling of its models and trims, so let's start by sorting that out. First up is the Mini Cooper, which going forward is the name for the three- or five-door configurations, including the Convertible. While there are gas-burning Cooper and Cooper S models coming, today Mini is only unveiling the purely electric Cooper E and SE, which will be built on a wholly different platform.

Those Coopers will be available in four purely cosmetic trims: Essential, Classic, Favoured, and JCW (which features black logos, racing stripes, and a Chili Red roof).