Enlarge (credit: VERONIQUE DUPONT / Contributor | AFP)

Yesterday, Elon Musk appeared at his first Tesla unveiling since he took the helm at Twitter. At a Tesla plant in Nevada, the billionaire announced that after five long years, Tesla’s first heavy-duty Semi had been delivered to PepsiCo.

The Semi, Tesla announced, would go into production in 2023 and feature an updated version of Tesla’s Supercharger, which uses liquid-cooling technology in its charging cable and is capable of charging the large electric vehicle at 1 megawatt.

“If you're a trucker and you want the most badass rig on the road, this is it,” Musk told those gathered for the reveal, according to a Reuters report.

Enlarge / Ferrari has ditched the V8 for its latest mid-engined supercar, the 296 GTS. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

IMOLA, ITALY—Time is running out for the internal combustion engine. Looming bans on new vehicles powered by internal combustion engines are set to go into effect in the mid-2030s around the world, from California to China, but even now, there are dozens of European cities that have implemented low-emissions zones that restrict passenger cars to hybrids and EVs. And unlike the average CO₂ regulations that govern carmakers, there are no exemptions for building in low volumes.

That means if you build supercars—like, say, Ferrari—and you want to sell your supercars to people who live in the center of cities (which supercar owners often do), it's time to get electrified. That's something Ferrari has been working on for some time, first in Formula 1 and then in its ultra-expensive, ultra-low-volume models like the LaFerrari and SF90. But now, that tech has trickled down to the manufacturer's bread-and-butter model, a mid-engined machine called the 296. During the spring, Ferrari debuted the hardtop 296 GTB. More recently, it took the wraps off the folding-top 296 GTS, tested here.

Visually, it's easy to place this as a mid-engined Ferrari, and were you to line up a 296 alongside an F8, 488, and 458, the evolution of the shape would be obvious. Then again, there are only so many places you can put a mid-engined car's engine and radiators, and where those go dictates where you need ducts, vents, and so on. However, break out a tape measure and you'll discover the wheelbase has shrunk by a couple of inches (50 mm).

Enlarge / Jaguar's latest factory racing car is the I Type 6, its latest Formula E challenger. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

LONDON—On Wednesday, Jaguar Racing became the latest Formula E team to unveil its race car for the coming season. The sport has radical new technical rules for its third-generation race car, which is smaller, lighter, more powerful, and more efficient. This will be the British automaker's sixth season competing in the series, and its participation is for more than just marketing; Jaguar Land Rover's electrified road cars have benefited in tangible ways as a result, according to the team's technical manager Phil Charles.

"If you rewind back to 2017, that's the first time that [we used] our in-house inverter for the racing team," Charles told Ars. "We put a silicon carbide switching device, the Wolfspeed one actually... that gave us the ability to switch super fast. That was the push on our side—we want to switch faster and see if that can give us efficiency, which it did. So we've gotten over and over and over during these inverter development cycles, switching faster and faster and faster," he said.

At the time, few manufacturers looked at silicon carbide power electronics for road-going EVs. "Now everyone wants silicon carbide, and the reason they want it is the same reasons we do," Charles said. "So the tech that we pushed then has really caught up now—the race to road is really clear. If I kind of map our switching speed increase, we've done five evolutions with different topologies of the in-house inverter. Now the road cars are coming along and the benefit there is range, ultimately; it means smaller batteries."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Electric vehicles have never been more popular. Just about every automaker is in the midst of an electrification effort, spurred on by impending government regulations around the world aimed at reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. But is the movement having an effect? Here in the US, plug-in vehicles are selling better than ever, despite supply chain shortages and frequent hefty dealership markups.

According to Argonne National Lab, between 2010 and the end of 2021, the US had bought more than 2.1 million plug-in vehicles, including 1.3 million battery EVs. That sounds like a very impressive number, but bear in mind that's out of a total national vehicle pool of nearly 276 million cars and trucks. Argonne estimates that despite all these plug-ins, national gasoline consumption was reduced by just 0.54 percent in 2021.

In total, Argonne calculates that US plug-in vehicles have driven nearly 70 billion miles since 2010, consuming 22 TWh of energy in the process. That's displaced the use of more than 2.5 billion gallons of gasoline and 19 million tons of greenhouse gases, Argonne reports, although for context, the US consumed about 369 million gallons of gasoline a day in 2021. For 2021 specifically, plug-in vehicles saved about 690 million gallons of gasoline—about two days of consumption—and reduced CO₂ emissions by 5.4 million metric tons, consuming 6.1 TWh in the process.

Enlarge / Chevrolet gave the Bolt a facelift in 2021 and added a stretched variant called the Bolt EUV. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

The Chevrolet Bolt doesn't get enough respect. After early experiments like the hand-built EV1 and the limited-run Spark EV, the Bolt was General Motors' first mass-produced battery electric vehicle, beating Tesla's Model 3 to the market and boasting a sub-$40,000 price tag when it launched in 2017. In 2021, the car got a (COVID-delayed) facelift, a price cut, and a second variant, called the Bolt EUV, which had a longer wheelbase and more interior room, plus the option of GM's Super Cruise hands-free driver assist.

We've finally gotten some time behind the wheel of a Bolt EUV, just in time for another price cut in June that sees the price of this is-it-a-hatchback, is-it-a-crossover start at $27,200, making it the second-cheapest EV on sale (after the $25,600 Bolt EV). And other than the fact that its fast charging ability is not particularly fast, I'm struggling to find reasons to avoid this competent EV.

The original Bolt EV turned out to be a hoot to drive—fit one with slightly grippier tires and it will embarrass a Golf GTI—but it got a bad rap thanks to front seats that some found uncomfortable. More recently, there was a massive recall affecting battery packs built by LG until 2022. Those issues are now behind the Bolt; GM and LG set about replacing the battery in every affected car, giving older Bolt owners a nice energy storage bump in the process.

Enlarge / A Rolls-Royce hydrogen-fueled aircraft engine is tested at Boscombe Down in the UK. Flying is one of the most difficult industries to decarbonize, and hydrogen-powered aircraft are still years away from carrying a plane over long distances. (credit: Steve M. Smith / Rolls-Royce)

British engineer Rolls-Royce has successfully used hydrogen instead of conventional jet fuel to power a modern aircraft engine in a world first for the aviation industry, according to the company.

The ground test, which took place at a government test facility at Boscombe Down, used green hydrogen generated by wind and tidal power from the Orkney Islands in Scotland.

Rolls-Royce used a converted AE 2100-A turboprop engine that powers civil and military aircraft to conduct the test in partnership with easyJet.

Enlarge / Lighter and less powerful, the 911 T benefits from some desirable options that aren't available on other 911s. (credit: Tim Stevens)

Getting bigger and heavier as you age is something that many of us can relate to. Even the sportiest of cars is not immune to this unfortunate expansion. The Porsche 911 weighed just 2,400 lbs (1,089 kg) when new in the early 1960s and was only 165 inches (4,191 mm) long. Since then, it has grown by over a foot (300 mm) and has packed on over 800 pounds (363 kg).

Mind you, the 911 is still a stellar car, sublime really, but that expanded girth has changed the Carrera from a proper sports car to something that sits on the sporty side of a comfortable touring machine. Now, though, with the return of the Carrera T, the 911 is going back to its roots—again. After spending a lovely evening carving canyons in California, I'm happy to say that the result is remarkable.

As 911s go, this one is aimed squarely at driving enthusiasts. (credit: Tim Stevens)

The T in Carrera T actually stands for "touring," but that's a bit of a misnomer. Here it's a designation for a lighter-weight, edgier, more engaging flavor of Carrera. The first Carrera T premiered way back in 1968, a simpler 911 that most famously conquered the Monte Carlo Rally at the hands of Vic Elford.

Enlarge / The Chevrolet Bolt EUV is one of the cheapest EVs on sale, starting at $27,200. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

You might have noticed that our car coverage is rather heavily biased toward electrified vehicles. Partly that's in recognition of the fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are now far higher than at any time since humans have walked the planet. But as I drive more and more EVs, it's also clear that they're actually just better in nearly every metric one might choose, other than when it comes to energy density and how long it takes to recharge. But this viewpoint puts me in a minority of Americans, according to a new survey of Americans, Canadians, and Australians.

The survey was conducted by Consider the Market, an Australian insurance comparison site, which found that only 33.8 percent of Americans say they'd prefer an EV to a traditional vehicle. By contrast, more than half (52.9 percent) say they want to stick with gasoline or diesel, a number that goes up to 70 percent in the 55–64 age bracket. Meanwhile, 43 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds would prefer an EV.

Which is unfortunate, because very few in that age bracket can afford them. In fact, purchase price ranked second as a barrier to EV adoption, at 54.5 percent. (The highest barrier to adoption was battery life and replacement costs, at 56.4 percent of survey respondents, which, as we've explained before, is more a problem of perception than reality.)

Enlarge / The Cupra Born is a sporty alternative to the Volkswagen ID.3. (credit: Cupra)

Recently, we reviewed Audi's RS e-tron GT, a handsome four-door electric vehicle that, while closely related to the Porsche Taycan, still manages to feel quite distinctive to drive. As I detailed in that article, the practice of sharing common platforms or architectures has been a fact of life in the automotive industry for decades.

That's particularly true at Volkswagen Group, which uses a handful of platforms as the starting point for its collection of 10 brands. One of the newest of these platforms is known as MEB (Modularer E-Antriebs-Baukasten or Modular Electrification Toolkit), and so far Ars has sampled MEB-based EVs in the form of the Volkswagen ID.4 crossover and then, more recently, the ID. Buzz minivan and the Audi Q4 e-tron crossover.

Not every MEB-based EV is destined for America, however. Volkswagen isn't bringing the Golf-sized ID.3 hatchback over to this side of the Atlantic, although based on European colleagues' takes on that car I'm not so sure we're missing out heavily. It is more unfortunate that US roads may also never see the Cupra Born, an electric hot hatch from a brand that got spun out of Seat in 2018 as a more performance-focused OEM. Friend of Ars Jonny Smith recently drove the Born and came away impressed, particularly since he was one of those reviewers underwhelmed by the ID.3.

Enlarge (credit: LG Display)

LG Display will commercialize thin, vibrating speakers for cars in the first half of 2023, the company announced today. The Thin Actuator Sound Solution has similar dimensions to a passport and forgoes many of the bulkier parts of typical car speakers.

LG Display is known for developing display panel technologies and providing them to various companies, including the consumer LG brand. Its new speaker doesn't use a cone, magnet, or voice coil and doesn't require a speaker grille. Instead, the speaker relies on what the company described as a "film-type exciter technology," which vibrates off display panels "and various materials inside the car body" to create "3D" sound that LG Display claims is as good as what traditional car speakers produce.

LG even worked with a "global audio company" to develop the speakers, but we can't tell you if that's impressive or not because LG Display didn't specify the partner's name.

Enlarge / Domino's new fleet of 2023 Chevrolet Bolts are unmistakeable. (credit: Domino's Pizza)

While it may not be your favorite pizza-slinger, one has to respect Domino's Pizza for being forward-looking. Whether or not it actually launched the first pizza delivery service in 1960, it certainly popularized the idea and more recently has been testing autonomous vehicles and sidewalk robots to deliver pizza.

At some point, before robotic Domino's delivery is commonplace, its pizzas may speed their way to you in an electric car.

On Monday the company announced the arrival of more than 100 Chevrolet Bolts to select Domino's locations, with another 700 due by the end of 2023. You can even check on their progress online—of Bolt deliveries, not pizza deliveries, although that's possible, too, thanks to onboard telematics.

Enlarge / LEDs have opened up new possibilities for lighting car interiors, as seen in the new Hyundai Ioniq 6. (credit: Hyundai)

The annual auto show is underway in Los Angeles this week, and Hyundai used the event to make the North American debut of its next electric vehicle, the Ioniq 6. It's a curvaceous sedan, one that looks better in person than on a two-dimensional screen, and when it goes on sale in 2023, it will be yet another example of the lighting revolution that's brightened up automotive interiors, and perhaps brightening a driver's mood.

We've written before about how LEDs have been embraced by designers crafting the exteriors of new cars. Freed from the old confines of inefficient bulbs and large, often round reflectors, today new cars and trucks are decorated by strips and slashes of yellow and red daylight running lights, with headlamps that light brighter and throw further down the road. If a car's headlights are its face—and humans are good at seeing faces in things—then new lighting technology has given our vehicles a new range of expressions.

Instead of direct lighting, the Ioniq 6's LEDs project onto the door cards. (credit: Hyundai)

Vehicle interiors are becoming more expressive, too. LEDs have taken over from incandescents here, bringing color along for the ride. The Ioniq 6, for example, boasts 64 different hues to choose from, backlighting the door cards and the dashboard.

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  The Waymo and Geely driverless car. [credit: Waymo ]

Waymo is now running a robotaxi service in two states, but the vehicles for those services are retrofitted commercial cars. The company rolls around in either the "4th-gen" Waymo vehicles, built on the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid, or the "5th-gen" driver, built on the Jaguar I-Pace. That's all great for enabling Waymo's service to get up and running, but these vehicles, which are full of controls and dials for human drivers, are driven by a robot that, in the long term, doesn't actually need a steering wheel or pedals.

So, for the second time now, Waymo is doing a ground-up design of a driverless vehicle, without any of those useless, legacy human controls. The car was originally announced in December, but today Waymo is showing off a bit more detail about the vehicle. Real-life models are actually being built now, with Waymo showing off the car at an LA press event and a camouflaged, sensorless, human-driven test mule recently hitting a test track.

The car is being built with Geely Group's Zeekr brand and designed as an all-electric "transportation-as-a-service (TaaS)-optimized" vehicle. The car has no steering wheel, pedals, or mirrors, and four automated sliding doors open up like it's some kind of road-going subway train. Inside, the minivan seats five people, including two in the front, where the dashboard contains nothing but a centrally mounted touchscreen. There are also two seat-back touchscreens for the back seats, where you can play music, pick a destination, or see what the car is currently thinking.

Enlarge / After a controversially styled fourth-generation Prius, the new car looks much more cohesive. (credit: Toyota)

This week, Toyota revealed the 2023 Prius hybrid. It's the company's fifth-generation Prius, and when it goes on sale, it will be the most efficient Prius yet, with an estimated 57 mpg (4.1 L/100 km), according to Toyota.

First seen on US roads in 2000, the Prius soon became a byword for environmentally conscious driving, marked by distinctive styling that was hard to mistake for anything else on the road. In the intervening decades, Toyota has sold millions, although many fewer now than during the nameplate's heyday in the early teens.

In part, that might have been due to the Prius's highly efficient Atkinson Cycle powertrain making its way into other Toyotas. The powertrain still offered nearly as impressive fuel economy, sometimes paired with a small traction battery as a "regular" hybrid and sometimes paired with a larger one as a plug-in hybrid (or Prime, in Toyota-speak).

Enlarge / In addition to getting faster over the years, F1 cars have also gotten far more efficient. And that's only going to increase in the coming years. (credit: Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images)

When Formula 1 cars take to the track for the first time in 2026, they'll do so powered by carbon-neutral synthetic fuels, part of the sport's "net zero by 2030" plan. It's a laudable goal, but, I confess, one I've sometimes questioned. After all, most of the carbon emitted during the course of an F1 weekend comes from the same sources as any other popular sport—the teams and fans traveling to and from the event. But after speaking with Pat Symonds, Formula 1's chief technical officer, I may have been missing the forest for the trees.

"In essence, yes, you're quite right. The total carbon footprint of the sport—of scope 1, 2—is just over a quarter million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, and the cars on the circuit represent 0.7 percent of that," Symonds explained to me. "So yes, your premise is true. But we try and take a much wider view. And what I think we have in developing a sustainable fuel and putting it in our race cars is an enormous multiplier effect. The 2 billion vehicles that are out there could use this fuel, and then the 400,000 people driving to [the US Grand Prix] isn't a problem," he said.

Formula 1 has changed quite a bit in the years since Liberty Media bought it at the end of 2016 with bigger ideas than simply sucking revenue out. Instead of pretending the Internet never happened, you can now watch races via F1's own streaming service, a service that has markedly improved over the past couple of years. In the US, a move to ESPN saw the sport go commercial-free during the actual races. And, of course, there's the whole Drive to Survive phenomena, which has boosted audiences worldwide—but particularly in North America, which next year will host grands prix in Austin, Texas; Miami; and Las Vegas.

Enlarge / This is our first official look at the Lucid Gravity, a new electric SUV from the luxury automaker. (credit: Lucid)

On Tuesday afternoon, Lucid showed off its next electric vehicle, called the Gravity. We've known for some time that the Saudi-backed EV startup was working on an SUV to go with its high-end sedan, the Air, as the prototype has been seen testing in California. But now it's official.

"Gravity builds upon everything we have achieved thus far, driving further advancements of our in-house technology to create a luxury performance SUV like none other. Just as Lucid Air redefined the sedan category, so too will Gravity impact the world of luxury SUVs, setting new benchmarks across the board," said Peter Rawlinson, Lucid's CEO and CTO.

The Gravity will be configurable with either five, six, or seven seats. (credit: Lucid)

The three-row SUV goes into production in 2024, which is why Lucid isn't giving out any details about the new machine other than to say it will have "supercar performance" and more range than any non-Lucid EV. The company will start taking deposits next year, and while we don't have a price for the new EV, given how expensive the Lucid Air sedan is, it's not unreasonable to expect the launch edition to cost around $200,000.

Enlarge / Danish racing driver Tom Kristensen leads another pair of Audi RS e-tron GTs through the corkscrew corner at Laguna Seca. (credit: Audi)

Call it platform sharing, call it badge engineering, call it what you like—car companies have collaborated with each other to make cars for much of the automobile's history. Sometimes these link-ups happen between companies that might normally be considered rivals: Honda and Rover in the 1980s; the BMW/Toyota project that gave us the new Supra; or perhaps the forthcoming electric vehicle platform-sharing between Ford and Volkswagen or General Motors and Honda.

More often, it occurs among the shared brands of a single OEM—Chrysler Group's K platform in the 1980s is a good example. But few automakers have exploited the advantages of that quite like Volkswagen Group, which builds hundreds of different vehicles across its 10 brands around the world using just a handful of different platforms. The vast majority of these—and we're talking several million cars a year—are built on VW Group's MQB platform, which can give rise to anything from an Audi A3 to a Volkswagen Transporter van, with cars and crossovers and SUVs of most sizes and shapes.

The RS e-tron GT is a little draggier than the Taycan, with a Cd of 0.24. (credit: Audi)

But even as you go up the price scale, this practice is still widely used. For example, for decades Bentleys were basically Rolls-Royces with a slightly different nose; today, they share platforms with Porsche's Panamera and Cayenne. And it's why the handsome four-door EV in this review wears Audi RS e-tron GT badging yet features very Porsche Taycan-like specifications—a consequence of sharing the same J1 platform.

Enlarge / You can tell this Polestar 2 is a bit more special than most Polestar 2s by the great big stripe and the large number two. (credit: Roberto Baldwin)

Polestar tunes Volvos. Polestar used to only tune Volvos. Taking a Volvo and making it better was Polstar’s only real job until it became one of the dozens of EV startups that have burst on the scene in the past 10 years. Now the company builds intriguing electric vehicles under the watchful eye of parent company Geely and quasi-parent Volvo.

But Polestar couldn’t deny its inclinations.

That’s how the Polestar 2 BST edition 2 (a garbled mouthful of a name) was born. A skunkworks project to tune a Polestar 2 by… well, Polestar. The chassis team wanted to make an “extraordinary version of the EV Christian Samson, Polestar’s head of product attributes told Ars Technica.

Enlarge / The exterior clues that this is a Porsche 718 GT4 ePerformance and not a 718 GT4 Clubsport are subtle; it's 140 mm (5.5 inches) wider, and the headlight projectors look more like a Taycan's than a Cayman's. But it's an all-electric car with more than a thousand horsepower on tap. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

FRANCIACORTA, ITALY—The auto industry is in the midst of a mass transformation as we move towards product lineups that are mostly or even entirely electric. Some are handling this transformation better than others, as supply chain problems caused by the pandemic and invasion of Ukraine add further complications. Witness the sorry state of Jaguar, which cancelled an electric replacement for the XJ sedan at the last minute, or the repeated electric vehicle-related missteps we've seen from Toyota, Honda, and Mazda of late.

There appear to be no such woes at Porsche, however. In 2019 it debuted the Taycan, a four-door electric sportscar that remains one of the best EVs on sale. Since then it's added new Taycan variants, two different flavors of EV wagon included, all built in a factory in Zuffenhausen, Germany that's already carbon-neutral. (Porsche's Zuffenhausen factory uses a very heavy mix of renewable energy and biogas from waste materials, and has been independently certified by Germany's DGNB.)

But Porsche isn't resting on its laurels. Fine though the Taycan is, it really is just the start of the OEM's electrified journey—as long as you aren't counting some of Ferdinand Porsche's very earliest vehicles, like the Egger-Lohner C2 Phaeton of 1898. Future battery EVs from Porsche will use an all-new flexible architecture called PPE—for premium platform electric—which the company is developing together with fellow VW Group sibling Audi (with Porsche taking the lead here).

Enlarge (credit: Education Images/Getty)

The only statewide climate measure on California’s ballot Tuesday failed, even though it would have raised billions to help meet the state’s ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets by subsidizing electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, among other things. Its downfall resulted largely from the high-profile opposition of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has arguably worked harder than any other governor to position himself as a climate leader.

Official ballot materials said Proposition 30 would provide funding for programs to reduce air pollution and prevent wildfires by increasing tax on personal income over $2 million. The roughly 35,000 Californians who make more than $2 million would have been required to pay an additional 1.75 percent on income above that amount.

The tax on these high-income earners—0.08 percent of Californians—would raise about $3.5 billion to $5 billion annually, according to the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office.