Electric Cars

Rivian has had layoffs in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, and now, within a week of launching the long-awaited R2 SUV, layoffs in 2026. The Wall Street Journal reports the cuts made Tuesday affected less than two percent of its employees, which the company confirmed, saying it “restructured a handful of teams,” as it attempts to turn a profit for the first time.

While talking to the press ahead of a race in Barcelona this weekend, Hamilton said his friends’ reaction to the Luce was “mixed, like you see on social media.” “Mixed” is definitely one word for the online reaction to Ferrari’s new EV, which attracted a wave of memes and criticism over its design.

The Autopian spotted the highly anticipated EV in Long Beach this week. Although it was heavily camouflaged, the outlet was able to estimate its measurements to be around 64-inches tall and about 195-inches long, which would make it a little smaller than a Ford Maverick. That’s extremely interesting to me as a person who thinks most trucks today are way too big for their britches. Sure, it’s no kei truck, but for Ford, it’s practically microscopic. Bring on the baby trucks!

He said the company’s autonomous ridehail vehicles would be available to half the US population by the end of 2025. Well, here we are in June 2026, and Tesla only has 59 vehicles in a handful of Texas cities. Bloomberg breaks down the growing chasm between Musk’s bombastic predictions and the realities of a very slow, often inconvenient robotaxi service.

The 2027 Eclipse Sportback EV is based on the next-gen Nissan Leaf and will go on sale in North America later this fall. The Japanese automaker says it will reveal the prices and specs closer to launch, but given this is a Leaf in different clothing, you can probably expect a 75 kWh battery pack providing an estimated 303 miles of range.

While the Verge Motorcycles spinoff Donut Lab has spent the last few months claiming to have solved solid-state batteries, science YouTuber Ziroth says he’s determined that the battery the company is testing is actually a lithium-ion battery cell.

The over-the-air software update will allow Lucid Gravity owners to drive hands-free on “compatible” North American highways. A manual tug of the turn signal will also initiate hands-free lane changing. The software update will also bring to the Gravity new Google Maps’ Smarter Navigation feature, Adaptive High Beams, and more detailed battery information.

The Ferrari Luce grabbed most of the spotlight this week, but China’s EV industry continues to make headlines. Here are some worth checking out:

That’s the conclusion from a Reuters investigation that includes a hard look at Tesla’s statistical methodology and interviews with company insiders. Tesla workers routinely review video clips from FSD-enabled vehicles of animal deaths or narrow misses with children. And there’s a lot of speeding:

As Nikkei Asia reports, Toyota is discontinuing development of the mass-production version of the LF-ZC concept EV it announced in 2023, focusing instead on developing SUVs. The electric Lexus was originally supposed to launch in 2026, but got delayed until 2027 and may now be shelved indefinitely.

Stephan Winkelmann didn’t comment directly on Ferrari’s EV, but told CNBC that his company’s decision to cancel its EV plans in favor of hybrids was “the right way to go.”

While a few Rivian employees have already received their R2s, the first customer deliveries won’t start until next month. Rivian says order invitations to R2 reservation holders will start to go out on “a rolling basis,” with current R1T and R1S owners getting first priority. The first version to get delivered will be the R2 Performance with Launch Package ($59,485), followed by R2 Premium ($55,485) in late 2026. Once your order is confirmed, delivery should take 2-6 weeks, the company says.

Whatever you think of the new Ferrari Luce EV, designed with help from Jony Ive, it doesn’t look much like a Ferrari. A few individual parts do, but it all adds up to something a little different.

That was Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, former Ferrari president, commenting on the recent reveal of the polarizing electric Luce. He continued (translated from Italian):

The automaker’s RACE stock is down over 7 percent, while its US-listed shares are down 4 percent, according to CNBC. It would seem Ferrari fans are not the only ones disappointed by the Jony Ive-designed Luce.

During a recent episode of Ryan McCaffrey’s Ride the Lightning podcast, Tesla’s chief designer, Franz von Holzhausen, confirmed its second-gen Roadster (first announced in 2017) will be built in Texas. The company’s vice president of engineering, Lars Moravy, also confirmed that alpha prototypes of the vehicle are currently in testing.

While gas prices continue to skyrocket, China’s EV industry keeps advancing. It can be hard to keep up, so here are some recent headlines to check out:

Karpathy, who had also been on the founding team of OpenAI, says he will be working on R&D at Anthropic. Previously, he had been working on “new kind of school that is AI native,” and he says he’s still “deeply passionate about education” and plans to go back to it “in time.”

A bipartisan bill that was just introduced in the House would levy an annual fee of $130 on everyone who owns an electric vehicle. The reasoning is that EV owners need to help pay for road and infrastructure improvements, since they don’t pay the gas tax that funds the Highway Trust Fund. But EV advocates are miffed that they’re being asked to pay almost twice what the average car owner pays each year in gas taxes, especially at a time when high gas prices are leading some consumers to give EVs a new look.

First teased in 2023, this ID. Polo GTI is the first EV in the GTI brand’s 50-year history, launching in Germany this fall for “just under” €39,000, and probably never in the US. It features a 52kWh battery with a max range of 424 km (263 miles). Volkswagen says the electric GTI can accelerate up to 100km/hr in 6.8 seconds.

That means we won’t get an all-electric Mazda until 2029 at the earliest. The Japanese automaker also plans on slashing its investment in EVs to ¥1.2 trillion ($7.52 billion) through 2030, down from an earlier budget of ¥2.0 trillion ($12.53 billion), the CEO told Automotive News. I guess it could have been worse; Mazda could have gone full Honda and cancelled everything.