Transportation editor
Andrew is transportation editor at The Verge, He covers electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles, ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, public transit, policy, infrastructure, electric bikes, and the physical act of moving through space and time. Prior to this, he wrote about politics at City & State, Crain's New York Business and the New York Daily News. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids, and many different brands of peanut butter.
The Italian sports car company is ditching in-car navigation for some of its models, acknowledging that it can never produce a map as good as your smartphone. The new Purosangue and 12Cilindri will be the first Ferraris without a built-in navigation system. The company’s head of product marketing told The Drive that it knows its customers prefer phone-mirroring, like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Besides, who’s even using their Ferrari as a daily driver?
Despite numerous setbacks, autonomous vehicle startups are somehow still able to get rich investors to open their wallets to them. Just today, Waabi, the driverless truck startup founded by former chief scientist at Uber’s Advanced Technology Group Raquel Urtasun, announced its Series B funding round, led by Uber and Khosla Ventures, of $200 million. The money will go toward the launch of the company’s “fully driverless, generative AI-powered autonomous trucks” by 2025. Big bucks and an elusive deadline to launch the new tech? What is this, 2017?
The legislation would have given large cities the power to tax or even restrict autonomous vehicle deployment. But after lawmakers proposed stripping local control provisions, the bill’s sponsor decided to put it on ice. AV lobbyists opposed the bill, calling it a “backdoor ban.” But supporters said cities should have more say over whether to allow driverless cars on their streets.
Tesla recently filed a $1 billion lawsuit against a former supplier, Matthews International, alleging trade secret theft of its EV battery technology. Matthews has been supplying Tesla with machinery since 2019, and the company says it has been been swiping trade secrets related to dry electrode battery manufacturing. Tesla got those secrets by acquiring a company called Maxwell Technologies back in 2018.
Stellantis has been teasing a more affordable electric Jeep, and now we know what it will be called when it arrives in 2027: Renegade. The gas-version of the subcompact SUV typically starts at $29,445, so it will take some work for Stellantis to bring that price down to $25,000 — especially given how expensive some EV batteries still are.
[InsideEVs]
The shareholder meeting ends with several people pitching Musk on their personal business ideas. He adds another note about FSD’s rate of improvement. And that’s the end.
Thanks for following along with us! We’ll have more coverage of the meeting tomorrow, so stay tuned for that.
Musk kind of sidesteps a question about whether there’s a succession plan in place in the event that he gets hit by a car — or just decides to leave. “I think Tesla has a good future without me,” he said. “I think I’m a helpful accelerant to that future.”