Electric Cars

Tesla notified a California judge that it had reached a conditional settlement with Rivian, reports Bloomberg, four years after accusing Rivian in a lawsuit of intentionally poaching Tesla employees and stealing trade secrets.

Conditions of the settlement weren’t revealed in the filing, and Tesla expects that a request to dismiss the suit will be filed by December 24th, Bloomberg notes.

A Tesla Cybertruck was spotted joining President-elect Donald Trump’s motorcade in Texas while traveling to the SpaceX Starship launch.

The Secret Service wouldn’t answer Road & Track’s questions about who was driving the Cybertruck, but come on, we all know who it was. A better question is whether the Cybertruck will officially join once Trump takes office. I mean, he’s already got one, gifted by streamer Adin Ross. And it is bulletproof — sort of.

Sweden’s Northvolt filed for Chapter 11 this week after racking up $5.8 billion in debt and burning through $30 million in cash. The company had investments from Volkswagen and Goldman Sachs and orders from Audi, Porsche, and BMW.

It was working with Volvo on new batteries due in 2025 with higher energy density to be integrated as a structural element of the vehicle, It’s unclear whether Northvolt will make that deadline, although it plans to “operate as usual” during the restructuring.

The automaker is preparing for a big reveal of a new car in Miami on December 2nd — amidst the internet jeering at the perplexing “JaGUar” rebrand this week. Besides its HVAC-like appearance, the car's rear seems to have a closed-off windshield, à la Polestar 4.

Audi’s A6 e-tron series, Q6 e-tron series, and A5 series vehicles in Europe will get the feature this month before it rolls out globally based on the “launch timeline of Audi vehicles.” Samsung Wallet already supports various Genesis, Kia, Hyundai, and BMW vehicles.

Unsurprisingly, President-elect Donald Trump plans to end the federal incentive, which encouraged Americans to buy EVs like Teslas for years. Now, Reuters is reporting Tesla is for it:

representatives of Tesla - by far the nation’s largest EV seller - have told a Trump-transition committee they support ending the subsidy

Meanwhile, Trump has tasked Tesla CEO Elon Musk with cutting “wasteful expenditures” in the new administration.

To celebrate its recent coupling, Volkswagen and Rivian brought a few journalists to its new Palo Alto-based office to see an example of the type of EVs they plan on building together. (Handelsblatt’s Felix Holtermann posted the first pic to his LinkedIn.) The unmarked VW test vehicles are running on Rivian’s software and electrical architecture, which the company boasts uses fewer electronic control units and less wiring than most other EVs.

Volkivian? RivWagen? I’ll leave the portmanteaus to more creative minds.

Rivian released a short film today in which the company’s CEO RJ Scaringe issues a call to action on climate change, arguing the time is now to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy solutions.

The scale of the challenge means we need to be making these changes now, and we need to begin working toward every increasing renewable content on our grid. We need to replace the roughly one-and-a-half billion combustion powered vehicles on our planet with electric vehicles, but also know that on the path to the end state, we’re going to have solutions that are imperfect, but we need to start.

In a Mazda Insider Blog interview, design chief Masashi Nakayama said:

This concept is not just one of those empty show cars. It has been designed with real intent to turn it into a production model in the not-so-distant future.

Mazda debuted the rotary engine hybrid electric coupe last year. However, as Road & Track notes, Mazda has reneged on promises it made in the past.

AT&T and curbside EV charging startup Voltpost announced a partnership to convert street lights “across Michigan and the Metro-Detroit area” into internet-connected EV charging posts. That connectivity means it’s easier to monitor and fix malfunctioning posts, as InsideEVs writes.

Curbside charging is very rare in the US. Voltpoint’s plans also include charging posts in New York City and Chicago, though, and Massachusetts has been testing utility pole-mounted ones since 2022.

That marks two more big executive departures for the EV startup; the company’s CTO left earlier this year.

The company has also furloughed 30 workers in Oklahoma, TechCrunch reports.