Vehicles

Was Didi’s 2020 autonomous vehicle subsidiary a Chinese equivalent to Uber’s? Since then, China’s tech landscape has changed, with internet firms regulated and foreign investments plummeting due to U.S.-China tensions. Despite Beijing’s data security probe into Didi’s parent company, its AV unit has survived and received new funding. Didi Autonomous …

WM Motor, another promising Chinese EV startup, has filed for bankruptcy as bigger players gain market share and Chinese spending on big ticket items declines. WM Motor, Nio, Li Auto, and XPeng were China’s best-funded EV startups, backed by Baidu and Tencent. Investors gave the company over $5.3 billion, including …

On Thursday, the EEOC sued Tesla for tolerating widespread and ongoing racial harassment of its Black employees and retaliating against those who opposed it. Tesla faces multiple racial bias lawsuits from the federal agency that enforces civil rights laws. Tesla was sued by the California Civil Rights Department in 2022 …

In a 10-year strategic partnership, autonomous trucking startup Waabi will provide billions of miles of driverless capacity to Uber Freight. Waabi’s test fleet will begin commercial pilots with Uber Freight shippers between Dallas and Houston this week. Waabi will eventually switch to a Driver-as-a-Service model where carriers buy trucks with …

Dance, a German startup that rents electric bikes and mopeds, has two interesting developments. First, the company added a few investors to its €12 million funding round. Second, Dance has 10,000 paying members. Dance says little about funding. The company isn’t disclosing the second tranche’s amount, which usually means it’s …

The summer of 2023 is almost over, and we have no Cybertruck. But a serendipitous visit to a San Francisco parking lot yielded new images of the unreleased polygonal electric truck. Tesla watchers The Kilowatts posted new interior photos of Elon Musk’s Cybertruck. Fingerprints? On this blocky buggy’s exterior? Fingerprints. …

When BMW started charging $18 per month for heated seats in 2022, the backlash was swift and brutal. Customers united to discourage automakers from encouraging this behavior, fearing it would encourage avarice. “You’ve already paid for it!” cried one Redditor. “The fucking hardware is in your car and you paid!” …

In 2024, Deeproute.ai, a Shenzhen robotaxi startup with $350 million in funding and over 500 employees, will open an operations center in Germany. The move will make it another Chinese mobility startup to open in Germany, home to some of the world’s largest automakers. A few Chinese mobility players announced …

GM has found a new way to join the generative AI revolution. The automaker now handles non-emergency OnStar features with Google Cloud’s Dialogflow chatbot. GM announced the partnership Tuesday during Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s Google Cloud Next 23 keynote. Since 2022, GM’s OnStar in-car concierge has used Google Cloud’s conversational …

Tesla blamed insider wrongdoing for a data breach that affected over 75,000 employees. Tesla, owned by Elon Musk, filed a data breach notice with Maine‘s attorney general after an investigation found that two former employees leaked over 75,000 personal data to a foreign media outlet. In the notice, Tesla data …