For years, automakers have chased a dream: what if selling you a car was just the beginning of the relationship? What if the vehicle itself became a platform for ongoing revenue — a subscription machine that keeps delivering value (and profit) long after you drive off the lot?

They’ve tried. God, have they tried. Automated payments at gas stations. In-car food ordering. Package delivery to your trunk while you’re at work. Pilot after pilot, partnership after partnership. None of it stuck.

But something’s different now. Fully autonomous driving — the kind where you’re not even in the car — isn’t a decade away anymore. It might be next year. And that changes everything about what’s possible.

The question isn’t whether your car will eventually run errands for you. It’s whether anyone can build that experience in a way that actually makes your life better, rather than just creating new ways to sell you things.

Let’s talk about why all those pilots failed.

Automated gas station payments — Shell partnered with Jaguar, Chevy tried too. The pitch: link your card, pull up to the pump, fuel flows automatically. No swiping, no PIN entry. Seamless! Except it wasn’t. You still had to tap through screens in the car before you got out. You still had to get out. The total time saved was maybe 30 seconds, and that’s being generous. It solved a problem that wasn’t really a problem.

Trunk delivery was worse. Amazon and Audi piloted letting delivery drivers open your car remotely and drop packages inside. The value proposition: no more porch pirates! Your stuff is safe in your car! But that’s Amazon’s problem, not yours. Failed deliveries and stolen packages cost them money. The customer got nothing for participating except the vague satisfaction of knowing their protein powder was sitting in a hot trunk instead of on a hot porch. Why would anyone opt into that?

These weren’t benefits. They were features dressed up as benefits. And customers saw right through them.

If you want to build something that actually works — that customers actually use and partners actually pay for — it has to clear three bars simultaneously. First, real, obvious improvement for the customer. Not theoretical. Not “well, technically this saves you...” Real. Time saved, money saved, ideally both. And it cannot be any more complicated or difficult than what they’re already doing. Second, genuine economic value to the partner — significant enough that they’re not just willing to participate, they’re willing to pay for the privilege. Third, a sustainable cut for whoever’s facilitating the platform.

Most pilots hit one, maybe two. They never hit all three. That’s why they died.

This article is sponsored by Nokian Tires. Full disclosure: I ran their winter tires on my own cars for years before they ever sent me free ones. The Finnish have been making specialized winter tires since 1936 — they know cold weather.

If you’re curious about tire choices for your vehicle, email me and I’m happy to help.

What Actually Passes

Picture this: You’re on Amazon, checking out. Under delivery options, you see your house, Amazon Locker, Whole Foods pickup, and a new one — “Send your car.”

You tap it. Your car drives to the fulfillment center while you’re at work, pulls into a queue, pops the trunk, and an Amazon worker loads your packages. The car drives home, parks in your garage, and waits. You unload whenever you feel like it — that night, the next morning, whenever.

For this minor inconvenience (is it even an inconvenience?), you get 5% off your order.

Why would Amazon offer that? Because last-mile delivery costs them somewhere around $10 per package. If your car comes to them, they save most of that. They can share $3-4 with you, give a cut to the platform, and still come out way ahead. That’s a real benefit for the customer. That’s a real benefit for the partner. And the partner’s benefit is significant enough that everyone gets paid.

Now expand it. Dry cleaning. Prescriptions. UPS and FedEx package pickup. Anything that currently requires you to either wait at home or drive somewhere during business hours. Your car just... handles it.

Same logic applies when you’re in the car. You say “I’m hungry.” The voice assistant — because by now it’s deeply integrated with your accounts — knows your Starbucks order, your OpenTable history, your preferences. It doesn’t just show you a list of nearby restaurants. It checks Resy for availability, cross-references with your calendar, calculates exactly when you’d arrive, and makes a reservation at a place you’ll actually like that can actually seat you.

Or simpler: “Order my usual from Starbucks.” It knows your usual because you logged into Starbucks once, the same way you logged into Spotify. It shows you three nearby locations with wait times. You pick one — or say “whichever’s fastest” — and by the time you pull up, it’s ready. No app. No line. No fumbling with your phone while driving.

That’s not a feature. That’s magic. And the magic is in what doesn’t happen.

Why Tesla

Everything I’ve just described requires three things: a car that can drive itself, a platform that controls the entire stack, and the design discipline to make it feel native rather than bolted-on.

Tesla’s the obvious candidate. FSD version 14 is making genuine progress toward unsupervised operation. Cybercab production is reportedly starting next year — a vehicle designed from the ground up without a steering wheel, with a massive trunk and wireless charging, optimized for exactly this kind of use. The robotaxi rollout in Austin is already underway, with Tesla removing in-vehicle human supervisors just this week.

But it’s not just capability. It’s mentality.

Legacy automakers can’t do this because they have too many cooks. Partners, suppliers, dealers, infotainment vendors — everyone wants a piece, everyone adds friction, and there’s no one empowered to say “this is how it has to be.” The result is lowest-common-denominator experiences that satisfy no one. It’s like watching the same movie again.

Apple gets away with a 30% cut on the App Store because they built something worth 30%. They demand quality. They say no constantly. The result is an ecosystem developers want to be part of because customers actually use it. Tesla has that same energy — or could. Rivian might. Most automakers don’t, and probably can’t.

Here’s what makes this less speculation and more inevitability: the autonomous driving was the moonshot. That was the decade-long, tens-of-billions-of-dollars problem. Teaching a car to navigate the world safely without human intervention — that’s the hard part.

Warehouse queuing? Partner APIs? Figuring out where the car parks while a worker loads groceries into the trunk? That’s plumbing. Non-trivial plumbing, sure. But plumbing. Once the car can drive to a location, identify a loading zone, open its frunk, and drive home — everything else is execution. The pieces already exist. McDonald’s already uses geofencing to time when your food gets made. Starbucks already has order-ahead with estimated pickup times. Amazon already has curbside infrastructure at Whole Foods. Someone just has to connect them in a way that respects the customer.

The autonomous vehicle future isn’t about what you do when the car drives itself. Sleep, watch YouTube, answer emails — that’s obvious and boring. The interesting question is what the car does when you’re not in it. It sits parked 95% of the time. What if that time worked for you instead of just costing you insurance and depreciation?

The technology to make this happen is arriving. The question is whether anyone will build it right — where “right” means genuinely beneficial to the customer, not just another surface for advertising and upsells.

That’s the bet. And for the first time, it feels like someone might actually win it.

Share

We’ve seen this movie before. The industry convinced itself Tesla was about to fail, that hybrids were dead, that battery supply chains would materialize on faith. They were wrong about all of it — and Ford’s $19.5 billion writedown is the receipt.

Read part one → How (and why) Ford lost $19.5 billion betting on EVs

Ford just announced it’s writing down $19.5 billion in EV-related assets. BlueOval City — the Tennessee gigafactory that was supposed to be Ford’s electric future — is being renamed “Tennessee Truck Plant” and will build gas-powered pickups starting in 2029. Production of the current F-150 Lightning has ended. The next-generation Lightning will be an extended-range EV with a gas-powered generator onboard, not a pure battery electric. Model e, Ford’s EV division, won’t be profitable until 2029.

This is a confession dressed up as a pivot.

Ford isn’t alone. Remember in 2016 when Dieter Zetsche, then-CEO of Mercedes, predicted that 25 percent of the company’s sales would be electric by 2025? A few years later, Merc doubled down, then doubled down again, saying in 2021 that it would be all-electric by 2030. It has since rolled back most of its EV strategy and will be selling internal combustion engines for the foreseeable future.

GM has scaled back Ultium and quietly walked back the “all-EV by 2035” rhetoric. They eventually shipped the electric Silverado and Sierra EV — I drove the Sierra from Boston to LA earlier this year to test Super Cruise — but the volume ambitions have cratered. Volkswagen is closing a factory in Germany amid software disasters and disappointing ID.4 sales. Stellantis just pushed out Carlos Tavares with its EV strategy in disarray.

The common thread: around 2021-2022, every legacy automaker convinced themselves that Tesla had cracked the code and they needed to bet billions — immediately — or get left behind. The Biden administration’s EPA mandates added regulatory tailwinds that made the transition feel inevitable. The fear of being “the next Kodak” overwhelmed any sober analysis of actual consumer demand, battery supply chains, or charging infrastructure.

Then the political winds shifted. Trump’s back, and he just revoked almost all of the fuel economy mandates. The regulatory inevitability turned out to be politically reversible. Ford’s press release mentioned “regulatory changes” as one reason the business case “eroded.” No kidding.

Here’s the thing: two companies didn’t buy the consensus. And they’re doing just fine.

Toyota spent a decade getting roasted. Akio Toyoda was practically called a climate denier for insisting that hybrids were the bridge technology and that global battery supply chains couldn’t support mass EV adoption. The automotive press, the analysts, the EV Twitter commentariat — everyone dunked on Toyota as dinosaurs who didn’t get it.

Toyota understood something the consensus missed: you can’t electrify a global fleet if you can’t build the batteries. Akio was right.

And now Ford is announcing a pivot to... Toyota’s strategy from 2015. Hybrids everywhere. Extended-range EVs for trucks. Pure battery electrics only where the economics actually work.

Then there’s Tesla, which is printing money while legacy automakers write down billions. But Tesla didn’t win by building better cars (though it did that too). Tesla won by building the machine that builds the machine.

I stood in Tesla’s Gigafactory in the Nevada desert in 2016. A Panasonic executive told me something that stuck: the production capacity of that single factory would exceed the total output of the entire global battery industry. Not Panasonic. Not Japanese companies. All Japanese, Korean, and Chinese battery makers combined.

The obvious question — the one I kept asking — was: where are Ford’s batteries coming from? GM’s? Volkswagen’s?

The answer I got from several carmakers was some version of: “We have faith in our supply chain.”

The supply chain that didn’t exist.

Nine years and $19.5 billion later, we see how that faith was rewarded.

It’s worth noting: the products themselves were often good. GM’s Bolt in 2016 was a genuinely excellent car — 238 miles of range, around $30,000 after the tax credit, and what I called at the time “aggressively normal.” But LG made the cells, LG had finite capacity, and GM was never going to build its own gigafactory. The Bolt stayed a compliance car (and they were all recalled).

I loved Ford’s EVs — the Mach-E, the Lightning, the E-Transit. Good products, all of them.

But you can’t scale good products without the industrial foundation to build them. Ford’s engineers could design a great electric truck. Ford’s supply chain couldn’t build enough batteries to put them in customers’ driveways.

Meanwhile, the Hummer EV — which I also enjoyed driving — perfectly captured GM’s strategic confusion. A 205 kWh battery pack, the largest in any production vehicle. That’s roughly three Model 3s worth of cells stuffed into a single $110,000 truck so it could do a 3-second 0-60 party trick. Cool? Absolutely. A strategy? Absolutely not.

Tesla took a different path at every turn. Vertical integration from the start. Build your own cells. Build your own charging network. Create software that actually adds value rather than extracting rent from customers who already bought the car.

This article is sponsored by Nokian Tires. Full disclosure: I ran their winter tires on my own cars for years before they ever sent me free ones. The Finnish have been making specialized winter tires since 1936 — they know cold weather.

If you’re curious about tire choices for your vehicle, email me and I’m happy to help.

But Tesla’s advantage wasn’t just manufacturing scale — it was making EV ownership effortless. Superchargers everywhere, one-click purchasing, software that improves the car after you buy it. Ford built some great EVs and then handed the keys to a dealership network that would rather sell you a Bronco, powered by a charging ecosystem that requires three apps and a prayer. When you’re asking customers to abandon a century of muscle memory around gas stations, “good product” isn’t enough. You have to make the switch feel easy. Tesla did. Ford didn’t.

By 2023, the “we’ll do it our own way” consensus collapsed entirely. Ford adopted Tesla’s charging standard, the first capitulation of many. GM followed, then everyone else. The Supercharger network that legacy automakers ignored for a decade became the de facto North American standard — not because regulators mandated it, but because it was simply better and customers knew it.

And here’s the part that’s almost too perfect: buried in Ford’s announcement is a “new” strategic initiative. Ford is launching a battery energy storage business, repurposing the Kentucky battery plants to build grid storage systems for data centers and utilities. They’re planning to ship 20 GWh annually by 2027. Jim Farley called it a “high-growth opportunity.”

You know who identified that opportunity? Elon Musk. In 2016. Standing in that same Gigafactory, he told me that stationary storage would “probably be as big as the car business long term” with “a super-exponential growth rate.”

Tesla’s Megapack business is now enormous. They’re building dedicated Megafactories. Last year, Tesla launched a $5-per-month unlimited overnight charging program in Texas — not as a loss leader, but because Tesla is an electricity retailer in Texas’s deregulated market. They’re building the grid-as-platform business while Ford is still trying to figure out what to do with stranded battery factories.

Ford’s bold new direction is Tesla’s 2016 roadmap, too.

So what went wrong? Groupthink. The same consultants, the same McKinsey decks, the same conference circuit, the same assumptions bouncing around the same rooms. Everyone validated everyone else. Nobody asked the basic questions — like “who’s going to make all these batteries?” — because asking would have revealed that the emperor had no clothes.

When everyone at Davos agrees on something, that’s usually a sell signal.

Which brings me to the uncomfortable question: what else is the auto industry getting wrong right now?

I’d start with autonomy. The industry has burned billions on LIDAR, HD mapping, geofenced cities, and safety drivers. Cruise imploded. Argo AI is dead. Waymo works but hasn’t proven the economics. Meanwhile, Tesla’s vision-only approach has been dismissed as “dangerous” and “reckless” by the same expert consensus that assured us legacy automakers would catch up on EVs by 2025. Tesla just started pulling human safety operators out of its robotaxis in Austin.

This has the same energy as the people who said SpaceX was nuts for trying to land rockets.

And here’s the thing: the real autonomous opportunity isn’t even robotaxis. It’s what your car does when you’re not in it — the errands it runs, the packages it picks up, the friction it removes from your life. I wrote about this separately, but the short version is: the moonshot was teaching the car to drive itself. That’s done. Everything else is plumbing. The same structural problems that killed Ford’s EV strategy — too many stakeholders, too much consensus, no vertical integration — will kill their shot at capturing it.

Then there’s the software-defined vehicle fantasy — the idea that automakers can build recurring revenue streams by paywalling features or selling stuff to the driver long after the initial purchase. BMW tried charging a subscription for heated seats and got laughed out of the room. The difference between BMW’s approach and Tesla’s is simple: Tesla’s software updates make the car better. They add capability. Legacy OEMs are trying to monetize the relationship; Tesla is trying to solve problems.

One of those approaches creates value for customers. The other extracts it. Guess which one people will pay for.

The lesson from Ford’s $19.5 billion education is simple: when the consensus is overwhelming and the skeptics are being laughed at, go find the skeptics and hear them out.

Toyota was the punchline. They were right.

Tesla was “about to go bankrupt” every year for a decade. They were right.

SpaceX was “nuts” for trying to land rockets. They were right.

The pattern isn’t complicated. Revolutionary technology confounds conventional expertise. The people closest to the old way of doing things are often the worst at predicting the new way. And when you ask a basic question — like “where are the batteries coming from?” — and the answer is “faith,” that’s your signal.

Ford’s executives aren’t stupid. Neither were GM’s or Mercedes’ or Volkswagen’s. They were operating in a system that punished dissent and rewarded consensus. They hired smart people who told them what everyone else’s smart people were saying.

And when someone asked where the batteries were coming from, they had faith.

Faith cost them $19.5 billion.

Share

And it’s about to happen again — the same structural failures that gave Ford and GM and Mercedes so much trouble with EVs are about to kill their shot at autonomy.

Read part two → Why your next car might run your errands

Winter in the Rockies.

A lesson learned the hard way: the Model 3 doesn't have a spare... and Tesla roadside assistance doesn't cover third-party tires. Make sure you have a Friend With A Truck nearby if you're going to get a flat. Props to Nokian Tires for getting a replacement tire to the middle of Colorado in less than 48 hours.

Found some holiday spirit along the way.

An unexpected roadside companion.

Miles of empty road in eastern Arizona.

Old meets new — from steam power to hydroelectric.

Subscribe now

About our sponsor: I'm excited to partner with Nokian Tires. I've been running their winter tires on my own vehicles for years — both the studded and non-studded versions — long before they sent me free ones. Nokian has been making specialized winter tires since 1936, and they're genuinely the experts when it comes to cold-weather performance. What else would you expect from the Finnish?

They've also just launched the Surpass AS01, a new ultra-high-performance tire designed for longer tread life than typical UHP options.

Happy to answer any questions about tire choices for your specific vehicle and driving conditions — just comment below.

This was originally published in June 2024, following a Starship test flight and Apple introducing new AI features. Next week, SpaceX will launch another test flight (that I’m very excited for) and everything here remains true. Enjoy.

I wonder if, when world-changing inventions of the past came to be, people realized they were going to change the world.

When the Gutenberg press was invented, did people know what was to come? Or the steam engine, the automobile or the airplane?

What about the day Alexander Graham Bell made the first phone call or when Edison created the light bulb? Our history is filled with world-changing inventions, and I don’t know how many of them people knew would change everything forever. But I bet even Bell and Edison couldn’t have foreseen the impact their inventions would make upon the world.

Some folks probably knew when Wernher von Braun was developing the rocket or when Alan Turing was developing the first computer, but even then, regular people definitely didn’t see what was going on.

This week was different. This week, millions watched live as we reached milestones in the development of technologies that have the potential, at least, to reshape our world.

SpaceX sent a rocket the size of the Statue of Liberty into space and had half of it return to a controlled landing in the Gulf of Mexico and the other half to a controlled landing in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Australia. Elon Musk’s Starship has the potential to drastically reduce the cost of getting cargo and people to space. Not just to space — Starship has been specifically designed from the beginning to go not just to the moon but to Mars.

Two decades ago, the idea that you could land and reuse a rocket seemed like science fiction. Musk had an idea, and the competition laughed at him. Even a decade ago, his competitors at United Launch Alliance thought landing and reusing a rocket was crazy. Nonetheless, he persisted. Recently, SpaceX successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket for the 300th time.

Subscribe now

With this successful soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico, SpaceX showed that Starship can be reused as well. For its next launch, Elon is hinting that they’ll try to use their insane “chopsticks” set of pincers to catch the ship when it returns to Earth.

If you thought flying a rocket to India was crazy, with an HD video feed watching a flap slowly burn away like something out of “Terminator,” you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Then, on Monday, Apple unveiled the most significant updates to its computer platforms since the invention of the iPhone: A deep integration of artificial intelligence into the iPhone, iPad and Mac that will change the way people use their phones and computers forever. Apple’s tagline for this was perfect: “AI for the rest of us.”

I’ve been playing with ChatGPT and its competitors for more than a year now and have been able to get some amazing results. But I still haven’t been able to talk to it like it was the computer on “Star Trek.” I had to be extremely specific, almost pedantic, to get it to do what I wanted, and even then, it wasn’t quite right.

Apple correctly noted that, in order to be truly helpful, an AI bot needs some sense of personal context — information about your life from your calendar, your email and your text messages. Only then can an assistant be truly helpful. This is what we were promised 13 years ago when Siri launched as the first voice-activated assistant.

It only took a decade and then some, but it seems this promise is finally here. You’ll be able to say things like, “When does my mom’s flight get in?” and it’ll know to check your messages and emails for messages from your mom, find her flight number, check its status and return the information to you in just a second or two.

No longer will you need to remember where she sent the information — was it in a text or an email? This seems like a small thing, but our brain doesn’t need to remember where Mom sent that information, just that she sent it.

It seems silly — or it will seem silly in five or 10 years — that we ever needed to remember things like that, in the same way a Rolodex is amusing when we see it on the set of “Mad Men.” No one remembers phone numbers anymore. The Yellow Pages no longer exist; the entire idea of them is an anachronism.

Subscribe now

What will Apple’s new artificial intelligence make obsolete? What will Starship landing and taking off multiple times a day mean for our species? I don’t know the answer, but I know that this was one of those weeks where everything might have changed. We just won’t know it for a while.

But boy, am I excited about it.

REDONDO BEACH, Calif. — It's after midnight when I finally pull into the drive of The Portofino Hotel, stopping in front of a marker featuring two digital clocks: One displays the local time, and the other shows the time in Manhattan.

This is significant because it marks the end point of the amusingly-named Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash between New York and Los Angeles, an "unofficial" time trial running nearly 3,000 miles between the two largest cities in the country. And I was the latest competitor.

Conceived in the '70s by Car and Driver editors Brock Yates and Steve Smith, the race was seen as a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the interstate highway system and protest against traffic laws. The traditional starting point is the Red Ball Garage on East 31st Street in Manhattan, finishing at The Portofino on the opposite coast.

The video above contains all my driving, with explanations of every disengagement and plenty of commentary. It also includes a 20x timelapse of all the “uneventful” driving — of which there was plenty. There’s also some great tunes running during the timelapse parts. Enjoy.

There are no "official" records, as winning involves committing numerous traffic infractions, but the modern record was set almost 20 years ago at 31 hours, 4 minutes in a modified BMW M5, averaging 90 miles per hour and using a spotter plane for some higher-speed stretches.

The current Cannonball Run record is an astonishing 25 hours and 39 minutes, but I'm not trying to break it today. It was set during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic — when there was minimal traffic — and may never be beaten.

There are other records on the same route, too, including a 39:25 electric car-record that my friend Kyle Conner set a few months ago in a 2025 Porsche Taycan.

I made the journey in my 2024 Tesla Model 3 Performance, not for time (I stopped at hotels along the way) but to set a new record for touching the steering wheel as little as possible.

My car is fitted with Tesla's latest Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, an advanced driver assist system that handles nearly all driving tasks while the driver needs only to supervise. As a professional automotive reviewer, I needed to put FSD through its paces, and the Cannonball Run seemed the perfect test.

Here's where things get complicated: FSD is software, and it's constantly being updated. I was running the latest version, released in November, that features a newly updated highway driving system. It can handle nearly all driving tasks, including red lights, stop signs and highways, but what trips it up is... the humble parking lot.

As a result, I knew I would need to manually take over for the last couple of hundred feet around charging stations. Other than that limitation, I hoped that I wouldn't need to touch the steering wheel at all. I was (mostly) right.

I had three cameras running in the car at all times to capture the run, and I'm still reviewing the video. However, after more than 40 hours of driving, I'd estimate that I touched the steering wheel for less than five minutes. Many drive segments required no manual driving at all.

It's definitely not autonomous, and the driver is required to keep an eye on the road, which is verified by a camera inside the car that watches your eyes. Look down at a phone, your breakfast burrito or even the car's giant touchscreen for more than a few seconds and the car will gently (and then more insistently) ask that you get your attention back to the windshield. If you look away for too long, eventually, the car will disengage and force you to take over.

For full disclosure, that happened once on my journey when I spent a bit too long poring over the navigation screen while examining my next sequence of charging stops. I pulled over immediately and reset the system, but it was my longest hands-on moment of the trip — and it was entirely my fault, not the car's.

FSD certainly wasn't perfect. While it did well going through toll booths when it had a car to follow, the system had trouble deciding which lane to go in when approaching a toll booth on its own, showing another navigation-related edge case where the system needs a little more guidance.

Among the concerning moments, FSD strongly dislikes passing tractor-trailer trucks on sharper curves and, on more than one occasion, slowed significantly while next to a truck in the passing lane. It would have been better to continue on ahead as there was plenty of room to do so.

There were also two incidents when the highway was narrowing from three lanes to two, with the far-left lane merging into the middle, when the car seemed completely oblivious of the impending merge and nearly merged into another car rather than moving over in a more orderly manner. That said, there were other merges where it worked perfectly, so I'm not 100% sure what the issue was.

But these were mere foibles compared to the 3,000 miles of perfect control exhibited by Tesla's astonishingly good Full Self-Driving software. It successfully navigated roundabouts, red lights, sunlight and darkness, rain and snow, and, trickiest of all, all the other cars on the road.

You can't yet take a nap or watch a movie while it handles the driving, but we're not far from that point. FSD takes a significant leap forward in the upcoming version 13 release, which has already gone out to a few outside reviewers. A future update will allow cars to drive themselves directly to chargers and even park themselves in a spot. FSD will also be able to plan better, helping with stuff like those tricky highway merges.

Of course, since the main place I needed to take over was the last few hundred feet approaching a charger, once the car can do that itself, we'll be awfully close to a cross-country drive without needing to touch the steering wheel at all.

I guess I'll need to plan another Cannonball.

If you end up purchasing a Tesla after reading this piece, use the button below use my referral code. You’ll get a discount and I’ll get a credit towards charging or a future Tesla purchase.

Buy A Tesla

Note: After I made my journey but before I published this or the video, my friend Alex Roy (who, ironically, I’d asked months earlier if he wanted to make the run with me), revealed his own FSD dash across the country. As his was nonstop and mine was made with stops, his is the more “authentic” Cannonball Run — however, we both saw impressive results and will likely make future attempts as the software (and its competitors) become more capable.

About our sponsor: I'm excited to partner with Nokian Tires. I've been running their winter tires on my own vehicles for years — both the studded and non-studded versions — long before they sent me free ones. Nokian has been making specialized winter tires since 1936, and they're genuinely the experts when it comes to cold-weather performance. What else would you expect from the Finnish?

They've also just launched the Surpass AS01, a new ultra-high-performance tire designed for longer tread life than typical UHP options.

Happy to answer any questions about tire choices for your specific vehicle and driving conditions — just comment below.

A few weeks ago, I joined a unique cross-country race: 10 cars driving from Seattle to Boston, including nine electric vehicles and one gas car. The most telling participant? A 2013 Tesla Model S that showed just how far electric vehicles have come in a decade — and how outdated most people’s perceptions of EVs remain.

The Competitors:

• 2013 Tesla Model S 85

• Genesis G80 Electric

• BMW i7 eDrive50

• Porsche Taycan

• Mercedes-Benz EQS 450+

• Hyundai Ioniq 6

• Tesla Model 3 LR RWD

• Tesla Model S Plaid

• Lucid Air Grand Touring

• Acura TLX Type S (The gas comparison)

Here’s the thing about electric cars: Most people’s understanding of them is stuck in 2013 with that old Model S. While that vintage Tesla needed more than 30 lengthy charging stops to get across the country, modern EVs tell a different story. Most completed the journey with just 15-16 stops across some 48 hours of travel time, each typically lasting 15-20 minutes — barely enough time to grab coffee and use the restroom.

The results challenged conventional wisdom about electric vehicles. The Tesla Model 3, the most affordable EV in our group at less than $40,000, finished second among the electric entries while besting competitors costing two or three times as much. While the new Porsche Taycan easily beat the rest of the electrics thanks to its astonishing charging capabilities, it was still only a few hours ahead after a 3,000-mile journey despite being the most expensive.

Subscribe now

The gas-powered car, an Acura TLX, did win overall, but even that comes with a caveat: Its team spent the first half of the trip taking it easy until they realized how quickly the Porsche was moving. Only then did they get serious about maintaining their lead.

Different cars took different approaches to the challenge. I might be a little biased because I was on Team Mercedes, but the EQS seems to have been designed with “normal” drivers in mind rather than range-optimizing nerds like us, maintaining largely consistent charging speeds regardless of battery level. Other cars have much more significant “charging curves” where charging slows dramatically as the battery fills up. It’s the difference between a car designed by engineers seeking maximum performance and one designed for how people actually drive.

What made the journey particularly fascinating was how the cars naturally grouped together despite different charging strategies and capabilities. Even over thousands of miles, we kept running into each other at charging stations, creating an impromptu social atmosphere that made the long journey more enjoyable and more competitive.

The charging infrastructure along America’s longest interstate proved remarkably robust. Tesla’s Supercharger network was the clear standout — while other networks like Electrify America are technically capable of faster charging for certain vehicles (like the Lucid, Porsche and Hyundai), Tesla’s chargers are more plentiful and more reliable. It’s no wonder most automakers are in the process of adopting Tesla’s charging standard, with Tesla planning charger upgrades to support even faster speeds.

Tesla’s Superchargers were also consistently located right off the highway with good amenities nearby, while other networks often required short detours to places like Walmart parking lots. In more than 3,000 miles, none of us encountered a completely failed or blocked charger — a milestone that would have been unthinkable just a few years (or months!) ago.

And modern navigation systems have made long-distance EV travel nearly foolproof. While most cars have smart systems for planning charging stops, the Tesla and Mercedes stood out by requiring virtually no thought beyond following the nav’s instructions about where to stop and how long to charge.

Range anxiety? That turned out to be a nonissue. Our EVs could easily travel 200 miles between charges, and while that’s less than many gas cars, it aligns well with how people actually road trip — and with 15-minute charge stops, the car will likely be ready before you are. Most drivers — especially those traveling with families — prefer to stop every few hours anyway.

The longest theoretical range doesn’t win races, either; smart charging strategies and convenient charger locations do. The Lucid had the longest range by far, but the uber-fast charging of the Porsche and the Model 3’s efficiency and Tesla Supercharger network were enough to best it.

What’s most striking is how normal it all felt. This real-world test proved that it really doesn’t matter which modern EV you buy, as long as it’s the latest generation and not an older or slower-charging model like a Chevy Bolt EV or Ford Mustang Mach-E. They all completed the journey successfully, though some certainly proved more capable than others.

Gas cars still hold advantages for cross-country travel, but the gap is surprisingly narrow, and for the kind of road trips most Americans actually take (not many folks are driving coast-to-coast!), modern EVs are more than capable.

The 2013 Tesla that joined our race was revolutionary for its time. But using it as a benchmark for modern EVs is like judging today’s smartphones by the original iPhone. The technology has evolved — it’s time for our perceptions to catch up.

Subscribe now

The four episodes of “I-90 Surge” are below. Enjoy!

Tesla just launched a seemingly boring, throwaway promotion for customers in Texas: $5 per month for unlimited overnight charging of a new Tesla. That's it. No solar panels required, no Powerwall battery storage system needed — just plug in your car at night and pay less than the cost of two gallons of gas for a month's worth of charging.

It seems simple at first, but reveals something far more ambitious: Tesla isn't just trying to sell cars — it's positioning itself to revolutionize how we interact with electricity.

Subscribe now

The exciting part isn't the price (though who doesn't love a bargain?). It's that Tesla can offer this deal at all. In Texas's deregulated electricity market, Tesla isn't just a car company — it's also your power company. This means Tesla can optimize across both sides of the equation: when you charge your car and how much you pay to do it.

It's the first glimpse of a much bigger transformation. Today, electricity flows one way: from massive power plants through transmission lines to your home. Tesla is laying the groundwork for a future where power flows in multiple directions, with homes and cars acting as nodes in a vast energy network.

Everyone thinks of hot summer days, when the air conditioning gets cranked up, as a tough test for the power grid. But it's actually unpredictable power usage that's the problem. If the weatherman says it's going to be 90 degrees today, and it is, power companies can plan for it. But if the forecast is for 90 and it turns out to be 100 — or, just as bad, turns out to be 80 degrees — then power companies need to scramble to produce more (or less) electricity.

In 20 or 30 years, I suspect electric vehicles won't be the burden on the power grid that many fear — they'll be its salvation. Because cars sit parked 95% of the time, they represent an enormous untapped resource for grid stability. Imagine millions of car batteries that can absorb excess power when renewable generation is high (think sunny afternoons or windy nights) and feed it back when needed. Or to provide extra juice on an unexpectedly hot day or absorb extra power generation when it's surprisingly cool.

Subscribe now

The current electrical infrastructure wasn't built for this two-way power flow — most local substations can only send power in one direction. When a Tesla Powerwall or car sends power back today, it only reaches their immediate neighborhood.

Tesla's approach — combining home Powerwalls with utility-scale Megapacks — could solve this without requiring massive infrastructure upgrades nationwide. Instead of needing expensive peaker plants that run only during high-demand periods, utilities could tap into a vast network of distributed batteries — in homes and cars — to manage supply and demand at a neighborhood level, while Megapacks take care of balancing flow systemwide. This makes the grid more resilient, more efficient, and more sustainable.

What makes Tesla unique is its vertical integration. By controlling the full stack — from solar panels and home batteries to cars and now the retail electricity relationship — Tesla can create a seamless, consumer-friendly experience. This is crucial because transforming the grid isn't just a technical challenge — it's getting consumers on board as well.

It needs a compelling user experience, an attractive app interface, well-designed hardware and, most importantly, a clear value proposition. Tesla has proven remarkably adept at making complex technical solutions feel accessible and desirable — look at how they transformed the image of electric cars from glorified golf carts to objects of desire.

In other words, Tesla is going to make boring old electricity as exciting as the iPhone.

It follows a familiar Tesla playbook: build in capability before it's needed, then activate it when the ecosystem is ready. The company's new Cybertruck already supports vehicle-to-grid power flow, even though the feature isn't yet enabled. This is reminiscent of how Tesla used its Supercharger network to make its cars infinitely more practical: create the infrastructure first, then expand its capabilities over time. And now, every carmaker in the country is making its cars Supercharger-compatible.

Envision utilities offering free car charging in exchange for the ability to draw power when needed while guaranteeing it'll be recharged for your commute: "Your car will be charged to 75% by the time you leave, and in exchange, we can use your battery capacity down to 50% when you're plugged in." Free electricity for doing nothing? I think most folks would take that deal.

The economics are compelling. Utilities spend billions maintaining peaker plants that run for a handful of hours per year. By tapping into distributed storage instead, they could reduce costs dramatically. These savings could be passed on to consumers through programs like Tesla's $5 charging deal — or even more ambitious offerings as the technology matures.

Texas's deregulated market makes it the perfect laboratory for this future. While traditional utilities are constrained by regulations and legacy business models, Texas allows for the kind of innovation Tesla is pursuing. Once this model proves successful, other states will face pressure to adapt their regulations or risk falling behind.

The brilliance of Tesla's approach is that it makes this complex transformation accessible and desirable. No one needs to understand the intricacies of power markets or grid infrastructure — they just need to plug in their car at night and watch the savings add up. It's the same strategy that worked for electric cars: make the sustainable choice the attractive choice.

This $5 program is just the beginning. As more Teslas hit the roads, more Powerwalls get installed, and more solar panels go up on roofs, we'll see increasingly sophisticated ways for homes and vehicles to interact with the grid. The future of electricity won't just be about consumption — it'll be about participation.

And that future is starting in Texas, five dollars at a time.

DETROIT — The 2025 Ford Expedition will roll into dealerships soon with new tech and clever features borrowed from some of the best SUVs in the world.

Ford’s flagship SUV, the new Expedition makes a bold move for supremacy in the competitive full-size SUV market, going up against stalwarts like the GMC Yukon and Chevrolet Tahoe.

I recently got a sneak peek at the redesigned Expedition a few weeks ago in Detroit, and it’s clear that Ford knows how families use these large vehicles in their everyday lives.

The most striking change is the new dash, with a 24-inch-wide screen running along the base of the entire left side of the windshield. It replaces the instrument cluster and allows drivers to keep their eyes up and on the road while still accessing crucial information like speed and navigation.

In the middle is a large touchscreen running Google’s automotive platform. It offers built-in Google Maps, Google Assistant and access to the Google Play Store for additional apps.

It’s called the Ford Digital Experience, and it debuted earlier this year in the Lincoln Nautilus and new Ford Explorer, delivering a connected experience that is becoming mandatory in modern cars. It even supports video streaming services like YouTube, perfect for keeping kids (and parents) entertained during long waits at soccer practice. Wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are also on board, as is Alexa integration for those who prefer Amazon’s virtual assistant.

But the real winner is the split tailgate at the rear. This clever design combines a traditional SUV liftgate with a fold-down tailgate similar to what you’d find on a pickup truck. The lower portion can support up to 600 pounds and includes a fold-down seatback that can transform into a table. It’s a versatile setup that’s perfect for tailgating or impromptu picnics.

The split tailgate setup has been used in the Range Rover for years, and the fold-down seatback is reminiscent of a $10,000 seating option available on the Rolls-Royce Cullinan. Getting the same features as luxury SUVs that cost twice or six times as much is a clever move for Ford, and it’ll sell a lot of SUVs. It’s reminiscent of the fancy tailgate that GMC introduced on the Sierra a few years back, which left competitors scrambling to respond.

In the cabin, Expedition’s new Flex Powered Console (an awful name) can slide back nearly 8 inches, revealing a secure storage area up front while giving second-row passengers access to their HVAC controls and cup holders. Moms looking for a place to put purses will be thrilled with this development.

There’s also a new mount for securely holding tablets or smartphones on the back of the front headrests, a terrific alternative to wildly expensive (and generally terrible) permanently mounted rear-seat screens. It’s another feature borrowed from more luxurious SUVs, as I remember Volvo offering something similar in the XC90 nearly a decade ago.

To improve road trip life, Ford is expanding the availability of its BlueCruise hands-free highway driving system across the Expedition lineup. It’s now available on nearly 90% of all models, including the new Tremor off-road variant. Speaking of which, the Tremor is an exciting addition to the Expedition family, offering serious off-road capability for adventure-seeking families — and, if we’re honest, a terrific look that will attract even more attention than its functionality.

The Expedition Tremor boasts 10.6 inches of ground clearance, the highest in its class, and rides on 33-inch all-terrain tires. It’s powered by a high-output version of Ford’s 3.5-liter EcoBoost V6, producing 440 horsepower and 510 lb-ft of torque. With additional features like skid plates, off-road auxiliary lights and special drive modes, the Tremor will be popular for those heading off the beaten path.

Like with its pickup trucks, Ford seems to know that it can keep packing lux features into its full-size SUVs, and people will keep buying them. With that in mind, the new Expedition gets premium touches like available massaging seats, a panoramic sunroof and a 28-speaker B&O sound system. The interior design is a significant step up, with higher-quality materials and a more modern aesthetic across all trim levels. Finally, Fords no longer look dated the moment they come off the assembly line.

A pair of 3.5-liter V6 EcoBoost (aka turbocharged) engines are available, one with higher output, but the base model offers 400 horsepower and 480 torque, so there’s plenty of power. However, in a segment where some competitors are moving toward hybrid powertrains, it will be interesting to see how the Expedition’s fuel efficiency stacks up — I was disappointed that Ford’s terrific PowerBoost hybrid wasn’t coming over from the F-150. Company spokespeople didn’t have a great answer as to why there wasn’t a hybrid option, and I spoke to a current Expedition owner who was passing on the new one because of the lack of one.

Still, it’s clear that Ford has put a lot of effort into making it more than just a people mover. The Expedition is a versatile family tool that’s equally at home on the daily school run, a cross-country road trip, or even an off-road adventure. It pairs well with the Ford F-150 for buyers who need to decide whether they want the flexibility of a pickup’s open cargo compartment or a third-row and family-friendly SUV.

MARYVILLE, Tenn. — The Ford Bronco Sport, the smaller “baby” Bronco SUV, is getting a new “Sasquatch” package for 2025 that brings all manner of hardware upgrades that will significantly increase its off-road prowess.

When Ford first introduced the Bronco Sport, many folks thought the small, RAV4-sized vehicle was meant to be the New Bronco.

It wasn’t, but because of production delays, the smaller, rounded family SUV came out well ahead of the larger, beefier, full-size off-roader, and the Bronco Sport became the butt of much derision and jokes.

It wasn’t big enough, it was too soft and, most importantly, it wasn’t A Real Off-Roader.

It’s not that the Bronco Sport is bad — it’s actually extremely well-designed and capable for what it is: a small, family-focused, outdoorsy SUV. But because it had that prancing pony emblem, Bronco purists howled even though the Sport was actually a quite capable vehicle for the sorts of outdoor pursuits that buyers of a small sport utility vehicle would undertake.

I never bought into this criticism and have happily joked that the Bronco Sport is the baby Bronco but is still an excellent and worthy alternative to competitors like the Toyota RAV4, Chevrolet Equinox and Hyundai Tucson.

But the new Sasquatch package, available as an upgrade to the Badlands and Outer Banks trims, adds 29-inch Goodyear Territory all-terrain tires adapted from the full-size Bronco and clever tech features like Trail One-Pedal Drive that allows you to navigate off-road with a single pedal that doubles as both throttle and brake (like an EV). The Badlands variant also gets Bilstein rear shocks with position-sensitive damping and piggyback reservoirs, as well as actual underbody protection, something usually reserved for more hardcore off-road vehicles.

Subscribe now

Redesigned bumpers include modular mounting points for accessories like brush bars and driving lights, and I’m told that it might even be possible to mount a winch, though Ford will not be offering one through official channels as it does for the full-size Bronco.

That, plus new front and rear springs increasing ride height, gives the Bronco Sport Badlands Sasquatch 8.3 and 8.7 inches of front and rear suspension travel, respectively, and the ability to ford almost 2 feet of water.

If you’re an off-road enthusiast, these may seem like trivial numbers, but they’re actually quite impressive when you consider the size of the Bronco Sport and its place in the market. Though competitors like Subaru, Toyota and Jeep offer “wilderness” or “trail” editions, they haven’t gone so far as to offer true off-road capabilities quite like Ford has with the new ’Squatch.

The 2025 Bronco Sport also gains new standard tech like an enormous 13-inch center infotainment screen (with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto now standard) and the horribly named Ford Co-Pilot360 Assist+, which includes a host of standard safety features, including automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection, adaptive cruise control with lane centering, blind spot monitoring and automatic headlights.

Available as an optional extra is a 360-degree camera and automatic rear-emergency braking — an interesting feature that automatically stops the car if you’re about to back into something (or someone).

In all, Ford has taken a modest midcycle refresh of the Bronco Sport that I first drove three years ago and made it far more interesting. It has real off-road capabilities now and, in a brief demo and drive last week at Ford’s new Bronco Off-Roadeo in the Smokey Mountains of Eastern Tennessee, the upgrades are not just for show.

Subscribe now

The Bronco Sport may be the baby of the Ford SUV family, but it’s now far more capable — and more unique as a competitive offering — than before. Plus, Sasquatch is just a cool name.

The 2025 Bronco Sport will arrive in dealers in November, and the Sasquatch package will ship in the new year.

ANN ARBOR, Mich — The 2025 Ford Explorer isn’t just another SUV. It’s a rolling computer, signaling a fundamental shift in how we interact with our vehicles. By adopting Android Automotive into its infotainment system, Ford is attempting to transform the Explorer into a device as clever and connected as the smartphone in your pocket.

Android Automotive isn’t an extension of your phone, like Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, which effectively transforms your car’s touchscreen into a display for your phone. Instead, it’s a full operating system embedded within the vehicle itself. This means the car becomes a standalone smart device, capable of running apps, receiving updates, and integrating deeply with the vehicle’s systems.

The Ford Digital Experience integrates a suite of familiar apps and abilities directly into the dashboard. Google Maps offers real-time traffic updates, intelligent rerouting, and voice-activated searches that feel natural and intuitive. The ability to seamlessly send destinations from your phone to your car bridges the gap between devices, creating a more cohesive ecosystem.

Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of this system is the inclusion of the Google Play Store. This opens up a world of possibilities for expanding your car’s capabilities over time. Want to use Waze instead of Google Maps for your daily commute? You’ll be able to download it directly to your Explorer and use it as if it were the native mapping app. This feature has the potential to keep vehicles feeling fresh and capable long after they’ve left the showroom floor, although it remains to be seen how extensively this feature will be utilized by consumers and supported by developers. The promise is there, but the execution is wait and see.

Ford isn’t alone in this push toward software-defined vehicles. Other major brands including GM, Honda, Volvo and Nissan have also adopted Android Automotive with Google Automotive Services, while BMW, Stellantis and Porsche are using the platform without Google’s suite of apps. This convergence could lead to a more fulfilling experience across brands and potentially allow for greater innovation as developers can create apps for a wider audience.

As vehicles become more connected, privacy concerns naturally arise. One particular point of concern is the potential for data sharing between automakers and third parties, such as insurance companies. Ford and other manufacturers will need to navigate these waters carefully, ensuring transparency in how data is collected and used. While many users have shown a willingness to trade data for convenience in other aspects of their digital lives, vehicle location and data like speed and driving style feel more intimate.

Subscribe now

Expect things like vehicle location and speed data to increasingly become a topic of divorces, car crash investigations and the like over the next few years. We’ve already had automotive black boxes sharing information, but this is a whole new world of transparency and vulnerability. The risks around cyberattacks — imagine ransomware locking millions of car owners out of their vehicles — are immense, and it remains to be seen if carmakers are ready for this threat.

Ford’s move toward a more software-centric vehicle experience comes as a direct response to Tesla’s success in this area. Tesla is more a tech company than a carmaker, with a Silicon Valley ethos rather than one focused on Detroit iron. As a result, it’s long emphasized the importance of software and frequent updates, and traditional automakers are struggling to play catch-up more than a decade after the Model S first came out. However, it’s worth noting that while Ford’s system will allow for relatively easy updates to the infotainment system, it doesn’t extend to the entire vehicle in the same way Tesla’s does. Ford will be able to update its screens with relative ease, but complex updates are trickier because of how its tech works.

The shift toward software-defined vehicles (an awkward name that basically means screens and apps) presents both opportunities and challenges for the automotive industry. On one hand, it allows for greater customization and ongoing improvement of vehicles post-purchase. On the other, it requires automakers to develop competencies far, far outside their traditional wheelhouse.

The biggest risk for Ford is not in adopting these technologies but in screwing them up. A buggy, unintuitive interface can be far worse than a simple, reliable one. This is why many automakers are partnering with Google and Apple, tech giants who have spent literally tens of billions of dollars — likely greater than the entire R&D budget for most of the car industry — developing user interfaces and studying user experiences.

Interestingly, Ford is maintaining support for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto alongside its new Android Automotive system, emphasizing user choice. This stands in contrast to crosstown-rival GM’s decision to phase out these systems in their new EVs. It remains to be seen which approach will resonate more with consumers, but Ford’s strategy allows them to hedge their bets while still pushing forward with more integrated solutions.

The venerable Explorer represents a future where our cars are not just boxes to move from point A to point B but extensible platforms that can grow and adapt to our needs over time (as we move from point A to point B).

For consumers, this means the software experience should soon become as important a factor in car-buying decisions as traditional metrics like horsepower or fuel efficiency. For the automotive industry, it represents both a challenge and an opportunity — a chance to redefine what a car can be in the digital age but also a chance to really screw it up. The history of smartphones is littered with epic failures, even from huge brands like Microsoft or former success stories like Palm and BlackBerry. There’s no reason to expect companies like Ford or GM to pull this off on their own.

Ford’s hiring of Doug Field, a former Apple and Tesla exec, to run its software is a good sign, however. The more carmakers adopt Silicon Valley smarts and, more importantly, culture, the better off they’ll be.

The road ahead is sure to have its bumps, but one thing is clear: The car of the future is as much about bits and bytes as it is about nuts and bolts. And with the new Explorer, Ford isn’t quite the trailblazer it was with the Model T, but it’s not (yet) falling far behind either.

Subscribe now

PEORIA, Ill. — If I were 10 years old, Caterpillar’s Edwards Demonstration and Learning Center would be the greatest place on earth.

While the learning-focused classrooms, complete with giant screens for PowerPoint sessions on safety (that’s big here), aren’t particularly exciting, the massive demonstration area is best described as an enormous sandbox for some of the biggest toys on earth: dozens of examples of Caterpillar construction equipment.

I’d come to the midwest of the midwest to tag along with a bunch of Caterpillar’s best dealers and customers as the company demonstrated how its fanciest new tech helps build better bridges, roads, golf courses and anything else you might care to sculpt out of, or into, the earth.

If you’ve never operated an excavator, the one I played with had two joysticks, buttons, pedals and all manner of things. Move one stick one way and the bucket pivots to fill or dump. Move it the other way and the boom pivots at another joint to help you get the bucket exactly where you want.

And then, as if things weren’t complicated enough, the other joystick controls a third joint. In the hands of Caterpillar’s highly skilled demonstration team, it looks like ballet. In my hands, it looked like what I probably look like trying ballet.

Sure, I dug a hole and moved some dirt around, but what if there was a gas main five feet down, and I needed to dig a three-foot trench? Luckily, Caterpillar has some whiz-bang cleverness to help me out.

Subscribe now

With a few taps of a screen, you can set virtual fences that the teeth of your bucket will refuse to cross. I adjusted my limits and was suddenly digging a perfect hole, precisely 3 feet deep. No matter what I did, the teeth wouldn’t go any deeper than that, keeping the imaginary gas line safely intact.

Other electronic nannies prevent you from sending the bucket into the excavator’s cab, which is a terrifying thought I’d never considered. And you can set a virtual fence that prevents you from swinging the whole thing into an adjacent lane in a highway construction zone or up into overhead power lines.

And that’s just the start — the construction equipment equivalent of automatic emergency braking in an automobile.

While those features are focused on safety, a site engineer can (if you subscribe to the appropriate services that Caterpillar offers for a price they declined to share with me) upload schematics and plans straight to a tablet in the cab. This allows an operator to see exactly what they’re supposed to be working on and will dynamically set a virtual fence so the bucket only digs where it’s supposed to.

Even a novice like me could easily dig a 50-foot-long, 3-foot-deep trench if the schematics were correct. Anyone who has ever been involved in construction, whether at a house you were building or even just some landscaping project, knows that the risk of digging in the wrong place is real.

With Caterpillar’s cloud-connected 3D planning tech, the measure-twice is suddenly complete, and the operator is sent on to handle the cut once.

Difficulties in attracting labor were a common theme throughout the event, and I asked an instructor if all this tech made it challenging to get operators into cabs. But I had it backward: The safety and 3D planning features made it so relatively unskilled operators could do complicated jobs that would have taken decades of experience to pull off if they needed to be done manually.

While I still couldn’t do ballet, Caterpillar offered a pair of shoes that could handle the fancy footwork on my behalf.

And then they took me out of the cab entirely. Sometimes, there are places where you need to operate heavy equipment that isn’t entirely safe for a human being — an unstable hillside, perhaps, or when cleaning up a chemical spill.

That’s why Cat has all manner of remote controls for its equipment, everything from a belt-mounted “belly box” — a control console with joysticks that lets you walk around the machine, controlling it as if you were inside — to a screen-filled virtual setup that allows you to control a machine remotely from the other side of the world if you need to.

Subscribe now

Sitting in an excavator all day, even one with comfortable seats and air conditioning on max, isn’t the most fun job in the world. But if you could do it from home, you might be more interested, which could help with the labor shortages.

Caterpillar reps told me, rightfully proud, of the job opportunities the remote setups can provide injured vets who can’t do physical construction work but could easily operate heavy machinery from a wheelchair.

Though I was happy to play in the giant sandbox for a day, I walked away with a lot of respect for those construction workers toiling away hour after hour, building new highways and byways. Surprisingly (or not), it takes a shocking amount of skill to move dirt just so.

Caterpillar’s fancy cloud connectivity and smarts lighten the load considerably and, perhaps, can help build that new highway a little bit faster, too.

I’m not 10 years old anymore, but even (and perhaps especially) for a 40-year-old, the sandbox is still a fun place to play.

Share

SEATTLE — As a car journalist, I’ve long had the privilege of being at the cutting edge of transportation innovation, and I try to keep that in mind when testing new tech.

I’ve spent dozens of hours chatting with carmaker engineers, learning the intricacies of advanced driver assist systems like GM’s Super Cruise and Tesla’s Autopilot: how they work, why they do (or don’t) certain things, their limitations and strengths.

Last week, I was in Seattle to test the updated 2024 Ford Mustang Mach-E (more on that next week), but I was particularly interested in the latest version of Ford’s hands-off driving system, BlueCruise.

Up to version 1.3, the latest update doesn’t add any new features — instead, it adds a lot of polish and, for lack of a better word, driving experience. It’s like going from a 17-year-old behind the wheel to a 25-year-old. It’s smoother and less tentative, and easier to trust.

At least, that’s what I thought. I’ve been testing these systems for years, and I could immediately tell that BlueCruise 1.3 was a giant leap forward. I’d say it’s even closing in on Super Cruise’s driving ability, an impressive feat as I’ve long felt that GM’s product is the best in the industry.

But then I swapped with my co-driver, another auto journalist who had never driven BlueCruise before, and I was reminded that not everyone has spent so much time learning about why these systems are trustworthy.

He was tentative, understandably hesitant to remove his hands from the wheel, even with my encouragement. His hands floated next to the wheel, waiting to take over.

BlueCruise allows drivers to remove their hands from the wheel on certain preapproved roads, typically interstates and other major highways, while still paying attention to the road. The car is smart enough to recognize both the lane lines and other cars, and to keep the vehicle heading in the right direction.

Think of it as a very advanced version of the lane departure warning you might have in your car (if it was built in the last 10 or 15 years). Instead of just beeping when you touch a lane line (or steering you back if you have a more advanced system), it just steers for you.

And you can’t take a nap. The system watches your eyes — including through sunglasses, luckily — to make sure you’re paying attention to the road. Look away for more than a few seconds (even to adjust the radio or to look at the navigation map, annoyingly), and the system beeps angrily at you. Eventually, it’ll just shut off entirely.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Why do I care? How hard is it to steer?

I’ve written about these systems before, including an L.A.-to-Vegas road trip where I used Super Cruise for hours. You have no idea how much mental effort driving is until you use and get used to a system like BlueCruise.

Driving along, watching the highway to ensure nothing weird happens while the car steers for you is almost relaxing. An interstate is one of the easiest places to drive: There are (probably) no pedestrians, no cross-traffic, no vehicles coming the other way, and everyone else (mostly) stays in their lane.

Of course, sometimes weirdness does happen, which is why the driver always needs to be paying attention. Future versions of this software will be able to handle crazy situations, but we’re not there yet.

If a deer runs out in front of you, BlueCruise may try to brake, but it won’t be able to perform evasive maneuvers like a human could. But those incidents are rare. Most of the time, driving on the interstate is boring and tedious.

But then, as I watched my co-driver, I realized that this is an entirely foreign concept for many people, and it would take years for folks to get used to it.

A half-decade ago, I was an Uber driver for a hot minute and would converse with my passengers about the adaptive cruise control in my Volvo. As we sat in stop-and-go traffic, I’d show them how I didn’t need to touch the brake or throttle, and the car would handle it for me. People marveled at that, and BlueCruise is a giant leap forward from that impressive tech.

Then I meet people, like my auto journalist co-driver, who don’t even like regular cruise control and prefer to manage their speed manually at all times.

We have a long way to go before using a hands-free system like BlueCruise is as second nature as cruise control (or even automatic headlights). New technology, especially when it comes to steering a car down the road, can be bewildering or downright alarming.

But these systems are slowly making their way into the world. Ford and GM are equipping more vehicles with the tech every year, and as people get exposed to them (and journalists like me sing their praises), I think enthusiasm and acceptance will continue to grow.

At least, I hope it will. It’s just so convenient ... once you learn to keep your hands to yourself, anyway.

For the last decade, it has felt like fully autonomous cars have been about five years away. Today, it often still feels like they are five years away, but every once in a while, we get a big step forward to remind us that this technology actually is progressing.

Today, it comes from Aurora — an autonomous tech company co-founded by Sterling Anderson, who used to run Tesla's self-driving team.

For years, Aurora has been quietly working on a self-driving tractor-trailer platform that could revolutionize how cargo is moved around the country. Through partnerships with companies like FedEx and Schneider, Aurora-powered trucks have been driving themselves all over Texas, moving actual real-world cargo, completely autonomously (albeit with a safety driver behind the wheel).

Subscribe now

Aside from the "easy" problems of ensuring a truck weighing 80,000 pounds stays in its lane and doesn't hit the car in front of it, the Aurora team has also been solving more complex issues like when and how to pull over to the side of the road safely without causing problems with the shoulder, how to deal with highway construction, or how to handle being pulled over by law enforcement.

Many of these are truck-specific challenges, but all must be overcome to deliver a final, commercial-ready product. That product is about to arrive.

The new Volvo VNL Autonomous takes the proven flagship of Volvo Trucks (the company no longer has any connection to the Chinese-owned Swedish carmaker, but kept the name after a corporate split) and equips it with a full suite of Aurora tech and software.

The end result is a Transport-as-a-Service model that will allow customers to buy autonomous cargo movement rather than purchasing a truck outright. Instead of needing to provide its own employees to drive the rig, FedEx will pay an all-in-one price that includes the software, support, and technology needed to make the VNL Autonomous work.

It's designed for hub-to-hub traffic, running from, say, a Houston FedEx warehouse to another FedEx facility in Dallas and back again. Companies might run dozens of these routes every day, moving freight around in predictable ways — something perfect for an autonomous system to handle. The routes would be easily mapped, and, perhaps more crucially, as warehouses are typically located close to major interstates, the trucks wouldn't need to navigate much by way of surface streets.

The Aurora Driver, the name for its self-driving platform, is an amalgamation of redundant computers, cameras, radar, and an in-house lidar sensor that combine to allow the Driver to navigate the world. Aurora says it has traveled 1.5 million real-world miles already, on top of many times that in simulation.

It has handled both interstates and rural highways, even operating at night and in bad weather.

While companies like Tesla get most of the attention with products like "full self-driving," outfits like Aurora (and, it must be said, Google's Waymo) have quietly been working to solve real-world problems.

Far from AI putting everyone out of a job, autonomous trucking has the potential to make a real-world impact on pricing. Freight costs — particularly labor — have a significant impact on the price of goods, and autonomous truck drivers have the potential to reduce those costs in a major way.

The announcement with Volvo brings self-driving trucks another step closer to reality. While you're right to ask questions about safety, both Aurora and Volvo are safety-obsessed and are doing everything possible to get it right.

“We built the Volvo VNL Autonomous from the ground up, integrating these redundancy systems to ensure that every safety-critical component is intentionally duplicated, thereby significantly enhancing both safety and reliability," said Shahrukh Kazmi, Chief Product Officer at Volvo Autonomous Solutions. That boring, corporatized answer basically translates to: We have two of everything — which is more than can be said for a truck being driven by a human.

Subscribe now

The trucking industry continues to experience a shortage of drivers, and this partnership between Volvo and Aurora could help alleviate that challenge. The Volvo VNL Autonomous is built at Volvo's flagship New River Valley plant in Dublin, Virginia, on the same assembly line as the company's other VNL trucks, and the company promises to be able to meet industry demand for the vehicle.

And, if things work out like Aurora expects, there will be plenty of demand to go around.

CHARLOTTE — On April 17, 1964, at the New York World’s Fair, Ford unveiled its all-new Mustang.

Ford Vice President Lee Iacocca, an auto executive almost as iconic as the car he introduced, had teased the Mustang a few months earlier in a press release that read: “The new line of cars will be called the Mustang ... no further details on the new car line will be revealed until the time of its public introduction.”

In an industry as famous for its flops as its hits, it’s impressive to see any nameplate last 60 years, much less one as enduringly iconic as the Ford Mustang.

Starting at $2,368 in ’64 — about the cost of the upgraded tire package on the ’24 car or $24,000 in today’s dollars — the Mustang was almost infinitely customizable. Depending on the owner’s desires, it could be made more sporty or more luxurious. It could be a family car with spacious backseats or a teenager’s dream makeout vehicle. It had the longest list of options ever offered on a car from Detroit, which was the Mustang’s other significant contribution to automotive history.

Ford execs hoped it could sell 100,000 of the car named for a fighter plane in its first year of production, which would be a decent hit for the boys from Dearborn. They sold 22,000 on the first day.

Within three years, GM and Chrysler came chasing with the Challenger and Camaro, and Steve McQueen made it clear that the competition was always a step or two behind.

The Mustang remains a classic, enduring and jaw-dropping even today. There’s a reason “Gone in 60 Seconds” cast a ’67 Fastback as Eleanor in both the original and the remake. Everyone instinctively knew, even with zero car knowledge, that Mustang was special.

“You have a vehicle that’s already a hit, and it gets used in movies and gets even cooler,” Bob Casey, an automotive historian and former curator of the Henry Ford Museum, told me in an article I wrote for WIRED about the 50th anniversary of the Mustang. “You too can be like Steve McQueen! They picked it because it was a car that Steve McQueen would drive.”

Subscribe now

It hasn’t been all glitz and glamour and Hollywood starlets. The ’74 Mustang failed to live up to its name. Based on the Pinto, it was slow and, worse, not very pretty. But then the Fox body Mustang showed up in 1979, really hitting its stride with the GT in 1982.

That car cemented the Mustang’s place as a cultural icon, especially for 40ish millennials like me. Sure, Vanilla Ice (who rapped about dropping the top on his “five-point-oh”) ain’t no Steve McQueen, but the green-backlit instrument cluster remains so well-known that Ford included it as a not-so-secret Easter Egg in the latest generation Mustang (which comes standard with a pair of giant digital screens, which Bullitt definitely didn’t have).

The seventh-generation Mustang was released last year, and I adore it, not least because Ford — unlike GM and Dodge — had the courage to buck the EV proponents and release a (mostly) new one. There’s a new performance version called Dark Horse with more than a whiff of McQueen about it, and Ford is teasing something even cooler for a big 60th-anniversary party today in Charlotte.

A few years back, Ford built its 10 millionth Mustang — a white unit that lives at the Ford Archives in Dearborn — and it’s difficult to imagine a car that’s generated more memories.

Sure, Toyota has sold 50 million Corollas (I was taken aback when I looked up that particular number), but that practical, reliable workhorse doesn’t make the heart skip a beat like the pony car.

Mustang enthusiasts might decry the 2024’s “base” 2.3-liter turbocharged EcoBoost four-cylinder engine as “underpowered,” but they look pretty foolish doing it.

The 1982 GT (with that venerable 5.0L V8) made 157 horsepower, but the entry-level 2024 Mustang gallops out 315 horsepower. Shockingly, one only has to return to the 2010 Mustang GT’s 4.6L V8 to equal that. And the Dark Horse makes a whopping 500 horsepower, putting even Eleanor to shame (at least under the hood).

Sixty years later, the Mustang is as American as ever, even if tastes have changed a bit. It’s no longer the family car it once was, though it starts around $30,000, so it remains (somewhat) affordable. More than that, though, nostalgia is strong these days as Americans search for something familiar and comforting to grab hold of.

And what’s more familiar than the most iconic car America has ever made?

Subscribe now

POMPEII, Italy — It’s been two thousand years and we’re still dealing with potholes.

That was my thought as I stared at the perfectly preserved stone roads in Pompeii. The well-used path from one of the city’s gates towards the commercial district had deep grooves worn in the Roman paving stones from decades of wagons and chariots.

This continued everywhere in the city, and it was easy to see where the high-use commercial traffic occurred versus the more intact roads of the residential neighborhoods.

One can only imagine the complaints from Pompeii’s denizens about the increasingly deteriorating state of the roadways. Of course, these concerns became somewhat less urgent once Vesuvius blew onto the scene. However, wandering the city — complete with sidewalks and crosswalks — led me to reflect on the infrastructure challenges facing the US and how little things have changed some two millennia later.

The Roman Empire used a familiar approach to building and maintaining its road network. The central government, often using military labor, constructed these marvels of engineering. The United States, some two thousand years later, does something similar with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers building all manner of impressive infrastructure projects. The feds also often fund the initial buildout of roads and highways thanks to enormous projects like the Eisenhower Interstate System and one-off funding bills like the 2009 Stimulus Bill and the more recent Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill.

Subscribe now

Like us, the Romans were happy to fund the initial build-out of roadworks. But, the responsibility largely fell to local provinces and even individual landowners when it came to maintenance.

This landowner-reliant system, in particular, isn’t far removed from the responsibilities some city dwellers face today - think of homeowners shoveling snow from their sidewalks or clearing fire hydrants. While we’re not laying down gravel or patching up potholes on the roads outside our homes, these small acts of local maintenance are a nod to an age-old tradition of community involvement in public works.

And though the feds might come in and drop millions on new or updated highways, we leave it up to the states to maintain them.

The Romans understood something still true today: infrastructure is as much about maintenance as construction. Building a road, a bridge, or an aqueduct is only the beginning. Keeping it functional, safe, and reliable for decades is a never-ending task that requires a cooperative effort between those at the top and those on the ground.

With US roads and bridges often constructed by the lowest bidder, building something for the long term is not necessarily in their best interests. As a result, modern streets face continual deterioration within a decade or two, while some Roman roads are still used today.

The rapid movement of goods and services is fundamental to a functioning economy, and the benefits of such projects often greatly exceed the initial costs. Even the most rabid libertarian will acknowledge that infrastructure projects are often beneficial to the public good to such an extent that it makes sense for the government to collect taxes and make outlays to build them.

High-end roadworks are perhaps the greatest symbol of prosperity, while roads falling into disrepair are the ultimate symbol of a fallen empire.

Failing roadworks not only costs businesses money through slower distribution of goods and increased wear and tear on vehicles, but it also costs the government money through reduced tax revenue due to lower economic production.

The budget for the U.S. military is approaching one trillion dollars per year, funding everything from soldier salaries to the construction of billion-dollar ships, far-flung military bases, and everything in between.

Logistics is the base of any military operation, and ours is no different. Without resupply ships or port stops, the Navy couldn’t operate. Our ability to provide aerial refueling and heavy lift capabilities allows us to project force around the world with ease. In a way, our fleets of cargo planes like the C-130 and C-17 are the modern Roman roadways.

But logistics matter at home as well. We could generate at least as much economic utility and national benefit from a similarly structured and funded infrastructure plan. Senators and congressmen are forever angling to have military funding allocated to their districts but aren’t nearly as worried about building highways and byways.

With a comprehensive nationwide roadway strategy akin to that used to build our military, we could take lessons from the Roman Empire and ensure our economic might is as dominant as our military's.

A national project to ensure well-maintained, high-speed highways with consistent lane markings and signage — as well as easy-to-access rest areas and truck stops — would go a long way toward improving our ability to compete domestically and abroad.

We also need to figure out how to avoid the red tape and political infighting that dooms some of our most ambitious ideas. A high-speed train project in California is such a farce that SNCF, the French national railroad — no stranger to bureaucratic battles and fights with labor unions — gave up trying to build it for us and went to Morocco, where things are less politically dysfunctional.

Share

The situation is echoed across the country, where ambitious ideas become mired in the bureaucratic bog, fighting other priorities for funding or simply expanding their scope so far as to become unworkable.

SNCF dropped the California project in 2011, while its Moroccan bullet train opened in 2018. Meanwhile, not a single mile of high-speed rail has been laid in The Golden State 15 years after voters first approved the project.

In 2016, then Volvo Cars USA CEO Lex Kerssemakers exclaimed to Eric Garcetti, mayor of Los Angeles at the time: “It can’t find the lane markings!” He was frustrated with the poor condition of the city’s roads, resulting in subpar performance from his company’s autonomous development vehicles. When asked what the government could do to help spur self-driving car innovation, his surprisingly straightforward answer was, “You need to paint the bloody roads here!”

The potential of autonomous vehicles for improved economic production is massive, but poorly marked and maintained roads are a significant challenge. Rather than pouring billions into clean energy programs of questionable utility, the money would be better spent improving the country’s roadways — possibly improving fuel economy and reducing the premature retirement of vehicles shaken to bits by rough rides.

Well-marked lane lines seem like something that should be easily addressed and kept up to date, but as anyone who has driven on the 405 in Los Angeles or any highway in New York City can tell you, it’s apparently too much to ask.

The Romans knew what we seem to have forgotten: roads are the key to prosperity.

In many ways, little has changed in two thousand years. We still have potholes and challenges maintaining our roads.

We still have a significant need for high-quality infrastructure to encourage economic growth and efficiency. And we still have to balance the initial funding of construction with maintenance costs.

Federal funding of highways is great, but we need a more consistent and predictable way to maintain said highways. Relying on individual states for maintenance doesn’t appear to work particularly well.

We need an infrastructure plan that attacks the issue like we would attack a military logistical challenge. We must consider this an Apollo project for the 21st century: an ambitious, all-hands-on-deck effort to build the most impressive, technologically advanced roadway network the world has ever seen. If we can put a man on the moon, we can surely figure out how to build and maintain our highways, can’t we?

Subscribe now

I like the Hyundai Kona. It’s an affordable, nicely equipped crossover that makes for a perfect commuter car. It makes sense then that Hyundai is launching a new commute-focused ad campaign for the new 2024 Kona tonight during the NFL season opener.

But instead of a straightforward "make your commute better" push, Hyundai has gone all in on Covid nostalgia, positioning the new Kona as the car for people who — just now in September 2023 — are going back to the office.

The ad begins with alarmed millennials learning of their employer's return-to-work plans, with agonizing leading to dismay at the prospect of a traffic-filled commute.

Then the Kona is introduced as the cure to these end-of-lockdown blues. I’m sure the new Kona, complete with useful commuter features like adaptive cruise control with stop-and-go, is a great commuter car.

But the logic of tying a family crossover national ad campaign to sadness about the end of Covid lockdowns and work-from-home seems... questionable.

Ad campaigns, especially for a mass-market product like an automobile, typically border on anodyne for fear of upsetting any portion of a potential target market. This one goes the other way.

It's as if Hyundai's ad agency hasn't looked at a calendar or news outlet for the past two years. With significant portions of the country, including Hyundai's own workforce in Alabama and Georgia, having returned to in-person work ages ago, the timing feels terribly off. The campaign seems tailored for younger, white-collar professionals who might begrudgingly be returning to their ad agency offices after extended work-from-home stints. However, the campaign may come across as deeply insulting to the wide swath of workers who never had the luxury of remote work.

Subscribe now

In well-to-do, white-collar Orange County, the ad might receive chuckles and nods of agreement. But across vast regions of the U.S. that ended lockdown and work-from-home long ago, the ad feels two years too late and potentially divisive. Political figures like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, no stranger to bashing big corporations, could easily seize this campaign as another opportunity to bash California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Hyundai isn't merely testing the waters with this campaign; they're diving into the deep end. Launching during the NFL season opener, one of the most-watched events on television, the ad will be exposed to immediate and potentially significant scrutiny.

“For some of us a ‘commute’ spurs feelings of excitement, loss, anticipation, anxiety,” said Jason Sperling, Chief Creative Officer of INNOCEAN, Hyundai’s ad agency of record, in a press release. “As many head back to the office this year or are heading to the office for the first time, the Hyundai Kona is here for the journey.”

Why Hyundai would want to remind potential car buyers of “loss, anticipation, and anxiety” is beyond me. The irony is that the Kona is a fantastic commuter car, perfect for anyone going back to the office — but a mass-market ad campaign seems a tone-deaf place to point that out.

Earlier this year, Bud Light found itself in hot water over a minor social media partnership with Dylan Mulvaney that exploded into a PR crisis and dramatic drop in sales that shows no sign of abating. While not as inherently controversial, Hyundai's campaign has similarly heightened stakes given its high-profile launch.

At a time when the auto industry is navigating a myriad of challenges, from chip shortages to a push for electrification, the last thing Hyundai needs is a self-inflicted PR crisis. This ad campaign, developed in what appears to be a cultural and socio-political vacuum, could very well be a spectacular misstep for the automaker.

That’s a shame, too, because the Kona is a terrific car for commuters, whether they’re returning to the office for the first time in years or if they’ve been getting there all along.

Read this next:

Ford is reaching into its bag of truck tricks with the 2024 F-150 Lightning Platinum Black Edition. Limited to 2,000 units and priced just under $100,000, the arrival of a limited edition with custom aesthetics—rather than improved performance—could signify a subtle but significant shift in the electric truck market.

The Platinum Black Edition takes a standard, close to fully loaded truck and adds a few optional extras and a host of special cosmetic parts. The most obvious is a matte black wrap from the factory. Fully warrantied, it covers a glossy Agate Black paint and is the first time Ford has offered a wrap on a production pickup truck. Black Ford ovals and other badging add to the allure.

Subscribe now

Every option box has been checked, partially to add to the all-black-ness, including power running boards, a tonneau cover, and a spray-in bedliner, all of which hide any sign of the standard gloss black paint. The net effect is a truck that would make Hotblack Desiato proud, though there's not too much here (aside from the exclusive badging)  that enterprising truck buyers couldn't do themselves. But still, a "limited" run of 2,000 numbered units could entice some folks to get a midnight-ified Lightning.

Ford says it will reach an annual run rate of 150,000 F-150 Lightning trucks at its Rouge Electric Vehicle Center outside Detroit by this fall, producing 70,000 Lightnings in calendar 2023. The company says it's driving down order times, noting that the increase in capacity will allow for models with "visual differentiation."

It's a significant and impressive ramp in production capacity and at least partially explains why we're seeing this special edition now. However, it's curious that Ford only put this on the top-of-the-line Platinum trim. Standard F-150 models offer a Black Appearance Package that is available across a host of trims, not just the most expensive. It may be that Ford is seeing weakness in demand for its top-tier trucks or, perhaps more likely, that only someone buying a $90,000 truck would see value in an extra $3,000 for a matte black wrap.

The arrival of the first special edition electric pickup is reminiscent of the countless "special edition" trucks that have come over the years. The legendary Ford F-150 has come in Harley-Davidson, Dallas Cowboys, and King Ranch brandings — though only that last one still sticks around, and the cowboy-themed King Ranch (licensed from a Texas ranch that remains the largest in the United States, bigger than the state of Rhode Island) remains one of the most popular trim levels in the lineup.

Since it came out, consumer demand for the F-150 Lightning well-outstripped supply, simply on the basis of it being an electric F-150. As Lightning production increases, and competitors like the Tesla Cybertruck and Chevy Silverado EV edge closer to market, it may take more than simply being an electric truck to move units. Adding a special edition like this could tug at the emotional heartstrings of both buyers who were already considering an electric truck, and those who might stumble across it in the showroom.

In the early days of electric trucks, ownership itself was a badge of novelty and exclusivity. With tens of thousands of these on the road, plus hundreds of thousands more EVs from other carmakers, Ford may need something more unique to attract a more discerning consumer who's less impressed with the fact that it's electric and is looking for something unique.

Historically, truck buyers could walk into a dealership and have their pick of the lot, and special editions were a staple — countless truckmakers have offered various "Texas Editions," among many other things. With electric trucks, that hasn't been the case. This Platinum Black F-150 harks back to a time-honored tradition in truck sales—enticing buyers with exclusive packages, reviving a sales strategy that seemed to wane with COVID-era supply chain shortages.

Over the past month or two, as supply gains and economic concerns like higher interest rates affect car loans — more than 30 percent of auto loan applicants were rejected in the past year, according to the New York Fed, a record — EV inventories on dealer lots have crept up. If that trend continues, expect more traditional sales tricks like special editions and aggressive pricing incentives to make the transition to the EV world.

So, is this a new dog performing old tricks or an old dog learning new ones? Either way, Ford's limited edition F-150 Lightning could very well be a bellwether for how electric trucks will be marketed and sold in the future. The message seems clear: as more electric trucks arrive on the scene, don't expect one-size-fits-all.

Support me with a paid subscription or take advantage of my new car consulting as part of the founding member plan:

Subscribe now

Read this next:

There is something intoxicatingly beautiful about wickedly fast cars racing through the French countryside at night. That's probably why the 24 Heures du Mans, or, in English, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, has continued for the last 100 years. It is perhaps the world's premier motor race, and the 2023 edition takes place this weekend.

Some of the world's fastest drivers transit the 8.5-mile Circuit de la Sarthe — a mix of closed public roads and a bit of dedicated racetrack in less than three-and-a-half minutes at an average speed of close to 150 miles per hour.

I had the good fortune to attend the 2016 running of the race, when Ford returned after a multi-decade absence and won its class the first time out. Every year brings different stories, but the brief is simple: Win.

There are four different classes of car this year, with more than five dozen entries. From the no-holds-barred prototype hypercars to the GT cars that look almost like something you might be able to buy from your local Aston Martin or Porsche dealer, there are constant battles up and down the grid. But the biggest battle teams will face is time.

The goal of an endurance race isn't necessarily to be the fastest. Instead, the winner is the car that can travel the greatest distance in 24 hours, accounting for pit stops to refuel, change tires and drivers, and even to make repairs. It is a brutal, merciless game designed to push man and machine to their breaking point. In 2016, the year I attended, Toyota missed out on its first-ever win at Le Mans when its race-leading car broke down on the main straight on the last lap of the race. Having a big lead after 23 minutes and 57 seconds is not enough, it turns out.

Subscribe now

But this year, the most exciting story comes from an unexpected place. Most folks think of NASCAR as a sport for rednecks where heavy cars with big V8 motors rip around a superspeedway turning left. To show that there's much more to stock car racing than left turns and good ol' boys, NASCAR teamed up with Hendrick Motorsports, one of the top teams in racing, to field Garage 56: a Next Gen stock car that's been Le Mans-ified and is the talk of the paddock (and all of racing) this year.

The NASCAR Garage 56 crew won the annual Le Mans Pit Stop competition:

@nascarSpeed 😮‍💨 NASCAR Garage 56 took home first place in the LMGTE class and 5th overall in the pit stop competition. #NASCAR #imsa #LeMans

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

The No. 24 car, ostensibly a Chevrolet Camaro, has been heavily modified from a standard NASCAR. Rather than stickers, it has functioning headlights and taillights, carbon brake discs, and a fuel cell 12 gallons larger than normal. It's covered in a mind-boggling array of new aerodynamic components to increase downforce, and it's a whopping 500 pounds lighter than the typical Cup car you'd find in a NASCAR race.

Le Mans teams typically field three drivers, and the Garage 56 entrant — a special slot on the grid introduced in 2012 for particularly innovative and futuristic cars that might not fit into any other category — has F1 Champion Jenson Button, 7-time NASCAR Cup Series champ Jimmie Johnson, and Le Mans winner Mike Rockenfeller behind the wheel.

But what's most exciting is that while the Garage 56 entry will be racing in a class of 1, it will be racing the rest of the field, particularly the sports cars. Even more exciting? It beat the fastest GT car, a Ferrari 488 GTE EVO, by nearly four seconds in qualifying. In other words, America might be about to roll into France and kick some European ass. It's hard to put into words how unusual this car is, so perhaps this visual will help — compared to everybody else on the grid, this thing is huge:

There are other American entries in the race, too, including a Chevrolet Corvette C8.R and a rather bonkers hybrid Cadillac in the Hypercar class. But forget all that. With a naturally aspirated, cast-iron small block V8 under the hood, the Garage 56 car is mind-bogglingly loud and sure to keep fans tenting trackside up all night long. America. I mean, just listen to this thing:

@f1_lemansAmerican Power 🇺🇸🦅🔊 #camaro #nascar #nascarlemans #garage56 #24hoursoflemans #24heuresdumans #cadillac #corvette #ferrari #porsche #toyota #hendrickmotorsports #motorsport #racing #fyp #parati #zyxcba

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Anyway, the 24 Hours of Le Mans starts at 10 AM Eastern on Saturday, June 10, and runs... well... 24 hours until 10 AM ET on Sunday. You can catch the entire race on the Motor Trend channel, which is on YouTube TV and maybe other networks as well.

While it's basically impossible to watch the whole race (in 2016, I eventually fell asleep trackside on the terrace at Ford's hospitality building) but it might be worth a check-in at some point this weekend to see how the boys are holding up.

Best of luck, Jenson, Jimmie, and Mike. Make us proud.

Subscribe now

Wow. It made too much sense not to, but I didn’t think it would happen this quickly.

General Motors is following in Ford's footsteps and adopting the Tesla charging plug for its future electric vehicles. In a Twitter Spaces conversation with Elon Musk, GM CEO Mary Barra endorsed the North American Charging Standard (NACS) — the official name for the Tesla plug — asserting that it is the superior charger and should be recognized as the standard EV connector in North America.

With Ford and GM — two of America's largest EV manufacturers — joining Tesla in adopting NACS, it seems likely that other industry players will soon abandon competing plugs, such as the J-1772 and CCS chargers currently used in Ford and GM EVs (and basically every other EV sold in America today).

The adoption of the NACS by Ford and GM is a huge win for Tesla and its Supercharger network, which was initially exclusive to Tesla owners. Recently, Tesla had started to open some of its stations to other EVs in both Europe and the US to get access to additional government funding, but now the entire Supercharger network will reach hundreds of thousands of new EV users.

Subscribe now

Tesla’s Supercharger network was already the biggest and most popular EV fast charging system in the country, but with the addition of Ford and GM to the fold, it will likely see even faster expansion and investment as the pool of customers just grew dramatically.

In 2014, Tesla's opened its patents to other automakers, and the fruits of that decision are finally coming to pass. GM and Ford’s decision to adopt the NACS plug and the Supercharger network is a major step towards standardizing EV charging across the industry. This is a game-changer for all EV buyers and could potentially be a devastating blow to charging network operators like Blink, ChargePoint, and Electrify America, who operate thousands of chargers with plugs that may soon become obsolete.

When Tesla opened its patents, I wrote in WIRED:

If other car companies adopt some of Tesla's technology to develop long-range electric cars, that's nothing but good for the company.

[…]

At the end of the day, the biggest risk for Musk isn't that BMW or Toyota will steal his technology. It's that the big automakers might not be interested in electric cars enough to bother building them at all.

It took almost a decade, but the controversial move finally paid off. In the end, this is a win for GM, Tesla, and Ford customers, as GM EV owners will have access to Tesla's extensive Supercharger network in addition to existing chargers, and the added customers will only fuel investment in the network.

Share

As this situation unfolds, I find myself wondering how long the Supercharger network should even remain a part of Tesla. Does it make sense to spin it off into a separate company and attract investments from other automakers? And what implications does this have for other company-owned charging networks, such as those previously announced by Mercedes-Benz and Rivian?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Leave a comment

In the electrifying world of EVs, change sparks both innovation and controversy. Ford's decision to adopt Tesla's NACS charging plug in its future EVs has ignited a heated debate, while the potential for innovation remains to be seen. , a fellow car journalist whom I greatly respect recently wrote disapprovingly on his own Substack about his concerns, and it’s worth reading (even if he is somewhat incendiary towards Musk, for whom his distaste is obvious). However, in my view, Ford's move is not only bold but beneficial for consumers.

With the obvious benefit of opening up thousands of Supercharger stations worldwide to Ford customers, this decision gives Ford a significant leg up over other non-Tesla EV makers and will likely result in more carmakers following suit and adopting the protocol.

Around the Next Bend

Why Ford Betting on Tesla's Plug is Bad News

"The great thing about standards is there's so many to choose from!" - Greybeard engineer That's my favorite joke from my software engineering days, one that I'm sure is older than me by decades and probably predates the invention of digital computers. The sad part is, it's a joke I've been able to use agai…

Read more

3 years ago · 4 likes · 11 comments · Tim Stevens

Stevens argues that Ford's adoption of the NACS plug deviates from the globally accepted Combined Charging System (CCS) standard. However, let's remember that standards should serve consumers, not the other way around. All of Tesla’s US cars have been equipped with the NACS plug for over a decade now, and it’s reasonably argued that — with Tesla being by far the market leader in EVs — it is Tesla’s NACS that is the consumer-preferred standard in the United States, not CCS.

Subscribe now

By adopting this plug and providing access to the Tesla Supercharger network, Ford isn't subtracting options for its customers - it's adding them. Ford EV owners will have the flexibility to use both CCS and Supercharger stations (albeit with an adapter), dramatically broadening their charging network choices. Tesla’s Supercharger network, renowned for its rock-solid reliability and extensive reach, has been a significant selling point for Tesla vehicles for years. Now, Ford's decision allows its customers to reap similar benefits.

Tesla has also started rolling out its “Magic Dock” solution at select Supercharger stations, opening them up to CCS-port having EVs, including Ford product. The Magic Dock incorporates a built-in CCS adapter that allows non-Tesla vehicles, like the CCS-equipped Mustang Mach-E and the F-150 Lightning, to charge seamlessly at Supercharger stations. I recently tested the Magic Dock with a Rivian R1S electric SUV at a Supercharger station in New York and loved the experience:

Stevens also raises other concerns that warrant consideration. He points out that shorter Supercharger cables could pose challenges for larger vehicles like the Ford F-150 Lightning, given that the charging port on the Lightning is on the front left of the vehicle rather than the back left on a Tesla. However, this logistical hurdle can be readily addressed by repositioning the charging ports in future models to match the rear-left port placement on Teslas or by building future Supercharger stations to accommodate a range of vehicle port locations.

Charging port location is likely the least of most EV owner worries when it comes to fast charging. There are countless stories about DC fast charging sessions being difficult to start or, worse, not working at all. I suspect consumers would greatly prefer a slightly difficult parking situation with a working charger to a hit-or-miss charging solution with marginally better parking.

The @RateYourCharge Twitter account recently found that, according to its collected feedback, more than 90 percent of Tesla Supercharger experiences are problem free versus barely 50 percent at Electrify America and EVGo stations.

Stevens goes on to argue that Ford's existing customers might somehow feel alienated by the decision, which is a staggering misread of the situation. Ford's EV owners will likely welcome expanded access to the Supercharger network. It's an upgrade, not a downgrade, and a significant one at that. Ford EV owners will now get access to the country's largest and most reliable fast-charging network, a benefit of which they had no awareness when they bought their car.

While he correctly points out that customers will have to use an adapter to charge at Tesla stations… so what? Any customers who are so opposed to an adapter (which Ford CEO Jim Farley suggests will be provided to existing customers for free) can continue with the status quo, while everyone else will happily plug in at their local Tesla station with whatever adapter is required.

One valid concern raised by Stevens relates to the current lack of bidirectional charging support — that is, the ability to take electricity out of the EV and use it to power a house during a blackout — in the NACS standard, a feature Ford has spent ample marketing dollars touting for its F-150 Lightning electric pickup. However, Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised to add this feature within two years. Ford's NACS-equipped vehicles won't hit the roads until after that, so there's ample opportunity to incorporate this functionality even if Elon’s legendary tendency to misstate timelines holds.

I’d bet that Ford CEO Jim Farley brought up bidirectional charging during negotiations with Elon and that Tesla will prioritize developing support for it in the NACS standard.

Lastly, Stevens worries that this change could somehow confuse consumers. Confuse them how? This is the most straightforward product announcement in the world:

This is perhaps the most compelling marketing that Ford could imagine and one that greatly simplifies the EV charging landscape for Ford customers. The current situation, where non-Tesla EVs can't use the highly visible and abundant Superchargers, is what confounds customers.

Ford's decision to adopt Tesla's NACS plug and Supercharger network is a progressive move that greatly benefits Ford customers and advances the EV industry. Instead of adhering to a standard for the sake of conformity, Ford has chosen to prioritize what's best for its buyers.

Even better, this decision could pave the way towards a more unified, efficient, and consumer-friendly EV charging landscape, as other companies will feel intense pressure to adopt the Tesla charging port and ensure their EV buyers also have access to the Supercharger network — a network that is going to receive hundreds of thousands of new users and, I suspect, significant new investments from Ford to boot.

Change may be a constant in the EV world, but in this case, change is indeed good.

Subscribe now