Industry

Reuters Tesla has announced it will move its company headquarters to Texas from California. Chief executive Elon Musk announced the move at the electric carmaker’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Austin. Mr Musk had fallen out with local politicians in Alameda county, California, the location of a key Tesla factory, over its Covid response. He gave

Getty Images New car registrations fell to their lowest levels in September for more than two decades, according to figures from the industry’s trade body. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) said new registrations dropped 35% compared with the same month a year earlier. Falling car production has been blamed on an ongoing

DETROIT — BrightDrop, General Motors’ electric delivery van brand, will launch its second vehicle in 2023, with Verizon as the first customer. The EV410, a midsize delivery van designed for small, frequent trips, will join the larger EV600 van at GM’s CAMI Assembly plant in Ingersoll, Ontario. Like the EV600, it will have a GM-estimated

Ford Motor Co. will receive twice the amount of Michigan tax incentives for its Dearborn Truck Plant after announcing last month that it plans to double production of the F-150 Lightning pickup at the plant. The automaker will receive just more than $6 million in State Essential Services Assessment, or SESA, exemption tax incentives for

Canadian supplier Magna International Inc. and the University of Waterloo in Ontario announced Monday a $1.3 million ($1.6 million CAD) joint project designed to enhance the safety and cybersecurity of self-driving vehicles. Jim Quesenberry, director of research and development at Magna, said the five-year collaboration will aim to tackle some of the big issues in

Plug in America, a nonprofit, Los Angeles- based advocacy group, calls itself the consumer voice of the electric vehicle industry. Among its missions is to educate consumers about driving EVs, and, through its PlugStar program, to educate dealerships on selling the vehicles. Shift Deputy Editor Pete Bigelow spoke with Program Director Kathryn Urquhart and Executive

As interest in alternative powertrains rises worldwide, U.S. consumers remain less likely than those in most other major markets to say they want an electric vehicle instead of a gasoline-powered one, according to a recent study. About two-thirds of Americans planning to buy a vehicle said they would prefer one powered by gasoline or diesel,

LOS ANGELES — Honda is late to the EV push, without an electric vehicle on sale now in the U.S. and not much success with its cute-but-pricey “e” model in Europe. But that’s not stopping the brand from predicting ambitious sales of future EV products. Honda said last week that its initial target is 70,000

COVID-related dealership shutdowns last year greatly sped up the previously slow and uneven development and implementation of online sales at dealerships. As a result, “end-to-end” retail selling and financing, performed entirely online, are now available at hundreds of dealerships and climbing. Before last year, what most dealerships considered “online selling” was mostly collecting leads on

Self-driving technology company Aurora said it will begin piloting trucks loaded with its software this week to haul goods for U.S. package delivery firm FedEx Corp between Dallas and Houston, albeit with a safety driver. Aurora, which is led by former heads of self-driving programs at Google, Uber and Tesla Inc., added on Wednesday it

The recently completed IAA Mobility show in Munich will be remembered perhaps as the first major automotive show to take place amid the pandemic. It may also be remembered for something else: bikes. Two halls were devoted to vehicles of the two-wheeled variety. Approximately 70 bike and e-bike companies showcased their latest models, and there

Deploying vast fleets of robocars has been much tougher than Tesla Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo and others thought. One European startup is now pitching an intermediate step to full autonomy: teledriving. Germany’s Vay, which has been quietly testing a fleet of remote-controlled electric vehicles all over Berlin, plans to roll out a mobility service in

Waymo, the autonomous vehicle unit owned by Google parent Alphabet Inc., is taking more office space in San Francisco. The company is subleasing more than 48,000 square feet at 555 Market Street in the city’s financial district from Uber Technologies Inc. Waymo already has space in the Bayview neighborhood, while Google has several offices in

DETROIT — Ford Motor Co. and its partner Argo AI will soon launch an autonomous vehicle delivery service with retail giant Walmart in three U.S. cities, the companies said Wednesday. The service, which will begin later this year in Miami, Washington and Austin, Texas, will use Ford Escape hybrid test vehicles equipped with Argo technology

Rather than usher in an era of low-pollution travel, future fleets of all-electric robotaxis could instead deliver unintended environmental consequences. Despite the emissions problems they might solve, new research suggests electrified self-driving fleets could, at least in some cases, exacerbate pollution problems. The counterintuitive findings were published in Environmental Research Letters this month, and come

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group and four domestic venture capital firms have jointly invested more than $300 million in DeepRoute, an autonomous driving technology developer based in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. DeepRoute said this week it will tap the investment to expand its team, ramp up R&D, and scale up collaboration with automakers

BEIJING — Xpeng Heitech, a flying car startup backed by electric vehicle maker Xpeng Inc., said on Wednesday that it would deliver electric flying cars to customers in 2024. The startup, founded in 2013 and funded by Xpeng and Xpeng’s CEO He Xiaopeng, now employs 400 people and will expand its work force to 700 by

SAN FRANCISCO — General Motors’ venture capital arm has invested millions of dollars in Oculii, a U.S. startup maker of software for radar sensors used in self-driving cars, Oculii co-founder Steven Hong said. GM can use Oculii’s low-cost software to boost the resolution of radars and scale up its partially automated vehicles and full self-driving

The Biden administration has an ambitious, $7.5 billion plan to expand electric vehicle charging to underserved areas, but it must first overcome a host of obstacles that have discouraged private investment in more equitable charging networks. The experience of California — the state with the largest number of EVs and the most advanced charging infrastructure

TOKYO — Asia’s two auto superpowers, Hyundai Motor Group of South Korea and Toyota Motor Corp. of Japan, may be competitors, but they also have something in common when it comes to their visions of the future: They both believe that hydrogen power is a promising and commercially viable alternative for a coming generation of

Short of Apple’s secretive foray into automated and electric vehicles, perhaps the most interesting ongoing mystery in the automotive industry revolves around Sony Group Corp. and its Vision-S prototype. The Japanese entertainment and consumer electronics behemoth dropped the surprise of CES in January 2020, unveiling an all- electric sedan that made public its ambitions in

The assortment of sensors automated vehicles should use to perceive their surroundings and detect obstacles is anything but settled upon. Cameras, radar and lidar comprise the elemental sensors needed to reach higher levels of automated driving. But more companies are now exploring the ways thermal cameras might augment their systems. A company called Plus that

Getty Images US car giant Ford is to stop making cars in India and shut down both of its plants in the country, according to a company statement. Ford said it would close the plants in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu states by the second quarter of 2022 but it would continue to make car engines

MUNICH — German supplier giant Continental is counting on the launch of a new business unit dedicated to autonomous mobility to help it become more nimble and more attractive to tech startups it wants to partner with. The creation will also help make Continental’s push deeper into emerging technologies more visible to outsiders and investors,

As I sat down to write the introduction to this Shift issue on 5G, something interesting happened. I decided to run a speed test on my mobile phone. “Your Internet connection is fast,” the website said. It had measured my download speed at 28.4 megabits per second, upload speed at 2.51 mbps.  Not blazingly fast

LOS ANGELES — Holoride, the company behind a groundbreaking extended reality (XR) in-vehicle media platform, is looking to drive the passenger entertainment experience in ways never imagined, with the wider adoption of 5G. The German tech company — started in 2018 with backing from Audi — has developed an application that delivers unique immersive virtual

Getty Images This week marks the beginning of Germany’s biennial Internationale Automobil Austellung – or International Motor Show. Traditionally, it is a chance for the country to parade the enduring strength of its own car industry, while welcoming the biggest brands from around the world. But this year’s event, held in the Bavarian city of

MAASAI MARA, Kenya — In the Maasai Mara National Reserve, the Toyota 4×4 Land Cruiser of tour guide and driver Sylvester Mukenye glides silently past a herd of grazing elephants, then past a pride of lions lying in the grass. The animals are completely unperturbed by the proximity of the vehicle because its diesel engine

PHILADELPHIA — While 5G networks are still rolling out across the world, some people are already looking further. Telecom companies have started developing the next generation of mobile connectivity, sparking talk of 6G and even 7G networks. By the end of 2020, there were only 217 million 5G subscriptions worldwide, according to a study from

In a 40-minute video posted to YouTube, dashcam footage shows a car maneuvering around double-parked trucks, closed lanes, pedestrians and an endless stream of other vehicles on a trip from Midtown Manhattan to Queens—all while the driver keeps his hands off the wheel. The footage, taken in July, is from a vehicle equipped with technology