Transportation

The Ferrari Luce grabbed most of the spotlight this week, but China’s EV industry continues to make headlines. Here are some worth checking out:

That’s the conclusion from a Reuters investigation that includes a hard look at Tesla’s statistical methodology and interviews with company insiders. Tesla workers routinely review video clips from FSD-enabled vehicles of animal deaths or narrow misses with children. And there’s a lot of speeding:

As Nikkei Asia reports, Toyota is discontinuing development of the mass-production version of the LF-ZC concept EV it announced in 2023, focusing instead on developing SUVs. The electric Lexus was originally supposed to launch in 2026, but got delayed until 2027 and may now be shelved indefinitely.

Stephan Winkelmann didn’t comment directly on Ferrari’s EV, but told CNBC that his company’s decision to cancel its EV plans in favor of hybrids was “the right way to go.”

While a few Rivian employees have already received their R2s, the first customer deliveries won’t start until next month. Rivian says order invitations to R2 reservation holders will start to go out on “a rolling basis,” with current R1T and R1S owners getting first priority. The first version to get delivered will be the R2 Performance with Launch Package ($59,485), followed by R2 Premium ($55,485) in late 2026. Once your order is confirmed, delivery should take 2-6 weeks, the company says.

Virginia doesn’t allow autonomous vehicles yet, but Wired reports the company told state officials in a meeting this week its vehicles are in the state, mapping Arlington and Alexandria with their sensors. Updated laws governing self-driving vehicles are still under discussion, but it’s preparing to bring its vehicles one step closer to Washington, D.C., despite public skepticism and some recent issues.

Whatever you think of the new Ferrari Luce EV, designed with help from Jony Ive, it doesn’t look much like a Ferrari. A few individual parts do, but it all adds up to something a little different.

The Vatican and Ferrari go way back, so a little cross promotion of the all-electric Luce is to be expected. But not even divine intervention will pacify Ferrari fans eager for a return of sharp, aggressive lines. Still, I think we can all agree that it looks better than the all-electric G-Class popemobile which also cost half a million dollars.

The newly formed App Drivers Union represents 70,000 rideshare drivers in the state. The group can negotiate pay, benefits, and deactivation policies as part of its contract. It is the first officially recognized union representing Uber and Lyft drivers in the US.

That was Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, former Ferrari president, commenting on the recent reveal of the polarizing electric Luce. He continued (translated from Italian):

The automaker’s RACE stock is down over 7 percent, while its US-listed shares are down 4 percent, according to CNBC. It would seem Ferrari fans are not the only ones disappointed by the Jony Ive-designed Luce.

During a recent episode of Ryan McCaffrey’s Ride the Lightning podcast, Tesla’s chief designer, Franz von Holzhausen, confirmed its second-gen Roadster (first announced in 2017) will be built in Texas. The company’s vice president of engineering, Lars Moravy, also confirmed that alpha prototypes of the vehicle are currently in testing.

While gas prices continue to skyrocket, China’s EV industry keeps advancing. It can be hard to keep up, so here are some recent headlines to check out:

The National Transportation Safety Board disabled its public docket today after realizing an image it released in connection with a 2025 UPS airline crash could be used to reconstruct audio from a cockpit voice recorder — something it’s prohibited by law from doing. The agency cites “advances in image recognition and computational methods” as the enabling factor. (h/t to Scott Manley for pointing this out.)

I’ll let Jalopnik’s Daniel Golson set the scene for you:

Audi says that its Matrix LED headlights reduce glare for oncoming drivers by using the vehicle’s front-facing cameras to continuously shape the light pattern in real time. Audi first released the headlights in Europe in 2013, but regulatory hurdles delayed their adoption in the US. A rule change in 2022 eased those hurdles, allowing Audi to launch the new Matrix LED headlights in its Q9 and SQ9 SUVs later this year.

Parent company Stellantis said it would be integrating Wayve’s tech into its STLA AutoDrive platform to enable “hands-free, door-to-door supervised automated driving across both urban streets and highways.” Think of it as Stellantis’ answer to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving. The automaker also has a preexisting deal with Nvidia, Uber, and Foxconn to make robotaxis.

With imports from China effectively blocked, Israeli drone company Flytrex is opening a new “manufacturing and maintenance facility” in the Dallas-Fort Worth area with the capacity to produce “thousands” of drones annually. The company says the new facility is key to its plan to open 60 new delivery sites across DFW by mid-2027. Flytrex currently operates a drone delivery service with Uber Eats and DoorDash, with some of its drones capable of delivering a couple pizzas at a time.

Karpathy, who had also been on the founding team of OpenAI, says he will be working on R&D at Anthropic. Previously, he had been working on “new kind of school that is AI native,” and he says he’s still “deeply passionate about education” and plans to go back to it “in time.”

A bipartisan bill that was just introduced in the House would levy an annual fee of $130 on everyone who owns an electric vehicle. The reasoning is that EV owners need to help pay for road and infrastructure improvements, since they don’t pay the gas tax that funds the Highway Trust Fund. But EV advocates are miffed that they’re being asked to pay almost twice what the average car owner pays each year in gas taxes, especially at a time when high gas prices are leading some consumers to give EVs a new look.