Enlarge/ A Waymo self-driving car in front of Google’s San Francisco headquarters, San Francisco, California, June 7, 2024.
Silicon Valley’s latest disruption? Your sleep schedule. On Saturday, NBC Bay Area reported that San Francisco’s South of Market residents are being awakened throughout the night by Waymo self-driving cars honking at each other in a parking lot. No one is inside the cars, and they appear to be automatically reacting to each other’s presence.
Videos provided by residents to NBC show Waymo cars filing into the parking lot and attempting to back into spots, which seems to trigger honking from other Waymo vehicles. The automatic nature of these interactions—which seem to peak around 4 am every night—has left neighbors bewildered and sleep-deprived.
NBC Bay Area’s report: “Waymo cars keep SF neighborhood awake.”
According to NBC, the disturbances began several weeks ago when Waymo vehicles started using a parking lot off 2nd Street near Harrison Street. Residents in nearby high-rise buildings have observed the autonomous vehicles entering the lot to pause between rides, but the cars’ behavior has become a source of frustration for the neighborhood.
Christopher Cherry, who lives in an adjacent building, told NBC Bay Area that he initially welcomed Waymo’s presence, expecting it to enhance local security and tranquility. However, his optimism waned as the frequency of honking incidents increased. “We started out with a couple of honks here and there, and then as more and more cars started to arrive, the situation got worse,” he told NBC.
The lack of human operators in the vehicles has complicated efforts to address the issue directly since there is no one they can ask to stop honking. That lack of accountability forced residents to report their concerns to Waymo’s corporate headquarters, which had not responded to the incidents until NBC inquired as part of its report. A Waymo spokesperson told NBC, “We are aware that in some scenarios our vehicles may briefly honk while navigating our parking lots. We have identified the cause and are in the process of implementing a fix.”
The absurdity of the situation prompted tech author and journalist James Vincent to write on X, “current tech trends are resistant to satire precisely because they satirize themselves. a car park of empty cars, honking at one another, nudging back and forth to drop off nobody, is a perfect image of tech serving its own prerogatives rather than humanity’s.”
Enlarge/ The Cybertruck remains a divisive vehicle.
Jonathan Gitlin
When Tesla CEO Elon Musk first unveiled the Cybertruck in 2019, the angular pickup was pitched right at the heart of the highly competitive truck market. With a promised starting price of $39,900, the single-motor version ever so slightly undercut the cheapest version of Ford’s electric F-150 Lightning. Tesla increased the entry-level price by more than $20,000 by the time the Cybertruck was actually getting close to production, with promises of deliveries in 2025. But now, all mention of the cheaper rear-wheel drive Cybertruck is gone from Tesla’s ordering page.
Although pickup trucks have dominated new vehicle sales in the US for decades, their buyers are not exactly clamoring to swap their V8s or diesels for a slab of batteries and some electric motors. Ford has been finding that out the hard way—a constant string of price changes have helped keep demand depressed enough that the Blue Oval is shifting its entire electric vehicle strategy as a result.
And the F-150 Lightning has the advantage of looking just like all the other F-150s that roll off the production line. Not so the Cybertruck, a vehicle that manages to look even less elegant when you see one in the wild rather than on a screen.
As is typical with new Tesla models, the stainless steel pickup’s gestation was anything but easy. Last October Musk told fans “we dug our own grave with the Cybertruck,” having previously berated his workforce about quality control, insisting “sub 10 micron accuracy.”
And yet, the Tesla has been outselling the Ford despite the cheapest Cybertruck costing a minimum of $99,900, with Lightnings available on dealer lots with price tags that are $20,000-$30,000 less.
A better cross-shop might well be the GMC Hummer EV. Like the Cybertruck, the Hummer is so heavy it counts as a class 3 truck here in the US, a fact that precludes international sales in most markets, which require special licenses to operate heavier vehicles. Both also effectively have six-figure starting prices now, once you take into account delivery charges. So far, the Tesla is winning this sales battle, too, with nearly three times as many being sold in Q2.
That makes it the best-selling vehicle costing more than $100,000, according to industry analysts Cox Automotive, telling Automotive News that “sustained high volume at that price point will be a challenge.”
Enlarge/ Sustainable aviation fuels could help cut carbon emissions from commercial flights.
Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Last November, Virgin Atlantic Airways made headlines for completing the world’s first transatlantic flight using “100 percent sustainable aviation fuel.”
This week, the Advertising Standard Authority (ASA) of the U.K. banned a Virgin radio ad released prior to the flight, in which they touted their “unique flight mission.” While Virgin did use fuel that releases fewer emissions than traditional supplies, the regulatory agency deemed the company’s sustainability claim “misleading” because it failed to give a full picture of the adverse environmental and climate impacts of fuel.
“It’s important that claims for sustainable aviation fuel spell out what the reality is, so consumers aren’t misled into thinking that the flight they are taking is greener than it really is,” Miles Lockwood, director of complaints and investigations at the ASA, said in a statement.
The ruling is the latest in a string of greenwashing crackdowns against sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs), which are made of components other than fossil fuels. In recent years, the U.K. and U.S. governments and private sector have offered incentives and funds to help ramp up SAF production. But skeptics say the alternative fuels will hardly make a dent in the airline industry’s large carbon footprint.
Plant-powered flights
Aviation accounts for roughly 2.5 percent of global emissions, largely from the burning of petroleum-based fuels. Sustainable aviation fuels have been made with a number of alternative ingredients—from worn-out tires to plastic waste (though my colleague James Bruggers has previously covered some setbacks in the plastic-to-jet-fuel field).
The majority of SAFs are made using materials already found in the environment, such as cooking fats or plant oils. These alternative fuels still emit carbon dioxide when they burn, but they typically have lower “lifecycle” emissions than petroleum-based fuels due to the way they are harvested. SAFs tap into renewable resources found in the environment instead of fossil fuels that have trapped carbon underground for millions of years.
Currently, international standards require SAFs to be mixed with conventional fuels, which enables airlines to continue using the same infrastructure rather than developing new aircraft that can handle exclusively bio-based accelerants. To qualify as “sustainable” for U.S. tax credits, though, the mixture must cut net emissions by at least 50 percent compared with exclusively oil-based fuels.
Enlarge/ Dodge doesn’t want to be accused of building a boring EV.
Dodge
Electric motors have many advantages over internal combustion engines, including the fact that they don’t waste a lot of their power as sound energy. So quiet are electric vehicles, in fact, that federal vehicle safety regulations require EVs (and hybrids) to make a certain amount of noise at lower speeds to warn vulnerable road users like blind or visually impaired pedestrians of their presence.
Almost all of those cars end up sounding like a choir of depressed angels, a phrase memorably coined by either Richard Porter or Jonny Smith on the Smith and Sniff podcast. That’s not the case with the forthcoming electric Dodge Charger, however. When it first broke cover in March, we learned that the electric Charger would feature something called a “Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust” to give it some aural character. Now, thanks to the video from Dodge embedded here, we can all hear what that sounds like in practice:
Dodge knows that emotion is a big part of muscle car sales, so it’s made the electric Charger sound very emotional.
The Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust—the name refers to a Dodge logo—combines various chambers underneath the Charger’s body with some woofers and mid-range speakers, all driven by a dedicated 600 W amplifier. The system is also designed to transmit vibrations into the chassis through elastomeric bushings, mimicking an internal combustion engine and its motor mounts.
“We know our Dodge enthusiasts want that visceral feel you get when you drive a Dodge muscle car, and the Charger’s new Fratzonic system delivers the adrenaline-pumping spirit that they expect. It reacts to specific inputs and driving events, giving the driver a direct connection to their new Charger. Simply put, when you hear it and feel it, you will know it’s a Dodge Charger Daytona,” said Matt McAlear, Dodge brand CEO at Stellantis.
As you can hear in the video, the Fratzonic system makes more than one sound. Dodge says it “intensifies a suite of dynamic vehicle events, including power up/power down, idle/rev, acceleration/throttle, powershot [like a boost function], and deceleration/regenerative braking.”
Dodge is not the first automaker to apply a degree of automotive skeuomorphism in an effort to appeal to the more traditionally minded car enthusiast. Last year, we tested a Toyota fitted with a fake manual transmission, and later this month, we’ll be conducting a more extensive test of the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N, which sonically replicates gearshifts, winning over just about every skeptic who has driven it.
The two-door electric Charger Daytona goes on sale later this year and will cost $59,595 for the Charger Daytona R/T and $73,190 for the Charger Daytona Scat Pack.
Enlarge/ This is the Figure 02, a new humanoid robot that recently tried its hand(s) at assembling BMW chassis in South Carolina.
BMW
Robots have been working in car factories for decades now, starting with machines performing some welds on a General Motors production line back in 1961. Now, robots work alongside people on production lines, excelling at tasks like manipulating parts too heavy for humans to easily lift or welding or bonding with more precision than we can manage.
Those robots mostly look like big multi-axis arms, but a new breed of two-armed, two-legged robots is being tested in car factories. BMW is the latest automaker to try them at its factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Unlike Tesla, which hopes to develop its own bipedal ‘bot to work on its production line sometime next year, BMW has brought in a robot from Figure AI. The Figure 02 robot has hands with sixteen degrees of freedom and human-equivalent strength.
“We are excited to unveil Figure 02, our second-generation humanoid robot, which recently completed successful testing at the BMW Group Plant Spartanburg. Figure 02 has significant technical advancements, which enable the robot to perform a wide range of complex tasks fully autonomously,” said Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure AI.
BMW wanted to test how to integrate a humanoid robot into its production process—how to have the robot communicate with the production line software and human workers and determine what requirements would be necessary to add robots to the mix.
The Figure robot was given the job of inserting sheet metal parts into fixtures as part of the process of making a chassis. BMW says this required particular dexterity and that it’s an ergonomically awkward and tiring task for humans.
Now that the trial is over, Figure’s robot is no longer working at Spartanburg, and BMW says it has “no definite timetable established” to add humanoid robots to its production lines. “The developments in the field of robotics are very promising. With an early-test operation, we are now determining possible applications for humanoid robots in production. We want to accompany this technology from development to industrialization,” said Milan Nedeljković, BMW’s board member responsible for production.
Enlarge/ You should not do this while you are driving.
Getty Images
Distracted driving isn’t only a result of drivers using their phones when they should be paying attention. But it is a significant cause of the problem, accounting for at least 13 percent of distracted driving deaths and rising to 1 in 5 for young drivers. Now, a study conducted with customers of the Progressive insurance company has tested different strategies to get those drivers to put their phones down in the car, and it found two that significantly reduced handheld use, with the effect persisting after the end of the study.
The study recruited 1,653 customers already enrolled in its Progressive Snapshot program, which involves the use of a smartphone app that detects phone use while driving. Before the start of the trial, the participants all averaged more than 6.4 minutes per hour of handheld use while driving—Progressive says its safest customers have handheld usage of less than 1 minute per hour while driving.
Five test groups
The drivers were split into five different arms, each with increasing amounts of intervention. The first group just received education about the problem, such as statistics about state laws that ban phone use while driving, increased crash risks, and recommendations to use hands-free options like a phone mount or casting interface instead.
The second arm received the educational materials and a free phone mount with the message “Driving? Park your phone here.” The authors were particularly interested to see whether this arm worked, given the relatively low-cost and one-time nature of this intervention.
The third arm received both educational materials and the mount, but the participants were also asked to commit in writing to reducing their phone use while driving. The researchers informed these participants about their baseline phone use while driving and then gave them weekly goals to reduce their phone use to below 1 minute per hour over the course of the 10-week study. This arm also got regular tips on helpful habits, like mindfulness reminders, encouraging prompts, or using a phone’s “do not disturb” mode while driving.
Arm four included all the same interventions as arm three but added competitive gamification as well. Each Monday evening during the 10-week trial, the participants in arm four received a message with their handheld usage goal for the coming week and whether they met the previous week’s goal. Points were awarded for meeting the goal and were taken away for backsliding. Additionally, participants with similar baseline usage were grouped together in tens to form leaderboards so individuals could compete against (anonymized) peers.
Finally, arm five included the same interventions as arm four and added a financial incentive. Participants who scored enough points over the course of the 10-week study shared a $2,000 prize, each taking home $15.63 in the end. This arm was also told they would earn $5 for finishing at the head of the weekly leaderboard, which displayed a “total winnings” column in this arm.
What worked?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, none of the interventions in groups one, two, or three resulted in those participants significantly reducing their handheld use while driving. But the drivers in arm four had a 20.5 percent reduction in the amount of handheld usage while driving during the study.
What’s more, this effect persisted throughout the rest of the Progressive Snapshot period (a variable-length post-intervention period lasting 25–65 days) following the end of the 10-week study, with this arm still showing 16.2 percent less handheld usage compared to the control.
Paying drivers on top of competitive gamification was the most effective way to get them to put down their phones. This group reduced its handheld usage by 27.6 percent, or 89 seconds/hour, compared to the control. That reduction was maintained at the same level throughout the post-intervention period for this arm.
Gamification has already been adopted to varying degrees of success by automakers and their UI designers to try to encourage hybrid and EV drivers to be more efficient. So it’s not entirely surprising to see the same approach can work to modify other types of driving behavior. It’s even possible that insurance companies could start financially incentivizing drivers to behave better, assuming prizes cost less than the amount saved by paying for fewer crashes and claims.
A wireless charging pad is now the most-desired in-car feature among people intending to buy a new vehicle. Being able to forget about a USB cable and still not run down one’s battery topped the list of 163 features that AutoPacific asked about in its annual survey on future demand. Almost 15,000 people intending to buy a new car within the next three years replied to the survey, with 44 percent ticking the box for wireless charging for the front passengers.
This market research data is rather illuminating; as we test new cars, they’re increasingly equipped with features or gadgets that don’t seem exactly necessary—an extra infotainment screen for the front seat passenger, for example, or remote parking via a smartphone app. Sometimes, the features are even mandatory—several luxury brands won’t let you order certain cars without a glass moonroof.
These decisions are justified by product planners as responding to customer demand, so it’s helpful to see one of the sources that feeds into that.
In joint second place were a second wireless charging pad for the back seats and heated and ventilated seats. These were each picked by 37 percent, narrowly beating out rain-sensing windscreen wipers (36 percent).
The aforementioned moonroof (or sunroof) shared fifth place (35 percent) with having the ability to store more than one driver profile. Interestingly, this feature has grown in popularity over the years, rising from 19th-most requested in 2022 up to 10th-most in 2023. More and more automakers are moving to Android Automotive OS, which uses Google accounts to bring a driver’s digital life seamlessly into their vehicle; others are building their own solutions on private clouds, but either way, it’s increasingly becoming built into every new car we test. (It’s probably time I created a Google account to test out those features on AAOS cars going forward, too.)
Seventh on the list is a feature that requires a car to be electrified—it’s a household 110 V socket (34 percent). Ford’s much in-demand Maverick hybrid pickup—now in AWD, too—is a good example, with some EVs offering enough onboard juice to run a little outdoor office or movie theater.
I’m not sure I can remember seeing rear sunshades in a car—I probably wasn’t looking—but a third of survey respondents wanted them in their next vehicle. Only 32 percent showed interest in rear-cross traffic alert with automatic emergency braking.
I’m surprised this safety tech didn’t rate higher—its value is easily proven when reversing in a crowded parking lot when the spaces on either side of your car are occupied by gargantuan SUVs and pickups. Perhaps the other two-thirds only ever reverse into parking spaces? That’s certainly safer and much easier to do now that backup cameras have been legally required for the past few years.
Who wants hands-free?
Finally, 31 percent of the people who replied to AutoPacific also said that a built-in air compressor would be on their list, too. Notably, hands-free driving tech like Super Cruise or Autopilot did not crack the top 10.
But perhaps first place should really have gone to unresponsive driver detection. AutoPacific says that this idea was represented by two different options: a system that stops the car in its lane and a system that pulls the car over to the shoulder in the event of an unresponsive driver. When combined (45 percent), the demand for these two features edged out the demand seen in 2023 (43 percent) for a less well-defined unresponsive driver system.
Enlarge/ The cosmetic changes to the MY25 Ford Maverick include a new front bumper, front grille, and new headlamps.
Ford
Ford is giving its Maverick pickup truck a midlife refresh for model year 2025. And while the changes aren’t earth-shattering, they will probably pique your interest. The headline news for Ars readers is probably this: The hybrid is back, and now you can spec an all-wheel drive hybrid Maverick as well as a front-wheel-drive electrified model.
When we tested the Maverick in 2021, we were very impressed with it, particularly the front-wheel drive hybrid powertrain. The 191 hp (142 kW) pickup was capable of exceeding 42 mpg (5.6 L/100 km). It was the right size, as opposed to being gargantuan like almost every other pickup on sale, yet it still had the ability to carry 1,500 lbs (680 kg) in the bed or tow 2,000 lb (907 kg) trailers. All for a starting price of just under $20,000, assuming you ignored the destination charge.
Even better, the 2.5 L hybrid powertrain was the standard option, with the more powerful 2.0 L EcoBoost as a cost-option, either with front- or all-wheel drive. Sadly, more recent supply chain issues got in the way of that, with Ford dropping the hybrid as standard for MY24.
Those supply chain problems are evidently no more because the front-wheel drive 2.5 L hybrid is now the default powertrain option once again. What’s more, Ford has responded to overwhelming customer feedback and is adding an all-wheel drive hybrid option, too—this truck is a fraction less efficient, but only a fraction, still achieving 40 mpg (5.9 L/100 km) according to Ford. There’s even a towing package for this model that doubles its towing capacity to 4,000 lbs (1,813 kg).
However, you’ll no longer be able to order the 2.0 L turbo with just front-wheel drive.
Many customers chose not to buy the hybrid Maverick because of a lack of all-wheel drive. Now that’s been solved.
Ford
The Maverick’s multi-position tailgate lets it carry up to 18 sheets of half-inch 4×8 plywood.
Ford
There’s a new infotainment system for MY25.
Ford
It won’t power your whole house for three days like an F-150 Lightning can, but there’s 110 V, 400 W power in the bed with the hybrid.
Ford
There are new trim combinations for MY25.
Ford
New tech
Ford has given the refreshed Maverick some tech upgrades, too. The old 8-inch infotainment system is gone, replaced by a 13.2-inch unit running Sync 4, with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. 360-degree parking cameras are now available, and there’s a Pro Trailer Hitch Assist and a Pro Trailer Backup Assist to make towing less stressful.
Unfortunately, Ford won’t release pricing for most of the MY25 Mavericks until tomorrow, when it opens its order books ahead of deliveries in “late 2024.” Right now, we only know the price of the standard front-wheel drive hybrid Maverick, and it’s a fair bit more expensive than it was in 2021, starting at $26,295, plus a $1,595 delivery charge.
Enlarge/ Converting this street from two lanes in either direction to one lane in each direction with a turning lane in-between would make it much safer.
Getty Images
Although driving is a privilege, some Americans treat it more like a right. This entitlement leads them to get upset with policy proposals that try to increase road safety by prioritizing vulnerable road users over the wants of drivers. But a new study suggests that a common complaint—taking away lanes from cars makes emergency response times go up—about traffic calming isn’t actually true.
Which is where road diets come in—they’re a relatively cheap and simple way to slow traffic and significantly cut the accident rate along a stretch of road. You take a four-lane (two-way road) and repaint it so there are now three lanes for cars: one in each direction, with a center lane in the middle for turning. The remaining space on either side becomes bike lanes (physically protected ones, please).
The study, conducted by a group of researchers at the University of Iowa led by Nicole Corcoran (now at Arizona State University) and published in Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, sought to do a couple of things: First, survey emergency responders to find out how they feel about road diets, and secondly actually quantify the effect of road diets on EMS response time.
The emergency responders were all from Iowa, which was an early adopter of road diets, stretching back to 1996, and all had to have responded to emergencies both before and after the introduction of 4-to-3 road diets in a number of specific locations around the state. Just over half (52 percent) of the responders thought that their response times were the same both before and after the introduction of road diets, with a third saying times got slower and 16 percent saying they became faster.
What does the stopwatch say?
To quantify the actual effect of 4-to-3 road diets on emergency response times, the researchers looked at response times to certain emergency calls—”fires, overpressure ruptures, explosions, overheat-no fires, and rescue and EMS calls, as these incidents require a fast response where lights and sirens would be activated”—from three Cedar Rapids fire districts, each of which received a road diet during a six-year period between 2014–2020.
In total, they identified 1,202 emergency response trips that occurred before the road diets and 2,665 trips that occurred on roads that had been converted down to three lanes. And in doing so, they found that there was virtually no difference between emergency response travel time (in min/km) after a road conversion compared to before, both in total and when they looked at specific road diets.
As I mentioned in another recent review, I’ve been checking out electric hardtail mountain bikes lately. Their relative simplicity compared to full-suspension models tends to allow companies to hit a lower price point without sacrificing much in terms of component quality, potentially opening up mountain biking to people who might not otherwise consider it. The first e-hardtail I checked out, Aventon’s Ramblas, fits this description to a T, offering a solid trail riding experience at a price that’s competitive with similar offerings from major manufacturers.
Velotric’s Summit 1 has a slightly different take on the equation. The company has made a few compromises that allowed it to bring the price down to just under $2,000, which is significantly lower than a lot of the competition. The result is something that’s a bit of a step down on some more challenging trails. But it still can do about 90 percent of what most alternatives offer, and it’s probably a better all-around bicycle for people who intend to also use it for commuting or errand-running.
Making the Summit
Velotric is another e-bike-only company, and we’ve generally been impressed by its products, which offer a fair bit of value for their price. The Summit 1 seems to be a reworking of its T-series of bikes (which also impressed us) into mountain bike form. You get a similar app experience and integration of the bike into Apple’s Find My system, though the company has ditched the thumbprint reader, which is supposed to function as a security measure. Velotric has also done some nice work adapting its packaging to smooth out the assembly process, placing different parts in labeled sub-boxes.
Enlarge/ Velotric has made it easier to find what you need during assembly.
John Timmer
These didn’t help me avoid all glitches during assembly, though. I ended up having to take apart the front light assembly and remove the handlebars clamp to get the light attached to the bike—all contrary to the instructions. And connecting the color-coded electric cables was more difficult than necessary because two cables had the same color. But it only started up in one of the possible combinations, so it wasn’t difficult to sort out.
The Summit 1’s frame is remarkably similar to the Ramblas; if there wasn’t branding on it, you might need to resort to looking over the components to figure out which one you were looking at. Like the Ramblas, it has a removable battery with a cover that protects from splashes, but it probably won’t stay watertight through any significant fords. The bike also lacks an XL size option, and as usual, the Large was just a bit small for my legs.
The biggest visible difference is at the cranks, which is not where the motor resides on the Summit. Instead, you’ll find that on the rear hub, which typically means a slight step down in performance, though it is often considerably cheaper. For the Summit, the step down seemed very slight. I could definitely feel it in some contexts, but I’m pretty unusual in terms of the number of different hub and mid-motor configurations I’ve experienced (which is my way of saying that most people would never notice).
Enlarge/ The Summit 1 has a hub motor on the rear wheel and a relatively compact set of gears.
John Timmer
There are a number of additional price/performance compromises to be found. The biggest is the drivetrain in the back, which has a relatively paltry eight gears and lacks the very large gear rings you’d typically find on mountain bikes without a front derailleur—meaning almost all of them these days. This isn’t as much of a problem as it might seem because the bike is built around a power assist that can easily handle the sort of hills those big gear rings were meant for. But it is an indication of the ways Velotric has kept its costs down. Those gears are paired with a Shimano Altus rear derailleur, which is controlled by a standard dual-trigger shifter and a plastic indicator to track which gear you’re in.
The bike also lacks a dropper seat that you can get out of your way during bouncy descents. Because the frame was small for me anyway, I didn’t really feel its absence. The Summit does have a dedicated mountain bike fork from a Chinese manufacturer called YDH that included an easy-to-access dial that lets you adjust the degree of cushioning you get on the fly. One nice touch is a setting that locks the forks if you’re going to be on smooth pavement for a while. I’m not sure who makes the rims, as I was unable to interpret the graphics on them. But the tires were well-labeled with Kenda, a brand that shows up on a number of other mountain bikes.
Overall, it wasn’t that hard to spot the places Velotric made compromises to bring the bike in at under $2,000. The striking thing was just how few of them there were. The obvious question is whether you’d notice them in practice. We’ll get back to that after we go over the bike’s electronics.
Enlarge/ The Cadillac V-Series.R is one of General Motors’ factory-backed racing programs.
James Moy Photography/Getty Images
It is hard to escape the feeling that a few too many businesses are jumping on the AI hype train because it’s hype-y, rather than because AI offers an underlying benefit to their operation. So I will admit to a little inherent skepticism, and perhaps a touch of morbid curiosity, when General Motors got in touch wanting to show off some of the new AI/machine learning tools it has been using to win more races in NASCAR, sportscar racing, and IndyCar. As it turns out, that skepticism was misplaced.
GM has fingers in a lot of motorsport pies, but there are four top-level programs it really, really cares about. Number one for an American automaker is NASCAR—still the king of motorsport here—where Chevrolet supplies engines to six Cup teams. IndyCar, which could once boast of being America’s favorite racing, is home to another six Chevy-powered teams. And then there’s sportscar racing; right now, Cadillac is competing in IMSA’s GTP class and the World Endurance Championship’s Hypercar class, plus a factory Corvette Racing effort in IMSA.
“In all the series we race we either have key partners or specific teams that run our cars. And part of the technical support that they get from us are the capabilities of my team,” said Jonathan Bolenbaugh, motorsports analytics leader at GM, based at GM’s Charlotte Technical Center in North Carolina.
Unlike generative AI that’s being developed to displace humans from creative activities, GM sees the role of AI and ML as supporting human subject-matter experts so they can make the cars go faster. And it’s using these tools in a variety of applications.
Enlarge/ One of GM’s command centers at its Charlotte Technical Center in North Carolina.
General Motors
Each team in each of those various series (obviously) has people on the ground at each race, and invariably more engineers and strategists helping them from Indianapolis, Charlotte, or wherever it is that the particular race team has its home base. But they’ll also be tied in with a team from GM Motorsport, working from one of a number of command centers at its Charlotte Technical Center.
What did they say?
Connecting all three are streams and streams of data from the cars themselves (in series that allow car-to-pit telemetry) but also voice comms, text-based messaging, timing and scoring data from officials, trackside photographs, and more. And one thing Bolenbaugh’s team and their suite of tools can do is help make sense of that data quickly enough for it to be actionable.
“In a series like F1, a lot of teams will have students who are potentially newer members of the team literally listening to the radio and typing out what is happening, then saying, ‘hey, this is about pitting. This is about track conditions,'” Bolenbaugh said.
Instead of giving that to the internship kids, GM built a real time audio transcription tool to do that job. After trying out a commercial off-the-shelf solution, it decided to build its own, “a combination of open source and some of our proprietary code,” Bolenbaugh said. As anyone who has ever been to a race track can attest, it’s a loud environment, so GM had to train models with all the background noise present.
“We’ve been able to really improve our accuracy and usability of the tool to the point where some of the manual support for that capability is now dwindling,” he said, with the benefit that it frees up the humans, who would otherwise be transcribing, to apply their brains in more useful ways.
Take a look at this
Another tool developed by Bolenbaugh and his team was built to quickly analyze images taken by trackside photographers working for the teams and OEMs. While some of the footage they shoot might be for marketing or PR, a lot of it is for the engineers.
Two years ago, getting those photos from the photographer’s camera to the team was the work of two to three minutes. Now, “from shutter click at the racetrack in a NASCAR event to AI-tagged into an application for us to get information out of those photos is seven seconds,” Bolenbaugh said.
Enlarge/ Sometimes you don’t need a ML tool to analyze a photo to tell you the car is damaged.
Jeffrey Vest/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
“Time is everything, and the shortest lap time that we run—the Coliseum would be an outlier, but maybe like 18 seconds is probably a short lap time. So we need to be faster than from when they pass that pit lane entry to when they come back again,” he said.
At the rollout of this particular tool at a NASCAR race last year, one of GM’s partner teams was able to avoid a cautionary pitstop after its driver scraped the wall, when the young engineer who developed the tool was able to show them a seconds-old photo of the right side of the car that showed it had escaped any damage.
“They didn’t have to wait for a spotter to look, they didn’t have to wait for the driver’s opinion. They knew that didn’t have damage. That team made the playoffs in that series by four points, so in the event that they would have pitted, there’s a likelihood where they didn’t make it,” he said. In cases where a car is damaged, the image analysis tool can automatically flag that and make that known quickly through an alert.
Not all of the images are used for snap decisions like that—engineers can glean a lot about their rivals from photos, too.
“We would be very interested in things related to the geometry of the car for the setup settings—wicker settings, wing angles… ride heights of the car, how close the car is to the ground—those are all things that would be great to know from an engineering standpoint, and those would be objectives that we would have in doing image analysis,” said Patrick Canupp, director of motorsports competition engineering at GM.
Enlarge/ Many of the photographers you see working trackside will be shooting on behalf of teams or manufacturers.
Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images
“It’s not straightforward to take a set of still images and determine a lot of engineering information from those. And so we’re working on that actively to help with all the photos that come in to us on a race weekend—there’s thousands of them. And so it’s a lot of information that we have at our access, that we want to try to maximize the engineering information that we glean from all of that data. It’s kind of a big data problem that AI is really geared for,” Canupp said.
The computer says we should pit now
Remember that transcribed audio feed from earlier? “If a bunch of drivers are starting to talk about something similar in the race like the track condition, we can start inferring, based on… the occurrence of certain words, that the track is changing,” said Bolenbaugh. “It might not just be your car… if drivers are talking about something on track, the likelihood of a caution, which is a part of our strategy model, might be going up.”
That feeds into a strategy tool that also takes lap times from timing and scoring, as well as fuel efficiency data in racing series that provide it for all cars, or a predictive model to do the same in series like NASCAR and IndyCar where teams don’t get to see that kind of data from their competitors, as well as models of tire wear.
“One of the biggest things that we need to manage is tires, fuel, and lap time. Everything is a trade-off between trying to execute the race the fastest,” Bolenbaugh said.
Obviously races are dynamic situations, and so “multiple times a lap as the scenario changes, we’re updating our recommendation. So, with tire fall off [as the tire wears and loses grip], you’re following up in real time, predicting where it’s going to be. We are constantly evolving during the race and doing transfer learning so we go into the weekend, as the race unfolds, continuing to train models in real time,” Bolenbaugh said.
Enlarge/ The VW ID.4 has a new drive motor and infotainment system for model-year 2024. It’s not the sportiest EV you can buy, but it remains one of our favorites to drive.
Jonathan Gitlin
Volkswagen didn’t wait the traditional four model years before giving its ID.4 electric crossover something of a spiff-up. The tweaks to the model-year 2024 ID.4 are mostly under the skin or inside the cabin—like the recent refresh of the Polestar 2, this update was more about making the ID.4 an easier EV to live with, with more range and more power.
Volkswagen was one of the first automakers to react to Tesla finally making the electric vehicle viable. After the company-wide bet on diesel went up in a cloud of nitrogen oxides and black smoke, VW threw itself headlong into electrification as a way to meet ever-stricter carbon emissions regulations. Already an industry pioneer for the use of highly flexible vehicle architectures that let it build vehicles in a wide range of sizes and shapes with a common set of components and tools, it applied that approach to a line of electric vehicles, all branded under the Intelligent Design, or ID, name.
VW is a global automaker, but automobile tastes are often not global. For Europe, VW designed the ID.3, an electric hatchback that Americans who want forbidden fruit keep asking for, but which generated less than enthusiastic reviews from the people who actually got to buy them. Other models are optimized for China. But for America, with its adoration of the SUV and crossover, VW designed the ID.4.
Enlarge/ The ID.4 was designed with America’s love of crossovers in mind.
Jonathan Gitlin
Unveiled in the depths of the pandemic, we got our first (if short) drive in a prototype ID.4 in October 2020. Four months later, it was time to try the production version, an EV we proclaimed “a solid effort.” A few months later, we tried out the all-wheel drive ID.4 and checked out VW’s factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which has been churning out locally made ID.4s since mid-2022.
What’s new?
For model-year 2024, the $44,875 ID.4 Pro keeps its 82 kWh battery pack, but its EPA range jumps to 291 miles (468 km), up from 275 miles (443 km). The reason will probably seem counterintuitive if all you’re used to is gasoline cars—a new, more powerful drive unit that generates 282 hp (210 kW) and 402 lb-ft (545 Nm). That’s a 40 percent increase in power and a 30 percent increase in torque compared to the rear-wheel drive ID.4 Pro we tested in the past.
With internal-combustion engine vehicles, turning up the wick on the power and torque usually means your range plummets. Not so with an EV. The new motor has an improved stator and a new water- and oil-cooling system, both of which mean it can cope better with higher thermal loads—VW says this is “an elementary contributing factor” to the improved efficiency. The one-speed transmission has had its components optimized to reduce friction, and there’s a new inverter with all-new software.
A very tight turning circle means this is a great EV for American cities.
Jonathan Gitlin
There’s plenty of room here for your kids’ sports equipment, the monthly Costco run, or a vacation’s worth of luggage.
Jonathan Gitlin
The battery can also accept a higher rate of power during charging and regenerative braking, now 175 kW, up from 125 kW. That means a 10–80 percent fast charge should take 30 min. While we weren’t able to deplete the battery quite enough to test that, a charge from 35–80 percent state of charge took just 22 minutes at a peak of 155 kW, and just under 31 minutes was sufficient to reach a 92 percent SoC from that starting point.
On the road, and despite its mainstream design, the ID.4 remains a pretty good EV to drive. It has a very tight turning circle (31.5 feet/9/6 m), which is helpful in the city, and on a winding back road it is far better-mannered than a family crossover should be. A shared vehicle dynamics control system with the latest Golf GTI no doubt helps here.
I prefer Comfort mode over Sport; the latter makes the steering heavier but with no more feedback and makes the lift-off regen braking more aggressive. Power delivery is very smooth despite the bump in output.
In any of the three modes (which includes Eco as well as Comfort and Sport) the ride is a little bouncy—US market ID.4s do without adaptive dampers, so it doesn’t change when you switch. And there was a fair bit of road noise from the tires at highway speeds.
I was surprised that, in relatively mild weather, I was able to achieve an average of 4.1 miles/kWh (15.2 kWh/100 km). As the weather got hot and AC was a necessity, this dropped to 3.5 miles/kWh (17.8 kWh/100 km), which is still an improvement on the First Edition we tested in 2022.
