Cars

carmakers-give-up-on-software-that-avoids-kangaroos

Carmakers give up on software that avoids kangaroos

animal collisions, automated systems, Cars, driver safety, kangaroos / /

Hopping madly —

Australia is turning to virtual fences to cut down on car-kangaroo impacts.

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Once they go airborne, collision avoidance software can't make sense of kangaroos.

Enlarge / Once they go airborne, collision avoidance software can’t make sense of kangaroos.

Shane Williams is always on the lookout for dead kangaroos. She keeps a can of red spray paint and a pillowcase in her car, just in case she finds one on the side of the road.

When Williams spots a roo, she hops out of her car to check for an orphaned joey, which might still be in its now-dead mother’s pouch. She then sprays the adult with a large pink cross so drivers will know the body has been searched. If Williams, the founder of Bridgetown Wildlife Rescue, finds a baby roo, she’ll hang it up in a pillowcase inside the car for the ride home. Sometimes, she said, when the animals are too small to generate their own heat, “you just put ‘em straight down your top.”

Williams has had plenty of opportunities to refine her technique, as kangaroos are one of Australia’s biggest traffic threats.

Wildlife hazards

Australia’s National Roads and Motorist’s Association estimated that over 12,000 of its insurance claims from 2018 were from kangaroo and wallaby collisions, accidents which cost upward of $5,000 AUD on average.

Over the past 20 years, car companies have pivoted from the old strategies of structurally reinforcing cars to designing prevention technologies that avoid crashes altogether. Car companies and researchers have spent years trying to create systems to detect or deter the animals. But so far, marsupials have presented a nearly impossible tech challenge, leaving communities to come up with alternative solutions to keep roos away from busy roads.

One issue is that collision-prevention systems for large wildlife were originally designed with a very different animal in mind: moose. Wildlife collision technology began in earnest due to increasingly prevalent moose crashes in Nordic countries. These crashes are serious, and if one occurs, the sheer weight of the animal—which is sometimes over 1,200 pounds—causes extensive damage to vehicle, moose, and human.

To mitigate these brutal impacts, Magnus Gens, a master’s vehicle engineering student at KTH Royal Institute of Technology partnered with Saab, a Swedish car company, to investigate how its cars could keep drivers safe in wildlife collisions. For his thesis, Gens built a life-sized moose dummy—crafted from 116 bright red rubber disks—to test on Saabs and Volvos. The dummy mimicked lethal moose accidents, which are especially dangerous when the mammal’s body mass rolls directly into (and through) the car’s windshield.

Saab’s participation in the project and continued wildlife-testing protocols initiated its reputation as a moose-proof vehicle manufacturer, while Gens won a long-belated Ig Nobel Prize for his research last year.

Volvo, however, was the first to market with a Large Animal Detection System, which debuted in 2016. It’s unique because it accurately detects and brakes for mammals when a driver doesn’t have time to respond manually. The system is equipped with a camera and radar that track how far away an animal is by using the ground as a reference point. The program can detect moose, elk, horses, and deer. But it can’t figure out kangaroos.

Completely irrational animals

That’s because kangaroos are completely irrational animals, said David Pickett, Volvo Australia’s technical lead. In 2015, Pickett was a part of the Volvo team that tried to develop the world’s first kangaroo detection and avoidance system by a major car manufacturer.

Pickett and a research team from Volvo headquarters in Sweden traveled to Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve near Canberra, Australia, where they spent a week driving up and down winding roads, watching their detection system attempt to account for kangaroos.

“We were able to drive through the Tidbinbilla, looking past and filming what the car saw, and look at the way the car would sort of react,” Pickett said. “Well, the car wasn’t reacting.”

It quickly became clear that ground detection wouldn’t work for animals with such a hoppy disposition. They look entirely different in full flight than when resting, and they’re fast. They jump in unpredictable ways, maneuvering mid-air to confuse and outrun predators.

Carmakers give up on software that avoids kangaroos Read More »

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EV buyers want SUVs and sedans, not minivans or trucks, survey says

Cars, EV adoption / /

people really hate minivans —

There’s also a wide spread when it comes to acceptable range, Edmunds found.

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Car dealer is giving key for a new car to a woman

Enlarge / Edmunds surveyed 300 car buyers who were considering a new EV in January 2024.

Getty Images

There is a significant mismatch between the people who want to buy electric vehicles and the people who want to sell them. That’s according to data from a new survey by Edmunds, which polled people shopping for new cars in January. These prospective buyers want affordable sedans and SUVs, segments of the market that are being ignored by automakers. Instead, they’re being offered expensive EVs, including plenty of trucks, for which there is little demand.

Almost half (47 percent) of the 300 people surveyed said they want to spend less than $40,000 on a new EV. And just over 1 in 5 (22 percent) said that they don’t want to pay more than $30,000. But currently, no new EV is on sale below this price, and only a handful of EVs (Mini Cooper SE, Fiat 500e, Hyundai Kona Electric, Nissan Leaf, and Tesla Model 3) are on sale for less than $40,000.

According to Edmunds’ data, the average transaction price of a new EV was $61,702 in 2023, compared to $47,450 for other vehicles.

When it comes to body styles, and despite what you might read in the comments to automotive articles at Ars, SUVs are as popular as sedans with potential buyers; 43 percent said they want a sedan (or wagon), and 42 percent want an SUV. Edmunds’ data does not make a minivan boom seem any more likely—appeal for minivans was minuscule, at just 5 percent.

Things don’t look great for the electric pickup truck, either. The Detroit-based automakers have had high hopes for the electrified versions of their biggest cash cows, but Ford’s F-150 Lightning (the first to reach market) has sat on lots as dealers stocked up on fully loaded models that are often double the price of the $40,000 model that Ford spent so much time telling us about.

Just 10 percent of Edmunds’ survey respondents said they were shopping for an electric pickup. Ironically, this probably spells good news for the automakers, Edmunds says—truck buyers will keep buying gasoline- and diesel-powered pickups, which contribute greatly to automaker profits.

The survey shows that car buyers looking for EVs are, on the whole, not well-informed. Twelve percent said they trust Toyota best when it comes to EVs, despite the fact that the Japanese automaker is years behind its rivals and has but a single, somewhat mediocre EV on sale today in 2024. Another 8 percent named Honda, which similarly is lagging the industry in terms of electrification.

Tesla scored top (23 percent), followed by BMW (13 percent)—both companies with extensive experience in electrifying automobiles. Ford and Chevrolet shared fifth place (7 percent), but neither Kia nor Hyundai were namechecked, despite offering a range of EVs, most of which are best in class.

Edmunds also found a pretty wide spread when it asked car buyers how much range they needed. Just fewer than 1 in 4 (24 percent) said they’d be happy with 99 miles (160 km) or less. Another 22 percent said between 100–199 miles (160–320 km) was fine, with 17 percent indicating that 200–299 miles (320–481 km) was the sweet spot. Most EVs on sale today fall into this range bracket.

But a significant number of potential EV buyers indicated a desire for much more range. Nineteen percent wanted 300–399 miles (482–642 km)—the Hyundai Ioniq 6, Tesla Model 3, Mercedes-Benz EQS, BMW i4 and i7, and the Polestar 2 all fit this bill.

Another 8 percent wanted 400–499 miles (642–804 km) of range in their new EV, which limits them to the Tesla Model S, which has a claimed range of 405 miles (651 km). The 5 percent of survey recipients who claimed a desired range of 500–599 miles (805-964 km) at least have the Lucid Air as an option; no EV exists that can satisfy the 4 percent who demand more than 600 miles (964 km) of range.

EV buyers want SUVs and sedans, not minivans or trucks, survey says Read More »

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EV bargains to be found as Hertz sells off some of its electric cars

Cars, cheap EV, Chevrolet Bolt EUV, EV adoption, Hertz, Kia EV6, Subaru Solterra, tesla model 3, used ev prices, used EV tax credit / /

tell me where it hertz —

More than 1,200 EVs are cheap enough to qualify for the used clean vehicle tax credit.

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A Silver Chevrolet Bolt EUV next to a beach house

Enlarge / Hertz currently has more than a thousand Bolt EUVs for sale as they leave its rental car fleet.

Chevrolet

Electric vehicles have many advantages over cars that still use internal combustion engines. They’re far more efficient, they’re quieter, and they usually have much more torque than their gasoline-powered equivalents. But we’re still far from achieving price parity between powertrains. In other words, EVs are expensive.

One place you can find some bargains, though, is the rental company Hertz, which currently has more than 2,100 EVs for sale, more than half of which are affordable enough to qualify for the IRS used clean vehicle tax credit.

Hertz has been adding a lot of EVs to its fleet as part of the company’s decarbonization plan. In 2021, it revealed plans to purchase 100,000 Teslas. However, the controversial car maker had delivered fewer than half of those two years later, and long repair times for customer-inflicted damage have seen the rental agency divest itself of many of those Teslas and diversify its fleet, adding plenty of Polestars, Kias, and Chevrolets.

This January, we learned that Hertz plans to sell off about 20,000 of its EVs, and there are currently 2,115 EVs up for grabs among the 31,134 cars for sale on its used car sales site.

There are 761 Teslas for sale, 63 of which are Models 3 priced at less than $25,000—the price cap for the IRS used clean vehicle tax credit. Some of them have been around the block a few times, with more than 90,000 miles on the odometer (145,000 km), but there are others with less than 50,000 miles (80,500 km) on them.

Better bargains are available if you want a Chevy Bolt—Hertz currently has 1,178 Bolt EUVs (and another eight Bolt EVs) for sale. All of these are cheap enough to qualify for the used clean vehicle tax credit, and plenty of them are low-mileage examples with less than 10,000 miles (16,000 km) on the clock.

There are a handful of other makes and models of EVs also available. You could pick from one of 126 Subaru Solterras, for example, which range from $27,027 to $33,002. And there are 42 Kia EV6s, ranging from $27,120 to $39,901. These are too expensive for the used clean vehicle tax credit, though.

Not everyone reading this will feel entirely comfortable buying an ex-rental car, given the hard lives that such vehicles often lead. But if you’re feeling brave, there are some big savings to be had versus buying new. Anecdotally, the only thing that went wrong with the ex-rental Ford Ka I used to own was a worn-out clutch—not a problem an EV will suffer from.

EV bargains to be found as Hertz sells off some of its electric cars Read More »

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Testing the 2024 BMW M2—maybe the last M car with a manual transmission

BMW M2, car review, Cars, Features, manual transmission / /
A pale blue BMW M2 seen parked in the hills

Enlarge / BMW’s M2 might be the last M car it builds with three pedals and a stick shift.

Peter Nelson

We’re at an interesting crossroads in the high-performance enthusiast car market. Running east to west is the adoption of electric vehicles and a slow reduction in internal combustion engine car production. North to south is the progression of ICE horsepower from the factory over the years, and it’s unclear how far it continues from here. Coming in diagonally is the weakening demand for manual transmissions—this is sadly where they end.

In the middle of this intersection is the 2024 BMW M2 six-speed manual, hanging its tail out in a massive controlled drift around the edges, expressing one last hurrah as BMW’s final object of internal-combustion M car affection.

I recently had the opportunity to pilot BMW’s latest, smallest M car through some of Southern California’s most fun mountain roads, plus Willow Springs International Raceway’s Streets of Willow circuit. When it comes to quickly figuring out this kind of car’s powertrain and chassis, I can’t think of a better mix of pavement. Here’s what makes the latest—and last—six-speed-manual-equipped M2 generation an overall excellent enthusiast coupe.

BMW has given the M2 a much more muscular look than the normal 2 series coupe.

Enlarge / BMW has given the M2 a much more muscular look than the normal 2 series coupe.

Peter Nelson

Focused inside-out

Looks are subjective, particularly BMW looks, but I think BMW did a good job on the M2’s exterior. Its kidney grilles, headlights, fender flares, exhaust tips, and wide fenders—especially in the rear quarter panels—are attractive. It’s a muscular little coupe, and it definitely informs you of its intentions with its massive intakes cut into its front end. Behind them lies a heat exchanger for its engine’s air-to-water intercooling (more on that in a bit), plus several other forms of water and oil cooling to ensure long-lasting peak performance, all-twisty-road-and-track-session-long. It’s hard to mistake it for a base 2 Series.

Inside, it’s quite spacious for a coupe and has great visibility all around. My test car included the $9,900 Carbon Package, which gets you comfortable, near-race-bucket carbon fiber seats and a slick carbon roof. I’m 6 feet and 3 inches tall, so the absence of sliding glass up top was a godsend and even allowed me to wear a helmet on track without needing to recline, a rarity in modern cars. The seats are a bit of a pain to slide in and out of, and the left leg bolster pushed inward slightly too much, impeding efficient and comfortable clutch action for my lanky figure. I suspect many folks wouldn’t have the same issue, though.

Technology-wise, a crisp 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster and a 14.9-inch touchscreen take up a lot of real estate. BMW’s iDrive 8 software is easy to get the hang of, operates quite seamlessly, and has good haptic feedback. Materials quality is overall quite good; all buttons and dials felt substantial, and the Carbon Package includes chic slabs of carbon fiber trim instead of the boring old piano black plastic that’s all too common in modern performance cars.

Opinions are mixed when it comes to BMW's carbon bucket seats. They hold you in place well but can be hard to get in and out of, and the hump between the driver's legs is polarizing.

Enlarge / Opinions are mixed when it comes to BMW’s carbon bucket seats. They hold you in place well but can be hard to get in and out of, and the hump between the driver’s legs is polarizing.

Peter Nelson

Testing the 2024 BMW M2—maybe the last M car with a manual transmission Read More »

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GM stops sharing driver data with brokers amid backlash

Buick Smart Driver, Car Insurance, Cars, connected car, data sharing, General Motors, GM, lexisnexis, privacy, verisk / /

woo and indeed hoo —

Customers, wittingly or not, had their driving data shared with insurers.

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Scissors cut off a stream of data from a toy car to a cloud

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

After public outcry, General Motors has decided to stop sharing driving data from its connected cars with data brokers. Last week, news broke that customers enrolled in GM’s OnStar Smart Driver app have had their data shared with LexisNexis and Verisk.

Those data brokers in turn shared the information with insurance companies, resulting in some drivers finding it much harder or more expensive to obtain insurance. To make matters much worse, customers allege they never signed up for OnStar Smart Driver in the first place, claiming the choice was made for them by salespeople during the car-buying process.

Now, in what feels like an all-too-rare win for privacy in the 21st century, that data-sharing deal is no more.

“As of March 20th, OnStar Smart Driver customer data is no longer being shared with LexisNexis or Verisk. Customer trust is a priority for us, and we are actively evaluating our privacy processes and policies,” GM told us in a statement.

GM stops sharing driver data with brokers amid backlash Read More »

lincoln-corsair-phev-review:-a-luxury-car-shouldn’t-squeak-this-much

Lincoln Corsair PHEV review: A luxury car shouldn’t squeak this much

car review, Cars, lincoln corsair, plug-in hybrid crossover / /

small but not cheap —

It has an attractive cabin and decent fuel economy, but build quality needs work.

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A white Lincoln Corsair parked next to a wall

Enlarge / We like the interior styling, and it rides well and is rather efficient. But the interior build quality needs work.

Jonathan Gitlin

It probably hasn’t escaped notice that electric vehicles, having captured everyone’s attention, are having a bit of a slide into what Gartner calls “the trough of depression.” But as skeptics push back on battery EVs, another style of electrified car looks set to travel back up the slope of enlightenment. Plug-in hybrids are finding their second wind, as automakers and regulators look to PHEVs as a way to reduce transport-related carbon emissions.

Lincoln’s Corsair Grand Touring is not a particularly new PHEV, but since we hadn’t tested one yet and there was an example on the local press fleet, it seemed prudent to schedule a week with this compact crossover from one of America’s luxury brands.

The first thing to note is that, despite the way it might look in photos, this is not a huge land barge. The Corsair is 181.4 inches (4,608 mm) long, 76.4 inches (1,941 mm) wide, and 64.1 inches (1,628 mm) tall, so about the same size as a Toyota RAV4, or six inches shorter than a Tesla Model Y. The shape uses plenty of curved edges, dominated by the large Lincoln grille up front, with a hint of late-teens Audi SUV to it.

Under the hood you’ll find a 165 hp (123 kW) 2.5 L four-cylinder gasoline engine, which uses the more-efficient Atkinson cycle and drives the front wheels via a PowerSplit electric CVT transmission. (This uses a pair of electric motors and a single planetary gear set, with no clutches or torque converter or rubber belts.) The rear wheels are powered by a permanent magnet synchronous motor that generates 67 hp (50 kW) and 110 lb-ft (150 Nm). (Lincoln chose not to disclose a combined torque figure for the powertrain.)

It's a compact crossover, but not a particularly cheap one.

Enlarge / It’s a compact crossover, but not a particularly cheap one.

Jonathan Gitlin

The electric motor is powered by a 14.4 kWh lithium-ion traction battery, made up of 84 prismatic cells. Recharging times are 10–11 hours if you only have access to a 120 V socket, or between 3–4 hours with a 240 V level 2 charger. In practice, 3.5 hours on a level 2 charger was sufficient to give me a full battery. Should you wish, you can also set the Corsair Grand Touring to Preserve mode, which uses spare engine power to top up the battery, to about 75 percent state of charge. (Like most PHEVs, the Corsair Grand Tourer has a reserve that means even if it doesn’t have a sufficient state of charge to operate on electric power alone, the powertrain will still function as a hybrid, and the electric motor will still engage at low speeds and as a boost.)

When fully charged, the EPA rating gives the Corsair Grand Touring an electric-only range of 27 miles (43 km). But our time with the Corsair Grand Touring was scheduled for late December, and the cold weather at the time had other thoughts about that. After a full charge, the littlest Lincoln reported 23 miles of electric range, which dropped to 21 miles after a couple of blocks. Like BEVs, PHEV powertrains also suffer in terms of range when the temperatures approach freezing.

In fact, all vehicles suffer from worse economy in freezing temperatures, and the US Department of Energy points out that even hybrids can suffer up to 45 percent worse efficiency on short trips in cold weather. Gas mileage is rated at a combined 33 mpg (7.13 L/100 km), but here I actually saw as high as 38 mpg (6.19 L/100 km) on short trips even with a depleted battery. The cold weather also meant that the car would fire up the engine even when there was charge in the battery, presumably to help run the heater and also battery cooling—another common PHEV trait in winter.

The clamshell rear hatch is a Lincoln SUV design cue at this point.

Enlarge / The clamshell rear hatch is a Lincoln SUV design cue at this point.

Jonathan Gitlin

For most of the week, I used either Normal or Conserve drive modes—the latter is the eco setting with more gentle throttle response. There’s also Excite mode, which keeps the engine running and the battery cooled for better performance, plus there’s a sharper throttle response and more weight to the steering. But the Corsair Grand Touring still weighs 4,397 lbs (1,994 kg), 561 lbs (255 kg) more than the non-hybrid AWD Corsair, and driving it like a sports car didn’t seem in keeping with the Lincoln’s vibes.

On the road, the ride was smooth and well-controlled, although definitely on the softer side of things. Happily, there wasn’t excessive road noise from the tires or air flow around the car at highway speeds. Lincoln says its designers “obsessed over each detail to create a sanctuary for the senses,” and in that regard they did a pretty good job.

I also have to commend the interior design team—the mix of tan leather and aluminum trim work well together. Unfortunately, with just 12,000 miles on the odometer, our test car creaked and rattled more than any other car I’ve driven in the last few years. The culprit seemed to be the dashboard, or something behind it, which registered its protest over each bump or jolt that made it past the adaptive suspension.

  • Jonathan Gitlin

  • There’s up to 43.2 inches (1,097 mm) of rear leg room.

    Jonathan Gitlin

  • There’s 26.9 cubic feet (762 L) of cargo volume with the rear seats in use, or 56.2 cubic feet (1,591 L) with the rear seats folded down.

    Jonathan Gitlin

For a model that has been in production for some time, it’s not unreasonable to expect better quality, especially with a starting price of $53,925.

In fact, our test car tipped the scales at $65,390, largely due to the $8,675 Collection III package that added (among other features) Lincoln ActiveGlide, the brand’s name for parent company Ford’s BlueCruise hands-free driver assist. This works as well as BlueCruise in other recent Fords we’ve tested and only operates on premapped restricted-access highways, and the car’s UI does a good job of indicating which mode you’re in so there’s no confusion.

While I’m praising UI stuff, I’ll add the infotainment to the list—the interface and fonts are clear but also aesthetically pleasing and are in keeping with the  car’s vaguely art deco look and feel. Amazon Alexa is included as a voice assistant (with three years of free connectivity), but I imagine most drivers will just use Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.

Despite the cold weather and its deleterious effect on battery range, I finished my week with warm feelings toward the Corsair Grand Touring. It’s an example of a luxury car that doesn’t try to be a sports car as well, and I’ve already described how much I like the interior. But the amount of creaks and rattles in the cabin aren’t really acceptable for a car with just a year under its belt, and the sticker price is quite high, although the car is eligible for a $3,750 IRS clean vehicle tax credit.

Lincoln Corsair PHEV review: A luxury car shouldn’t squeak this much Read More »

new-epa,-doe-fuel-regs-give-automakers-longer-to-reduce-co2-emissions

New EPA, DOE fuel regs give automakers longer to reduce CO2 emissions

auto emissions, CAFE, Cars, corporate average fuel efficiency, department of energy, fuel economy, fuel efficiency, US Environmental Protection Agency, vehicle pollution / /
An EV charger and a fuel container on a balance

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

This week, the US Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency have published new fuel efficiency rules that will go into effect in 2026. The rules favor both battery-electric vehicles and also plug-in hybrid EVs, but not to the degree as proposed by each agency last April.

Those would have required automakers to sell four times as many electric vehicles as they do now. This was met with a rare display of solidarity across the industry—automakers, workers, and dealers all called on the White House to slow its approach.

Under the 2023 proposals, the DOE would change the way that Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations are calculated for model years 2027-2032 (which would take place from partway through calendar-year 2026 until sometime in calendar-year 2031), and the EPA would implement tougher vehicle emissions standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles for the same time period.

Among the changes were a new “petroleum-equivalency factor,” which currently is extremely generous in the way it “converts the measured electrical energy consumption of an electric vehicle into a raw gasoline-equivalent fuel economy value” when determining an automaker’s fleet average.

According to the EPA, the proposed rules were met positively by “environmental and public health NGOs, states, consumer groups,” and EV-only automakers. But many other automakers told the agency that the rules were too ambitious, the EPA’s technical analysis was “overly optimistic,” and worries about supply chains, customer demand, and charging infrastructure delays could all throw big spanners in the works. Labor groups “urged a slower transition” to plug-in vehicles to prevent potential job losses.

What’s changed?

The DOE and EPA have tried to keep everyone happy with the final rules. The revised rules (DOE, EPA) arrive at roughly the same levels of emissions for model-year 2032 as before.

But the way that CAFE used DOE’s formulae gets a bit more complicated, with “a PEF value based on the expected survivability-weighted lifetime mileage schedule of the fleet of vehicles sold during the regulatory period,” and a revised balance of different energy sources used to determine how clean the grid will be for each model year.

Cars will be allowed to emit up to 85 grams of CO2 per mile, light trucks up to 90 CO2 g/mile, for a combined fleet average for light-duty vehicles of 85 CO2 g/mile. And medium-duty vehicles will need to emit less than 245 CO2 g/mile for vans and 290 CO2 g/mile for pickups by 2032.

One hopefully important change is a decrease in the allowable footprint for light trucks over time. The EPA hopes this will prevent automakers from “upsizing” trucks and SUVs and will emerge unscathed from the 2023 proposed rule.

Although the MY 2032 endpoints are almost in the same places, both DOE and EPA rules give automakers more time to meet them, with less strict goals than before for MY 2027–MY 2031.

In total, the White House says that the final rule will avoid 7.2 billion tons of CO2 emissions through 2055, with $99 billion in net benefits to society.

New EPA, DOE fuel regs give automakers longer to reduce CO2 emissions Read More »

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Formula 1 chief appalled to find team using Excel to manage 20,000 car parts

Biz & IT, Cars, Excel, Microsoft Excel, Tech / /

Dark matter strikes again —

Williams team leader may only be shocked because he hasn’t worked IT.

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A pit stop during the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix in early March evokes how the team's manager was feeling when looking at the Excel sheet that managed the car's build components.

Enlarge / A pit stop during the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix in early March evokes how the team’s manager was feeling when looking at the Excel sheet that managed the car’s build components.

ALI HAIDER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

There’s a new boss at a storied 47-year-old Formula 1 team, and he’s eager to shake things up. He’s been saying that the team is far behind its competition in technology and coordination. And Excel is a big part of it.

Starting in early 2023, Williams team principal James Vowles and chief technical officer Pat Fry started reworking the F1 team’s systems for designing and building its car. It would be painful, but the pain would keep the team from falling even further behind. As they started figuring out new processes and systems, they encountered what they considered a core issue: Microsoft Excel.

The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was “a joke,” Vowles recently told The Race. “Impossible to navigate and impossible to update.” This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.

“When you start tracking now hundreds of thousands of components through your organization moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless,” Vowles told The Race. Because of the multiple states each part could be in—ordered, backordered, inspected, returned—humans are often left to work out the details. “And once you start putting that level of complexity in, which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that’s exactly where we are.”

The consequences of this row/column chaos, and the resulting hiccups, were many. Williams missed early pre-season testing in 2019. Workers sometimes had to physically search the team’s factory for parts. The wrong parts got priority, other parts came late, and some piled up. And yet transitioning to a modern tracking system was “viciously expensive,” Fry told The Race, and making up for the painful process required “humans pushing themselves to the absolute limits and breaking.”

Williams' driver Alexander Albon drives during the qualifying session of the Saudi Arabian Formula One Grand Prix at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit in Jeddah on March 8, 2024.

Williams’ driver Alexander Albon drives during the qualifying session of the Saudi Arabian Formula One Grand Prix at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit in Jeddah on March 8, 2024.

Joseph Eid/AFP via Getty Images

The devil you know strikes again

The idea that a modern Formula 1 team, building some of the most fantastically advanced and efficient machines on Earth, would be using Excel to build those machines might strike you as odd. F1 cars cost an estimated $12–$16 million each, with resource cap of about $145 million. But none of this really matters, and it actually makes sense, if you’ve ever worked IT at nearly any decent-sized organization.

Then again, it’s not even uncommon in Formula 1. When Sebastian Anthony embedded with the Renault team, he reported back for Ars in 2017 that Renault Sport Formula One’s Excel design and build spreadsheet was 77,000 lines long—more than three times as large as the Williams setup that spurred an internal revolution in 2023.

Every F1 team has its own software setup, Anthony wrote, but they have to integrate with a lot of other systems: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and wind tunnel results, rapid prototyping and manufacturing, and inventory. This leaves F1 teams “susceptible to the plague of legacy software,” Anthony wrote, though he noted that Renault had moved on to a more dynamic cloud-based system that year. (Renault was also “a big Microsoft shop” in other areas, like email and file sharing, at the time.)

One year prior to Anthony’s excavation, Adam Banks wrote for Ars about the benefits of adopting cloud-based tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP). You adopt a cloud-based business management software to go “Beyond Excel.” “If PowerPoint is the universal language businesses use to talk to one another, their internal monologue is Excel,” Banks wrote. The issue is that all the systems and processes a business touches are complex and generate all kinds of data, but Excel is totally cool with taking in all of it. Or at least 1,048,576 rows of it.

Banks cited Tim Worstall’s 2013 contention that Excel could be “the most dangerous software on the planet.” Back then, international investment bankers were found manually copying and pasting Excel between Excel sheets to do their work, and it raised alarm.

But spreadsheets continue to show up where they ought not. Spreadsheet errors in recent years have led to police doxxing, false trainee test failures, an accidental $10 million crypto transfer, and bank shares sold at sorely undervalued prices. Spreadsheets are sometimes called the “dark matter” of large organizations, being ever-present and far too relied upon despite 90 percent of larger sheets being likely to have a major error.

So, Excel sheets catch a lot of blame, even if they’re just a symptom of a larger issue. Still, it’s good to see one no longer connected to the safety of a human heading into a turn at more than 200 miles per hour.

Formula 1 chief appalled to find team using Excel to manage 20,000 car parts Read More »

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F1’s pursuit of sustainability drives Pirelli to unveil forest-friendly tires

auto racing, Cars, F1, Pirelli, tires / /

pit stop —

The Forest Stewardship Council has given its approval to Pirelli’s natural rubber.

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A pirelli F1 tire with the FSC logo on it

Enlarge / You’ll notice the Forest Stewardship Council’s logo on the sidewall to the right of the Pirelli logo.

Pirelli

Formula 1 is on a big sustainability kick. The race cars are switching to carbon neutral synthetic fuels. Teams are improving their logistics to cut freight emissions. Race tracks are starting to run entirely on solar power. And now, the tires that Pirelli brings to the races have been given the seal of approval by an NGO as meeting its standards for sustainable forestry.

It will be hard to spot when the cars are moving, but this year, you’ll find a tree logo on the sidewall. That indicates that the natural rubber that went into making the tire has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Natural rubber makes up about 15 percent of the rubber in an F1 tire, with the rest being synthetic.

According to the FSC, natural rubber is a key driver of deforestry, as well as human rights abuses, particularly among the smallholders who farm 85 percent of the world’s natural rubber. By putting its logo on the tire, the FSC says that Pirelli has met “the world’s most credible standards for sustainable forestry,” protecting both the forests and the forest communities’ rights, including fair wages.

It’s one of a number of steps that Pirelli has put in place to make its F1 program more sustainable.

“I believe that the certification is an important step in this direction because it’s not Pirelli that is certifiying itself; it is a recognized third party that is giving us this certification, from the way in which we collect natural rubber, with respect of biodiversity, respect of the local population, the way we transport or use the natural rubber,” explained Mario Isola, head of Pirelli’s F1 program.

The synthetic rubber—chosen because it allows Pirelli to tune the characteristics it needs for the tires’ performance—is another area of attention. “Our R&D is focused on replacing the current material with more sustainable materials, keeping the same level of performance characteristics of the tire,” Isola told Ars.

Pirelli technicians work on the tires during practice ahead of the F1 Grand Prix of Saudi Arabia at Jeddah Corniche Circuit on March 7, 2024, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Enlarge / Pirelli technicians work on the tires during practice ahead of the F1 Grand Prix of Saudi Arabia at Jeddah Corniche Circuit on March 7, 2024, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Qian Jun/MB Media/Getty Images

In other racing disciplines, particularly sports car racing, series have begun to restrict the total tire allocation across a race weekend to drive the development of more durable tires that will be used across multiple stints rather than being changed at each pit stop. That’s less appropriate in F1, where the rules require using two different tire compounds during a race. But for this year, Pirelli may well be able to cut the number of wet and intermediate tires by half.

“We are working on another idea that is what we call ‘strip and fit.’ When we fit a tire on a rim, even if it is new, we have to scrap it because of the bead and the stress that you put on the bead,” Isola said.

“But we made an investigation on wet and intermediate tires where the stress on the tire was lower compared to the slick tire. So the tires that we are going to fit but not use during the first half of the season will be dismounted and checked, and then we can use them in the second half of the season. If it doesn’t rain—obviously, we cannot control the weather—we are going to save roughly 50 percent of the rain tires,” he told me.

In other F1 tire news, we’ve now learned that the sport will stick with 18-inch wheels when the technical regulations undergo their next shake-up ahead of the 2026 season.

F1 only moved to 18-inch wheels from much smaller 13-inch wheels at the start of the 2022 season, long after any new vehicle was equipped with wheels so small. There have been complaints that the larger 18-inch wheels have added too much unsprung weight to the current generation of F1 cars, which are by far the heaviest the sport has seen in its history.

Consequently, it was believed that the sport might reduce the wheel size to 16 inches in 2026. But that would require an expensive testing program, and since 16-inch wheels are barely more road-relevant to current new vehicles than 13-inch wheels, the decision was made to stick with what we mostly have now, although the final tire size and shape have yet to be decided upon.

F1’s pursuit of sustainability drives Pirelli to unveil forest-friendly tires Read More »

here’s-what-we-know-about-the-audi-q6-e-tron-and-its-all-new-ev-platform

Here’s what we know about the Audi Q6 e-tron and its all-new EV platform

Audi, Audi Q6 e-tron, Cars, Features, Premium Platform Electric / /

premium platform electric —

Audi has bet big on its next flexible EV architecture, starting with this SUV.

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An Audi A6 seen in a studio

Enlarge / This is Audi’s next electric vehicle, the Q6 e-tron SUV.

Audi

MUNICH—Audi’s new electric car platform is an important one for the company. Debuting in the new 2025 Q6 e-tron, it will provide the bones for many new electric Audis—not to mention Porsches and even Lamborghinis and Bentleys—in the coming years. Its development hasn’t been entirely easy, either; software delays got in the way of plans to have cars in customer hands in 2023. But now the new Q6 e-tron is ready to meet the world.

There’s some rather interesting technology integrated into the Q6 e-tron’s new electric vehicle architecture. Called PPE, or Premium Platform Electric, it’s been designed with flexibility in mind. Audi took the role of leading its development within Volkswagen Group, but the other brands within that corporate empire that target the upper end of the car market will also build EVs with PPE.

Since SUVs are still super-popular, Audi is kicking off the PPE era with an SUV. But the platform allows for other sizes and shapes—next year, we should see the A6 sedan and, if we’re really lucky, an A6 Avant station wagon.

  • The Q6 e-tron is a midsize SUV, measuring 187.8 inches (4,771 mm) long, 78.5 inches (1,993 mm) wide, and 65 inches (1,648 mm) tall.

    Audi

  • That’s as wide and tall as the Q8 e-tron, but four inches shorter, mostly in the 114.3-inch (2,998 mm) wheelbase, which translates to a little less rear leg and cargo room.

    Audi

  • The “quattro blisters” above each wheel arch prevent the shape from looking too slab-sided when you see it in person.

  • There’s a small frunk.

    Audi

  • Most of your luggage goes here.

    Audi

Better batteries

There’s a new EV powertrain, a significant advancement over the one that powers Audi’s Q8 e-tron SUV. The cells are prismatic and made by CATL at a German plant, with a nickel cobalt manganese chemistry (in a roughly 8:1:1 ratio). It’s been simplified, with 12 modules, each made of 15 cells. Compared to the Q8’s pack, the new Q6 has 30 percent greater energy density at the pack level, as well as 5 percent more actual energy, despite a 15 percent reduction in the mass of the pack (1,257 lbs/570 kg).

It operates at 800 V, which enables very fast DC charging: The 94.9 kWh (useable) battery pack can charge from 10 to 80 percent in 21 minutes. Audi says it doesn’t have to throttle back from 270 kW until the state of charge increases past 40 percent, at which point it declines at a constant rate to 150 kW at 80 percent SoC. (Past 80 percent, a fast-charging EV will throttle back the charger significantly.)

Of course, that requires access to a DC fast charger capable of 800 V. For 400 V chargers, the battery pack cleverly splits itself into two 400 V packs using a mechanical fuse switch, then equalizes their SoCs, then charges them both in parallel at up to 135 kW. Audi says it went for this approach versus a DC-DC inverter because it saved weight. Both sides feature AC charge ports, with DC charging only on the driver’s side. Model year 2025 Q6 e-trons will feature CCS1 ports on the driver’s side, with the switch to J3400 taking place the following year.

  • A cutaway of the Q6 e-tron’s powertrain.

    Jonathan Gitlin

  • A closer look at the Q6 e-tron’s rear drive motors.

    Jonathan Gitlin

  • More motor components.

    Jonathan Gitlin

  • PPE EVs have AC charging ports on both sides.

    Audi

Here’s what we know about the Audi Q6 e-tron and its all-new EV platform Read More »

2025-maserati-grecale-folgore-review:-a-stylish-suv,-but-a-hard-ev-sell

2025 Maserati Grecale Folgore review: A stylish SUV, but a hard EV sell

Cars / /
A blue Maserati Grecale Folgore EV seen head-on

Enlarge / Maserati’s first electric SUV looks good, but the weight ruins the handling.

Michael Teo Van Runkle

PUGLIA, ITALY—At a recent media drive program in Puglia, Italy, Maserati introduced the production version of the all-electric Grecale Folgore. The svelte SUV will join the American lineup for model-year 2025 as the company’s second-ever EV, following the 2024 GranTurismo Folgore.

Similar to the GranTurismo, development of the Grecale chassis always included plans to electrify the model. But unlike the GT, Grecale does not receive a dogbone-style battery and triple drive unit layout, instead sticking with by-now-traditional skateboard underpinnings and dual 205-kilowatt motors that swap in for the spectacular twin-turbo “Nettuno” V6 engine used on the lower Modena and Trofeo trims.

Total combined output maxes out at 550 hp (410 kW) and 605 lb-ft (820 Nm) of torque, or about 30 hp (22 kW) more than the former top-spec internal-combustion Trofeo trim. Only a few years ago, those power figures for either a gasoline or battery-electric drivetrain would have placed the Grecale at the top of the SUV food chain. Throw in the reactive nature of instantaneous torque, as well as all-wheel-drive traction, and 605 lb-ft should sound pretty impressive.

Michael Teo Van Runkle

But in the modern EV era, most of the Grecale Folgore’s stats lag behind the rest of the market, at least on paper. The decision to use 400 V architecture means that a relatively sizeable 105 kWh battery, which houses 33 large modules of six prismatic cells each, can only reach a maximum charging rate of 150 kW when plugged into a DC fast charger. Topping up the battery from 20 to 80 percent will therefore take a sluggish 29 minutes under the best of conditions. The onboard AC charger is capable of up to 22 kW, although that requires European three-phase electricity to take advantage of.

No official EPA range rating has been released yet, but in European WLTP testing, the Grecale reached as high as 501 kilometers of range (311 miles) but, in its least-efficient configuration, as low as 426 kilometers (264 miles). And keep in mind that EPA range estimates typically come in at around 70 percent of WLTP numbers.

That battery pack bolted onto a unibody chassis nonetheless weighs in at 1,490 lbs (676 kg), contributing mightily to a total curb weight of nearly 5,500 lbs (2,494 kg)—almost exactly 1,000 lbs (454 kg) gained versus the ICE Trofeo and Modena trims. The additional weight means that despite producing more grunt than a Grecale Trofeo, the Folgore can only manage a 4.1-second sprint to 62 mph (100 km/h).

Adding an EV powertrain increased the SUV's curb weight by half a ton compared to the gasoline versions.

Enlarge / Adding an EV powertrain increased the SUV’s curb weight by half a ton compared to the gasoline versions.

Michael Teo Van Runkle

The dual motors produce not-insubstantial straight-line acceleration, without a doubt, but while mashing the ‘”go” pedal in Sport mode all the way to the floor, expected levels of EV jerk (the gut-punch sensation that’s also the scientific term for rate of change of acceleration) never quite materialize as much as expected. For context, the Trofeo runs the 0–62 mph (0–100 km/h) sprint in 3.8 seconds.

2025 Maserati Grecale Folgore review: A stylish SUV, but a hard EV sell Read More »

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GM uses AI tool to determine which truck stops should get EV chargers

AI, Cars, ev fast charging, General Motors, travel center / /

help me choose —

Forget LLM chatbots; this seems like an actually useful implementation of AI.

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A 2024 Chevrolet Silverado EV WT at a pull-through charging stall located at a flagship Pilot and Flying J travel center, as part of the new coast-to-coast fast charging network.

Enlarge / A 2024 Chevrolet Silverado EV WT at a pull-through charging stall located at a flagship Pilot and Flying J travel center, as part of the new coast-to-coast fast charging network.

General Motors

It’s understandable if you’re starting to experience AI fatigue; it feels like every week, there’s another announcement of some company boasting about how an LLM chatbot will revolutionize everything—usually followed in short succession by news reports of how terribly wrong it’s all gone. But it turns out that not every use of AI by an automaker is a public relations disaster. As it happens, General Motors has been using machine learning to help guide business decisions regarding where to install new DC fast chargers for electric vehicles.

GM’s transformation into an EV-heavy company has not gone entirely smoothly thus far, but in 2022, it revealed that, together with the Pilot company, it was planning to deploy a network of 2,000 DC fast chargers at Flying J and Pilot travel centers around the US. But how to decide which locations?

“I think that the overarching theme is we’re really looking for opportunities to simplify the lives of our customers, our employees, our dealers, and our suppliers,” explained Jon Francis, GM’s chief data and analytics officer. “And we see the positive effects of AI at scale, whether that’s in the manufacturing part of the business, engineering, supply chain, customer experience—it really runs through threads through all of those.

“Obviously, the place where it shows up most directly is certainly in autonomous, and that’s an important use case for us, but actually [on a] day-to-day basis, AI is improving a lot of systems and workflows within the organization,” he told Ars.

“There’s a lot of companies—and not to name names, but there’s some chasing of shiny objects, and I think there are a lot of cool, sexy things that you can do with AI, but for GM, we’re really looking for solutions that are going to drive the business in a meaningful way,” Francis said.

GM wants to build out chargers at about 200 Flying J and Pilot travel centers by the end of 2024, but narrowing down exactly which locations to focus on was the big question. After all, there are more than 750 spread out across 44 US states and six Canadian provinces.

Obviously, traffic is a big concern—each DC fast charger costs anywhere from $100,000 to $300,000 dollars, and that’s not counting any costs associated with beefing up the electrical infrastructure to power them, nor the various permitting processes that tend to delay everything. Sticking a bank of chargers at a travel center that’s rarely visited isn’t the best use of resources, but neither is deploying them in an area that’s already replete with other fast chargers.

Much of the data GM showed me was confidential, but this screenshot should give you an idea of how the various datasets combine.

Enlarge / Much of the data GM showed me was confidential, but this screenshot should give you an idea of how the various datasets combine.

General Motors

Which is where the ML came in. GM’s data scientists built tools that aggregate different GIS datasets together. For example, it has a geographic database of already deployed DC chargers around the country—the US Department of Energy maintains such a resource—overlayed with traffic data and then the locations of the travel centers. The result is a map with potential locations, which GM’s team then uses to narrow down the exact sites it wants to choose.

It’s true that if you had access to all those datasets, you could probably do all that manually. But we’re talking datasets with, in some cases, billions of data points. A few years ago, GM’s analysts could have done that at a city level without spending years on the project, but doing it on a nationwide scale is the kind of task that requires the amount of cloud platforms and distributed clusters that are really now only becoming commonplace.

As a result, GM was able to deploy the first 25 sites last year, with 100 charging stalls across the 25. By the end of this year, it told Ars it should have around 200 locations operational.

That certainly seems more useful to me than just another chatbot.

GM uses AI tool to determine which truck stops should get EV chargers Read More »