Lifeboat Foundation

Toyota announced today that it will invest $1.3 billion in the development of future electric vehicles at its flagship Kentucky facility.

The Japanese automaker said it would bring an all-new, three-row battery electric SUV to the U.S. market thanks to the investment. Toyota has now committed nearly $10 billion in investments to the Kentucky plant, aiming to build high-quality vehicles and offer job stability to its employees at the factory.

The investment is also set to support the addition of a battery pack assembly line to the Kentucky plant. The batteries used in the packs assembled in Kentucky will come from Toyota’s Battery Manufacturing Plant in North Carolina.

The UK’s best-selling car is going electric. Ford said it will reveal the all-electric Puma Gen-E later this year as it expands its European EV lineup.

After unveiling the new Puma on Wednesday, Ford said that the all-electric Gen-E model will be revealed later this year.

Ford announced last October that it would be ending production of its once-best-selling Fiesta model to focus on its next-gen EVs. The American automaker already revealed the electric version of its best-selling SUV, the Explorer, last March.

In just four years, the Tesla Model Y became the uncontested best-selling car in the world!

In a twist that’s got the auto world going nuts, the Tesla Model Y has raced past the finish line to become the world’s best-selling car of 2023. This means that for the first time ever, an electric vehicle (EV) has snagged the title of the planet’s favorite ride, leaving traditional gas guzzlers and even hybrid contenders in the dust.

The Model Y, Tesla’s entry-level crossover, didn’t just nudge past the competition; it zoomed ahead with over 1.2 million units finding new homes across the globe last year. This electric crossover outpaced the stalwarts of the industry, the Toyota RAV4 and the Toyota Corolla, which managed to sell 1.07 million and 1.01 million units, respectively. The fact that the Model Y did this just four years after it started rolling off the production lines is indeed remarkable.

California sales of battery-electric vehicles made up over a third of BEV sales across the U.S. last year, with Tesla leading the charge.

Chinese EV leader BYD is launching its new in-house smart driving tech next month. According to local reports, the advanced ADAS feature will roll out by the end of March.

A report from LatePost (via CnEVPost) Monday claimed the first BYD city pilot assist driving feature will be available on March 30. BYD’s Denza N7 SUV will be the first of the auto giant’s 20+ lineup to receive the upgrade.

Citing sources close to the matter, the report says major cities like Shenzen (BYD’s headquarters) will be the first to see the feature rollout.

Ford thinks cheaper vehicles are crucial for competing with upcoming vehicles from Tesla and Chinese EV companies.

Imagine you work for a car rental agency or a package delivery company and you’re in charge of a fleet of vehicles. If you’re switching to EV vehicles, it becomes more complex to manage your vehicles due to long charging time and limited charging point availabilities.

Guided Energy, a French startup that raised $5.2 million from Sequoia Capital and Dynamo Ventures at the end of 2023, is building a software tool that help EV fleet operators when it comes to charge management and dispatch. The company aggregates data from vehicles, public and private charging points and uses machine learning to tell you when and where you’re supposed to charge your vehicles.

“The beauty of the EV ecosystem is that it is all online. This means, we connect to both EVs and charging points directly. Where customers already have telematics or supervision platforms in place, we can integrate with them using APIs into our platform, giving them a single, real-time, unified view of their EV operations,” co-founder and CEO Anant Kapoor told me.

Meta is promising to roll out auto-labeling for AI-generated images — as soon as it figures out how, that is.

Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said in a policy update that the company is currently working with “industry partners” to formulate criteria that will help identify AI content. Once those criteria are determined, Meta will begin automatically labeling posts featuring any AI-generated images, video, or audio “in the coming months.”

“This approach represents the cutting edge of what’s technically possible right now. But it’s not yet possible to identify all AI-generated content, and there are ways that people can strip out invisible markers,” Clegg wrote. “So we’re pursuing a range of options. We’re working hard to develop classifiers that can help us to automatically detect AI-generated content, even if the content lacks invisible markers.”

Aside from things like special tread design and the use of foam, EV tires and regular tires are nearly identical.