Hyundai's Cute Porter Truck Is Morphing Into An EV

When you’re in the middle of a dream, everything makes sense. It’s only later, in the recounting, that the dream seems absurd. Giorgio Amoretti had a dream once, and it seemed absurd. His dream was to sail a car across the Atlantic Ocean. Only it started out as a lark, an offhand half-joke by his girlfriend Lucia. This story originally appeared in Volume 37 of Road & Track. Giorgio wanted to journey to the United States, where, he said, “dreams and projects are realized!” But at the time, he didn’t have the money to book passage by air or ship to a land so far. Let’s go there by car, Lucia said. To Giorgio, it was a provocation. A dare. A great idea! This was in the late Seventies, when they lived near Venice, Italy. They were a pair, Giorgio and Lucia. In 1968, they had driven across the Sahara in a Ferves. Giorgio didn’t believe in institutional education; he thought that—like other conventions of modern society, things such as employment and marriage—it suffocated the human spirit and stifled the creative mind. He learned about the world by devising novel ways to experience it.

Vik is the Co-Founder and former Editor at MotorAuthority, a leading U. S. website covering performance and luxury cars. Since 2025, he has contributed to CarBuzz, blending his engineering background and almost 20 years of automotive journalism experience to deliver cutting-edge news and analysis. Subaru of Japan has kicked off a teaser campaign for what it describes as a new WRX with a manual transmission. The automaker has released a single photo and described the car as carrying the WRX legacy into the next era. What all of this means remains unclear, but Subaru has scheduled the reveal for November, so we won't have long to wait for answers.

Vik is the Co-Founder and former Editor at MotorAuthority, a leading U. S. website covering performance and luxury cars. Since 2025, he has contributed to CarBuzz, blending his engineering background and almost 20 years of automotive journalism experience to deliver cutting-edge news and analysis. Mercedes-Benz helped start the trend of calling almost anything with a curved roof a coupe when it launched the original CLS in 2004. Today, it offers one of the industry's widest ranges of coupe-like models, most of which are SUVs. According to Mercedes, the popularity of these models, particularly coupe-like SUVs like the GLC Coupe and GLE Coupe, means the body style is here to stay. The bad news is that their success appears to be coming at the expense of traditional two-door coupes.

Brett T. Evans has more than a decade of experience driving, writing about, and evaluating automobiles. His early career comprised writing about pre- and post-war classic cars, as well as late-model performance diesel trucks. These varied experiences allowed him the chance to gain expertise in every corner of the auto world. Today, he spends much of his time on modern car culture and mass-market news. Earlier this month, Volkswagen announced it would recall more than 22,000 examples of its ID.4 electric SUV from the 2023–2026 model years over the risk of a battery fire – the second such issue this year. And although the automaker is working on a more permanent fix, the interim solution may not be very appealing to the folks who commute some distance in their German EVs. That's because Volkswagen will automatically issue an over-the-air software update that will limit the charging capacity to 80 percent of the battery's state of charge unless the vehicle owner specifically opts out of the temporary remedy.

A contributor to CarBuzz since April 2025, Ben also was a finalist in The Intercooler Young Writer Compition in 2021, has done a placement with AutoCar, and runs his own independant  automotive blog. Thanks to his push from his family, Ben has been able to experience some incredible cars, being to feel the nimble character of a Lotus 3-eleven, sitting in an Aston Martin Valkyrie, and getting to experience a Mercedes-Benz AMG E63 estate being driven by a professional driver on a track. These are all examples of things that pushed Ben to the career he is in today.

Redwood Materials and Rivian are expanding their existing EV battery partnership, adding a fresh battery material recycling effort to the EV startup’s Normal, Illinois, vehicle factory and, potentially, other Rivian-owned sites. As Tesla co-founder JB Straubel’s second act, Redwood Materials had a lot to live up to. Its plan to give used EV batteries a second life as energy storage for public- and private-sector buildings, construction sites, micro-grids, and (sigh) data centers makes plenty of sense, though. Enough sense, anyway, that Rivian decided to put the idea to work as it built out its R2 production line at the former Diamond-Star Mitsubishi plant in Normal. Back in April, the upstart EV brand signed on for 10 MWh worth of energy storage using repurposed Rivian battery packs – but that deal was just the beginning.