Automotive

GM said it will be the world’s first to mass-produce prismatic LMR battery cells. The new battery tech can deliver 33% higher energy density than LFP at a comparable cost. GM upgrades Tennessee plant for LMR battery cells

Lucid Air owners are finally getting the Gravity’s interface. Lucid started pushing Air UX 3.0 today as part of software version 2.11.0, its biggest Air software overhaul in years. Owners of 2025 and newer Airs get it for free over the air. But if you bought a 2022, 2023, or some 2024 Air, you’ll first need a $950 infotainment processor upgrade at a Lucid service center.

An 11-year-old boy in Florida has found himself with a traffic citation, a towed electric motorcycle, and a court date after police caught him riding a high-powered electric dirt bike in lieu of an electric bicycle on public roads. It’s a rare example of an alternative to the growing push for stricter e-bike laws nationwide: actually enforcing the perfectly good laws we already have.

As Amazon’s early fall Prime Day deals are in full swing, we have a bunch of Amazon deals being led by the Mango Prime Fall Sale with up to 72% discounts on its Power E bundles, like the 14kWh setup with 2x Power E CATL stations, 2x batteries, and an mSocket Pro at its $4,199 2026 low. Right behind that is Segway’s Navimow i105N Robot Lawn Mower at its $669 annual low, as well as a roundup of Tapo security devices starting from $32, like the C660 4K Wireless Outdoor Solar Security Camera at its $107 low. There’s also a solar bundle for Jackery’s 1,070Wh Explorer 1000 V2 power station, and a bunch more early Prime Day deals waiting for you below. You can find the hangover deals from yesterday down at the bottom of the page, like the massive Anker SOLIX Early Prime Day Sale lineup, Lectric’s 3-day Tailgating e-bike flash sale lineup, and more. Head below for other New Green Deals we’ve found today and, of course, Electrek’s best EV buying and leasing deals. Also, check out the new Electrek Tesla Shop for the best deals on Tesla accessories.

Tesla (TSLA) got the SEC’s blessing today to let retail shareholders sign up for a standing instruction that automatically votes their shares the way Tesla’s board recommends, at every meeting, until they cancel it. The timing is hard to ignore. Tesla still hasn’t scheduled its 2026 annual meeting, and Elon Musk keeps teasing a SpaceX merger that could hand him a big chunk of his $1 trillion pay package without hitting a single operational goal.

Kia introduced the new PV5 Chassis Cab, an open-bed model with “endless” conversion options, including a tipper, food truck, or even a camper. A year after it went on sale, the PV5 has already become Europe’s most popular small electric van. In the first half of 2026, it accounted for 37% of electric C-segment van sales in Europe and was the top seller in its segment.

EVgo has previewed a new DC fast charging system capable of delivering up to 750 kW. The system will share power among charging stalls, adjusting the amount delivered to each EV as its battery’s needs change. That, of course, will be subject to what power is available across the system. EVgo is developing and testing the chargers at its Innovation Lab in El Segundo, California, with support from Delta Electronics. Each station will have a NACS connector, and the company says the design will include easier-to-handle cables and touchless payment.

Hyundai has officially launched the Ioniq V in China, starting for a limited time at under $15,000 – a budget EV, but without budget specs. The Chinese rollout comes ahead of a planned global launch. But, as usual, if you’re reading this from America, you can’t have it.

A five-stop concert tour in Quebec ran entirely on two Chevrolet Silverado EVs and a 150 kWh mobile power plant this summer. No diesel generator, and no hookup to the grid. I went to the final show, held in a grocery store parking lot in Montreal’s Saint-Henri neighborhood, and everything from the speakers to the stage lights to the kitchen was running off batteries.

In news that should surprise very few, connected cars remain a complete privacy nightmare. But now we have a better idea of what data those cars are giving away, and to whom, thanks to a study conducted by a team of researchers at Northeastern University and Consumer Reports. Testing 21 cars from 19 different brands revealed patterns of traffic to advertisers and trackers, as well as data shared with Big Tech firms like Microsoft and Adobe. And using a car’s companion app can multiply the problem, their testing found. In 2023, the Mozilla Foundation published a widely covered report looking at the privacy policies of more than two dozen automakers. They were appalled, writing that “cars are the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy.” But that analysis was conducted by sitting down and reading all the various privacy policies of each brand; today’s study involved measuring traffic from actual cars under a number of scenarios, including idling and being driven. The researchers even parked 11 cars—just the electric ones—in a Faraday tent to see if the loss of a cellular signal would push that traffic to the car’s Wi-Fi connection instead.

Hyundai is preparing to introduce two new electric SUVs, the IONIQ 4 and IONIQ 7, filling two key gaps in its EV lineup. Hyundai adds IONIQ 4 and IONIQ 7 to its EV lineup

Tesla was just granted a patent for an “Electric Fan Car,” a system that uses four electric ducted fans in the rear diffuser to suck the car down to the road at any speed. The car in the drawings is a Model S, which Tesla stopped building in April. It’s Tesla’s second fan car patent in just over a year, and it arrives two weeks before the company’s latest attempt at a Roadster demo.

On today’s completely predictable episode of Quick Charge, Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the weather looks like it’ll be too rough to show off his new “flying” Roadster 2.0 on October 1st, so he’s pushing the reveal back another two weeks – but after 9 years of moving goal posts and broken promises, what’s a few more weeks? We’ve also got a review of the Tom Hanks classic The Money Pit, which may or may not be a reference to spending $250,000 on a car you’ve never driven, touched, or even seen – but which you might get to see in two weeks. Plus: the EU is delaying the vote to approve Full Self Driving (Supervised) until at least December, and y’all tell us who you think should be to blame when robotaxis crash into stuff.

The US lost 36,949 clean energy jobs in 2025, ending four straight years of growth. That’s the direct impact of the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress rolling back federal support for clean energy and EVs, which led companies to cancel or scale back projects. That’s according to new findings from E2, which analyzed employment data from the US Department of Energy. Clean energy employment fell to 3.52 million, the first annual decline since the pandemic. The jobs lost in 2025 erased nearly 40% of the gains made in 2024.

Lexus confirmed the 2027 TZ will go on sale later this year with prices starting under $65,000. The electric SUV will offer up to 315 miles of range on a single charge. While the Toyota Highlander BEV and Subaru Getaway won’t arrive until 2027 as 2028 model-year vehicles now, Lexus will beat both with its first three-row electric SUV.

New York City lawmakers are preparing this week to consider a sweeping new package of micromobility legislation, with more than 20 bills aimed at e-bikes, electric scooters, mopeds, delivery apps, and enforcement. Some of the proposals look like fairly reasonable attempts to deal with actual problems surrounding illegal or modified electric bikes. Others go considerably further, including several bills that would effectively eliminate an entire category of legal e-bikes from New York City.

One perhaps not-terrible change in the new rule is a tightening of the light truck loophole. Passenger cars and light trucks have been classified separately under CAFE, with weaker standards for the latter. That encouraged car companies to redesign their crossovers such that they could be categorized as light trucks, with the end result that our roads are full of SUVs that are bigger and thirstier than they should be. Should these regulations still be in effect by model year 2030, they will “change classification criteria starting in model year 2030 to reflect each vehicle’s intended use accurately, flipping the current fleet mix of approximately 70 [percent] light trucks and 30 [percent] passenger vehicles to around 70 [percent] passenger cars and 30 [percent] light trucks,” according to the Department of Transportation.

Renewables and battery storage are projected to add about 82.7 gigawatts (GW) of new generating capacity in the US in the next 12 months, while total fossil fuel and nuclear power capacity will fall by more than 1.4 GW, according to new data released by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), and reviewed by the SUN DAY Campaign. Renewable energy generation exceeded 29% of US total by end of July 2026