Enlarge/ F1 has a few more months before it has to finalize the technical regulations for 2026.
Darren Heath/Getty Images
F1 is set to undergo another of its periodic technical rule changes in 2026, undertaken every few years in an effort to keep the racing safe and at least somewhat relevant. The sport is adopting carbon-neutral synthetic fuels and switching to a simplified, if far more powerful, hybrid system, powering cars with much less drag. But early simulation tests have been alarming, with cars that were at times “undriveable,” according to a report in Motorsport.
The FIA, which is in charge of F1’s rules and regulations, wants cars that can race each other closely and entertain an audience, so expect the 2026 cars to generate less aerodynamic downforce, since that is often conducive to processional racing.
Reducing drag is a bigger priority for the FIA, especially since the new hybrid system, which still regenerates energy under braking but no longer also from the engine’s turbocharger, won’t have the energy sufficient to aid the car’s combustion engine throughout the entire lap.
The solution is to evolve the feature currently known as the Drag Reduction System, which has been required on cars since 2011. DRS lowers an element of the rear wing on command, cutting drag to the car. But instead of using it to make overtaking a bit easier, as is the case now, the idea is for the cars to have a low-drag configuration along the straights, then switch into a high downforce configuration for cornering.
But according to Motorsport, when the cars are in their lowest-drag configuration, they become “almost undriveable—with multiple examples of drivers spinning on straights under acceleration or being unable to take the smallest of curves without the rear stepping out.”
The culprit is a huge shift in the car’s center of pressure, which the FIA says is as much as three times greater than the current change in balance when a driver deploys their DRS. There is a solution, though—active front wings to go with the active rear wings, which move in concert to maintain the same balance on the car even as it switches from high downforce to low drag.
Some of you may be asking why, if F1 is supposedly the pinnacle of motorsport, it hasn’t had active front wings all along. But the sport has had a long-held prohibition on active aerodynamic devices—which it even extended to mass dampers—since 1969 (other than when specified by the rules, like DRS, obviously), following a series of crashes shortly after F1 discovered downforce.
Enlarge/ Electric F-150 sales are up 80 percent year over year.
Ford
Ford has caught a case of electric vehicle pessimism and is scaling back or delaying some of its plans for new EV models. A new electric pickup, scheduled to go into production next year, has been pushed back to 2026. And a three-row electric SUV has been given a two-year delay and will now not be available until 2027 at the earliest. The kicker? The automaker has published its sales for the first quarter of the year, and its EV sales are up a whopping 86 percent year over year.
Instead, the Blue Oval wants to focus on making more hybrids instead and says it will have hybrid options for all its internal combustion engine-powered vehicles by 2030. Ford’s current range of hybrids is not extensive, but it grew 42 percent in Q1 compared to the first three months of 2023.
Many of those—19,660 to be exact—were the Maverick Hybrid, despite the fact that for model year 2024, Ford removed the hybrid powertrain as the base model and effectively gave the electrified pickup a $1,500 price hike. In total, Ford sold 38,421 hybrids in Q1 2024, which it says makes this the best-ever quarter for hybrid sales. But they represent a rather small slice of its overall pie—just 7.6 percent of the 508,083 vehicles that Ford sold for the first three months of the year.
Still, that towers above the company’s total EV sales, which topped out at 20,223 for Q1. The F-150 Lightning was up 80 percent year over year for Q1, with 7,743 trucks sold. But one can see why Ford has cut production shifts for the Lightning—total F-series sales for the quarter were 152,943, suggesting that traditional truck buyers are yet to be tempted by the EV version en masse.
But with Mustang Mach-E sales up 77 percent to 9,589 sold, and a 148 percent growth for the E-Transit, Ford is the country’s second-bestselling EV brand. Despite that status, Ford expects that its EV division will continue to lose money—up to $5.5 billion in 2024, although that is more than offset by the money it expects to make selling commercial vehicles and gasoline-powered vehicles.
Meanwhile, it continues to build a series of battery factory joint ventures in Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as a battery facility in Michigan. It’s also working on a smaller, cheaper EV platform.
EV sales are still growing
Those details say a lot about the overall EV market in the US, which is not quite as bad as many of the naysayers claim, but it also leaves quite a lot to be desired if you’re anxious about US transport-related carbon emissions. In fact, EV sales still grew in Q1 overall, although only by 3.3 percent compared to a total growth in car sales of 5.1 percent. (For all of 2023, EV sales in the US grew 47 percent year over year.)
Other automakers also had a good Q1 in terms of EV sales. Rivian deliveries were up 71 percent. Kia EV sales were up by 88 percent. Hyundai Ioniq 5 sales increased by 19 percent. And Audi sold 23 percent more Q4 e-trons and 47 percent more Q8 e-trons despite overall Audi sales dropping 16 percent.
But not everyone is doing great. Volkswagen sold 37 percent fewer ID.4 crossovers last quarter, even as the brand’s sales grew by 21 percent. And then there’s Tesla. Despite being far and away the largest EV brand in the US, it had a no-good Q1, with an 8.5 percent decline in deliveries and a massive overproduction glut that has led to yet another round of price cuts for vehicles in its inventory. Tesla has also apparently canceled plans for a cheap “Model 2” EV in favor of a renewed focus on robotaxis.
The first thing I should say in this bike review is that I am not a bike enthusiast.
My preferred form of exercise is running, where no mechanical components are necessary. But I’m acting as reviewer here because what I lack in longstanding opinions on brand-name bike gearing and motor hubs, I make up for by being the exact target audience for the bike under review: the Maven Cargo E-bike by Integral Electrics. This is a cargo bike designed not for hardcore cyclists but for smaller riders, women specifically, who would happily swap out their family’s second car for a simpler e-bike—as long as it can handle the needs of family life: toting children, running errands, and making short commutes.
This is exactly what Integral CEO and co-founder Laura Belmar and her family were looking for amid the pandemic, she told me in an interview. But while her husband picked out e-bikes that were comfortably designed for him, who is taller than her, she consistently found herself top-heavy and struggling as soon as her two kids were loaded onto the bikes. “They were scared to ride with me,” she said of her kids. “One time, we were literally going down in the park and a jogger came by and grabbed the rack and pulled us back up.”
Belmar said she knew other families in the same situation. So she set out to design a bike that would essentially be a family station wagon on two wheels, one that would be easy to maneuver and control by smaller riders but still adjustable for taller cyclists—the Maven claims a size range of 5 feet, 0 inches to 6-foot-7. And, aside from ease of use, she sought ideal family-car features: comfort, safety, and affordability.
As a 5-foot-4 person with a 5-year-old, a taller husband, a need to run occasional errands, and an interest in ditching a second car, I’m the best person on Ars’ staff to see if the Maven lives up to its lofty goals. With the help of the cycling enthusiasts and experts on Ars’ staff, I’ll make sure this review hits all of the technical details cycling nerds will be looking for. But this will be an accessible review for families interested in an alternative to a second car and who, like me, may be cargo e-bike newbies. I’ll start with my general impressions and then dive into specifics.
The Maven at a glance
General impressions
As mentioned above, this is a cargo e-bike designed to never feel unwieldy to smaller riders while they’re hauling precious cargo. On this count, the Maven hits the mark. Straight out of the box, before I even dove into the manual, I easily rode around without even turning on the motor. It’s certainly a hefty bike, weighing in at 85 pounds on its own. But I never felt top-heavy on it or struggled to maneuver it. Integral boasts that it accomplishes this with a low center of gravity and fat, stable tires. Its two batteries sit low on the bike, and its 20-inch wheels allow the rear rack to sit just 24 inches off the ground. The tires are also 3 inches wide, giving them extra stability.
The Maven isn’t the only cargo e-bike on the market with these features; 20-inch tires are on several other bikes, including Aventon’s Abound and some others previously reviewed by Ars, like the Trek Fetch+2 and the RadWagon. So, whether the Maven is the best bike for your situation may depend on its other features.
The bike provides a fun, effortless ride—with and without groceries or my kid on the back. My review bike came with a rear railing/handlebar (a $99 add-on) and a seat pad ($69) that allowed my kid to help me test out the bike. He was not afraid to ride with me. In fact, he loved it. And in our many miles together, I found myself periodically forgetting he was back there. Going up hills and accelerating was effortless when the 750-watt motor kicked in. The adjustable front suspension was generously cushiony as we took the bike over gravel, dirt, asphalt, and sidewalks in various states of repair.
On a few occasions, my kid reminded me of his presence by shaking the bike from side to side, pretending we were sliding on ice. (He was having fun imagining us re-creating one of his favorite scenes from the animated movie Polar Express, when the train derails on a frozen lake.) But even with his best efforts to destabilize the bike, I never felt at risk of losing control or going down.
Budrul Chukrut/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Tesla has abandoned plans to develop an affordable electric Model 2, according to a report in Reuters. The news organization says it has reviewed company messages that say the affordable Model Y, which Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed would sell for $25,000 or less, has been axed.
Musk has been talking about an affordable Tesla Model 2 for some time now. An affordable mass-market EV was supposedly always key to the company’s long-term “master plans,” and in December 2023, he said the company was working on a “low-cost electric vehicle that will be made at very high volume.” Then, this March, Musk told Tesla workers that the Model 2 would go into production at the company’s factory in Berlin.
In light of this news, that statement certainly raises eyebrows—Reuters reports that one of its three unnamed sources told it that the decision to scrap the Model 2 was made in late February. Instead, Musk is allegedly “all in on robotaxi,” Tesla’s plan to create an autonomous driving system that could allow its cars to compete with Uber or Lyft without a driver in the equation.
Tesla has no press office and has not rebutted the news, but Musk took to his social network to declare that “Reuters is dying,” then in another post claimed that “Reuters is lying (again).”
Earlier this week, Tesla posted its worst delivery results since 2020, with an 8.5 percent drop in deliveries year over year and yet another quarter of overproduction that has left the electric carmaker with nearly 150,000 vehicles produced but unsold.
The next few weeks may offer little respite for Musk or Tesla; the trial over the death of Apple engineer Walter Huang, who was killed when his Tesla Model X drove into a highway gore in 2018, gets underway in California on Monday.
I found myself in the air long enough to give some thought to how I could land while remaining atop the bicycle I had been riding the instant before I hit the jump. Based on similar experiences while skiing, I immediately recognized that this invariably meant very bad things. A few seconds later, as I was brushing dirt out of the abrasions I had just picked up, I contemplated where I had gone wrong.
Once again, I had misunderstood HPC’s Trailblazer e-mountain bike. Doing so had become a feature of the time I spent using the bike.
The Trailblazer looks like a solid, hefty beast of a bike (that’s not an insult—I got compliments on its looks while taking a train to some trails). It’s covered with components that are likely to be unfamiliar to people who know the default sets that come with bikes from large manufacturers. But if you do some research on the components, you realize that the Trailblazer was specced by someone with deep knowledge and fairly particular tastes. And the ride the bike provided has some surprisingly subtle qualities that took me a while to adjust to.
Spare parts
High Performance Cycles offers two models of Trailblazer, the base and the Pro, and both have the same carbon fiber frame. They differ almost entirely based on their components, with the Pro having mostly top-of-the-line material befitting its $9,000 price tag and the base model costing $6,400 for very-good-but-still-a-step-down level components. You can increase the price of either by purchasing more capacious batteries, faster chargers, lights, or even an internal geared hub. (Note that the company has just updated the specs for 2024.)
You can also pay to boost the motor to one capable of speeds that will make you a danger to yourself and others, which will also make the bike illegal to use on anything but private property. Let’s get one thing out of the way here: Making an e-bike that can reach 65 km/hr (40 mph), as some Trailblazer configurations can, is a mistake. But HPC sent me the low-end model that behaved as a standard Class 1 e-bike, with a maximum speed of 32 km/hr (20 mph), so that’s what this review is about.
Most of the components you’ll find on mountain bike frames come from just a handful of manufacturers. And HPC relies on some of them (notably SRAM drivetrains). But smaller design companies stay afloat through a combination of replacements for broken parts, tempting people with upgrades, or offering some specific features that aren’t well-served by the more generic designs of major manufacturers. The Trailblazer leans heavily into those.
For example, the tires come from Kenda and have a reputation for great grip at the expense of high rolling resistance—a drawback that matters less when you have an electric assist. The forks and shocks come from a company called DVO and have an adjustment that, based on what I’ve read, should help compensate for the added weight of the hardware. Bafang, which provides the motor, isn’t a household name, but it’s a major player in electrified cycling. I’d already identified the WTB Volt as a highly rated saddle and was pleased to find one on the bike to try out. I could go through the rest of the bike’s specs and say similar things about the other components.
Enlarge/ I ended up liking the WTB seat a great deal.
John Timmer
Overall, the parts list felt quirky, and it might give someone who’s expecting big names some pause. But every component I looked into had some features that made it a good (or at least interesting) choice for an e-mountain bike.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
