Enlarge/ This Toyota factory in Indiana is getting a $1.4 billion investment so it can assemble a new three-row electric SUV for the automaker.
Toyota
US electric vehicle manufacturing got a bit of a boost today. Toyota has revealed that it is spending $1.4 billion to upgrade its factory in Princeton, Indiana, in order to assemble a new three-row electric SUV. That will add an extra 340 jobs to the factory, which currently employs more than 7,500 workers who assemble the Toyota Sienna minivan and the Toyota Highlander, Grand Highlander, and Lexus TX SUVs.
“Indiana and Toyota share a nearly 30-year partnership that has cultivated job stability and economic opportunity in Princeton and the surrounding southwest Indiana region for decades,” said Governor Eric Holcomb.
“Toyota’s investment in the state began with an $800 million commitment and has grown to over $8 billion. Today’s incredible announcement shows yet again just how important our state’s business-friendly environment, focus on long-term success, and access to a skilled workforce is to companies seeking to expand and be profitable far into the future. Indiana proudly looks forward to continuing to be at the center of the future of mobility,” Holcomb said.
Curiously, Toyota says this will be an entirely different new three-row electric SUV from the one that it will build at its factory in Georgetown, Kentucky. That plant upgrade, which was made public last summer, will cost Toyota $1.3 billion.
Part of the improvements to the Princeton plant include a battery pack assembly line, which will use cells produced at a $13.9 billion battery plant in North Carolina, which is due to open next year.
California’s electric grid, with its massive solar production and booming battery installations, is already on the cutting edge of the US’s energy transition. And it’s likely to stay there, as the state will require that all passenger vehicles be electric by 2035. Obviously, that will require a grid that’s able to send a lot more electrons down its wiring and a likely shift in the time of day that demand peaks.
Is the grid ready? And if not, how much will it cost to get it there? Two researchers at the University of California, Davis—Yanning Li and Alan Jenn—have determined that nearly two-thirds of its feeder lines don’t have the capacity that will likely be needed for car charging. Updating to handle the rising demand might set its utilities back as much as 40 percent of the existing grid’s capital cost.
The lithium state
Li and Jenn aren’t the first to look at how well existing grids can handle growing electric vehicle sales; other research has found various ways that different grids fall short. However, they have access to uniquely detailed data relevant to California’s ability to distribute electricity (they do not concern themselves with generation). They have information on every substation, feeder line, and transformer that delivers electrons to customers of the state’s three largest utilities, which collectively cover nearly 90 percent of the state’s population. In total, they know the capacity that can be delivered through over 1,600 substations and 5,000 feeders.
California has clear goals for its electric vehicles, and those are matched with usage based on the California statewide travel demand model, which accounts for both trips and the purpose of those trips. These are used to determine how much charging will need to be done, as well as where that charging will take place (home or a charging station). Details on that charging comes from the utilities, charging station providers, and data logs.
They also project which households will purchase EVs based on socioeconomic factors, scaled so that adoption matches the state’s goals.
Combined, all of this means that Li and Jenn can estimate where charging is taking place and how much electricity will be needed per charge. They can then compare that need to what the existing grid has the capacity to deliver.
It falls short, and things get worse very quickly. By 2025, only about 7 percent of the feeders will experience periods of overload. By 2030, that figure will grow to 27 percent, and by 2035—only about a decade away—about half of the feeders will be overloaded. Problems grow a bit more slowly after that, with two-thirds of the feeders overloaded by 2045, a decade after all cars sold in California will be EVs. At that point, total electrical demand will be close to twice the existing capacity.
Enlarge/ For the previous EcoCar 3 competition, student teams turned Camaro sportscars into hybrids. For the EcoCar EV challenge, their job is to improve on the Cadillac Lyriq.
EcoCar
Across the country, teams of students at 15 different universities are in the middle of a four-year project, dissecting an electric vehicle and figuring out ways to make it even better. The program, called the EcoCar EV Challenge, was founded more than three decades ago by the US Department of Energy and is run by the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory.
Over the last 35 years, more than 30,000 students from 95 universities have participated in the EcoCar Challenge, part of the DOE’s Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition. Each segment spans four years, with the most recent cycle beginning in 2023 with a new Cadillac Lyriq donated by the General Motors automaker.
The students take this competition very seriously, as participation alone brings a lot of benefits, including the potential for a lifelong career path.
Mobility advancement in progress
One of the organization’s goals is to challenge teams to “identify and address specific challenges with equity in the future of mobility through the application of innovative hardware and software solutions” while working with underserved populations. Through this process, the student-run teams are discovering untapped potential for future EV development and finding solutions that could help local and national communities.
The entire first year is packed with intense research and planning. Students don’t even get to put their hands on a car until year two; meanwhile, they learn how to work together and communicate as a team. They run simulations with propulsion controls and modeling, and by the time they have access to a vehicle, they’re ready to dive in.
University of Alabama student Corban Walsh explains that during the prototyping process, automakers like Cadillac end up with a fleet of pre-production vehicles that can’t be resold. Walsh and his team were given a practically new all-electric Lyriq with just 17,000 miles (27,400 km) on it, and they decided their goal was to transform it from a rear-wheel-drive to an all-wheel-drive configuration and boost the horsepower from 300 to 550 (223 to 373 kW). With tasks like that, one might think this is an ideal club for car fanatics. But Walsh says the team has diverse interests and is in fact very software- and planning-focused.
Year one is research and planning.
EcoCar
“In some ways, we attract the ‘car guy’ type of person, but at the end of the day, you don’t have to be a car guy,” Walsh says. “You can even forget it’s a car sometimes.”
Any student can join the EcoCar EV Challenge, and general onboarding familiarizes them with the tracks and teams they can join. First, they take a lab tour and view required safety videos; then, they choose a subteam under the general categories of hardware, integration, and software development. The Connected and Automated Vehicle Features subteam, for example, integrates sensor hardware and software, stitching together the data.
Along the way, small tasks lead to big advances. One of the first orders of business for the Lyriq was to obtain a clean title and registration as a salvage vehicle to be considered road-legal. Teams strip the cars down as far as they can, sometimes moving forward through a series of trials and errors. They read all the manuals they can get their hands on, consulting with their GM mentor when they get stuck.
GM also supplies some parts, allowing students to order a limited number from the catalog. The University helps defray some of the cost, and companies like American Axle donate critical components like motors. Natick, Massachusetts-based Mathworks provides the simulation software the team needs for planning. Students learn how to use the resources available on campus, too.
“One of the hardest but coolest things we’ve worked on was when we had to plan mountings for two new motors,” Walsh says. “We decided to use the on-campus foundry where we can cast these parts.”
The foundry had excellent advice for the team, Walsh says, helping them figure out how to make mountings that were strong enough to hold the motor and won’t cause corrosion. They 3D-printed the part and made a ceramic mold, then burned out the plastic and let the metal harden.
Enlarge/ The X-62A VISTA Aircraft flying above Edwards Air Force Base, California.
Kyle Brasier, U.S. Air Force
An AI test pilot has successfully flown a jet fighter in dogfights against human opponents. It’s the latest development for DARPA’s Air Combat Evaluation program, which is trying to develop aerospace AI agents that can be trusted to perform safely.
Human test pilots have a bit of a reputation thanks to popular culture—from The Right Stuff to Top Gun: Maverick, the profession has been portrayed as a place for loose cannons with a desire to go fast and break the rules. The reality is pretty far from that these days, especially where DARPA is concerned.
The agency instead wants a machine-learning agent that can safely fly a real aircraft autonomously, with no violations of training rules. After all, neural networks have their own reputation—at this point well-earned—for finding ways to exploit situations that hadn’t occurred to humans. And the consequences when controlling a real jet fighter can be a lot more severe than just testing in silico.
In this case, the jet fighter is called the X-62A Variable Stability In-Flight Simulator Test Aircraft, or VISTA. It began life as an F-16D (Block 30) two-seater, which spent most of its 32-year career working at the US Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards AFB.
Over the years, the plane, previously designated the NF-16D, has been modified to simulate the flight characteristics of other aircraft while in flight. “It has given almost a thousand students and staff members the opportunity to practice testing aircraft with dangerously poor flying qualities and to execute risk-reduction flight test programs for advanced technologies,” said William Gray, chief test pilot of VISTA and the USAF Test Pilot School.
That made it a natural candidate for DARPA’s ACE program, and in 2021, the process of modifying the aircraft began once again as it became the X-62A.
The USAF and DARPA started conducting X-62A test flights under AI control in December 2022, logging 17 hours by the time we first learned of the program in early 2023. Although DARPA’s AI agent flew the X-62A, there was always a pair of human pilots onboard to monitor the test flight and, if necessary, take control. But in those early tests, the X-62A flew against simulated adversaries.
By September 2023, the program had completed 21 test flights, including the first-ever AI versus human aerial engagement within visual range, flying against a human-piloted F-16. During that time, DARPA says the team made over 100,000 lines of flight-critical software changes, which it called “an unprecedented rate of development.”
That’s certainly an achievement, but just focusing on the dogfight is a mistake, according to Gray. “That misses the point. Dogfighting was the problem to solve so we could start testing autonomous artificial intelligence systems in the air, but every lesson we’re learning applies to every task we can give to an autonomous system,” he said.
On Monday, we learned that Tesla had suspended customer deliveries of its stainless steel-clad electric pickup truck. Now, the automaker has issued a recall for all the Cybertrucks in customer hands—nearly 4,000 of them—in order to fix a problem with the accelerator pedal. It has come at an inconvenient time for Tesla, which is laying off more than 10 percent of its workforce due to shrinking sales even as CEO Elon Musk asks for an extra $55.8 billion in compensation.
The problem, which affects all 3,878 Cybertrucks delivered so far, has to do with the EV’s accelerator pedal. Tesla has fitted this with a metal-finish cover to match the brushed metal appearance of the truck itself—no word on whether the pedals rust, too—but it says that at some point, “an unapproved change introduced lubricant (soap) to aid in the component assembly of the pad onto the accelerator pedal. Residual lubricant reduced the retention of the pad to the pedal.”
Thanks to the profile of the Cybertruck’s under dash, if the pedal cover becomes partially detached it can slide up and become trapped in place, wedging the pedal down and unleashing all of the Cybertruck’s substantial power—the dual-motor truck boasts 600 hp (447 kW) and can reach 60 mph (98 km/h) in just over four seconds.
This cover became partially detached from the accelerator pedal.
And then became stuck underneath some trim, jamming the accelerator on full.
Fortunately, applying the brake overrides the accelerator and cuts torque immediately, but that still didn’t prevent one owner from allegedly crashing into a light pole before he was able to bring his Cybertruck to a stop.
Tesla is no stranger to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s official recall process, but this time there is no software fix or over-the-air patch. Instead, the trucks will need to be physically inspected and reworked if necessary. The company says that it will notify its stores and service centers about the recall “on or around” today, and that owners will be contacted in due course.
Enlarge/ The Marina Palms condo development in Miami recently added an ADS-TEC ChargeBox DC fast charger for its residents.
ADS-TEC
Right now, the electric vehicle ownership experience is optimized for the owner who lives in a single-family home. A level 2 home AC charger costs a few hundred dollars, and with a garage or carport, an EV that gets plugged in each night is an EV that starts each day with a 100 percent charged battery pack. Plenty of Ars readers have told us that a 120 V outlet even works for their needs, although perhaps better for Chevy Bolt-sized batteries rather than a Hummer EV.
However, about a third of Americans live in large multifamily developments, often in cities that stand to benefit the most from a switch to electrification. And electrifying the parking lots of existing developments is often easier said than done. Some developments will allow individuals to install their own dedicated charger, and newly built developments may even have planned ahead and put conduits in place already.
For many others, the parking spaces will be owned by the condo association or co-op, complicating the idea of giving each EV driver their own plug. Here, shared solutions make more sense, perhaps starting with one or two shared level 2 chargers as a pilot—often this won’t even require extra work to the electrical panel. Costs are a little higher than for a home level 2 charger—between $7,500–$15,000 per charger, perhaps.
But for larger developments, scaling up level 2 chargers can quickly become prohibitively expensive. Older buildings may well need their electrical infrastructure to be upgraded, and running copper wiring across parking lots starts to add up fast.
Faced with the install costs for a dozen 2 chargers, a battery-buffered DC fast charger starts to look like an attractive alternative. These use an existing electrical feed to trickle-charge a lithium-ion battery pack that can then DC fast-charge an EV, rather than requiring hundreds of kilowatts. Instead of taking 6–10 hours to recharge with AC power, about 30 minutes is usually sufficient to return most EVs to 80 percent state of charge with a DC fast charger.
A condo building in Miami, the Marina Palms, recently made just this decision after a boom in the number of residents with EVs created a need for more charging capacity than its six existing level 2 chargers could offer. It went with a ChargeBox from ADS-TEC Energy, which is capable of charging at up to 320 kW.
“That was one of the biggest appeals, that we didn’t have to work with the electrical infrastructure of our development or grow it or whatever, just to get this charger installed. I think we have 200 kW in the power grid on that side, and we’re using 100 kW. The other way [with multiple level 2 chargers] we would be using a minimum of 140 kW, if not the whole thing, and then we have no buffer for something else we might be doing like—for instance a car lift or that type of thing,” explained George Barriere, general manager for the Marina Palms.
If the costs are comparable, there’s another benefit to picking a DC fast charger in place of a bank of AC plugs—it takes up less room. “We didn’t use anything from our inventory of parking, which is the biggest problem for condos—lack of parking. So, we would have to have 20 parking spaces for 20 level 2 chargers in order to service the same number of vehicles that we’re doing with two parking spaces [with a single level 3 charger],” Barriere told me.
“Our deployment at the Marina Palms Yacht Club and Residences serves as a model for other large condominium and apartment complexes in Miami and elsewhere in the US,” said Thomas Seidel, CEO of ADS-TEC. “The lack of charging infrastructure is still a deterrent in driver adoption of EVs. ADS-TEC Energy is solving this problem with our solution. We look forward to rolling out additional installations across the US this year. The advantages we provide will be a huge step for the US in building a strong and reliable charging infrastructure.”
Times are starting to get tough for Tesla. The electric vehicle automaker had been riding high, with quarter after quarter of successive growth and plenty of profits in the process. But lately, that success has mostly been due to a series of price cuts meant to tempt customers to buy into an aging lineup. This March, the company reported its first quarterly decline since 2020.
“As we prepare the company for our next phase of growth, it is extremely important to look at every aspect of the company for cost reductions and increasing productivity,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk told employees in the memo.
Musk has pursued a strategy of relentless cost-cutting, but all those price cuts have meant Tesla’s once-envied profit margins are now nothing special.
“As part of this effort, we have done a thorough review of the organization and made the difficult decision to reduce our headcount by more than 10 [percent] globally. There is nothing I hate more, but it must be done. This will enable us to be lean, innovative, and hungry for the next growth phase,” Musk wrote.
Tesla’s limited aging product portfolio is starting to become a problem in the face of stiff competition in China. Its newest vehicle is the Cybertruck, a large and controversial pickup with limited appeal outside of North America’s wide roads and parking spaces. And plans for a cheap two-seat Model 2 have been axed in favor of a robotaxi.
Enlarge/ The Cybertruck remains a divisive vehicle.
Jonathan Gitlin
Tesla’s troubled Cybertruck appears to have hit yet another speed bump. Over the weekend, dozens of waiting customers reported that their impending deliveries had been canceled due to “an unexpected delay regarding the preparation of your vehicle.”
Tesla has not announced an official stop sale or recall, and as of now, the reason for the suspended deliveries is unknown. But it’s possible the electric pickup truck has a problem with its accelerator.
Tesla has been accused of making cars that have sudden unintended acceleration problems. In 2017, the company was the subject of a class-action lawsuit based on at least 23 accounts of Tesla Models S and X suffering from this problem. Tesla vehemently denied any such problem, and in 2020, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration declined to investigate.
But in 2023, a safety researcher in Minnesota published a white paper with a potential mechanism, showing how a voltage spike in Tesla’s inverter could cause a car to experience an acceleration event. That same year, a leaked trove of Tesla documents to the German publication Handelsblatt included more than 2,400 customer complaints alleging sudden unintended brake problems. By July 2023, NHTSA decided it was time to investigate the problem.
This time, the potential culprit might be a lot easier to identify than a defective inverter experiencing a random voltage spike.
Yesterday, a Cybertruck owner on TikTok posted a video showing how the metal cover of his accelerator pedal allegedly worked itself partially loose and became jammed underneath part of the dash. The driver was able to stop the car with the brakes and put it in park. At the beginning of the month, another Cybertruck owner claimed to have crashed into a light pole due to an unintended acceleration problem.
This cover became partially detached from the accelerator pedal.
And then became stuck underneath some trim, jamming the accelerator on full.
The accelerator pedal without the metal cover.
Lending this theory credence, Whole Mars Blog, a social media account with close links to the automaker, stated on Saturday that “Tesla has stopped all Cybertruck deliveries for 7 days due to an issue with the accelerator pedal.”
Enlarge/ BYD electric cars stand at a BYD dealership on April 05, 2024, in Berlin, Germany. BYD, which stands for Build Your Dreams, is a Chinese manufacturer that went from making solar panels to electric cars. The company is seeking to gain a foothold in the German auto market.
Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Influential US Senator Sherrod Brown (D–Ohio) has called on US President Joe Biden to ban electric vehicles from Chinese brands. Brown calls Chinese EVs “an existential threat” to the US automotive industry and says that allowing imports of cheap EVs from Chinese brands “is inconsistent with a pro-worker industrial policy.”
Brown’s letter to the president is the most recent to sound alarms about the threat of heavily subsidized Chinese EVs moving into established markets. Brands like BYD and MG have been on sale in the European Union for some years now, and last October, the EU launched an anti-subsidy investigation into whether the Chinese government is giving Chinese brands an unfair advantage.
The EU probe won’t wrap until November, but another report published this week found that government subsidies for green technology companies are prevalent in China. BYD, which now sells more EVs than Tesla, has benefited from almost $4 billion (3.7 billion euro) in direct help from the Chinese government in 2022, according to a study by the Kiel Institute.
Last month, the EU even started paying extra attention to imports of Chinese EVs, issuing a threat of retroactive tariffs that could start being imposed this summer.
Chinese EV imports to the EU have increased by 14 percent since the start of its investigation, but they have yet to really begin in the US, where there are a few barriers in their way. Chinese batteries make an EV ineligible for the IRS’s clean vehicle tax credit, for one thing. And Chinese-made vehicles (like the Lincoln Nautilus, Buick Envision, and Polestar 2) are already subject to a 27.5 percent import tax.
An existential threat?
But Chinese EVs are on sale in Mexico already, and that has American automakers worried. Last year, Ford CEO Jim Farley said he saw Chinese automakers “as the main competitors, not GM or Toyota.” And in January, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he believed that “if there are no trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world.”
But not if Congress gets its way. A few weeks ago, Joshua Hawley (R-Mo.)—using very similar language to Brown—called for a tax increase on Chinese EVs. Hawley wanted to raise the base tariff from 2.5 percent to 100 percent, which would result in Chinese EVs being subject to an overall 125 percent import tax, up from today’s 27.5 percent. Hawley also wanted to apply those rates to Chinese EVs assembled in Mexico.
“A surge in Chinese EV sales would cripple the domestic manufacturing base, including critical inputs from parts suppliers to steel, tires, and glass producers,” wrote Brown, noting also that Chinese EVs could “undermine efforts to reshore semiconductor production.” Brown is similarly down on allowing made-in-Mexico EVs from Chinese brands.
It’s not just the potential damage to the US auto industry that has prompted this letter. Brown wrote that he is concerned about the risk of China having access to data collected by connected cars, “whether it be information about traffic patterns, critical infrastructure, or the lives of Americans,” pointing out that “China does not allow American-made electric vehicles near their official buildings.”
At the end of February, the Commerce Department also warned of the security risk from Chinese-connected cars and revealed it has launched an investigation into the matter.
Brown doesn’t just want a tariff on Chinese EVs, though. “When the goal is to dominate a sector, tariffs are insufficient to stop their attack on American manufacturing,” Brown wrote. “Instead, the Administration should act now to ban Chinese EVs before they destroy the potential for the US EV market. For this reason, no solution should be left off the table, including the use of Section 421 (China Safeguard) of the Trade Act of 1974, or some other authority.”
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.
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