Cars

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After years of saying no, Tesla reportedly adding Apple CarPlay to its cars

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Apple CarPlay, the interface that lets you cast your phone to your car’s infotainment screen, may finally be coming to Tesla’s electric vehicles. CarPlay is nearly a decade old at this point, and it has become so popular that almost half of car buyers have said they won’t consider a car without the feature, and the overwhelming majority of automakers have included CarPlay in their vehicles.

Until now, that hasn’t included Tesla. CEO Elon Musk doesn’t appear to have opined on the omission, though he has frequently criticized Apple. In the past, Musk has said the goal of Tesla infotainment is to be “the most amount of fun you can have in a car.” Tesla has regularly added purile features like fart noises to the system, and it has also integrated video games that drivers can play while they charge.

For customers who want to stream music, Tesla has instead offered Spotify, Tidal, and even Apple Music apps.

But Tesla is no longer riding high—its sales are crashing, and its market share is shrinking around the world as car buyers tire of a stale and outdated lineup of essentially two models at a time when competition has never been higher from legacy and startup automakers.

According to Bloomberg, which cites “people with knowledge of the matter,” the feature could be added within months if it isn’t cancelled internally.

Tesla is not the only automaker to reject Apple CarPlay. The startup Lucid took some time to add the feature to its high-end EVs, and Rivian still refuses to consider including the system, claiming that a third-party system would degrade the user experience. And of course, General Motors famously removed CarPlay from its new EVs, and it may do the same to its other vehicles in the future.

After years of saying no, Tesla reportedly adding Apple CarPlay to its cars Read More »

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Audi goes full minimalism for its first-ever Formula 1 livery

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Audi says it wants to be an F1 title contender by 2030.

The actual bodywork of Audi’s R26 won’t look identical to this show car, but the livery should, with the addition of the sponsors, obviously. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

MUNICH, Germany—Audi’s long-awaited Formula 1 team gave the world its first look at what the Audi R26 will look like when it takes to the track next year. Well, sort of—the car you see here is a generic show car for the 2026 aero regulations, but the livery you see, plus the sponsors’ logos, will race next year.

“By entering the pinnacle of motorsport, Audi is making a clear, ambitious statement. It is the next chapter in the company’s renewal. Formula 1 will be a catalyst for the change towards a leaner, faster, and more innovative Audi,” said Gernot Döllner, Audi’s CEO. “We are not entering Formula 1 just to be there. We want to win. At the same time, we know that you don’t become a top team in Formula 1 overnight. It takes time, perseverance, and tireless questioning of the status quo. By 2030, we want to fight for the World Championship title,” Döllner said.

After the complicated liveries of cars like the R18 or Audi’s Formula E program, the R26 is refreshingly simple. Jonathan Gitlin

I’ll admit, when I first saw the images Audi sent ahead of time, I was a little underwhelmed, but in person, as you approach it from different angles, it makes a lot more sense. The design is more than a little minimalist, juxtaposing straight-edged geometric blocks of color with the aerodynamically curved bodywork they adorn. The titanium references Audi’s latest concept car, and the red—which is almost fluorescent in person—is an all-new shade called Audi Red. It’s used to highlight the car’s various air intakes and looks really quite effective.

Why F1?

After a long and glorious history in sportscar racing and rallying before that, Audi’s motorsports activities virtually evaporated in the wake of dieselgate and then a brief Formula E program. Then in early 2022, Volkswagen Group revealed that after decades of “will they, won’t they” speculation, not one but two of its brands—Audi and Porsche—would be entering F1 in 2026. (The Porsche deal with Red Bull would later fall apart.)

The sport was already riding its post-COVID popularity surge, and a new technical ruleset for 2026 was written in large part to attract automakers like Audi, dropping one of the current hybrid energy recovery systems (the complex turbo-based MGU-H) in favor of a much more powerful electric motor (the MGU-K), and switching to synthetic fuels that must have at least 65 percent less carbon emissions than fossil fuels.

In August 2022, Audi confirmed a powertrain program that would be developed at its motorsports competence center in Neuberg, Germany. It also announced it was buying three-quarters of the Swiss-based Sauber team. The following year, then-Audi CTO and head of the F1 program Oliver Hoffman explained to Ars why the company was going to F1 now.

Audi's 2026 F1 livery on a show car, seen from the front 3/4s

As you see the car from other angles, you see how the bodywork interacts with the geometric shapes. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

“Nearly 50 percent of the power will come out of the electric drive train. Especially for battery technology, thermal management, and also efficiency of the power electronics, there’s a clear focus. And together, the fit between Formula 1 and our RS technologies is [the] perfect fit for us,” Hoffman said at the time.

A team in trouble?

On track, things did not look great. The Sauber team had finished 2023 in 9th place, and 2024 was looking worse. (It eventually finished dead last with a miserable four points at the end of the year.) Rumors that Audi wanted out of the program had to be quashed, then in March 2024 Audi decided to buy all of Sauber, adding Andreas Seidl, formerly of McLaren and before that Porsche, to run the team, now called Audi Formula Racing.

But within a year, Hoffman was gone, together with Andreas Seidl. Replacing Hoffman as head of the Audi F1 project: Mattia Binotto, who saw Ferrari get close to but not quite land an F1 championship. Then in August, Jonathan Wheatley joined the team from Red Bull as the new team principal.

a closer look at Audi's 2026 F1 livery on a show car

The way the air intakes are highlighted is particularly effective. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

Binotto and Wheatley’s arrival seems to have unlocked something. At Silverstone, Nico Hülkenberg finished third, the first podium for the team since 2012 and the first ever for a driver that was long, long overdue. Hülkenberg now lies ninth in points. His rookie teammate Gabriel Bortoleto might have just had a disappointing home race, but last year’s F2 champ has shown plenty of speed in the Sauber this year. It will surely want to carry that momentum forward to 2026.

“The goal is clear: to fight for championships by 2030. That journey takes time, the right people, and a mindset of continuous improvement,” Binotto said. “Formula 1 is one of the most competitive environments. Becoming a champion is a journey of progress. Mistakes will happen, but learning from them is what drives transformation. That’s why we follow a three-phased approach: starting as a challenger with the ambition to grow, evolving into a competitor by daring the status quo and achieving first successes, and ultimately becoming a champion,” Binotto said.

What’s under the bodywork?

Technical details on the R26 remain scarce, for the same reason we haven’t seen the actual race car yet. Earlier today we visited Audi’s Neuberg facility, which is much expanded from the sportscar days—while those were also hybrid race cars, the state of the art has moved on in the near-decade since Audi left that sport, and F1 power units (the internal combustion engine, hybrid system, battery, but not the transmission) operate at a much higher level.

In addition to the workshops and cleanrooms where engineers and technicians develop and build the various components that go into the power units, there are extensive test and analysis facilities, able to examine parts both destructively (for example, cutting sections for a scanning electron microscope) and nondestructively (like X-raying or CT scanning).

Development and assembly of the Energy Recovery System (ERS) at the Neuburg site

We weren’t allowed to take photos inside the Neuberg facility, or even go into many of the rooms, but the ones we did see are all immaculate. Credit: Audi

Unlike in the LMP1 days of multiple Le Mans wins, actual on-track testing in F1 is highly restricted, limited now to just nine days over three tests before the start of the season. “When I think of my past LMP1 racing, we tested 50 days, 60 days, and if we had a problem, we just added the days. We went to Sebring or whatever,” said Stefan Dreyer, Audi Formula Racing’s CTO. “And this is also a huge challenge… moving into the future of Formula 1.”

For the first three years of the project, there was one goal: design and build a power unit for the 2026 regulations. The complete powertrain (the power unit plus the transmission) first ran a race simulation in 2024. In addition to Neuberg and Hinwil, Switzerland, where Sauber is based, there’s a new location in Bicester, England, part of that country’s “motorsports valley” and home to an awful lot of F1 suppliers and talent.

Now, the group in Neuberg has multiple overlapping jobs: assemble power units and supply them to the race team in Hinwil that is building the chassis, as well as begin development on the 2027 and 2028 iterations of the power units. It’s telling that all over the facility, video screens count down the remaining three months and however many days, hours, minutes, and seconds are left until the cars take to the track in anger in Australia.

Photo of Jonathan M. Gitlin

Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica’s automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.

Audi goes full minimalism for its first-ever Formula 1 livery Read More »

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Pirelli’s Cyber Tire might become highway agencies’ newest assistant

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“Two weeks ago, a European manufacturer tested… the traction control and stability with a dramatic improvement in stability and the traction,” he said. “The nice part of the story is that there is not only an objective improvement—2 or 3 meters in braking distance—but there is also from these customers always a better feeling… which is something that is very important to us because numbers are for technicians, but from our customer’s perspective, the pleasure to drive also very important.”

The headline said something about traffic?

While the application described above mostly serves the Cyber Tire-equipped car, the smart tires can also serve the greater good. Earlier this year, we learned of a trial in the Italian region of Apulia that fitted Cyber Tires to a fleet of vehicles and then inferred the health of the road surface from data collected by the tires.

Working with a Swedish startup called Univrses, Pirelli has been fusing sensor data from the Cyber Tire with cameras. Misani offered an example.

“You have a hole [in the road]. If you have a hole, maybe the visual [system] recognizes and the tire does not because you automatically try to avoid the hole. So if the tire does not pass over the hole, you don’t measure anything,” he said. “But your visual system will detect it. On the opposite side, there are some cracks on the road that are detected from the visual system as something that is not even on the road, but they cannot say how deep, how is the step, how is it affecting the stability of the car and things like this. Matching the two things, you have the possibility to monitor in the best possible way the condition of the road.”

“Plus thanks to the vision, you have also the possibility to exploit what we call the vertical status—traffic signs, the compatibility between the condition of the road and the traffic signs,” he said.

The next step is a national program in Italy. “We are investigating and making a project to actively control not the control unit of the car but the traffic information,” Misani said. “On some roads, you can vary the speed limit according to the status; if we can detect aquaplaning, we can warn [that] at kilometer whatever, there is aquaplaning and [the speed limit will be automatically reduced]. We are going in the direction of integrating into the smart roads.”

Pirelli’s Cyber Tire might become highway agencies’ newest assistant Read More »

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F1 in Brazil: That’s what generational talent looks like

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After a weekend off, perhaps spent trick or treating, Formula 1’s drivers, engineers, and mechanics made their yearly trip to the Interlagos track for the Brazilian Grand Prix. More formally called the Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace, it’s definitely one of the more old-school circuits that F1 visits—and invariably one of the more dramatic.

For one thing, it’s anything but billiard-smooth. Better yet, there’s elevation—lots of it—and cambers, too. Unlike most F1 tracks, it runs counterclockwise, and it combines some very fast sections with several rather technical corners that can catch out even the best drivers in the world. Nestled between a couple of lakes in São Paulo, weather is also a regular factor in races here. And indeed, a severe weather warning was issued in the lead-up to this weekend’s race.

You have to hit the ground running

This was another sprint weekend, which means that instead of two practice sessions on Friday and another on Saturday morning, the teams get one on Friday, then go into qualifying for the Saturday sprint race. The shortened testing time tends to shake things up a bit, and we definitely saw that this weekend.

When we left Mexico, there was only a point’s difference between McLaren drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri in the championship. After a strong run in the middle of the season, when he led the championship and seemed to have the edge on Norris, Piastri has had a string of disappointing races. By recent standards, Brazil wasn’t quite so bad, but it wasn’t great, either.

Carlos Sainz Jr. of Spain drives the (55) Atlassian Williams Racing FW47 Mercedes during the Formula 1 MSC Cruises Grande Premio De Sao Paulo 2025 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on November 9, 2025. (Photo by Alessio Morgese/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Is it just me, or does Williams usually have a disappointing weekend when it does a Gulf Oil livery? Credit: Alessio Morgese/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Despite the weather warnings, none of the sessions required treaded tires. While the track surface was basically dry for the sprint race, the same couldn’t be said for the painted curbs—water had collected in the valleys between the stepped “teeth,” and as just about every racer knows, if the painted bits of the track are wet, you really don’t want to go near them if you have slick tires.

F1 in Brazil: That’s what generational talent looks like Read More »

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Ford says “no exact date” to restart F-150 Lightning production

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When Ford electrified its bestselling pickup truck, it pulled out all the stops. The F-150 Lightning may look virtually identical to other versions of the pickup, but it’s smoother, faster, and obviously far, far more efficient than the ones that run on gas, diesel, or hybrid power. But the future of the country’s bestselling electric truck may be in doubt.

That’s according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, which claims that Ford’s management is “in active discussions about scrapping” the Lightning. Production had already been suspended a few weeks ago due to an aluminum shortage following a destructive fire at a supplier’s factory in New York, which Ford estimates may result in as much as $2 billion in losses to the company.

While Ford told Ars it doesn’t comment on speculation on its future product plans, the automaker said that “F-150 Lightning is the best-selling electric pickup truck in the US—despite new competition from CyberTruck, Chevy, GMC, Hummer and Rivian—and delivered record sales in Q3.”

“Right now, we’re focused on producing F-150 ICE and Hybrid as we recover from the fire at Novelis. We have good inventories of the F-150 Lightning and will bring Rouge Electric Vehicle Center (REVC) back up at the right time, but don’t have an exact date at this time,” a Ford spokesperson said.

Ford was the first of the domestic automakers to bring a full-size pickup EV to market. But like General Motors, it has found that pickup truck customers have not flocked to electric propulsion in anything like the numbers predicted pre-pandemic. As we learned last week, GM has also scaled back its EV production, and last month Stellantis announced that it has ceased development of an all-electric version of its Ram 1500.

As for Ford, a second-generation F-150 Lightning has been postponed in favor of a much cheaper, much simpler-to-build electric pickup, which is due in 2027.

Ford says “no exact date” to restart F-150 Lightning production Read More »

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Elon Musk wins $1 trillion Tesla pay vote despite “part-time CEO” criticism

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Tesla shareholders today voted to approve a compensation plan that would pay Elon Musk more than $1 trillion over the next decade if he hits all of the plan’s goals. Musk won over 75 percent of the vote, according to the announcement at today’s shareholder meeting.

The pay plan would give Musk 423,743,904 shares, awarded in 12 tranches of 35,311,992 shares each if Tesla achieves various operational goals and market value milestones. Goals include delivering 20 million vehicles, obtaining 10 million Full Self-Driving subscriptions, delivering 1 million “AI robots,” putting 1 million robotaxis in operation, and achieving a $400 billion adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization).

Musk has threatened to leave if he doesn’t get a larger share of Tesla. He told investors last month, “It’s not like I’m going to go spend the money. It’s just, if we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army? Not control, but a strong influence. That’s what it comes down to in a nutshell. I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army if I don’t have at least a strong influence.”

The plan has 12 market capitalization milestones topping out at $8.5 trillion. The value of Musk’s award is estimated to exceed $1 trillion if he hits all operational and market capitalization goals. Musk would increase his ownership stake to 24.8 percent of Tesla, or 28.8 percent if Tesla ends up winning an appeal in the court case that voided his 2018 pay plan.

Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm has argued that Musk needs big pay packages to stay motivated. Some investors have said $1 trillion is too much for a CEO who spends much of his time running other companies such as SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), and xAI.

New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who runs a state retirement fund that owns over 3.3 million shares, slammed the pay plan in a webinar last week. He said that Musk’s existing stake in Tesla should already “be incentive enough to drive performance. The idea that another massive equity award will somehow refocus a man who is hopelessly distracted is both illogical and contrary to the evidence. This is not pay for performance; this is pay for unchecked power.”

Musk and his side hustles

With Musk spending more time at xAI, “some major Tesla investors have privately pressed top executives and board members about how much attention Musk was actually paying to the company and about whether there is a CEO succession plan,” a Wall Street Journal article on Tuesday said. “An unusually large contingent of Tesla board members, including chair Robyn Denholm, former Chipotle CFO Jack Hartung and Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, met with big investors in New York last week to advocate for Musk’s proposed new pay package.”

Elon Musk wins $1 trillion Tesla pay vote despite “part-time CEO” criticism Read More »

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Dune driving with Mercedes-Benz as it tests off-road systems

Cars, Mercedes GLC with EQ Technology / /

The reason Mercedes’ engineers were driving up and down and across the dunes was to work on the car’s brake control systems. As you slow with the brake pedal, the car’s electronic brain juggles the input of the traction control, electronic stability control, antilock brakes, and a downhill speed governor that keep you going where you want, as opposed to careening down a slope at speed.

After a passenger ride through a particularly tricky section, it was my turn to have a go. It was a more surreal experience than messing around in an all-wheel drive car on fresh snow—that might involve low traction surfaces and some sliding around, but the horizon tends to remain in the same place.

As I climbed a dune, my view was nothing but sand, then the deep blue sky. Despite the steep slope and the fact that the car was shod with regular street tires, the wheels found traction where needed, “churning” where necessary. Under braking, the ABS allows the front wheels to remain more controllable, taking into consideration any steering angle you have.

And that may be a lot, because as Lightning McQueen learned in Cars, to go left, sometimes you have to turn right. At times, crabbing up the side of a dune involved making progress with a fair amount of opposite steering lock.

Just think, the wind deposited all this sand here. Note the return of a maximalist Mercedes front “grille.” Mercedes-Benz

Driving on a loose surface like sand, similar to driving on snow, requires a fair bit of torque, and the GLC’s 596 lb-ft (808 Nm) was more than enough to throw a rooster tail or two as the speed picked up and propelled us along. And the low center of gravity that results from the 94 kWh battery pack between the axles no doubt helped keep the car planted even while driving sideways along the dune.

My experience was much less repetitive than that of the Mercedes engineers, whose job it is to go out and drive a route, come back to the trailer, download the data, and upload a new configuration to the car. Then go out and drive the route again and repeat the whole process before driving two hours back to Las Vegas at the end of each day. But the result should be an electric SUV with the kind of mountain goat ability that belies its posh badge and looks.

The new GLC with EQ Technology goes on sale in the US late next year.

Dune driving with Mercedes-Benz as it tests off-road systems Read More »

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Sam Altman wants a refund for his $50,000 Tesla Roadster deposit

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2017 feels like another era these days, but if you cast your mind back that far, you might remember Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s vaporware Roadster 2.0. Full of nonsensical-sounding features that impressed people who know a little bit about rockets but nothing about cars, the $200,000 electric car promised to have a suction fan and “cold gas thrusters,” plus 620 miles (1,000 km) of range and a whole load of other stuff that’s never happening.

Plenty of other electric automakers have introduced electric hypercars in the eight years since Musk declared the second Roadster a thing, with no sign of it being any closer to reality, if the latest job postings are accurate. And it seems that over time, a lot of the people who gave the company a hefty deposit—some say interest-free loan—have become tired of waiting and want their money back.

And that’s not quite so easy, it turns out. Musk’s current Silicon Valley rival is the latest to discover this. According to Sam Altman’s social media account, he placed an order for a Roadster on July 11, 2018, with a deposit of $45,000 ($58,206 in today’s money). But after emailing Tesla for a refund, he discovered the email address associated with preorders had been deleted.

A screenshot of Sam Altman's X posts about cancelling his car

Credit: Twitter

Perhaps Altman forgot to ask ChatGPT how best to go about getting his money. If he had, he might have stumbled across the experience of streamer Marques Brownlee, who eventually had to pick up a telephone and call someone to get most of his $50,000 back. Or perhaps some of the threads at Reddit or the Tesla forums, where other people who fell for the cold gas thruster-equipped two-seater with Lucid-busting range and F1-beating acceleration have gathered to share stories of how best to make Tesla return their money.

Sam Altman wants a refund for his $50,000 Tesla Roadster deposit Read More »

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2026 Hyundai Ioniq 9: American car-buyer tastes meet Korean EV tech

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The Ioniq 9 interior. Jonathan Gitlin

The native NACS charge port at the rear means all of Tesla’s v3 Superchargers are potential power-up locations; these will take the battery from 10–80 percent state of charge in 40 minutes. Or use the NACS-CCS1 adapter and a 350 kW fast charger (or find one of Ionna’s 350 kW chargers with a NACS plug) and do the 10–80 percent SoC top-up in a mere 24 minutes.

With this most-powerful Ioniq 9, I’d mostly keep it in Eco mode, which almost entirely relies upon the rear electric motor. When firing with both motors, the Calligraphy outputs 422 hp (315 kW) and more importantly, 516 lb-ft (700 Nm). In Sport mode, that’s more than enough to chirp the tires from a standstill, particularly if it’s damp. Low rolling resistance and good efficiency was a higher priority for the Ioniq 9’s tire selection than lateral grip, and with a curb weight of 6,008 lbs (2,735 kg) it’s not really a car that needs to be hustled unless you’re attempting to outrun something like a volcano. It’s also the difference between efficiency in the low 2 miles/kWh range.

Life with the Ioniq 9 wasn’t entirely pain-free. For example, the touch panel for the climate control settings becomes impossible to read in bright sunlight, although the knobs to raise or lower the temperature are at least physical items. I also had trouble with the windshield wipers’ intermittent setting, despite the standard rain sensors.

A Hyundai Ioniq 9 seen from the rear 3/4s.

Built just outside of Savannah, Georgia, don’t you know. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

At $74,990, the Ioniq 9 Calligraphy comes more heavily specced than electric SUVs from more luxury, and therefore more expensive, brands and should charge faster and drive more efficiently than any of them. If you don’t mind giving up 119 hp (89 kW) and some options, all-wheel drive is available from $62,765 for the SE trim, and that longer-legged single-motor Ioniq 9 starts at $58,955. Although with just 215 hp (160 KW) and 285 lb-ft (350 Nm), the driving experience won’t be quite the same as the model we tested.

2026 Hyundai Ioniq 9: American car-buyer tastes meet Korean EV tech Read More »

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An autonomous car for consumers? Lucid says it’s happening.

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Good news if you sell GPUs

First, Lucid will roll out a more advanced version of its partially automated driving assist for the Gravity SUV, which it says has been “turbocharged by Nvidia Drive AV.” But after that, the plan is for a so-called “level 4” autonomous system, capable of driving itself from point to point without human intervention, at least within a geofence or other limited operational design domain.

In scope, this is more limited and more achievable than the “level 5,” go-anywhere dream of Tesla’s FSD system. It is similar to the level 4 autonomous vehicles being developed by companies like Waymo and Zoox, but those are also designed to be operated by fleets with regular maintenance.

Lucid will use Nvidia’s platform to reach level 4, building a pair of Drive AGX Thor computers into the new midsize EV platform. And leaning on Nvidia’s software means Lucid doesn’t have the hard ongoing job of keeping everything up to date.

“As vehicles evolve into software-defined supercomputers on wheels, a new opportunity emerges—to reimagine mobility with intelligence at every turn. Together with Lucid, we’re accelerating the future of autonomous, AI-powered transportation, built on [the] Nvidia full-stack automotive platform,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.

Car buyers are starting to cotton on to driver assists like General Motors’ Super Cruise, which about 40 percent of customers choose to pay for after the three-year free trial ends, and Lucid must be hoping that offering a far more advanced system, which won’t require the human to pay any attention while it is engaged, will help it earn plenty of money.

The other part of the Lucid/Nvidia announcement may have the potential for even more impact on the profit and loss statements. Nvidia’s industrial platform will let Lucid create its production lines digitally first before committing them to actual hardware. “By modeling autonomous systems, Lucid can optimize robot path planning, improve safety, and shorten commissioning time,” Lucid said.

An autonomous car for consumers? Lucid says it’s happening. Read More »

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Here’s how Slate Auto plans to handle repairs to its electric trucks

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Earlier this year, Slate Auto emerged from stealth mode and stunned industry watchers with the Slate Truck, a compact electric pickup it plans to sell for less than $30,000. Achieving that price won’t be easy, but Slate really does look to be doing things differently from the rest of the industry—even Tesla. For example, the truck will be made from just 600 parts, with no paint or even an infotainment system, to keep costs down.

An unanswered question until now has been “where do I take it to be fixed if it breaks?” Today, we have an answer. Slate is partnering with RepairPal to use the latter’s network of more than 4,000 locations across the US.

“Slate’s OEM partnership with RepairPal’s nationwide network of service centers will give Slate customers peace of mind while empowering independent service shops to provide accessorization and service,” said Slate chief commercial officer Jeremy Snyder.

RepairPal locations will also be able to install the accessories that Slate plans to offer, like a kit to turn the bare-bones pickup truck into a crossover. And some but not all RepairPal sites will be able to work on the Slate’s high-voltage powertrain.

The startup had some other big news today. It has negotiated access for its customers to the Tesla Supercharger network, and since the truck has a NACS port, there will be no need for an adapter.

The Slate truck is due next year.

Here’s how Slate Auto plans to handle repairs to its electric trucks Read More »

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Porsche’s 2026 911 Turbo S is a ballistic, twin-turbo, 701-horsepower monster

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Other upgrades

To handle the 61 hp (45.5 kW) of additional power over the outgoing car, the new Turbo S features 10 mm wider tires at the rear—sticky Pirelli P Zero Rs to be exact. Porsche also outfitted a new form of active suspension to the Turbo S, which uses one of the pumps from the Panamera’s trick new Active Ride suspension to drive actuators at each of the car’s four corners.

By raising or lowering pressure, the 911 Turbo S effectively varies the stiffness of its anti-rollbars, resulting in a cushier ride for daily driving and a more aggressive one in Sport or Sport Plus. The feeling of the Turbo S is never exactly plush—those low-profile tires aren’t ideal for that—but neither is it harsh. I felt quite comfortable cruising over the broken Malagan asphalt, making this an ideal daily driver.

I didn’t even mind the soft-top convertible in the Cabriolet, which raises and lowers quickly and, even at highway speed, doesn’t add much road noise to the equation. Still, if I were buying, I’d go coupe instead of Cabriolet, if only for the extra headroom and cleaner styling.

I won’t be buying, though, because I can’t afford one. The 2026 Porsche 911 Turbo S starts at $270,300 for the coupe or $284,300 for the soft-top Cabriolet, plus a $2,350 destination fee. That’s for a reasonably well-equipped car, including the new active suspension and carbon-ceramic brakes, but start digging into the options catalogue or ponder the expanded palette in Porsche’s Paint to Sample lines, and you’ll quickly find yourself on the painful side of $300,000. That’s a mighty amount of money for a 911, a whopping $40,000 MSRP increase over last year’s model, but given the wild level of engineering required to deliver this much power and responsiveness, it doesn’t feel completely out of line.

Porsche’s 2026 911 Turbo S is a ballistic, twin-turbo, 701-horsepower monster Read More »