Honda is recalling almost 1.7 million vehicles due to a steering defect. An improperly made part can cause certain cars’ steering to become “sticky”—never an attribute one wants in a moving vehicle.
The problem affects a range of newer Hondas and an Acura; the earliest the defective parts were used on any vehicle was February 2021. But it applies to the following:
2022–2025 Honda Civic four-door
2025 Honda Civic four-door hybrid
2022–2025 Honda Civic five-door
2025 Honda Civic five-door Hybrid
2023–2025 Honda Civic Type-R
2023–2025 Honda CR-V
2023–2025 Honda CR-V Hybrid
2025 Honda CR-V Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle
2023–2025 Honda HR-V
2023–2025 Acura Integra
2024–2025 Acura Integra Type S
Honda says that a combination of environmental heat, moisture, and “an insufficient annealing process and high load single unit break-in during production of the worm wheel” means there’s too much pressure and not enough grease between the worm wheel and worm gear. On top of that, the worm gear spring isn’t quite right, “resulting in higher friction and increased torque fluctuation when steering.
The first reports of the problem date back to 2021 and had started an internal probe by November 2022. In March 2023, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration started its own investigation, but the decision to issue the recall only took place in September of this year, by which point Honda says it had received 10,328 warranty claims, although with no reports of any injuries or worse.
Honda has just finished telling its dealers about the recall, and owners of the affected vehicles will be contacted next month. This time, there is no software patch that can help—affected cars will be fitted with a new worm gear spring and plenty of grease.
Waymo’s robotaxis are going to get a lot more angular in the future. Today, the autonomous driving startup and Hyundai announced that they have formed a strategic partnership, and the first product will be the integration of Waymo’s autonomous vehicle software and hardware with the Hyundai Ioniq 5.
“Hyundai and Waymo share a vision to improve the safety, efficiency, and convenience of how people move,” said José Muñoz, president and global COO of Hyundai Motor Company.
“We are thrilled to partner with Hyundai as we further our mission to be the world’s most trusted driver,” said Waymo’s co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana. “Hyundai’s focus on sustainability and strong electric vehicle roadmap makes them a great partner for us as we bring our fully autonomous service to more riders in more places.”
Now, this doesn’t mean you’ll be able to buy a driverless Ioniq 5 from your local Hyundai dealer; Waymo will operate these Ioniq 5s as part of its ride-hailing Waymo One fleet, which currently operates in parts of Austin, Texas; Los Angeles; Phoenix; and San Francisco. Currently, Waymo operates a fleet of Jaguar I-Pace EVs and has also used Chrysler Pacifica minivans.
The electric vehicle charging company EVgo has secured conditional approval for a $1.05 billion loan from the US Department of Energy, the company revealed this morning. EVgo has applied to DOE’s Title 17 program, which exists to provide US Treasury-backed loans or loan guarantees for clean energy projects. If the deal is finalized, the money will be used to build around 7,500 DC fast chargers, with powerful 350 kW chargers its priority, EVgo said.
EVgo said the charger build-out will be concentrated in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Texas and should be completed by 2030.
Since the federal government is already spending billions on a network of DC fast chargers along highway corridors, EVgo is instead focusing on creating community charging stations, particularly in areas with a high density of multifamily developments and other communities where EV drivers have to rely on public chargers.
In fact, the company said 40 percent of the chargers will be deployed “in marginalized areas that have been overburdened by environmental impacts.”
Owners of the popular home EV chargers made by Juicebox are about to lose a whole lot of features. Its owner, the energy company Enel X, has just announced that it is leaving the North American market entirely as of October 11.
Enel X says its strategy will be to pursue “further growth by providing bundled offers, including private charging solutions, to its electricity customers as well as by developing public charging infrastructure in countries where it has an electricity retail business.” And since it does not have an electricity business in the US, merely a charging hardware and software one, it makes little sense to remain active here.
The company also blames high interest rates and a cooling EV market as reasons for its exit.
Enel X says Juicebox residential hardware will continue to work, so if you’ve been using one to charge at home, you can keep plugging it in. But Enel X is ending all software support—there will be no updates, and it’s removing its apps, so online functions like scheduling a charge will no longer work.
Commercial charging stations will be worse affected—according to Enel X, these “will lose functionality in the absence of software continuity.” The company also says its customer support is no longer available, effective immediately, and any questions or claims should be directed to juiceboxnorthamerica.com.
A group of more than 5,000 car dealers have made public their worries about a lack of demand for electric vehicles. Earlier this year the group lobbied the White House to water down impending federal fuel efficiency regulations that would require automakers to sell many more EVs. Now, they’re sounding an alarm over impending EV mandates, particularly in the so-called Zero Emissions Vehicle states.
The ZEV states—California, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia—all follow the emissions standards laid out by the California Air Resources Board, which require that by 2035, 100 percent of all new cars and light trucks be zero-emissions vehicles (which includes plug-in hybrid EVs as well as battery EVs).
That goes into effect starting with model-year 2026 (i.e. midway through next calendar year) and would require a third of all new vehicles to be a BEV, claim the car dealers. But there is not enough customer demand for electrified vehicles to buy those cars, the dealers say. Worse yet, it would make gasoline-powered cars more expensive.
“This is a de facto mandate, as dealerships will be allocated fewer internal combustion engine and hybrid vehicles, and due to the lack of BEV sales, the result will create excessive demand driving up prices for customers,” the group wrote in a statement.
EV sales are growing more slowly in 2024 than the 50 percent growth we saw in 2023 (to this writer, calling a 12.5 percent growth rate “flatlining” seems hyperbolic).
A lot of the dealers’ concerns are around a lack of knowledge about EVs among their customers. The open letter complains that customers are ignorant about where to charge and how long that takes, how long batteries last and how expensive they are, and range loss in winter. In defense of those car buyers, a place that sells cars, including electric ones, would surely seem like the obvious place to ask those questions—again, at least to this writer.
Enlarge/ I’ve had a soft spot for Audi’s RS7 for at least a decade now. Will Audi replace it, or is this the last in its line?
Jonathan Gitlin
The arrival of competent electric vehicles is a boon for car enthusiasts as much as those who consider driving a chore and their vehicle a driving appliance. Electric motors can respond faster than the revviest naturally aspirated engines this side of a mid-2000s Formula 1 engine, and with more immediate torque than the mightiest of turbochargers. They are the way forward, for performance as well as energy efficiency. Such is apparent after spending some time behind the wheel of a $128,000 Audi RS7 Performance after a diet of mostly EV performance cars.
For a long time, the RS7 was the Audi to go for if you wanted something with more than two doors, because the R8 doesn’t work with your lifestyle. Based on the more humble A7 fastback sedan, it was worked over by Audi Sport, the four rings’ racing offshoot based up the road from Ingolstadt in Neckarsulm, Germany. The designers there gave it a restyle, with aggressively flared arches to envelope larger wheels and tires, and new aerodynamic features to keep the car planted at speed. The result is one of the brand’s handsomest creations, at least to this observer.
Under the hood, a twin-turbo 4.0L V8 is now even more potent than when we first drove the RS7 in 2019, with 621 hp (463 kW) and 627 lb-ft (850 Nm) at your right foot’s beck and call, sent to all four wheels via an eight-speed ZF 8 HP transmission and, at the rear axle, a torque-vectoring rear differential.
Enlarge/ The seats are very supportive and comfortable for long drives, but you have to pay almost $2,000 to add a massage function.
Audi
For model-year 2024 (and 2025, for the car is unchanged), Audi Sport took out 17 lbs (8 kg) of sound deadening, which, in addition to making the car lighter, also fixes one of my chief complaints from that 2019 drive, it being too quiet inside the car when I was in sport mode and wanted to hear the exhaust in its full glory.
This RS7 Performance sounds divine, in fact, with plenty of bass and, in its fruitiest mode, some pops and bangs on the overrun that elicit the odd giggle from the driver. For more mundane occasions with the sport exhaust’s valves closed, it’s unremarkably quiet and won’t wake the neighbors if you leave the house early in the morning (or come home late). A sonorous powertrain is still really the preserve of the internal combustion engine, although some EVs are beginning to play with that idea.
You might be expecting me to extoll the relative lack of mass of this car versus an electric alternative, too, but the RS7 is not exactly a featherweight. Audi Sport took out that sound material, and each of the new 22-inch wheels are 11 lbs (5 kg) lighter than before, but the RS7 Performance still weighs a hefty 4,916 lbs (2,230 kg). So while the all-electric Audi RS e-tron GT is quicker to accelerate—0.4 seconds faster to 60 mph than the 3.3 seconds it takes the RS7—the EV is only really heavier to the tune of a large adult.
Thanks to computer-controlled air suspension, you never really feel like you’re driving a car that weighs more than 2 tons. There’s little roll while cornering, and the power assistance for the steering makes easy work of turning the 285/30-section front tires.
Jonathan Gitlin
A lap of the original Watkins Glen road course was an opportunity to reflect on how dangerous racing there must have been.
Jonathan Gitlin
It’s a handsome bum.
Jonathan Gitlin
There’s almost 50 cubic feet (1,382 L) of cargo volume with the rear seats down—more than enough to swallow a bunch of camping gear.
Jonathan Gitlin
The regular A7 already made a good highway cruiser, and the RS7 lost little of those chops even after its Audi Sport enhancement. The seats are comfortable on long drives while still gripping you well when things turn twisty, and they’re heated and cooled, but were I speccing a car at the Audi configurator I’d tick the box for the ones that use their inflatable air bladders to massage you as well.
The interior is well put together, with good sightlines from the driver’s seat. There’s a little too much glossy piano black for my tastes, and points have to be dinged for an over-reliance on touchscreens—bring back discrete buttons or dials for the climate controls, please. The haptic touchscreen needs a gentle press—I was poking it too hard for it to register my intentions, so the system ignored me at times. And the infotainment system is starting to feel a little bit dated in terms of voice recognition compared to Audi’s newest examples.
One downside to those huge tires is a propensity toward tram-lining, which was more noticeable while driving through a weather front. But otherwise the car felt as planted in the rain as it did in the dry. I was even able to better its official EPA rating on the highway by about 10 percent, though that’s still a rather unacceptable 24 mpg (9.8 L/100 km).
Even with the engine, chassis, and transmission settings all at their sharpest, the RS7 never feels less than utterly planted on dry roads. The interruptions in acceleration as the transmission changes up through its gear ratios feel almost jarring after becoming inured to single-speed EVs, but you’ll welcome their presence—and the engine braking they allow—as you slow for a corner.
Tesla’s German car factory on the outskirts of Berlin allegedly operates under a “culture of fear,” and its workers take sick leave at more than three times the industry average. The plant, which was targeted by arsonists earlier this year, is now experiencing a degree of discord between workers and management, according to reports in Handelsblatt and the Guardian.
“We will not tolerate some people bending their backs for others who just don’t feel like coming to work. There is no room in this factory for people who don’t get out of bed in the morning,” said André Thierig, manufacturing director of Tesla’s Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg.
It seems the company has been taking that directive seriously. Frustrated by a rate of sick leave that reached as high as 17 percent this summer—compared to a German auto industry average of 5.2 percent—Tesla started checking up on some employees at home, sending managers to visit 30 employees while they were on sick leave.
Such home visits were not well-received, and bosses were greeted with slammed doors and threats to call the police. But Thierig claimed checking up on sick workers at home was common practice and that they were appealing to “the employees’ work ethic.”
Thierig also pointed out that sick leave tended to increase on Fridays and late shifts. “That is not an indicator of bad working conditions because the working conditions are the same on all working days and across all shifts. It suggests that the German social system is being exploited to some extent,” he said.
This is not the first time Tesla has appeared less than sympathetic to the health of its workers. During the pandemic, the company had to be pressured into closing its factory in California, setting up a feud between Musk and the state that has since seen him relocate Tesla to Texas.
The IG Metall trade union, which represents some of the workers at the Berlin-Brandenburg factory, expressed its dismay at this move. Workloads at the factory have stressed employees, and those who haven’t called out sick have to pick up the slack for their colleagues who have.
“If the factory’s overseers really want to reduce the level of sickness, they should break this vicious circle,” said Dirk Schulze, a regional director at IG Metall.
Enlarge/ This was supposed to be Ford’s answer to the VW Beetle, a small, light, efficient, front-wheel drive car called Cardinal.
Ford
Between 100 percent tariffs and now an impending ban on software, it’s clear that America’s auto industry is more than a little worried about having its lunch eaten by heavily subsidized Chinese car makers. But it’s far from the first time that the suits in Detroit have seen storm clouds arriving from far-off lands.
In 1957, Detroit automakers’ dominance of the US market seemed unbeatable. Smaller, independent American automakers Studebaker, Packard, Nash, Hudson, Kaiser, and Willys-Overland underwent various mergers to match the might of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler to little avail.
Yet America’s Big Three faced a small but growing problem: foreign automakers.
The fastest-growing? Volkswagen. Inordinately popular worldwide, the automaker sold its millionth car in 1957, of which 36,000 were sold in the United States, making it the automaker’s largest export market. Ironically, the problem was of Detroit’s making. The Big Three had been offered the bombed-out remnants of Volkswagen for free seven years earlier. Their attitude was summarized by Ernie Breech, Ford’s newly appointed chairman of the board, who told Henry Ford II in 1948, “I don’t think what we’re being offered here is worth a dime.”
The automaker Ford spurned was among a flood of increasingly popular imported small cars. While Ford held 31 percent of the US market, it had nothing to counter the Volkswagen Beetle or other Lilliputian imports like the Renault Dauphine. An internal Ford report cited the surprising trend.
Surprising? Yes.
Independent American automakers had tried selling smaller cars. And while the 1950 Nash Rambler and 1953 Nash Metropolitan proved popular, other attempts, like the 1951 Kaiser Henry J and the 1953 Hudson Jet, flopped disastrously. So, it seemed that Americans didn’t like small cars.
More accurately, they didn’t like the small cars American automakers offered. They did like the ones being imported from Europe. New foreign car registrations in the US ballooned from 12,000 units in 1949 to 207,000 by 1957 and were projected to reach 625,000 by 1961 before falling to 495,000 in 1963. By 1959, even Studebaker noticed and launched the compact Lark. Its sales proved popular enough to reverse its slow slide to oblivion momentarily.
While Europeans were driving small cars, Americans preferred something that could seat six, like this 1960 Ford Falcon.
Ford
Back then, sedans came with two or four doors.
Ford
Robert McNamara was president of Ford until he was appointed secretary of defense by US President John F Kennedy. The Cardinal was his brainchild.
Ford
Lee Iacocca took over from McNamara, and had little time for his predecessor’s plans.
Ford
The Big Three responded with new compacts in 1960 with the Chevrolet Corvair, Chrysler Valiant, and Ford Falcon, as well as the upscale Pontiac Tempest, Oldsmobile F-85, Buick Skylark, Dodge Dart, and Mercury Comet—the latter planned as an Edsel until the marque folded in 1959. Of the compacts, the Falcon proved to be the most popular despite being plainly styled, spartan in trim, and unabashedly utilitarian. It was the vision of Ford Motor Company President Robert McNamara.
“McNamara believed in basic transportation without gimmicks, and with the Falcon, he put his ideas into practice,” said Lee Iacocca, then a rising star at Ford. “I had to admire its success. Here was a car priced to compete with the small imports, which were starting to come on strong and had already reached nearly 10 percent of the American market. But unlike the imports, the Falcon carried six passengers, which made it large enough for most American families.”
The Ford Falcon sold 417,174 units in its first year, a record broken by the 1965 Ford Mustang’s 418,812 units and later by the 1978 Ford Fairmont’s 422,690 units.
It was a remarkable feat for a company fresh off the humbling failure of the mid-market Edsel. Promoted as something revolutionary, the Edsel was anything but. In contrast, the growing consumer acceptance of smaller cars proved that consumers demanded something fresh. And Ford President Robert McNamara believed he had the answer.
Software fixes are now responsible for more than 1 in 5 automotive recalls. That’s the key finding from a decade’s worth of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recall data, according to an analysis from the law firm DeMayo Law. While that’s a sign of growing inconvenience for drivers, the silver lining is that a software patch is usually a much quicker fix than something requiring hardware replacement.
“Our analysis suggests we’re witnessing a shift in how automotive recalls are handled. The growing number of software-related recalls, coupled with the ability to address issues remotely, could revolutionize the recall process for both manufacturers and vehicle owners,” said a spokesperson for DeMayo Law.
In 2014, 34 of 277 automotive recalls were software fixes. The percentage of software recalls floated around 12–13 percent (apart from a spike in 2015) before growing steadily from 2020. In 2021, 16 percent of automotive recalls (61 out of 380) were for software. In 2022, almost 22 percent of recalls were software fixes (76 out of 348), and last year topped 23 percent (82 out of 356).
Leading the way was Chrysler, with 82 different software recalls since 2014. Ford (66 recalls) and Mercedes-Benz (60) are the two runner-ups. Meanwhile, Tesla ranks only eighth, with 26 software recalls since 2014, which puts it on par with Hyundai (25) and Kia (25).
Electrical systems were the most common problem area, which makes sense—this is also the second-most common hardware fix recall and would probably be the top if it were not for the massive Takata airbag recall, which has affected more than 100 million cars worldwide.
The other common systems affected by recalls requiring software remedies were related to backover prevention—whether that be reversing cameras, collision warnings, or automatic emergency braking—airbags, powertrains, and exterior lighting.
It should be noted that not all recalls involving a software fix are to solve a software problem. Take the recent Jaguar I-Pace recall, which was triggered by battery fires caused by battery cells damaged during assembly. Jaguar’s fix? A software update that sets a new, lower limit to the storage capacity of the battery pack, preventing it from fully charging to 100 percent.
While many older vehicles from legacy OEMs require a trip to the dealer to be patched, more and more new models can be updated over the air, meaning that owners can have the recall performed from the comfort of their own parking space, provided they have connectivity. Even this isn’t hassle-free, though, as some Rivian owners found out to their dismay late last year when an update broke some infotainment screens.
Expect this to become more common
To hear carmakers tell it, customers see their smartphone and games console and want that kind of entertainment built into their next car. (Whether that’s true is up for debate, however.) Software competency is a new battleground between global automakers, and the fear of Chinese brands is strong despite an impending ban on Chinese-connected car software, which looks likely to be put into effect in a couple of years.
So, it’s highly likely the trend of fixing product flaws with software will only escalate, particularly with the introduction of software-defined vehicles. This represents a clean-sheet approach to designing a car, with a handful of powerful computers replacing tens of dozens of black boxes, each with a single function. Which is great when it all works, but it’s a headache when there are problems.
Enlarge/ This is Thor and Harbinger’s test bed for a new Class A hybrid RV.
Thor
Electrification is moving through different parts of the automotive industry at different speeds. And soon, it will be time for the recreational vehicle segment to start adding batteries and electric motors. Today, Thor Industries revealed a new hybrid class A motorhome that demos a new hybrid electric powertrain from Harbinger.
“Electrification will play a central role in the future of mobility, including RVing,” said Thor Industries President and CEO Bob Martin. “This first-of-its-kind hybrid platform and our ongoing collaboration with Harbinger are reinforcing Thor’s leadership in this segment and creating major points of product differentiation for our family of companies.”
Thor and Harbinger have been working together for a while now—in March Thor took delivery of a medium-duty EV chassis from Harbinger. But the battery EV RV will only have a range of about 250 miles on a single charge. By comparison, the two companies say that the hybrid RV should have a range of twice that—500 miles—courtesy of a 140 kWh lithium-ion traction battery and a gasoline-powered range extender.
Like Harbinger’s other EV powertrains, this one runs at 800 V, which means, among other things, it should benefit from relatively rapid DC fast charging. The powertrain also features a vehicle-to-load function, so it can power your house as a battery, and there are even solar panels on the roof that can top up the pack during the hours of daylight. (Unlike a passenger car, a Class A motorhome has enough roof area to make the idea worthwhile.)
The electric motors provide as much as double the amount of torque of a comparable diesel RV powertrain, and the RV also features Harbinger’s suite of advanced driver assistance systems.
Thor
A look at the Harbinger chassis.
Harbinger
This is the range extender.
Harbinger
The Class A RV you see in the images is a test vehicle, but Thor is about to start gathering feedback from dealers, with a plan to bring the first hybrid RVs to market in 2025.
Enlarge/ No one likes being dazzled by an oncoming car at night.
Getty Images
Magna provided flights from Washington, DC, to Detroit and accommodation so Ars could attend its tech day. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.
TROY, Mich.—Despite US dominance in so many different areas of technology, we’re sadly somewhat of a backwater when it comes to car headlamps. It’s been this way for many decades, a result of restrictive federal vehicle regulations that get updated rarely. The latest lights to try to work their way through red tape and onto the road are active-matrix LED lamps, which can shape their beams to avoid blinding oncoming drivers.
From the 1960s, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards allowed for only sealed high- and low-beam headlamps, and as a result, automakers like Mercedes-Benz would sell cars with less capable lighting in North America than it offered to European customers.
A decade ago, this was still the case. In 2014, Audi tried unsuccessfully to bring its new laser high-beam technology to US roads. Developed in the racing crucible that is the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the laser lights illuminate much farther down the road than the high beams of the time, but in this case, the lighting tech had to satisfy both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Food and Drug Administration, which has regulatory oversight for any laser products.
NHTSA’s opposition to advanced lighting tech is not entirely misplaced. Obviously, being able to see far down the road at night is a good thing for a driver. On the other hand, being dazzled or blinded by the bright headlights of an approaching driver is categorically not a good thing. Nor is losing your night vision to the glare of a car (it’s always a pickup) behind you with too-bright lights that fill your mirrors.
This is where active-matrix LED high beams come in, which use clusters of controllable LED pixels. Think of it like a more advanced version of the “auto high beam” function found on many newer cars, which uses a car’s forward-looking sensors to know when to dim the lights and when to leave the high beams on.
Here, sensor data is used much more granularly. Instead of turning off the entire high beam, the car only turns off individual pixels, so the roadway is still illuminated, but a car a few hundred feet up the road won’t be.
Rather than design entirely new headlight clusters for the US, most OEMs’ solution was to offer the hardware here but disable the beam-shaping function—easy to do when it’s just software. But in 2022, NHTSA relented—nine years after Toyota first asked the regulator to reconsider its stance.
Satisfying a regulator’s glare
There was a catch, though. Although this was by now an established technology with European, Chinese, and Society of Automobile Engineers standards, NHTSA wanted something different enough that an entirely new testing regime was necessary to satisfy it so that these new-fangled lights wouldn’t dazzle anyone else.
That testing takes time to perform, analyze, and then get approved, but that process is happening at suppliers across the industry. For example, at its recent tech day, the tier 1 supplier (and contract car manufacturer) Magna showed Ars its new Invision Adaptive Driving Beam family of light projectors, which it developed in a range of resolutions, including a 48-pixel version (with 22 beam segments) for entry-level vehicles.
“The key thing with this regulation is that transition zone between the dark and the light section needs to be within one degree. We’ve met that and exceeded it. So we’re very happy with our design,” said Rafat Mohammad, R&D supervisor at Magna. The beam’s shape, projected onto a screen in front of us, was reminiscent of the profile of the UFO on that poster from Mulder’s office in The X-Files.
“It’s directed towards a certain OEM that likes it that way, and that’s our solution. We have a uniqueness in our particular projector because the lower section of our projector, which is 15 LEDs, we have individual control for those LEDs,” Mohammad said. These have to be tuned to work with the car’s low beam lights—which remain a legal requirement—to prevent the low beams from illuminating areas that are supposed to remain dark.
Enlarge/ An exploded view of Magna’s bimatrix projector.
Magna
At the high end, Magna has developed a cluster with 16K resolution, which enables various new features like using the lights to project directions directly onto the roadway or to communicate with other road users—a car could project a zebra crossing in front of it when it has stopped for a pedestrian, for example. “It’s really a feature-based projector based on whatever the OEM wants, and that can be programmed into their suite whenever they want to program,” Mohammad said.
As for when the lights will start brightening up the roads at night, Magna says it’s a few months from finishing the validation process, at which point they’re ready for an OEM. And Magna is just one of a number of suppliers of advanced lighting to the industry. So another couple of years should do it.
Enlarge/ Theory 1 is Lotus’ vision for the future of its cars.
Lotus
Earlier today, Lotus Cars revealed its idea of an “intelligent performance vehicle.” The wedge-shaped concept, called Theory 1, is meant to be Lotus’ new design manifesto for all its future cars and combines some eye-popping technical specs along with an adaptive driving experience that uses haptics and binaural sound to enhance driver feedback.
“With Theory 1, we’ve built on everything Lotus has achieved so far in its 76-year history, to push the boundaries for what it means to drive a performance vehicle. We want to demonstrate that you don’t need to compromise—with both digital and analog capabilities working harmoniously in the future car. In doing this, we are able to bring drivers the best possible immersive driving experience with raw emotion, functionality and connectivity, at the core,” said Ben Payne, vice president of design at Lotus Group.
In profile, the Theory 1 has more than a little resemblance to the Lamborghini Huracan, although that impression starts to fade as you see the car from other angles. The doors are something entirely new. Forget butterflies, dihedrals, or even gull wings; here, they open in reverse, allowing the occupants to step right into the car. The new design also allows the doors to open even in the tightest of parking spaces.
The Theory 1’s doors in action.
A lot of aerodynamic work has gone into the car’s shape. At the front, there’s a diffuser built into the nose, as well as air curtains to control the flow around the sides. The underbody is sculpted to channel the air, similar to a Formula 1 car—Lotus did pioneer the use of ground effect in the sport in the 1970s, after all.
Somewhere inside the Theory 1’s chassis is a 70 kWh lithium-ion battery pack, which, together with the motor, is designed as a fully stressed component of the chassis, again taking a page from the Big Book of Team Lotus F1 Innovations, as Lotus introduced the practice of using an engine as a stressed member with the revolutionary Type 49.
Like that F1 car and virtually every one ever since, the Theory 1’s suspension is directly connected to this assembly as opposed to there being a subframe. And the rear wing is also mounted directly to this assembly, transferring its load straight through to the suspension. Power output is a heady 987 hp (736 kW), which sounds like a lot but pales compared to Lotus’ first electric supercar, the 1,971 hp (1,470 kW) Evija.
Lotuswear
The Theory 1 features something new called Lotuswear, which thankfully is not a capsule collection of Lotus-branded jumpsuits that are meant to be worn while driving. Rather, Lotus says it’s an “immersive” system that aims to connect the driver and passengers closer with the road, while personalizing the driving experience. Oh, and did we mention the Theory 1 is a three-seater, like the McLaren F1?
The seats are clad in an “adaptive soft and lightweight robotic textile” from a company called MotorSkins, that communicates with the occupants, using inflatable pods in the seats and steering wheel that can provide haptic feedback. The seats also feature 3D-printed lattice headrests that also include binaural speakers that can either enhance the car’s speed sounds or work as noise-cancelling speakers to make road and wind noise go away.
Enlarge/ 3D-printed lattice allows Lotus to save weight from the seats.
Lotus
Despite Theory 1 being a sportscar, there’s a full sensor suite for autonomous driving, including four lidar sensors, six HD cameras, plus radar and ultrasonics, all of which feed into an Nvidia Drive car computer.
Will it happen?
For now, Theory 1 is mostly a way for Lotus to show off the various technologies it’s working on, with no production intent. Following its purchase by China’s Geely Group in 2017, Lotus got to work on four new vehicle platforms, three of which—the Evija, the Emira, and the EV platform used by the Eletre SUV and Emeya sedan—have now appeared. (The fourth, an EV sportscar meant to be developed together with Alpine, was abandoned last year.) So it needs an electric sportscar that’s much cheaper than the $2.3 million Evija, even if Theory 1 isn’t quite that car.
Enlarge/ Should we get excited about the Theory 1? Right now, I just hope Lotus survives.
Lotus
But Geely’s ownership of Lotus has not been quite the golden ticket some of us had hoped. The Eletre SUV was met with mixed reviews and plenty of people questioning whether it really deserved to wear the Lotus badge, a brand characterized by the slogan “simplify and add lightness.” Worse yet, the Eletre and Emeya are built in China, which means that they’re subject to massive import tariffs in the US and European Union that have cratered the brand’s sales forecasts. With sales in China similarly disappointing, some are already questioning whether Geely might offload Lotus entirely.
