Enlarge/ The cosmetic changes to the MY25 Ford Maverick include a new front bumper, front grille, and new headlamps.
Ford
Ford is giving its Maverick pickup truck a midlife refresh for model year 2025. And while the changes aren’t earth-shattering, they will probably pique your interest. The headline news for Ars readers is probably this: The hybrid is back, and now you can spec an all-wheel drive hybrid Maverick as well as a front-wheel-drive electrified model.
When we tested the Maverick in 2021, we were very impressed with it, particularly the front-wheel drive hybrid powertrain. The 191 hp (142 kW) pickup was capable of exceeding 42 mpg (5.6 L/100 km). It was the right size, as opposed to being gargantuan like almost every other pickup on sale, yet it still had the ability to carry 1,500 lbs (680 kg) in the bed or tow 2,000 lb (907 kg) trailers. All for a starting price of just under $20,000, assuming you ignored the destination charge.
Even better, the 2.5 L hybrid powertrain was the standard option, with the more powerful 2.0 L EcoBoost as a cost-option, either with front- or all-wheel drive. Sadly, more recent supply chain issues got in the way of that, with Ford dropping the hybrid as standard for MY24.
Those supply chain problems are evidently no more because the front-wheel drive 2.5 L hybrid is now the default powertrain option once again. What’s more, Ford has responded to overwhelming customer feedback and is adding an all-wheel drive hybrid option, too—this truck is a fraction less efficient, but only a fraction, still achieving 40 mpg (5.9 L/100 km) according to Ford. There’s even a towing package for this model that doubles its towing capacity to 4,000 lbs (1,813 kg).
However, you’ll no longer be able to order the 2.0 L turbo with just front-wheel drive.
Many customers chose not to buy the hybrid Maverick because of a lack of all-wheel drive. Now that’s been solved.
Ford
The Maverick’s multi-position tailgate lets it carry up to 18 sheets of half-inch 4×8 plywood.
Ford
There’s a new infotainment system for MY25.
Ford
It won’t power your whole house for three days like an F-150 Lightning can, but there’s 110 V, 400 W power in the bed with the hybrid.
Ford
There are new trim combinations for MY25.
Ford
New tech
Ford has given the refreshed Maverick some tech upgrades, too. The old 8-inch infotainment system is gone, replaced by a 13.2-inch unit running Sync 4, with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. 360-degree parking cameras are now available, and there’s a Pro Trailer Hitch Assist and a Pro Trailer Backup Assist to make towing less stressful.
Unfortunately, Ford won’t release pricing for most of the MY25 Mavericks until tomorrow, when it opens its order books ahead of deliveries in “late 2024.” Right now, we only know the price of the standard front-wheel drive hybrid Maverick, and it’s a fair bit more expensive than it was in 2021, starting at $26,295, plus a $1,595 delivery charge.
Enlarge/ Converting this street from two lanes in either direction to one lane in each direction with a turning lane in-between would make it much safer.
Getty Images
Although driving is a privilege, some Americans treat it more like a right. This entitlement leads them to get upset with policy proposals that try to increase road safety by prioritizing vulnerable road users over the wants of drivers. But a new study suggests that a common complaint—taking away lanes from cars makes emergency response times go up—about traffic calming isn’t actually true.
Which is where road diets come in—they’re a relatively cheap and simple way to slow traffic and significantly cut the accident rate along a stretch of road. You take a four-lane (two-way road) and repaint it so there are now three lanes for cars: one in each direction, with a center lane in the middle for turning. The remaining space on either side becomes bike lanes (physically protected ones, please).
The study, conducted by a group of researchers at the University of Iowa led by Nicole Corcoran (now at Arizona State University) and published in Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, sought to do a couple of things: First, survey emergency responders to find out how they feel about road diets, and secondly actually quantify the effect of road diets on EMS response time.
The emergency responders were all from Iowa, which was an early adopter of road diets, stretching back to 1996, and all had to have responded to emergencies both before and after the introduction of 4-to-3 road diets in a number of specific locations around the state. Just over half (52 percent) of the responders thought that their response times were the same both before and after the introduction of road diets, with a third saying times got slower and 16 percent saying they became faster.
What does the stopwatch say?
To quantify the actual effect of 4-to-3 road diets on emergency response times, the researchers looked at response times to certain emergency calls—”fires, overpressure ruptures, explosions, overheat-no fires, and rescue and EMS calls, as these incidents require a fast response where lights and sirens would be activated”—from three Cedar Rapids fire districts, each of which received a road diet during a six-year period between 2014–2020.
In total, they identified 1,202 emergency response trips that occurred before the road diets and 2,665 trips that occurred on roads that had been converted down to three lanes. And in doing so, they found that there was virtually no difference between emergency response travel time (in min/km) after a road conversion compared to before, both in total and when they looked at specific road diets.
As I mentioned in another recent review, I’ve been checking out electric hardtail mountain bikes lately. Their relative simplicity compared to full-suspension models tends to allow companies to hit a lower price point without sacrificing much in terms of component quality, potentially opening up mountain biking to people who might not otherwise consider it. The first e-hardtail I checked out, Aventon’s Ramblas, fits this description to a T, offering a solid trail riding experience at a price that’s competitive with similar offerings from major manufacturers.
Velotric’s Summit 1 has a slightly different take on the equation. The company has made a few compromises that allowed it to bring the price down to just under $2,000, which is significantly lower than a lot of the competition. The result is something that’s a bit of a step down on some more challenging trails. But it still can do about 90 percent of what most alternatives offer, and it’s probably a better all-around bicycle for people who intend to also use it for commuting or errand-running.
Making the Summit
Velotric is another e-bike-only company, and we’ve generally been impressed by its products, which offer a fair bit of value for their price. The Summit 1 seems to be a reworking of its T-series of bikes (which also impressed us) into mountain bike form. You get a similar app experience and integration of the bike into Apple’s Find My system, though the company has ditched the thumbprint reader, which is supposed to function as a security measure. Velotric has also done some nice work adapting its packaging to smooth out the assembly process, placing different parts in labeled sub-boxes.
Enlarge/ Velotric has made it easier to find what you need during assembly.
John Timmer
These didn’t help me avoid all glitches during assembly, though. I ended up having to take apart the front light assembly and remove the handlebars clamp to get the light attached to the bike—all contrary to the instructions. And connecting the color-coded electric cables was more difficult than necessary because two cables had the same color. But it only started up in one of the possible combinations, so it wasn’t difficult to sort out.
The Summit 1’s frame is remarkably similar to the Ramblas; if there wasn’t branding on it, you might need to resort to looking over the components to figure out which one you were looking at. Like the Ramblas, it has a removable battery with a cover that protects from splashes, but it probably won’t stay watertight through any significant fords. The bike also lacks an XL size option, and as usual, the Large was just a bit small for my legs.
The biggest visible difference is at the cranks, which is not where the motor resides on the Summit. Instead, you’ll find that on the rear hub, which typically means a slight step down in performance, though it is often considerably cheaper. For the Summit, the step down seemed very slight. I could definitely feel it in some contexts, but I’m pretty unusual in terms of the number of different hub and mid-motor configurations I’ve experienced (which is my way of saying that most people would never notice).
Enlarge/ The Summit 1 has a hub motor on the rear wheel and a relatively compact set of gears.
John Timmer
There are a number of additional price/performance compromises to be found. The biggest is the drivetrain in the back, which has a relatively paltry eight gears and lacks the very large gear rings you’d typically find on mountain bikes without a front derailleur—meaning almost all of them these days. This isn’t as much of a problem as it might seem because the bike is built around a power assist that can easily handle the sort of hills those big gear rings were meant for. But it is an indication of the ways Velotric has kept its costs down. Those gears are paired with a Shimano Altus rear derailleur, which is controlled by a standard dual-trigger shifter and a plastic indicator to track which gear you’re in.
The bike also lacks a dropper seat that you can get out of your way during bouncy descents. Because the frame was small for me anyway, I didn’t really feel its absence. The Summit does have a dedicated mountain bike fork from a Chinese manufacturer called YDH that included an easy-to-access dial that lets you adjust the degree of cushioning you get on the fly. One nice touch is a setting that locks the forks if you’re going to be on smooth pavement for a while. I’m not sure who makes the rims, as I was unable to interpret the graphics on them. But the tires were well-labeled with Kenda, a brand that shows up on a number of other mountain bikes.
Overall, it wasn’t that hard to spot the places Velotric made compromises to bring the bike in at under $2,000. The striking thing was just how few of them there were. The obvious question is whether you’d notice them in practice. We’ll get back to that after we go over the bike’s electronics.
Enlarge/ The Cadillac V-Series.R is one of General Motors’ factory-backed racing programs.
James Moy Photography/Getty Images
It is hard to escape the feeling that a few too many businesses are jumping on the AI hype train because it’s hype-y, rather than because AI offers an underlying benefit to their operation. So I will admit to a little inherent skepticism, and perhaps a touch of morbid curiosity, when General Motors got in touch wanting to show off some of the new AI/machine learning tools it has been using to win more races in NASCAR, sportscar racing, and IndyCar. As it turns out, that skepticism was misplaced.
GM has fingers in a lot of motorsport pies, but there are four top-level programs it really, really cares about. Number one for an American automaker is NASCAR—still the king of motorsport here—where Chevrolet supplies engines to six Cup teams. IndyCar, which could once boast of being America’s favorite racing, is home to another six Chevy-powered teams. And then there’s sportscar racing; right now, Cadillac is competing in IMSA’s GTP class and the World Endurance Championship’s Hypercar class, plus a factory Corvette Racing effort in IMSA.
“In all the series we race we either have key partners or specific teams that run our cars. And part of the technical support that they get from us are the capabilities of my team,” said Jonathan Bolenbaugh, motorsports analytics leader at GM, based at GM’s Charlotte Technical Center in North Carolina.
Unlike generative AI that’s being developed to displace humans from creative activities, GM sees the role of AI and ML as supporting human subject-matter experts so they can make the cars go faster. And it’s using these tools in a variety of applications.
Enlarge/ One of GM’s command centers at its Charlotte Technical Center in North Carolina.
General Motors
Each team in each of those various series (obviously) has people on the ground at each race, and invariably more engineers and strategists helping them from Indianapolis, Charlotte, or wherever it is that the particular race team has its home base. But they’ll also be tied in with a team from GM Motorsport, working from one of a number of command centers at its Charlotte Technical Center.
What did they say?
Connecting all three are streams and streams of data from the cars themselves (in series that allow car-to-pit telemetry) but also voice comms, text-based messaging, timing and scoring data from officials, trackside photographs, and more. And one thing Bolenbaugh’s team and their suite of tools can do is help make sense of that data quickly enough for it to be actionable.
“In a series like F1, a lot of teams will have students who are potentially newer members of the team literally listening to the radio and typing out what is happening, then saying, ‘hey, this is about pitting. This is about track conditions,'” Bolenbaugh said.
Instead of giving that to the internship kids, GM built a real time audio transcription tool to do that job. After trying out a commercial off-the-shelf solution, it decided to build its own, “a combination of open source and some of our proprietary code,” Bolenbaugh said. As anyone who has ever been to a race track can attest, it’s a loud environment, so GM had to train models with all the background noise present.
“We’ve been able to really improve our accuracy and usability of the tool to the point where some of the manual support for that capability is now dwindling,” he said, with the benefit that it frees up the humans, who would otherwise be transcribing, to apply their brains in more useful ways.
Take a look at this
Another tool developed by Bolenbaugh and his team was built to quickly analyze images taken by trackside photographers working for the teams and OEMs. While some of the footage they shoot might be for marketing or PR, a lot of it is for the engineers.
Two years ago, getting those photos from the photographer’s camera to the team was the work of two to three minutes. Now, “from shutter click at the racetrack in a NASCAR event to AI-tagged into an application for us to get information out of those photos is seven seconds,” Bolenbaugh said.
Enlarge/ Sometimes you don’t need a ML tool to analyze a photo to tell you the car is damaged.
Jeffrey Vest/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
“Time is everything, and the shortest lap time that we run—the Coliseum would be an outlier, but maybe like 18 seconds is probably a short lap time. So we need to be faster than from when they pass that pit lane entry to when they come back again,” he said.
At the rollout of this particular tool at a NASCAR race last year, one of GM’s partner teams was able to avoid a cautionary pitstop after its driver scraped the wall, when the young engineer who developed the tool was able to show them a seconds-old photo of the right side of the car that showed it had escaped any damage.
“They didn’t have to wait for a spotter to look, they didn’t have to wait for the driver’s opinion. They knew that didn’t have damage. That team made the playoffs in that series by four points, so in the event that they would have pitted, there’s a likelihood where they didn’t make it,” he said. In cases where a car is damaged, the image analysis tool can automatically flag that and make that known quickly through an alert.
Not all of the images are used for snap decisions like that—engineers can glean a lot about their rivals from photos, too.
“We would be very interested in things related to the geometry of the car for the setup settings—wicker settings, wing angles… ride heights of the car, how close the car is to the ground—those are all things that would be great to know from an engineering standpoint, and those would be objectives that we would have in doing image analysis,” said Patrick Canupp, director of motorsports competition engineering at GM.
Enlarge/ Many of the photographers you see working trackside will be shooting on behalf of teams or manufacturers.
Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images
“It’s not straightforward to take a set of still images and determine a lot of engineering information from those. And so we’re working on that actively to help with all the photos that come in to us on a race weekend—there’s thousands of them. And so it’s a lot of information that we have at our access, that we want to try to maximize the engineering information that we glean from all of that data. It’s kind of a big data problem that AI is really geared for,” Canupp said.
The computer says we should pit now
Remember that transcribed audio feed from earlier? “If a bunch of drivers are starting to talk about something similar in the race like the track condition, we can start inferring, based on… the occurrence of certain words, that the track is changing,” said Bolenbaugh. “It might not just be your car… if drivers are talking about something on track, the likelihood of a caution, which is a part of our strategy model, might be going up.”
That feeds into a strategy tool that also takes lap times from timing and scoring, as well as fuel efficiency data in racing series that provide it for all cars, or a predictive model to do the same in series like NASCAR and IndyCar where teams don’t get to see that kind of data from their competitors, as well as models of tire wear.
“One of the biggest things that we need to manage is tires, fuel, and lap time. Everything is a trade-off between trying to execute the race the fastest,” Bolenbaugh said.
Obviously races are dynamic situations, and so “multiple times a lap as the scenario changes, we’re updating our recommendation. So, with tire fall off [as the tire wears and loses grip], you’re following up in real time, predicting where it’s going to be. We are constantly evolving during the race and doing transfer learning so we go into the weekend, as the race unfolds, continuing to train models in real time,” Bolenbaugh said.
Enlarge/ The VW ID.4 has a new drive motor and infotainment system for model-year 2024. It’s not the sportiest EV you can buy, but it remains one of our favorites to drive.
Jonathan Gitlin
Volkswagen didn’t wait the traditional four model years before giving its ID.4 electric crossover something of a spiff-up. The tweaks to the model-year 2024 ID.4 are mostly under the skin or inside the cabin—like the recent refresh of the Polestar 2, this update was more about making the ID.4 an easier EV to live with, with more range and more power.
Volkswagen was one of the first automakers to react to Tesla finally making the electric vehicle viable. After the company-wide bet on diesel went up in a cloud of nitrogen oxides and black smoke, VW threw itself headlong into electrification as a way to meet ever-stricter carbon emissions regulations. Already an industry pioneer for the use of highly flexible vehicle architectures that let it build vehicles in a wide range of sizes and shapes with a common set of components and tools, it applied that approach to a line of electric vehicles, all branded under the Intelligent Design, or ID, name.
VW is a global automaker, but automobile tastes are often not global. For Europe, VW designed the ID.3, an electric hatchback that Americans who want forbidden fruit keep asking for, but which generated less than enthusiastic reviews from the people who actually got to buy them. Other models are optimized for China. But for America, with its adoration of the SUV and crossover, VW designed the ID.4.
Enlarge/ The ID.4 was designed with America’s love of crossovers in mind.
Jonathan Gitlin
Unveiled in the depths of the pandemic, we got our first (if short) drive in a prototype ID.4 in October 2020. Four months later, it was time to try the production version, an EV we proclaimed “a solid effort.” A few months later, we tried out the all-wheel drive ID.4 and checked out VW’s factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which has been churning out locally made ID.4s since mid-2022.
What’s new?
For model-year 2024, the $44,875 ID.4 Pro keeps its 82 kWh battery pack, but its EPA range jumps to 291 miles (468 km), up from 275 miles (443 km). The reason will probably seem counterintuitive if all you’re used to is gasoline cars—a new, more powerful drive unit that generates 282 hp (210 kW) and 402 lb-ft (545 Nm). That’s a 40 percent increase in power and a 30 percent increase in torque compared to the rear-wheel drive ID.4 Pro we tested in the past.
With internal-combustion engine vehicles, turning up the wick on the power and torque usually means your range plummets. Not so with an EV. The new motor has an improved stator and a new water- and oil-cooling system, both of which mean it can cope better with higher thermal loads—VW says this is “an elementary contributing factor” to the improved efficiency. The one-speed transmission has had its components optimized to reduce friction, and there’s a new inverter with all-new software.
A very tight turning circle means this is a great EV for American cities.
Jonathan Gitlin
There’s plenty of room here for your kids’ sports equipment, the monthly Costco run, or a vacation’s worth of luggage.
Jonathan Gitlin
The battery can also accept a higher rate of power during charging and regenerative braking, now 175 kW, up from 125 kW. That means a 10–80 percent fast charge should take 30 min. While we weren’t able to deplete the battery quite enough to test that, a charge from 35–80 percent state of charge took just 22 minutes at a peak of 155 kW, and just under 31 minutes was sufficient to reach a 92 percent SoC from that starting point.
On the road, and despite its mainstream design, the ID.4 remains a pretty good EV to drive. It has a very tight turning circle (31.5 feet/9/6 m), which is helpful in the city, and on a winding back road it is far better-mannered than a family crossover should be. A shared vehicle dynamics control system with the latest Golf GTI no doubt helps here.
I prefer Comfort mode over Sport; the latter makes the steering heavier but with no more feedback and makes the lift-off regen braking more aggressive. Power delivery is very smooth despite the bump in output.
In any of the three modes (which includes Eco as well as Comfort and Sport) the ride is a little bouncy—US market ID.4s do without adaptive dampers, so it doesn’t change when you switch. And there was a fair bit of road noise from the tires at highway speeds.
I was surprised that, in relatively mild weather, I was able to achieve an average of 4.1 miles/kWh (15.2 kWh/100 km). As the weather got hot and AC was a necessity, this dropped to 3.5 miles/kWh (17.8 kWh/100 km), which is still an improvement on the First Edition we tested in 2022.
Enlarge/ As Cruise ramps up its robotaxi service, it won’t be in these cool-looking driverless pods.
Cruise
The Cruise Origin was definitely the least conventional of all the myriad vehicles that General Motors planned to build using its new Ultium battery platform. For starters, it wasn’t a pickup truck or SUV, unlike all the Ultium-based electric vehicles that have gone into production thus far. Instead, the Origin—meant for Cruise, GM’s robotaxi startup—was a true driverless pod design, a box on wheels with the front and rear seats facing each other and no steering wheel at all. But now the Origin is dead, GM said in a letter to investors today.
We saw the Origin in person in January 2020 at a flashy reveal event that was light on the details. At the time, Cruise was targeting early 2022 to begin deploying Origins, a timeline that accounted for neither pandemic nor the difficulty in actually developing autonomous vehicles.
By early 2022, Cruise was ready to petition the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, asking permission to begin using Origins on the road. But 2023 was a bad year for the autonomous vehicle company, which had its operations in California suspended after a Cruise robotaxi ran over and then dragged a pedestrian in San Francisco.
The challenge of convincing NHTSA that such a radically different design should be given the OK proved too much for GM to bear, it told investors.
Instead of using Origins, Cruise will turn its attention to the next-generation Chevrolet Bolt, which will cost less per unit than the Origin, helpfully. The next-gen Bolt is a revamp of Chevy’s popular compact EV that will move over to the cheaper Ultium battery platform. The Bolt was GM’s bestselling EV but went out of production last year at the Orion Assembly plant in Michigan, which the automaker wanted to repurpose so it could build electric pickup trucks.
Those electric pickups are now on hold, postponed until mid-2026 GM says. Like Ford, it appears that GM miscalculated the appeal of expensive electric trucks, and as a result the company will not meet its originally stated ambition of building a million EVs in 2025.
This month, the Silicon Valley company filed a pair of lawsuits, neither of which have been previously reported, that demand hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages from two alleged vandals. Waymo attorneys said in court papers that the alleged vandalism, which ruined dozens of tires and a tail end, are a significant threat to the company’s reputation. Riding in a vehicle in which the steering wheel swivels on its own can be scary enough. Having to worry about attackers allegedly targeting the rides could undermine Waymo’s ride-hailing business before it even gets past its earliest stage.
Waymo, which falls under the umbrella of Google parent Alphabet, operates a ride-hailing service in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles that is comparable to Uber and Lyft except with sensors and software controlling the driving. While its cars haven’t contributed to any known deadly crashes, US regulators continue to probe their sometimeserratic driving. Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp says the company always prioritizes safety and that the lawsuits reflect that strategy. She declined further comment for this story.
In a filing last week in the California Superior Court of San Francisco County, Waymo sued a Tesla Model 3 driver whom it alleges intentionally rear-ended one of its autonomous Jaguar crossovers. According to the suit, the driver, Konstantine Nikka-Sher Piterman, claimed in a post on X that “Waymo just rekt me” before going on to ask Tesla CEO Elon Musk for a job. The other lawsuit from this month, filed in the same court, targets Ronaile Burton, who allegedly slashed the tires of at least 19 Waymo vehicles. San Francisco prosecutors have filed criminal charges against her to which she has pleaded not guilty. A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.
Burton’s public defender, Adam Birka-White, says in a statement that Burton “is someone in need of help and not jail” and that prosecutors continue “to prioritize punishing poor people at the behest of corporations, in this case involving a tech company that is under federal investigation for creating dangerous conditions on our streets.”
An attorney for Burton in the civil case hasn’t been named in court records, and Burton is currently in jail and couldn’t be reached for comment. Piterman didn’t respond to a voicemail, a LinkedIn message, and emails seeking comment. He hasn’t responded in court to the accusations.
Based on available records from courts in San Francisco and Phoenix, it appears that Waymo hasn’t previously filed similar lawsuits.
In the Tesla case, Piterman “unlawfully, maliciously, and intentionally” sped his car past a stop sign and into a Waymo car in San Francisco on March 19, according to the company’s suit. When the Waymo tried to pull over, Piterman allegedly drove the Tesla into the Waymo car again. He then allegedly entered the Waymo and later threatened a Waymo representative who responded to the scene in person. San Francisco police cited Piterman, according to the lawsuit. The police didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Enlarge/ It’s all too easy to go nuts with the Porsche option list and spend a fortune, but what if you didn’t do that?
Michael Teo Van Runkle
Porsche’s high-performance variants of the 911 might make for great headlines, proving the incredible potential of the world’s most iconic rear-engined sports car to serve as a track toy and off-road rally racer simultaneously. But while motorsport heritage always factors into any Porsche conversation, the 911 is anything but the top rung of the company’s sales ladder. Instead, the Cayenne and then Macan SUVs have led the pack in volume since 2002, bolstering the company’s financial position and allowing the smaller-scale 911s and 718s to continue production.
For model year 2024, the facelifted third-gen Cayenne now comes in seven trim levels, including the technologically advanced and startlingly quick Turbo E-Hybrid, which offers 35 miles of all-electric range and a 3.5-second sprint to 60 mph. And yet a base V6 Cayenne offers a far more attainable entree into what it’s like to own something other than a fully loaded, paint-to-sample uber-Porsche that can easily cost well over $200,000.
Revisiting the Cayenne SUV
A V6-powered Cayenne starts at $79,200, or almost $20,000 more than the smaller gasoline-powered Macan crossover. But the larger platform allows for a more refined vision of Porsche luxury on the interior, with more headroom, legroom, and cargo capacity. Despite the additional size, however, the latest iteration of the Cayenne never sacrifices the spirit that originally put the Sport in Sport Utility Vehicle. And even a small-displacement turbo V6 still delivers the highlights of Porsche performance, engineering, and reliability.
Enlarge/ Porsche hasn’t announced a replacement for the Cayenne yet, but we bet it will be electric.
Michael Teo Van Runkle
I took this 2024 Cayenne for a week loan in Los Angeles six months after selling my own 2006 Cayenne Turbo. Half a year without a Stuttgart SUV serving as my daily driver never dampened the impressions that originally inspired my purchase of a high-mileage Typ 955, though—especially that burly 4.5 L twin-turbo V8 pumping out 450 hp (335 kW) and 457 lb-ft (620 Nm) of torque. With a stout Aisin six-speed automatic transmission, 18-inch wheels shod in big knobby tires, and an adjustable air suspension system, my Cayenne Turbo handled far more difficult off-roading trails than I ever expected, all while still being able to cruise home on the freeway at with equal aplomb.
Since that undeniably over-engineered first generation—split between the 955 and later the 957 facelift—the Cayenne has evolved into a leaner, more consumer-focused SUV. The next generation, known as the 958, dropped the two-speed transfer case, locking differentials, and electronically disconnecting sway bars from the platform. With less truck-iness baked in, second and now third-gen (Typ 9Y0) Cayennes nail the sporty side even more effectively.
The biggest difference comes down to sheer weight. Without the substantial heft of a more complex driveline and powered by smaller displacement engine options throughout the lineup, the current Cayenne now tips the scales at 4,678 lbs (2,122 kg). Compare that to my Turbo, at 5,200 lbs (2,359 kg) before I bolted on steel skid plates, a swingout rear spare carrier, and bigger tires, and the difference in horsepower stats versus the V6-powered base Cayenne starts to seem less significant.
The single-turbo V6 receives ratings of 348 hp (260 KW) and 368 lb-ft (500 Nm) of torque, though the latter figure peaks at just 1,450 rpm and explains the ability for a full-size SUV to manage a 0–60 time of just 5.4 seconds when equipped with the Sport Plus package and Launch Control. That’s a long way off from a Turbo GT, sure, but it’s better than the V6’s raw specs on paper perhaps suggest.
Let me get three negative points about the Gazelle Eclipse out of the way first. First, it’s a 62-pound e-bike, so it’s tough to get moving without its battery. Second, its rack is a thick, non-standard size, so you might need new bags for it. Third—and this is the big one—with its $6,000 suggested retail price, it’s expensive, and you will probably feel nervous about locking it anywhere you don’t completely trust.
Apart from those issues, though, this e-bike is great fun. When I rode the Eclipse (the C380+ HMB version of it), I felt like Batman on a day off, or maybe Bruce Wayne doing reconnaissance as a bike enthusiast. The matte gray color, the black hardware, and the understated but impressively advanced tech certainly helped. But I felt prepared to handle anything that was thrown at me without having to think about it much. Brutally steep hills, poorly maintained gravel paths, curbs, stop lights, or friends trying to outrun me on their light road bikes—the Eclipse was ready.
It assists up to 28 miles per hour (i.e., Class 3) and provides up to 85 Nm of torque, and the front suspension absorbs shocks without shaking your grip confidence. It has integrated lights, the display can show you navigation while your phone is tucked away, and the automatic assist changing option balances your mechanical and battery levels, leaving you to just pedal and look.
The little shifter guy, who will take a few rides to get used to, is either really clever or overthinking it.
Kevin Purdy
The Bosch Kiox 300 is the only screen I’ve had on an e-bike that I ever put time into customizing and optimizing.
Kevin Purdy
The drivetrain on the C80+ is a remarkable thing, and it’s well-hidden inside matte aluminum.
Kevin Purdy
The shocks on the Eclipse are well-tuned for rough roads, if not actual mountains. (The author is aware the headlamp was at an angle in this shot).
Kevin Purdy
The electric assist changer on the left handlebar, and the little built-in bell that you always end up replacing on new e-bikes for something much louder.
Kevin Purdy
What kind of bike is this? A fun one.
The Eclipse comes in two main variants, the 11-speed, chain-and-derailleur model T11+ HMB and the stepless Enviolo hub and Gates Carbon belt-based C380+ HMB. Both come in three sizes (45, 50, and 55 cm), in one of two colors (Anthracite Grey, Thyme Green for the T11+, and Metallic Orange for the C380+), and with either a low-step or high-step version, the latter with a sloping top bar. Most e-bikes come in two sizes if you’re lucky, typically “Medium” and “Large,” and their suggested height spans are far too generous. The T11+ starts at $5,500 and the C380+ starts at $6,000.
The Eclipse’s posture is an “active” one, seemingly halfway between the upright Dutch style and a traditional road or flat-bar bike. It’s perfect for this kind of ride. The front shocks have a maximum of 75 mm of travel, which won’t impress your buddies riding real trails but will make gravel, dirt, wooden bridges, and woodland trails a potential. Everything about the Eclipse tells you to stop worrying about whether you have the right kind of bike for a ride and just start pedaling.
“But I’m really into exercise riding, and I need lots of metrics and data, during and after the ride,” I hear some of you straw people saying. That’s why the Eclipse has the Bosch Kiox 300, a center display that is, for an e-bike, remarkably readable, navigable, and informative. You can see your max and average speed, distance, which assist levels you spent time in, power output, cadence, and more. You can push navigation directions from Komoot or standard maps apps from your phone to the display, using Bosch’s Flow app. And, of course, you can connect to Strava.
Halfway between maximum efficiency and careless joyriding, the Eclipse offers a feature that I can only hope makes it down to cheaper e-bikes over time: automatic assist changing. Bikes that have both gears and motor assist levels can sometimes leave you guessing as to which one you should change when approaching a hill or starting from a dead stop. Set the Eclipse to automatic assist and you only have to worry about the right-hand grip shifter. There are no gear numbers; there is a little guy on a bike, and as you raise or lower the gearing, the road he’s approaching get steep or flat.
Enlarge/ Antonio Felix da Costa leads the way into turn one at Portland International Raceway.
Sam Bagnall/Formula E
PORTLAND, Ore.—Formula E wraps up its 10th series with a pair of races in London this weekend. It’s been a competitive manufacturer’s championship between Porsche and Jaguar. This weekend, seven drivers are still in contention to win the driver’s title after a double-header in Portland on June 29-30 that saw cars going five-wide down the main straight as they reached the highest top speeds of the season. It was the second visit by Formula E to the picturesque Portland International Raceway, and Ars spoke with some of the sport’s bigwigs to see what they think it’s getting right and where the technical evolution of the cars is headed.
Formula E has come a long way since 2014. Racing then exclusively in city centers, the cars were slow at first. And even as they developed, they carried too small a battery to complete even a relatively short race distance. There was a big upgrade in 2018 with the start of season five: The Gen2 car now has battery packs sufficient for 45 minutes-plus-a-lap races. The Gen2 car raced well, too, even putting on a better show at Monaco than Formula 1 has been able to muster for decades.
We expected another big improvement in lap times when the Gen3 car arrived at the start of last season. The Gen3 car featured much less weight and much more power, but also a change of tire supplier. Originally meant to last multiple race weekends, the rubber supplied by Hankook this season and last has much less grip than the Michelins it replaced. That’s kept cornering speeds relatively low and made the cars even harder to drive.
Enlarge/ There are no bad drivers in Formula E, but the cars are hard to handle.
Sam Bagnall/Getty Images.
That is not necessarily a bad thing, as the series has always written the rules to make things hard on the drivers and teams. For example, while the battery packs are larger now, they still don’t actually have quite enough charge to complete a race distance without careful energy management. But while the race officials get data-rich telemetry streams from all the cars during a race, the teams have to rely on each driver keeping tabs on their own state of charge and reporting that back via radio to the engineers in the garage so the boffins can calculate the optimal strategy.
More technical changes are in store. In 2025 and 2026, the series will move to the Gen3 Evo car, which will have on-demand all-wheel drive and more grip from better tires, among other tweaks. Meanwhile, everyone in Formula E has been thinking hard about Gen4, which is due to arrive for season 13.
What has worked?
I asked Formula E CEO Jeff Dodds, as well as some of the team principals, to start off by blowing their own horns a bit—what’s Formula E been doing right? “We’ve just announced our Gen3 Evo car, which gets to 60 miles an hour in 1.8 seconds, and we’re still an infancy business, only 10 years old, still playing around with early tech. So I think over time, a massive strength of ours is how that technology allows performance of the car to improve,” Dodds said.
Enlarge/ At Portland, we saw pack racing down the main straight.
Simon Galloway/Formula E
McLaren team principal Ian James, who previously led Mercedes to a Formula E championship before it quit the sport, was proud of how far Formula E has come over the last decade. “Gen2 really saw a step forward in that respect and a professionalization of the whole series. I think with Gen3 we’re really starting to unlock the performance potential of electric motorsport. And we’re going to see that take another notch up in Gen3 Evo,” James said.
Existing as a relevant arena for electric vehicle R&D is Formula E’s big strength, according to Nissan team principal Tommaso Volpe. “Representing a big car manufacturer in the sport I think the main strength is how relevant it is for a big transformation that is happening in mobility… using electrification as a key technology,” Volpe said. This is something that the motorsports cannot claim. They have other strengths, but they can not claim to be that relevant, purely speaking from the R&D perspective,” Volpe said.
For a company like Nissan, the primary benefit is still getting its EV tech in front of eyeballs, something Formula E’s deal to stream races live over Roku has no doubt helped. But there are other benefits to participation. “You cannot use the same motor, but the efforts that we put in place when we develop a Formula E car, in maximizing the energy efficiency of the hardware—so the materials we use, the solutions, the design—is something that is absolutely relevant for the core business and you can transfer some of these ideas and experience,” Volpe said.
Enlarge/ Can the big Mazda CX-90 make up for how disappointed we were with the last electrified Mazda we drove?
Jonathan Gitlin
Fairly or not, the Mazda CX-90 PHEV had a lot to make up for. The last electrified Mazda we drove was the abysmal MX-30, a cynical compliance car that proved too unpopular to remain on sale. That was a small hatchback crossover with suicide doors and a cork interior. The CX-90 PHEV, Mazda’s full-size SUV, is a much more substantial proposition, with seating for up to eight and starting at a reasonable $47,445.
You may miss out on some of the very newest bells and whistles found in the latest German or Korean luxury cars, but as electrified three-rows go, there’s a fair bit to like about this one.
Tech specs
The CX-90 uses a newly developed Mazda platform for larger vehicles, with rear-biased all-wheel drive powertrains. There’s a turbocharged mild hybrid inline-six cylinder engine available in two different levels of tune, but the one we’re interested in is the e-Skyactiv G powertrain, which pairs a turbocharged four-cylinder engine generating 189 hp (141 kW) and 192 lb-ft (260 Nm) with a 173 hp (129 kW), 199 lb-ft (270 Nm) permanent magnet synchronous electric motor.
If you need a gigantic SUV but also want it to be a PHEV, you don’t have too many choices. This one comes with a lot of good safety tech and not too much in the way of digital distraction, plus a great interior.
Jonathan Gitlin
With the third row of seats in use, there’s 14.9 cubic feet (423 L) of cargo volume. Drop the third row flat and that grows to 40 cubic feet (1,133 L). Fold down the middle row as well and you can fit 74.2 cubic feet (2,101 L) of stuff back there.
Jonathan Gitlin
A standard-size parking bay doesn’t leave much room.
Jonathan Gitlin
Total combined output is 323 hp (240 kW) and 369 lb-ft (500 Nm), all of which goes to the wheels via an eight-speed planetary gear transmission that uses a wet clutch instead of a torque convertor. Mazda says there’s a North America-specific tune that, by the sounds of it, has a peppier torque curve for better acceleration than the versions sold in Europe or Asia.
There’s a 17.8 kWh lithium-ion battery pack with an EPA-rated electric-only range of up to 26 miles. Add a full tank of gas to that and the CX-90 PHEV should go 490 miles, according to the regulator. Charge times are about 2.5 hours with a 240 V level 2 charger, and there’s a charge button on the center console that will use spare power from the internal combustion engine to recharge the traction battery while you drive (with an attendant hit to fuel economy as you do).
In normal mode, as long as the battery has more than 20 percent state of charge, the car will default to using the electric motor alone for propulsion. In this combined gas-plus-electric mode, the EPA rates the CX-90 at 56 MPGe. Below 20 percent SoC, the engine stays on and maintains some charge in the battery, which Mazda says is so the EV assist is always available.
There’s also an EV mode, although if the throttle pedal passes the kick-down point, the ICE fires up again, and the car reverts to normal mode. Sport keeps the engine fired all the time and adds electric torque, but at 5,243 lbs, this is not an SUV that will ever feel sporty to drive.
I don’t know about you, but my trips to Costco are not often long enough to get a meaningful charge in the battery. Particularly if there’s snow on the ground.
Jonathan Gitlin
In late spring, things went a lot better.
Jonathan Gitlin
Charging stats.
Jonathan Gitlin
The powertrain with a cutaway showing inside the electric motor, which is packaged between the engine and transmission.
Mazda
Once the battery is fully depleted, fuel economy plummets as the relatively small engine works hard to keep this large SUV in motion—just 25 mpg (9.4 L/100 km) combined, according to the EPA.
Enlarge/ Aventon’s Ramblas hardtail mountain bike.
John TImmer
Full suspension mountain bikes are complicated beasts, with sections of the frame that pivot and a shock absorber to moderate that pivot. These parts help limit the bumps that reach your body and keep your rear tire in contact with the trail across all sorts of terrain and obstacles. The complexity and additional parts, however, boost the costs of full suspension bikes considerably, a situation that only gets worse when you electrify things.
But there’s one easy way to lower the price considerably: lose the full suspension. The electric “hardtails” from major manufacturers typically cost considerably less than a full suspension bike with similar components. And because the engineering demands are considerably lower than in a full suspension bike, it’s easier for some of the smaller e-bike companies to put together a solid offering.
So over the course of the spring and into the summer, I’ve been testing two hardtail mountain bikes that were recently introduced by e-bike specialists. First up is the Aventon Ramblas.
The hardware
Aventon is one of the larger dedicated e-bike makers and offers a wide range of bikes at competitive prices. Most of them fall into a sort of generic “commuter” category, though; the Ramblas is the first offering from the company made for a specific audience (though it’s also categorized as a commuter option on the company’s website). It’s also the first bike the company is offering above the $2,000 price point. At $2,899, it’s actually more expensive than one of the electric hardtail models being cleared out by Trek, a company that does not have a reputation for affordability.
What do you get for that price? Solid low/mid-range components from SRAM, including its NX Eagle drive train. There’s a dropper seat, a front suspension from RockShox, and Maxxis tires. The fork is coil based, so it doesn’t offer much in the way of adjustment—what you start the ride with is pretty much what you’ll spend the entire ride experiencing, unlike many alternatives that let you firm up the ride for pavement. (It has a rebound adjustment at the bottom of the fork, but the effects are subtle.) Aventon doesn’t list who makes the rims on its website, and there are no external indications of the manufacturer there.
Enlarge/ A mid-motor combined with a huge range of gearing ratios makes for a winning combination.
John TImmer
Overall, it’s about what you’d expect from an entry-level offering. I don’t have any concerns about the durability of the components, and their performance was mostly fine. The one thing that did concern me was the plastic cover over the battery, which didn’t fit against the frame snugly and was only held in place by relatively weak contacts at each end. It’s enough to handle some water splashed off the front wheel, but I wouldn’t trust it to protect the battery while fording anything significant.
Saddle and pedals are matters of personal taste, and many people will argue they’re irrelevant because any serious cyclist will want to replace them anyway. But that’s far less likely to be true on the budget end of the scale, so I did most of my riding on what came with the bike. The pedals, while lacking the threatening-looking screws of serious mountain bike offerings, worked out fine when paired with a sticky set of mountain bike shoes, though I felt I had a bit more confidence going over bumps on a ride where I swapped in my clipless pedals.
The saddle, however, was a problem, in part because the frame was a bit too small for my relatively long legs. The saddle has a relatively slick surface that, when combined with my road biking shorts, meant I tended to slide toward the back of the seat over time. A better-fitting frame might have solved this issue (the large version was supposedly rated up to my height, but I clearly should have gone for the XL).
Enlarge/ The RockShox forks don’t offer much in the way of adjustments, but they work reliably.
John Timmer
Speaking of the frame, Aventon has detailed measurements of the geometry available if those make sense to you. But my experience was that the bike was fairly compact in the seat-to-handlebar dimension, leaving me feeling that I was leaning over the handlebars a bit more than I do in other bikes. It wasn’t uncomfortable; it just felt different.
