To fill a car with gas, you generally just need a credit card or cash. To charge an EV at a DC fast charging station, you need any number of things to work—a credit card reader, an app for that charger’s network, a touchscreen that’s working—and they’re all a little different.
That situation could change next year if a new “universal Plug and Charge” initiative from SAE International, backed by a number of EV carmakers and chargers, moves ahead and gains ground. Launching in early 2025, the network could make charging an EV actually easier than gassing up: plug in, let the car and charger figure out the payment details over a cloud connection, and go.
Some car and charging network combinations already offer such a system through a patchwork of individual deals, as listed at Inside EVs. Teslas have always offered a plug-and-charge experience, given the tight integration between their Superchargers and vehicles. Now Tesla will join the plug-and-charge movement proper, allowing Teslas to have a roughly similar experience at other stations.
The Electric Vehicle Public Key Infrastructure, or EVPKI, has a good number of the major players on board, and it builds on the ISO standard (15118) to make it faster and more secure for cars to be authenticated and authorized to charge at stations. A whole bunch of certificates are in place at every step of the charging process, as detailed in an EVPKI presentation, and the system includes a Certified Trust List. With an open standard and authentication system, there should be room for new charging networks and vehicle makers.
Enlarge/ Are you getting gas station vibes? Because I’m getting gas station vibes.
GM
Several years ago, General Motors and EVgo teamed up to build out a network of fast chargers for electric vehicles. As Tesla proved, giving your customers confidence that they won’t be stranded on a long drive with a dead battery really helps sell EVs, and GM’s sometimes-shifting target currently stands at deploying 2,850 chargers. Today, the two partners showed off their concept for an improved charging experience, which they say will come to a number of flagship charger locations around the US.
The most obvious thing to notice is the large canopy, co-branded with EVgo and GM Energy, similar to those found at virtually every gas station across the country. The gas station vibes don’t end there, either. Ample lighting and security cameras are meant to combat the sometimes sketchy vibes that can be found at other banks of (often dimly lit) fast chargers after dark, located as they often are in the far reaches of a mall parking lot.
And the chargers are sited between the charging bays the same way gas pumps are located, allowing a driver to pull through. Most fast chargers require a driver to pull in or back into the space even when the chargers are located to one side, a fact that complicates long-distance towing with an EV.
The chargers will be rated for 350 kW so that 800 V EVs can minimize their charge times. And while the announcement did not mention charging plugs, given GM’s adoption of the J3400 (originally NACS) plug from the next model year and EVgo’s embrace of the new connnector, it seems likely to expect both J3400 and CCS1 plugs on each charger.
“The future of EV charging is larger stall count locations, high-power charging, and designing around features that customers love—such as pull-through access, canopies, and convenient amenities. Through this next evolution of EVgo and GM’s esteemed collaboration, the future of EV charging is here,” said Dennis Kish, EVgo’s president.
“Ensuring that our customers have seamless access to convenient and reliable charging is imperative, and this effort will take it to the next level,” said GM Energy VP Wade Sheffer. “Through our collaborations with industry leaders like EVgo, we continue to innovate and expand customer-centric charging solutions that will meet the evolving needs of EV drivers across the country.”
The first site opens next year
There won’t be a fixed number of chargers at each location—the companies say most sites will have “up to 20 stalls,” with some locations featuring significantly more. We also don’t know where the sites will be—GM and EVgo say “coast to coast, including in metropolitan areas in states such as Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, New York, and Texas” and that the first location should open in 2025.
2025 was the original time frame for the full deployment of the GM Energy/EVgo fast charging network, which was also supposed to total 3,250 plugs by then—at least, that was the goal when Ars wrote about it in 2022. It appears as if the reduction in plugs freed up funds to pay for these fancier flagships.
That said, the network is not vaporware. EVgo and GM Energy deployed their 1,000th charger last summer and say they’ll reach the 2,000th by the end of this year. Additionally, the two are working together with Pilot Travel Centers to deploy another 2,000 chargers across the US at Pilot and Flying J travel centers—by the end of 2023, the first 17 of these were operational, with the goal of 200 sites by the end of this year.
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.
One of the major data brokers engaged in the deeply alienating practice of selling detailed driver behavior data to insurers has shut down that business.
Verisk, which had collected data from cars made by General Motors, Honda, and Hyundai, has stopped receiving that data, according to The Record, a news site run by security firm Recorded Future. According to a statement provided to Privacy4Cars, and reported by The Record, Verisk will no longer provide a “Driving Behavior Data History Report” to insurers.
Skeptics have long assumed that car companies had at least some plan to monetize the rich data regularly sent from cars back to their manufacturers, or telematics. But a concrete example of this was reported by The New York Times’ Kashmir Hill, in which drivers of GM vehicles were finding insurance more expensive, or impossible to acquire, because of the kinds of reports sent along the chain from GM to data brokers to insurers. Those who requested their collected data from the brokers found details of every trip they took: times, distances, and every “hard acceleration” or “hard braking event,” among other data points.
While the data was purportedly coming from an opt-in “Smart Driver” program in GM cars, many customers reported having no memory of opting in to the program or believing that dealership salespeople activated it themselves or rushed them through the process. The Mozilla Foundation considers cars to be “the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy,” given the overly broad privacy policies owners must agree to, extensive data gathering, and general lack of safeguards or privacy guarantees available for US car buyers.
GM quickly announced a halt to data sharing in late March, days after the Times’ reporting sparked considerable outcry. GM had been sending data to both Verisk and LexisNexis Risk Solutions, the latter of which is not signaling any kind of retreat from the telematics pipeline. LexisNexis’ telematics page shows logos for carmakers Kia, Mitsubishi, and Subaru.
Ars contacted LexisNexis for comment and will update this post with new information.
Disclosure of GM’s stealthily authorized data sharing has sparked numerous lawsuits, investigations from California and Texas agencies, and interest from Congress and the Federal Trade Commission.
Have electric vehicles been overhyped? A casual observer might have come to that conclusion after almost a year of stories in the media about EVs languishing on lots and letters to the White House asking for a national electrification mandate to be watered down or rolled back. EVs were even a pain point during last year’s auto worker industrial action. But a look at the sales data paints a different picture, one where Tesla’s outsize role in the market has had a distorting effect.
“EVs are the future. Our numbers bear that out. Current challenges will be overcome by the industry and government, and EVs will regain momentum and will ultimately dominate the automotive market,” said Martin Cardell, head of global mobility solutions at consultancy firm EY.
Public perception hasn’t been helped by recent memories of supply shortages and pandemic price gouging, but the chorus of concerns about EV sales became noticeably louder toward the end of last year and the beginning of 2024. EV sales in 2023 grew by 47 percent year on year, but the first three months of this year failed to show such massive growth. In fact, sales in Q1 2024 were up only 2.6 percent over the same period in 2023.
Tesla doesn’t break out its sales data by region anymore, but its new US registrations were down by as much as 25 percent, month on month, as its overall marketshare of EVs closes in on 50 percent this year; by contrast, Tesla was 80 percent of the US EV market in 2020. (Overall, Tesla’s global deliveries fell by 8.5 percent.)
The other sick patient in addition to Tesla is Volkswagen. Despite local production of the ID.4 crossover in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the brand saw EV sales fall by 37 percent in Q1. It has also abandoned plans to bring the ID.7 electric sedan to North America, and the long-awaited ID. Buzz microbus has yet to reach US showrooms more than eight years after it was first shown here.
But all this noise has been enough to spook executives into action. Both Ford and General Motors took the embarrassing step of rolling back their electrification goals, all but admitting they bet on the wrong horse. Instead of turning away from new internal combustion engine products, we’re set for a new flurry of hybrids—just don’t expect any of them to show up before 2026.
GM’s difficulty in ramping up its new family of EVs built around the UItium battery platform has been well-documented. The end of production of the Chevrolet Bolt, which sold for less than $30,000, didn’t help; with the little electric hatchback (and the slightly stretched Bolt EUV) no longer contributing to the sales charts, GM’s Q1 EV sales fell by 21 percent.
The problems with assembling Ultium cells into battery packs appears to be in GM’s past now. Cadillac Lyriqs are starting to become a common sight on the road, and GM CEO Mary Barra told Bloomberg that GM expects to build between 200,000 and 300,000 Ultium-based EVs this year, a huge increase over the 13,838 it managed to ship last year.
Meanwhile, Ford’s EV “slump” is nothing of the kind. In May, it sold 91 percent more F-150 Lightnings than last year. E-Transit sales were up 77 percent. And the Mustang Mach-E showed growth of 46 percent. In total, Ford’s EV sales for the first five months of this year were up 87.7 percent on 2023, helped no doubt by the company’s price cuts.
High double-digit sales growth (in Q1 2024) has also been occurring at Hyundai and Kia (up 56.1 percent), BMW (up 57.8 percent), Rivian (up 58.8 percent), Mercedes (up 66.9 percent), and Toyota (up 85.9 percent).
“As anticipated, Tesla’s sales took a hit, influencing the overall market dynamics. However, a few brands saw significant EV sales increases, achieving over 50 percent year-over-year growth,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive. “As noted in January, we are calling 2024 ‘the Year of More.’ More new products, more incentives, more inventory, more leasing and more infrastructure will drive EV sales higher this year. Even so, we’ll continue to see ups and downs as the industry moves toward electrification.”
“We view the current headwinds that EV sales are experiencing in the US and Europe as short-term in nature. The buildup of charging infrastructure, availability of affordable EV models with a fall in battery prices, combined with government regulations, will drive sustainable BEV growth in the long run,” said Cardell.
After public outcry, General Motors has decided to stop sharing driving data from its connected cars with data brokers. Last week, news broke that customers enrolled in GM’s OnStar Smart Driver app have had their data shared with LexisNexis and Verisk.
Those data brokers in turn shared the information with insurance companies, resulting in some drivers finding it much harder or more expensive to obtain insurance. To make matters much worse, customers allege they never signed up for OnStar Smart Driver in the first place, claiming the choice was made for them by salespeople during the car-buying process.
Now, in what feels like an all-too-rare win for privacy in the 21st century, that data-sharing deal is no more.
“As of March 20th, OnStar Smart Driver customer data is no longer being shared with LexisNexis or Verisk. Customer trust is a priority for us, and we are actively evaluating our privacy processes and policies,” GM told us in a statement.
Enlarge/ A Cruise robotaxi test vehicle in San Francisco.
Cruise
A law firm hired by the General Motors’ self-driving subsidiary Cruise to investigate the company’s response to a gruesome San Francisco crash last year found that the company failed to fully disclose disturbing details to regulators, the tech company said today in a blog post. The incident in October led California regulators to suspend Cruise’s license to operate driverless vehicles in San Francisco.
The new report by law firm Quinn Emanuel says that Cruise failed to tell California’s Department of Motor Vehicles that after striking a pedestrian knocked into its path by a human-driven vehicle, the autonomous car pulled out of traffic—dragging her some 20 feet. Cruise said it had accepted the firm’s version of events, as well as its recommendations.
The investigators found that when Cruise played a video of the crash taken from its autonomous vehicle for government officials, it did not “verbally point out” the vehicle’s pullover maneuver. Internet connectivity issues that occurred when the company tried to share video of the incident “likely precluded or hampered” regulators from seeing the full video, the report concluded.
Cruise executives are singled out in the report for failing to properly communicate with regulators. Company leaders assumed that regulators would ask questions that would lead the company to provide more information about the pedestrian dragging, the report says. And Cruise leadership is described as “fixated” on demonstrating to the media that it was a human-driven car, not its autonomous vehicle, that first struck the pedestrian. That “myopic focus,” the law firm concludes, led Cruise to “omit other important information” about the incident.
“The reasons for Cruise’s failings in this instance are numerous,” the law firm concluded, “poor leadership, mistakes in judgment, lack of coordination, an ‘us versus them’ mentality with regulators, and a fundamental misapprehension of Cruise’s obligations of accountability and transparency to the government and the public.” It said the company must take “decisive steps” to restore public trust.
Another third-party report on the crash released by Cruise today, by the engineering consulting firm Exponent, found that technical issues contributed to the autonomous vehicle’s dangerous pullover maneuver. Although the self-driving car’s software correctly detected, perceived, and tracked the pedestrian and the human-driven car, it classified the crash as a side-impact collision, which led it to pull over and drag the woman underneath it. Cruise says its technical issues were corrected when it recalled its software in November.
Cruise has paused its self-driving operations across the US since late October. Nine executives, plus CEO and cofounder Kyle Vogt, left in the fallout from the crash. In late 2023, the company laid off almost a quarter of its employees. General Motors says it will cut spending on the tech company by hundreds of millions of dollars this year compared to last.
Enlarge/ A GM Ultium battery pack like that found in the Lyriq.
Santa Fabio for General Motors
General Motors ended 2023 as the number one automaker in the United States, selling 2.6 million new vehicles during those 12 months. That’s a 14.1 percent increase from its performance in 2022, and comfortably eclipses the 2.3 million cars that Toyota sold during the same period. It had a strong year in terms of electric vehicle sales too—up 93 percent year-on-year.
But a quick look at the data reveals a somewhat less rosy picture. Yes, it was a banner year for GM EVs, with 75,883 deliveries in 2023. But only because of the Chevrolet Bolt EV and Bolt EUV. Chevy delivered 62,045 Bolts in 2023, a 62.8 percent increase on the 38,120 Bolts it sold in 2022.
But as Ars has detailed in the past, the Bolt is no more. Production ended at the Orion Assembly plant in Michigan on December 18, and GM is laying off 945 workers at the plant as it retools the factory to make electric trucks like the Chevy Silverado EV and GMC Sierra EV.
GM CEO Mary Barra has promised a new Bolt EV, this time using GM’s newer battery platform, known as Ultium. But the second-generation Bolt isn’t scheduled to appear until 2025 at the earliest.
Cheap, mass-produced cells?
GM has bet big on Ultium. In 2020 it revealed the new battery platform and told us that the new cells, developed together with LG Chem (which also produced the packs for Bolt) would drop below the $100/kWh barrier “early in the platform’s life.” $100/kWh is the point at which an EV powertrain reaches price parity with an internal combustion engine powertrain, at which point an EV should no longer cost several thousand dollars more than an equivalent conventionally fueled vehicle.
A spokesperson for GM told Ars that “cell production is going great, but the automation we use to pack cells into modules was not able to keep up,” and that “things are definitely improving.”
During the automaker’s Q2 2023 call with investors, it said that it had “deployed teams from GM manufacturing engineering to work on site with our automation supplier to improve delivery times,” and that it had added manual module assembly lines and was installing “more module capacity at all of our North America EV plants, beginning with Factory ZERO and Spring Hill this summer, Ramos Arizpe in the fall, and CAMI in the second quarter of next year.”
Three months later, GM told investors that “our battery module constraint is getting better, which helped us more than double Ultium Platform production in the third quarter compared to the second quarter. We are now in the process of installing and testing our high-capacity module assembly lines, which will continue into the first part of next year.”
GM also said that it believes the production constraint will have been overcome by mid-2024.
Software is hard
Unfortunately for GM, a lack of Ultium cells isn’t its only headache where new EVs are concerned. Last year the automaker revealed that it was dropping support for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, the extremely popular phone-casting apps, from its EVs from model year 2024. Instead, its Ultium-based EVs would ship with a new infotainment system called Ultifi, built using Google’s Android Automotive OS (not to be confused with the phone-casting Android Auto).
Enlarge/ The infotainment system crashed more than once during our drive of the Blazer EV, and the problem is serious enough that GM issued a stop sale for the SUV as a result.
A spokesperson for the company told Ars that “GM is working quickly to address these issues and to implement a fix. Customers will be able to bring their Blazer EVs to Chevrolet dealers once they are notified that the related software update is available. Our engineering teams are working around the clock toward a solution.”
