Transpo

That’s the assessment from US Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who just released a 300-page report (PDF) detailing key findings, including “missed deadlines, budget shortfalls, and overrepresentation of projected ridership.” Duffy is ordering the agency in charge of the project to respond in 37 days, or risk contract terminations. And he frames the demand as being “good stewards” of US tax dollars — even as Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is projected to grow the federal deficit to $2.4 trillion. Of course, Trump has been angling to kneecap California’s high-speed rail project for years now.

It will also be able to add 250 kilometers (155 miles) of charge in just 15 minutes of DC fast-charging, according to a new video from the Japanese automaker. Nissan already revealed that the new Leaf will come with a native NACS charging port, enabling it to charge at Tesla Superchargers. The addition of Plug and Charge appears to fit in with the narrative that Nissan aims to address charging headaches with the new Leaf.

The Blue Oval aims to tackle America’s mountain with a new Mustang Mach-E derived demonstrator with French racing impresario Romain Dumas behind the wheel. This is the third consecutive year that Ford is competing with an electric demonstrator at Pikes Peak, following the SuperVan 4.2 and F-150 Lightning SuperTruck.

Elon Musk says the company has been testing self-driving Model Y cars around Austin without anyone in the driver’s seat for the “past several days.” That’s good news for the company’s fledgling robotaxi business, which may launch as soon as June 12th. Though as Electrek points out, a few weeks of driverless testing is a far cry from the six months Waymo worked through before its Austin launch this year.

The original deal between Amazon and Stellantis, first announced in 2022, was to create a “digital cockpit” for “millions” of Jeep, Dodge, and Ram vehicles — similar to how Google has developed operating systems for a handful of key automakers. But after three years, the two companies are now “winding down” that aspect of their partnership, Reuters says. (The e-commerce company also said it would purchase electric Ram ProMaster delivery vans; no word on whether that deal went through.) And it’s not looking good for a future Amazon in-car experience, as Reuters notes that most of the company’s Digital Cabin staffers have resigned or left the company.

The Alphabet-owned company is planning to set its vehicles loose in Houston, Orlando, and San Antonio as part of its 2025 “road trip.” The vehicles will be manually driven, and the testing operations are not necessarily a precursor to the launch of a commercial robotaxi service — nor is Waymo precluded from launching a service, either. The company sees it as an opportunity to see how well its self-driving system adapts to new locales with varying weather conditions and regional driving habits. Waymo previously said it was testing its vehicles in Las Vegas, Miami, and Japan.

Well, as Jalopnik points out while referring its readers to the below video of a Volvo EX90’s Lidar scanner wrecking a camera sensor on the iPhone 16 Pro Max filming it, doing so can be “the technological equivalent of staring directly into the sun.”

GOP lawmakers passed resolutions rescinding federal approval of California’s plans to require that all car sales be zero-emission by 2035, as well as policies limiting nitrogen oxide emissions and other pollutants from trucks.

That’s gotta be a bizarre thing to wake up to, but at least it didn’t block the Suez Canal?

Rivian’s smaller, more affordable electric SUV may not arrive until the end of 2026, but the company is getting geared up to start testing development versions of the R2. But before they get released into the wild, they need to disguise themselves in camouflage so prying eyes (and phone cameras) can’t perceive their full awesomeness. To that effect, the company was eager to show off its custom wrap, which looks a bit different from the industry standard black-and-white design. Yes, there’s a Yeti in there.

After outdoing Tesla’s global revenue last year, Chinese auto manufacturer BYD just outsold it in Europe for the first time too.

Top Gear was the “most widely viewed factual TV programme,” according to Guinness World Records in 2012, and hundreds of millions of people around the world are familiar with the series’ theme music. In this video, Christian Henson recreates how they composed the theme over two decades ago, which includes a re-arrangement of the Allman Brothers Band’s song, Jessica.

During an interview with CNBC, Elon Musk laid out some of the details for next month’s robotaxi launch in Austin, Texas, most of which was already known. It will be a small number of vehicles, only 10-20, in the first week, but will increase in size week by week. It will be geofenced to the parts of Austin “that we consider to be the safest,” Musk said. And the vehicles will be monitored by remote operators who can intervene in case of emergency. “We’re going to be extremely paranoid about the deployment as we should be,” he added. “It would be foolish not to be so we’ll be watching what the cars are doing very carefully.” The rest was the standard bluster about “over a million Teslas doing self-driving in the US” and why he thinks Waymo’s use of lidar is fundamentally flawed.

The Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle developer announced that it would soon start mapping and gathering data in Atlanta, where it hopes to eventually launch a robotaxi service. That means that Zoox will be testing in a total of seven cities, including Las Vegas, San Francisco, Miami, Seattle, LA, and Austin. The company said it would start accepting public riders in Las Vegas and SF later this year. The announcement came a day after Uber said it was preparing to launch its next partnership with Waymo in Atlanta.

The company is walking back some of its long-term electrification plans, cutting 3 trillion yen (about $20.8 billion) from its investment in electric cars over the next six years. Instead, it’s shifting focus to hybrids, though still plans to be selling only EVs by 2040.