Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation.
Our readers are not very bullish on EV sales in the United States once the federal tax credit expires. For those wondering, I included a poll in the last edition of TechCrunch Mobility. Only email subscribers get to participate in polls. The question was about your prediction for EV sales over the next two quarters after the EV tax credit expires. About sixty percent of you predicted a steep decline.
I do not totally disagree, although I think some automakers will try to pass along the seven thousand five hundred dollar federal tax credit through other price reductions for at least one quarter. Automakers with fresh EV models slated for late 2025 and 2026 may be better positioned than competitors. However, tariffs are also bound to shrink margins.
Meanwhile, another speed bump is emerging in the EV industry in the United States as automakers transition to Tesla’s North American Charging Standard. I am talking about dongles, or EV charging adapters. Senior climate reporter Tim De Chant, a longtime EV owner himself, explains how some people may soon have a trunk or frunk load of charging adapters.
Take General Motors. The automaker began selling an adapter nearly a year ago to allow existing electric vehicles to use the North American Charging Standard plugs at Tesla Supercharger stalls. EV owners rejoiced in their newfound freedom. Now GM has announced three more adapters. The additional adapters help GM customers access EV chargers with different charging rates and standards. This is a win for flexibility but at the cost of simplicity. It is entirely possible that two-EV households could own four different adapters.
One important housekeeping note is that TechCrunch Mobility will not land in your inboxes next week. I will be back the following week.
It is your lucky day as we have two pieces of insider news to share. It has been six months since Peter Rawlinson abruptly stepped down from his CEO, CTO, and board positions at Lucid Motors. His departure came at a critical time as the company was on the precipice of finally launching its long-awaited Gravity SUV. Since then, Rawlinson’s CEO role has been filled on an interim basis by Marc Winterhoff, a longtime consultant at Roland Berger who came on as CFO of Lucid in 2023, as the company looks for a permanent replacement. While it is unclear whether Lucid is close to making a decision, we have heard the search net has been cast very wide, with the company even cold-calling some candidates. In the meantime, it is said that Winterhoff has an eye on taking the position himself.
Meanwhile, over at Tesla, when Elon Musk confirmed the company would disband the team working on Dojo, reporters were curious about the factory in Buffalo, New York, where the automaker was supposed to build the AI training supercomputer. We heard from sources, and the big takeaway is that Tesla is still committed to spending five hundred million dollars on a supercomputer there. The company already invested about three hundred fourteen million dollars of those funds last year, according to sources who said Tesla reported this figure to the state’s economic development department. Could Buffalo be getting a rebrand to Cortex, Tesla’s other supercomputing cluster? We are also hearing that Buffalo is keen to keep its relationship with Tesla alive and well, given that the automaker’s facility there is one of the top private employers in the city.
There were not a lot of deals this week, which we can blame on the last weeks of summer. Here are a couple of items for you. Blue Water Autonomy, a startup developing unmanned ships for the U.S. Navy, raised fifty million dollars in a Series A round led by GV. Eclipse Ventures, Riot, and Impatient Ventures also participated. Joby Aviation completed its acquisition of Blade. Vox AI, an Amsterdam-based startup developing a conversational voice AI platform for drive-throughs in quick-service restaurants, raised seven and a half million euros in seed funding.
Aurora Innovation said it will integrate its self-driving trucking platform into McLeod Software’s transportation management system. The upshot for mutual customers is the ability to manage autonomous shipments with McLeod’s TMS software, which could help boost adoption. The Boring Company is finally testing Full Self-Driving, the advanced driver-assistance system created by Tesla, in the tunnels that connect Las Vegas’ Convention Center to a few nearby hotels.
The last vestige of bankrupt Fisker Inc. is gone. Henrik Fisker, the founder of the failed EV startup, and his wife, Geeta, quietly wound down a private charitable foundation. Kodiak Robotics hired Surajit Datta as chief financial officer. Datta previously was VP of finance at SentinelOne. Remember that Kodiak will soon be a publicly traded company through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company.
Filings show Tesla could have avoided that two hundred forty two point five million dollar Autopilot verdict. Speaking of that trial, a hacker helped retrieve critical crash data that was missing. And speaking of data, a security researcher found over a thousand publicly exposed hobby servers run by Tesla vehicle owners that are spilling sensitive data about their vehicles, including their granular location histories.
Just days before Labor Day, California lawmakers reached an agreement with app-based companies Lyft and Uber that will give drivers a path to unionization. Uncaged Innovations, a biomaterials startup, is working with Hyundai’s Cradle division to refine its plant-based artificial leather material for automotive use. It even smells like leather, or can be made with other signature scents.
Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov posted a video of one of his company’s robotaxis navigating through a giant dust storm, known as a haboob, in Phoenix. Also, Waymo now has more than two thousand robotaxis in its commercial fleet. More than eight hundred are in the San Francisco Bay Area, five hundred in Los Angeles, four hundred in Phoenix, one hundred in Austin, and dozens in Atlanta, its newest market.
The Autonocast, a podcast I co-host with Alex Roy and Ed Niedermeyer, has a new episode out. It is worth a listen, especially if you are interested in the intersection of boats, autonomy, and planes. In the episode, Roy and I interview Billy Thalheimer, co-founder and CEO of Regent.