Toyota this week unveiled the 2019 Avalon at the the Detroit Auto Show, and the centered 9-inch screen will display a feature that has long been missing from Toyota cars: Apple CarPlay. Over the past few years, Toyota has been stubborn in adopting support for CarPlay, instead opting to use its in-house proprietary solutions. But the delay was much ado about nothing as Toyota has...
In 2011, Hyundai introduced the unique hatchback Veloster with an oddball three-door design that stood out amid a sea of two and four-door cars. Seven years later, the design that once stood out hasn’t aged particularly well. Cue the 2019 Hyundai Veloster redesign, announced at the Detroit Auto Show, which upgrades everything from the exterior to the interior. The original spirit of...
Ford is dramatically shifting its focus to EVs over the next four years with a planned $11 billion investment in developing 40 hybrid and fully electric vehicles by 2022. The news was shared by Chairman Bill Ford at the Detroit Auto Show. Originally, Ford was targeting an investment of $4.5 billion into alternative fuel cars by 2020. The huge shift highlights the pressure Ford is under...
Back in 2012, Henry Fisker launched the Fisker Karma—a luxury sedan meant to revolutionize the way people think of EVs. It failed spectacularly, and the fate of Fisker was left up in the air for five longs years before we got an answer. The company, now named Fisker Inc, managed to stick around and is back with a gaudy electric sports car called the EMotion. Fisker debuted the EMotion...
General Motors is ready to take the plunge into the self-driving future. The company announced it’s taking the next step toward autonomous driving, and if things pan out, the first GM car without a steering will hit the road by 2019. The car in question is the fourth-generation self-driving Cruise AV, a driverless version of the Chevy Bolt. It will feature level 4 autonomous driving to...
The new fad in the EV market is for hot-shot start-ups to present a concept that egregiously overpromises out-of-this-world features that will be enough to take down the mighty Tesla. Many have tried and most have failed, but the latest entry, Byton, says that it is different. Byton is a Chinese company that unveiled a dashing SUV EV concept that promises a lot. Led by an executive...
Tesla is launching a new web-based service with Supercharger pitstops included. The planning feature was already available to Tesla customers through the navigation system inside its cars, but now the feature will be available to everybody through a new web version. Using Google Maps, the service maps out Supercharger pit stops along a trip to make sure you reach your destination...
Tesla went through a tough go of it in 2017 hitting multiple snags with the Model 3 deliveries, disappointing mightily, but in the end, it delivered a new record number of vehicles in the year. On Wednesday, Tesla announced that it delivered 101,312 vehicles in 2017. That is a 33-percent increase over 2016, marking a new record for the Palo Alto car company. In the fourth quarter alone...
As someone who’s driven gas cars his entire life, I’ve seldom worried myself about eco-friendly options. Sure, I understand difference between an EV and a hybrid, but that’s the extent of my knowledge. That changed real quickly when Kia invited me to drive its new 2018 Niro Plug-In Hybrid (PHEV) from Orange County to San Francisco. Kia has been slowly dipping its foot in the electric/...
If you pre-ordered a Tesla Model 3, you may still have quite a wait ahead of you. Analysts at KeyBanc Capital Markets have been contacting Tesla dealers at 18 retail stores to survey how many Model 3 cars had been delivered during the fourth quarter, and the numbers were less than promising. “We talked to stores in California doing as many as a dozen per week with around 10 being the...