Carbon ceramics and creeping uncertainty. Credit: Tim Stevens

Hello from the best seat in the world, the one at my desk at home. I spent the better part of this week off in Utah driving a thing that I'm sadly not even allowed to hint about, so that's the beginning and the end of my teasing there, but thankfully I can say more in the near future. And trust me, there's a lot to say.

A few new publications this week to discuss and some updates on this very newsletter, too, so let's dig in.

RS5 redux

Memories from behind the wheel. Credit: Tim Stevens

Back when I had the great pleasure of driving Audi's RS5 in Marrakesh, all of three months ago, I was one of just a few journalists invited out into the desert to have a go. Nobody else on the media side had been behind the wheel yet.

Meanwhile, the internets were ablaze with keyboard warriors lambasting the PHEV for its 1,000-pound weight gain, saying that Audi had totally lost the plot.

All that was very definitely in the back of my mind as I was writing those first reports. Why? Because the car was great, far more exciting and alive than the previous model, a radical change but one that was undeniably for the better. My takes were almost universally positive, directly against what the keyboard warriors were saying. Even for someone who's been doing this sort of thing for three decades now, that can inject just a slight feeling of uncertainty.

I remember writing video game reviews back in the late '90s and having similar doubts. Back then I operated in a complete vacuum, working for weeks on reviews of this RPG or that shooter with nary a word between myself and any other videogame journalist. When reviews were published, I'd look to my peers at EGM or IGN or GameSpot to see whether my conclusions had been totally off base. Thankfully I rarely missed the mark, which I suppose is at least partly why I’m still in the game.

Anyhow, I was glad to see more Audi RS5 takes appearing online in the past few weeks after Audi held a second drive event. My friends at Ars Technica, Jalopnik, and The Drive were similarly enamored by the dynamics.

Sweet validation.

If you didn't get enough of my early takes on the RS5, another one went online this week for Worth Magazine. You can read it here, and check out my earlier takes for continuity's sake, too.

• 2027 Audi RS 5 First Drive Review: Return to Form - Edmunds

• 2027 Audi RS5 First Drive: 630-HP Plug-In Hybrid Transforms the RS Formula - MotorTrend

• Audi’s Latest RS is Rebooted, Reinvigorated - Worth

Latest Car Graphic in Japan

My latest hot take in Japanese is on Waymo and its expansion in the Tokyo market. Want to read it? Sadly you’ll likewise have to be in the Japanese market.

Newsletter updates

If you're still reading this, then you've successfully made the transition over to the new platform, or found this newsletter online. Either way, hello, and thanks.

Just a few updates. This is the first newsletter I've sent with an ad in it, and you have my sympathies and apologies about that, but I do have bills to pay. I promise I'll do my best to ensure the ads stay as unobtrusive as possible.

That said, if you can't stand them, you've got options. I've added an ad-free subscription tier that's just $1 a month or $10 annually. Join up and, assuming I set things up appropriately, you'll never see an ad.

Or, if you're still hanging on to the Really Simple Syndication lifestyle, A: you have my endless respect and B: you can dust off your RSS reader and point it here: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/2YJDRRVzqO.xml

Finally, if you're feeling generous, I have a Supporter plan that costs $8 a month, $90 annually, or $200 for a lifetime membership. You'll not only get no ads, but a personal email address you can use to ping me with questions, comments, and suggestions for what I should write about next.

To view the options and upgrade, click here.

That's all from me for now. I'm back to Bilbao next week to drive an electric machine that could do something rare: create a whole new market segment. More on that to come.

Until then, be well, do good, and my thanks again for your continued support.

It’s the coupiest of Cayennes. Credit: Tim Stevens

Hi there. What a week it's been. If I never see another Ferrari Luce hot take from someone opining based on a few photos they saw on the 'Gram, it'll be too soon. But, if nothing else, it's nice to see EVs in the mainstream conversation again, right?

Ahem, anyhow, welcome to the new home of my newsletter, now hosted on my own domain. I'll spare you the details, but for numerous reasons, I've decided to pack up shop and take you and me and the thousands of other subs to a new place. For now, at least, we're leaving Substack behind and, with any luck, the overall experience will be much the same.

For those curious, this came to your inbox via Beehiiv this time, which gives me a lot more power to both control where and how this content lives online and ultimately to maybe make a little money from its sharing along the way.

To those of you who have already generously paid to become subscribers, I very much appreciate you, and I am working to migrate those subs over to the new platform, so please stand by. To anyone else who'd like to become a benefactor, I’ll get that switch flipped soon as well. But, no pressure. Those on free subs may start to see an ad here or there in the future, which I hope you'll forgive, but shifting platforms does bring with it some rather more substantial fees that I need to recoup.

Anyhow, that's three paragraphs longer than I'd planned to prattle on about that, but I did at least want to be transparent about everything. Questions, concerns? I'd love to hear 'em. Now, on with the regular weekly update.

Cayenne, charged

Not sure which I love more, the Cayenne’s kinky infotainment screen or the pepita seat inserts. Credit: Tim Stevens

After driving the prototype electric Porsche Cayenne back in September of last year I've been quite keen to have a go in one where the exterior isn't wrapped in black vinyl. I got that chance a few weeks back in Germany, and now I can finally tell you about it without fear of legal repercussions. The new Cayenne, as you might expect, offers a driving feel that's not too dissimilar to Porsche's smaller battery-powered SUV, the Macan, only, you know, bigger and faster.

Very fast, as it turns out. I had a chance to really let it stretch its legs on a few de-restricted portions of the Autobahn. I was quite happy to see that the electric Cayenne, despite not having a two-speed transmission ala the Taycan, still had plenty of acceleration even as I was exceeding 200 kph.

What surprised me even more, though, was the harsh ride quality on the base model. Mine was optioned with the bigger, 22-inch wheels, which, in my book, is never a good move. I imagine smaller shoes would feel better, but the best setup was Porsche's Active Ride suspension.

I've sampled this high-voltage damping system on the Panamera and Taycan already, where its ability to dynamically raise, lower, and even incline the car impressed the hell out of me. It's just as good here, offering an ultra-plush ride when you need it, and a super-sharp feel when you want it.

That suspension comes at a $7,790 premium here, and sadly you can only get it on the top two trims, the Cayenne S and Cayenne Turbo. The Turbo starts at around $170,000, but the one I drove was optioned up over $220,000. No, dear reader, it's not just the 911 that's getting pricey.

• Driving Porsche’s most powerful car—and no, it’s not a 911 - Ars Technica

Cover of Excellence

Speaking of Porsches, my take on the 911 GT3 as compared to the 911 Cup appears on the cover of this month's Excellence magazine. Being in print is always a treat. Having the cover feature? Extra sweet.

That's all from me this week. Thanks as ever for reading. Again, if you notice anything weird on this week’s newsletter, please give me a shout. Comments are on.

Back in 1965, a young singer who’d already earned a strong following among the faithful of such folk greats as Woody Guthrie and Dave Van Ronk, took to the stage at the Newport Folk Festival, and almost created a riot by pulling out an electric Stratocaster guitar instead of his traditional acoustic Gibson.

At least, that’s what the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown would have you believe. I wasn’t even a twinkle in my dad’s eye at that point, and he surely wasn’t cool enough to be there himself, but so I have no first- or second-hand recounting myself. From what I’ve read, though, the depiction of shouts and cries and dismay in the film is rather overstating the event itself. It’s more of an encapsulation of the angst that followed him and his decidedly rock-flavored backing performers over the next year or so, fans calling him Judas for what he was doing to the folk movement.

Nevertheless, that moment is something of a bellwether of Bob Dylan’s career, a time when he decided it was time to prove that soulful music doesn’t have to be plucked out on an acoustic guitar. Some of his fledgling fanbase surely checked out at that point, but in retrospect, that was still just the beginning of his global stardom.

At nearly 80 years old, it’s hard to see Ferrari as a company that’s just beginning, but this weekend it did something radical: it unveiled its first EV. It’s called the Luce, it has over 1,000 horsepower, and it looks all the world like a happy car from a happy sci-fi movie. It’s hardly the angry aesthetic that so many modern Ferraris skew towards, and, surprising nobody, it hasn’t gone over particularly well.

The response I’ve seen online has been overwhelmingly negative. I confess that I’m a little tired of people immediately hating anything new and different, and so my gut makes me want to be contrarian simply for the sake of shushing the haters, but I have a few more specific problems with this reaction.

The first is that to judge a car you’ve only seen in a 1:1 thumbnail on Instagram is more than a little unfair. The Luce is a car where the intricate details are everything, and those details simply aren’t conveyed in the aforementioned, low-res, overly compressed preview.

I spent a fair few hours over the past weekend pondering that car in person, and while I confess my initial reaction was, well, not positive, I genuinely started to come around to it. Does it give me a yearning deep in my soul like say a 355 or F40? No. Do I appreciate the originality here? Yeah, I do.

That’s doubly true of the interior. I really didn’t have a good reaction to that either when I got a first look earlier this year. But, seeing it inside the car, surrounded by leather and all positioned perfectly, I was blown away. It’s among the greatest interiors in the world.

The bigger problem I have with this knee-jerk online reaction is that everyone is dismissing this car based on a look when there’s a much bigger story to tell here. This isn’t some character-free blob that’ll drive you to work while you doomscroll your brain into oblivion. This is genuinely a car that’s meant to be driven.

Ferrari’s engineers told me they went to great flengths to bring genuine fun and engagement to the car, including a novel paddle system that adjusts torque output and regen to bring some of the feel of shifting to what should be a delightful amount of performance from the quad-motor setup.

And yes, it’s Ferrari’s heaviest car by a long shot, but in the world of performance EVs, it’s remarkably light. It’s within 100 pounds of Porsche’s Taycan Turbo GT with the Weissach Pack, a car that is an absolute thrill ride.

To get the Taycan that light, Porsche’s engineers had to evict the rear seats. The Luce, meanwhile, still has a full interior. Ponder that for a moment when you think about what Ferrari’s engineers could do when they decide to make something properly sporty and battery-powered.

But the most interesting aspect for me is how Ferrari created the sound for the Luce, pumping the raw output from an accelerometer attached to the rear motors through an amplifier. It’s the same concept as an electric guitar, which makes but a tiny twang without an amp, but screams an unholy racket with the right combination of pedals and skill.

And that’s why Dylan was in my head this past weekend. Much like fans struggled to make sense of the noises made by early pioneers like Charlie Christian and Les Paul, I’m not surprised that many casual tifosi can’t get their heads around the Luce.

And maybe that’s okay. There’s a lot more changing here than just sound. Ferrari seems content to be creating something for a new generation of enthusiasts here -- or, as Ferrari CMO Enrico Galliera put it, to extend the “Ferrari Community.”

Will it be successful in that regard and become the car that brings Ferrari into a new generation of motoring? Or, will this unveil be the motoring equivalent of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where many of Bob Dylan’s fans rioted when he started strumming on an electric guitar?

61 years later, that guy’s career seems to still be doing alright, and he, of course, went to reshape his sound again and again. That big shift in 1965, though, really helped catapult him into the massive, mainstream superstar he became.

Will the Luce help Ferrari do the same? The company hopes so. You can’t talk of extending the community without going more mainstream. But there’s one key area where my over-wrought folk/Ferrari comparison here falls apart: price. The Luce is set to become one of Ferrari’s most expensive models, starting at €550,000 in its home Italian market.

That makes it nearly twice as expensive as the Roma, the company’s current most accessible model. Now, I fully realize that Ferraris have never been exactly attainable, but pricing this thing above such exotics as the 12Cilindri effectively rules it out as a market-expansion machine. It just pushes it further into a curious niche of mainstream practicality but an ultra-exotic price tag.

Will it be a success? Can the Luce be the kind of appreciating asset that the brand relies upon? And, most importantly, does this thing drive well enough to silence the armchair critics and keyboard warriors? Only time will tell on all those fronts.

In the meantime, you can read my full take on the Luce and all its details at these fine outlets:

• Ferrari’s First EV Is Here! Meet the Polarizing, Powerful and Seriously Expensive Luce - Edmunds

• Ferrari Luce unveiled: Here’s the first car from Jony Ive’s design house - Engadget

Greetings from Italy, where I’m getting an early look at a thing I’ll tell you all about soon enough. I hopped down here from Munich, where I was getting a little go behind the wheel of a Porsche I likewise can’t tell you much about.

I can at least say it was the new electric Cayenne Coupe, Porsche’s 1,139-horsepower super-SUV that seats five in superb comfort before scrambling their brains by accelerating from zero to 60 mph in 2.4 seconds. More on that soon enough.

What can I tell you about? A certain Volvo. It’s the new EX60, the all-electric counterpart to the brand’s most successful SUV in the United States. I spent a few days wheeling a few different flavors of the all-new machine around the greater Barcelona region, and I was left generally impressed.

The EX60 is a calm and extremely competent SUV, whether you go for the lower-spec, 369-hp, single-motor P6 trim or dial it up to the 503-hp P10 trim. There’s even more coming, with a 670-hp P12 model for the future.

That’ll be the longest-range version as well, with Volvo promising something in the area of 400 miles on a charge. Sadly the other two come up quite a bit short of that: 320 miles for the P10 and 307 miles for the P6.

That’s honestly plenty of range, but with BMW’s iX3 hitting dealers soon doing 434 miles on a charge and offering similar performance as the P10 at a lower price, I fear many cross-shoppers will tend towards the Bavarian option. Those who select the Swedish route, though, I don’t think will be disappointed.

That’s just the highlights. You can read my full impressions of the SUV here:

• 2027 Volvo EX60 Review - Capital One

• 2027 Volvo EX60 first drive: An ultra-smooth SUV for around $60k - Engadget

That’s all from me this week. Next time, I’ll have all the details on the Italian and German reasons for this week-long European sojourn. And, with any luck, I’ll be writing from somewhere a bit more domestic.

Good morning, dear reader. I’ve been at home for more than a full week now, enjoying some mostly miserable weather here in New York, a trend that is finally shifting this weekend.

I’ve not only had time to catch up on so many of my projects around here that have been dragging on, but also to get to drive my cars for a change. Don’t get me wrong, wheeling the cars of others all around the world is a real privilege, but when you’re away from home as much as I am, there’s real joy in taking your old, familiar machines out to run errands or catch a movie -- even if refueling them stings an awful lot right now.

But it’s not always driving that I’m doing on my travels. On one of my recent trips to Japan, I headed north out of Tokyo to ride a train. The Smile Train, to be exact, a railway line more formally called the Akita Nairiku Jukan Tetsudo Railway. It’s reputed to be Japan’s most scenic railway. I’ve visited Japan many times, rarely straying more than a day trip away from Tokyo, and was really looking for an opportunity to get out into the country.

This was it. That line runs through Akita Prefecture, a place that Amanda and I had hoped would be filled with fuzzy, photogenic dogs. Alas, we saw only one of that particular breed of inu while we were up there, but the Smile Train itself was literally littered with pictures of the things. They were romping in the snow, standing majestically in fields, and generally looking a lot warmer and more welcoming than I know their breed can sometimes be.

The train ride itself was fun, but the time we spent on either end was a real joy. On one side, there’s Kakunodate, full of authentic, Edo-period samurai homes that are a trip back to a time I’ve seen recreated in so many Kurosawa films. On the other end, we stayed in Hirosaki, land of more varieties of apple pie than I could sample during my brief stay there. And that was despite my best efforts.

It was a lovely trip, and I feel very fortunate to be able to document part of it for Mastercard’s travel site.

• Japan’s most scenic train ride takes you to sakura heaven and apple pie nirvana - Mastercard

A question for you

On that note, I’m really enjoying my limited forays into travel writing, and I’m also struggling to find homes for reviews of various products I get access to from time to time.

I’ve been professionally writing product reviews for going on 30 years now, and it’s a little sad to me that placing them is harder today than ever before.

So, I’m tempted to do more of that on here. My question, then: Would that be of interest? It’d rarely be more than once a week, and I would of course try to keep it interesting. There’s a little poll up there for ya, or of course you’re always welcome to comment, email, or find me on some other platform.

My latest ink

Showing up in print is an increasingly rare treat these days, so I’m happy to share that you can catch me in three magazines this month.

In Excellence, I wrote about Porsche’s latest electric Macan, the GTS. For Roundel, my impressions from behind the wheel of a prototype of BMW’s upcoming i3. And finally, for Car Graphic in Japan, I wrote about Lucid’s current struggles in the States and whether its next models will really change its fate.

That’s all from me for now. I’m soon off to Germany to drive another electric Porsche, and then I’ll head down to Rome for the unveiling of what will almost certainly be the most controversial electric car of the year... maybe the decade. I can’t wait to see it and show y’all what it looks like.

Until then, try not to be too controversial yourself, and enjoy what’s left of your weekend.

Hi there, writing from an unpleasant seating area in an unpleasant airport as I await the flight that might just take me home. It’s not the flight I was supposed to take. That one left about four hours ago, without me of course. With any luck, I’ll get home while there’s still some weekend left, but the travel gods have not been kind to me lately, so I’m trying not to get my hopes up.

Since my last note I took a few weeks off to tour the Japanese countryside with my better half. We had a mostly wonderful time, which I’ll be sharing a bit more on in a future update, and part of the reason why I had such a good time was because I did my damndest to completely ignore my phone while I was away.

After reading a Washington Post piece on the benefits of even short-term digital detoxing (gift link here), I’ve been actively trying to break the cycle of reaching for my phone whenever I have a spare moment, getting back into the pattern of gazing around idly instead of tapping and swiping and sharing.

The results have been surprising. I constantly found thinking it was later than it actually was, that the days were going by more slowly. I was more engaged and happier and having more fun whilst wandering through rural Japan, even when I was walking around in sopping wet shoes thanks to my failure to pack appropriately.

Happy to share more on my developing process there if there’s interest, but before moving on to this week’s links, I’ll just encourage you to give it a shot. Forget timers, forget daily limits, just try a little time away from your phone. I think you’ll like it.

How AI is aiding car design

Semi-intelligent, questionably sentient agents are invading new car infotainment screens like a plague, providing occasionally helpful, generally accurate suggestions. I’m hardly an AI zealot, but I confess I’m actually seeing in-car AI as a useful feature in many cases. But what about AI designing new cars?

That’s not exactly what’s happening, but the agentic wave is absolutely cresting over new-car design. For The Verge, I spoke with experts at several companies to get a sense of how AI is shaping that process. For the most part, AI is contributing to reduce the traditional five-plus year design cycle for a new car, helping manufacturers better surf the increasingly chaotic global waves of trade.

For now, the humans are very much at the reins, but it’s only a matter of time before some manufacturer rolls out an AI-shaped concept, probably something with a vestigial fifth wheel hanging off the rear or a pair of headlights not quite pointed in the same direction.

If you’re more into listening than reading, you can catch my thoughts on the latest episode of The Vergecast.

• The AI-designed car is taking shape - The Verge

• What an AI-Designed Car Looks Like - The Vergecast

Inside Toyota’s semi-dystopian future city

I love all sorts of speculative fiction, but I have a particular affinity for stuff with dystopian or post-apocalyptic angles. A significant portion of that former category takes place in corporate worlds where things sure seem awfully nice, but give the surface a little fingernail scratch and you see some horrors lurking underneath.

I couldn’t help picking up vibes from both subgenres whilst wandering through Toyota’s Woven City, a proto tech utopia that has the potential to be a privacy nightmare. I counted eight cameras at one intersection, all connected to and monitored by an AI-based system Toyota is planning to license to other businesses and municipalities. The promise of those cameras is to create city streets that can warn passing cars about kids chasing balls or runaway baby strollers, and yet the demonstrations I saw in Japan spent more time identifying shoplifters in stores and automatically tracking them across multiple cameras.

The overall off vibe wasn’t helped by streets that seemed completely bereft of residents. I spoke with a few, preselected people who live there, but I didn’t see anyone wandering the pristine sidewalks, didn’t spot a single pup watering the immaculate gardens, and didn’t hear a single kid playing.

I did, though, see some impressive technology, like a rolling robot that helps non-autonomous cars drive autonomously and a three-wheeled, leaning scooter that looked like a total blast to ride. If Toyota can keep this place focused on that kind of tech and maybe dial down the Big Brother stuff a smidge, this could turn out to be a genuinely fascinating experiment.

The presence of some real-life human beings in there might also liven up the joint, but it’s still early days.

• Toyota built a $10 billion private utopia—what’s going on in there? - Ars Technica

• Toyota Built a City From Scratch, But Is This $10 Billion Future Utopia Too Perfect to Work? - MotorTrend

That’s all from me this week. I’m still trying to get home from Spain, where I spent a few days getting familiar with Volvo’s upcoming EX60 SUV. It’s an all-electric crossover that looks great and is set to face off against BMW’s iX3 and Mercedes-Benz’s electric GLC later this year. Sadly, that’s about all I can tell you about it for now, but stay tuned for more. Until next time, be good and do well.

p.s. I did finally get home, a mere 10 hours later than scheduled.

If you liked it this far, please consider sharing!

The slow and steady march towards full automotive autonomy has, from the very beginning, been closely related to the advancements we’ve seen in the world of artificial intelligence. However, few companies working to develop autonomy are happy to let the machines do all the learning. Most have some way of getting in there and massaging the data, annotating or tagging or otherwise categorizing objects or scenarios to enable more control over the resulting digital driver that will, some day, take you from A to B.

Nissan and its partner Wayve have taken a different approach with what will be the next-gen ProPilot driver assistance system. Nissan’s engineers didn’t spend time teaching the car what a pedestrian is or how they move, what a cyclist is or how they behave, or indeed how to deal with a double-parked car on the side of the road.

They simply took a ready and willing digital brain and showed it how to drive. They fed it raw footage of good drivers driving in good ways and basically let the network figure it out. According to Tetsuya Iijima, Executive Chief Engineer of ADAS at Nissan, who led me on a scenic trip around Shimbashi and Ginza, the cars simply picked up the habits of those certified drivers. I have to say, the result was quite impressive.

The system, which Iijima called a brain, runs on a single Qualcomm SoC, but he was adamant that they’re not using Qualcomm’s dedicated automated driving software stack. The software I experienced comes to Nissan via Wayve, a British AI startup that’s helping Nissan make a big leap forward in the autonomy game. It’s potentially a great business pairing for Nissan, a brand that, in the U.S. at least, isn’t exactly known for pushing the envelope technologically. The company is indeed taking a somewhat conservative approach here, too, but we’ll get more into that in a moment.

Nissan doesn’t have a formal name for how it will market this system, just calling it a next-generation ProPilot, but as you can tell by the pictures, it relies on some extra hardware. The hat that Ariya is wearing isn’t just for style. Some extra sensors are hiding up there. The full suite includes 11 cameras and five radars looking all around the vehicle, plus one lidar sensor looking straight ahead.

Interestingly, though, there’s no complex sensor fusion happening here. The car relies entirely on the cameras at lower speeds, which meant my trip through Tokyo didn’t touch the lidar sensor at all. That’s only called in for higher speeds on the highway, where Iijima said cameras can’t see far enough to make the vehicle safe at speed.

And what about the radar? Those are for redundancy, but they’re not really tied into the autonomy feature at all. The Ariya still has its basic automatic emergency braking, which provides something of a safety net for this AI driver, much as it would for a human one.

Iijima slipped into that autonomy trope of saying the system is already safer than a human driver, but in the roughly 45-minute tour of Tokyo I received, I didn’t spot anything that contradicts that. He didn’t have to intervene once. The car handled everything from illegally parked delivery vans to indecisive pedestrians making a last-minute dives for the crosswalk.

Turns across busy lanes were handled without issue, even when the late-day sun was shining right into the car’s main lens. Most impressive was how smooth the car was. There was no jerkiness to the steering, no abrupt applications of gas or brake in reacting to those flocks of on-foot commuters.

That was helped by the system’s overall relaxed way of driving. The car accelerated slowly and took its time progressing through intersections. Chances are, you or I would have been more aggressive, even in this most polite of driving countries. But honestly, when the car is handling the duties behind the wheel, I never find myself in a rush. I certainly wasn’t on this day, anyway: My destination was the starting point of our Ginza loop.

Overall, this Nissan and Wayve mashup didn’t do anything that Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” can do, or the new MB.DRIVE Assist Pro that Mercedes-Benz is set to debut on the CLA this summer (which I wrote about here). But, it did it all more smoothly, and in about as bustling an urban environment as you can get.

So it’s all very impressive, but how is Nissan being conservative about it? The company is taking its time with the rollout. It won’t hit Japan until sometime in the fiscal year 2027. Iijima said it will come to the United States, but not until some time after that.

The big question is whether and where it will be hands-off in the U.S. Iijima said the technology is more than capable, even to the point of operating at Level 4, eyes-off mode. How Nissan restricts the system in the U.S., then, is largely a question of liability. Given the litigious nature of American drivers, it’s probably a safe bet that we’ll still be required to keep our hands on the wheel and our eyes on the road.

Iijima said that this feature will likely be an options package, and while he wouldn’t speculate on pricing, it’ll follow Nissan’s value-packed brand image. “We don’t want to sell at a very high price tag,” he said, and it actually could be cheaper than you might think.

“Currently, each sensor has its own brain,” Iijima said, resulting in a series of processors scattered around the vehicle. But with the new Qualcomm processor, there’s enough to process all that data centrally. “[It] is so intelligent and capable that the raw signal can be used. The hardware is reduced,” he said.

Iijima said that, once the initial R&D cost has cleared Nissan’s books, this could actually be cheaper than ProPilot 2.0 on cars today. That’s because current systems rely on a mesh of processors and sensors scattered about the car. This next-generation system simplifies all that onto a single chip.

Beyond that, Nissan won’t take the approach of just throwing the sensors on every car and then charging a fee to enable it. You’ll only get it if you pay for it.

It’s all sounding very promising, but it’s also sounding a long time away. In the accelerating world of driver assistance, 18 months is a lifetime. I’m tempted to say the autonomy landscape will look radically different in a year and a half, but then all this stuff is taking much longer to come to market than anybody thought, so it could just turn out that Nissan’s timed this perfectly.

Thanks for reading Around the Next Bend! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Tires deserve more respect. We media types in the automotive industry are inundated with press releases touting some new performance benchmark by some new performance car -- quicker 0 - 60 times or greater G-forces on the skid pad or, best yet, some new Nürburgring lap time that makes a new car the fastest thing ever in whatever hyper-specific vehicle niche that the manufacturer has decided to play within.

These releases talk about horsepower gains, suspension tweaks, aerodynamic efficiencies, and sometimes even the heroics of the drivers behind the wheel. Often, it’s the high-performance Michelin, Pirelli, or other weapons-grade rubber that delivers the lion’s share of the performance, tires that rarely get more than a token mention in those effervescent press releases.

Why? Because tires don’t sell cars, and even the most exciting ones are still black and round and largely hidden from view. Yet there’s some fascinating improvements being made down there, while most in the interest of higher grip and longer life, factors you’ll never notice on a casual Sunday drive.

That’s not the case with the latest from Nokian. Before I’d even left my driveway on the things, I could tell that the new Hakkapeliitta 01 tires were something different from what I’d experienced before. I’ve been running and racing Nokian’s studded winter tires on my Subarus for well over a decade now, going back to the Hakka 7, tires that spit out their studs with more vigor than an ‘80s outfielder with a mouth full of chaw.

I swore I’d never buy another set after that, but the Hakka 8s did markedly better at keeping their studs where they belong, with each generation improving from there. This past year, it was the Hakka 10s I ran, which lost but a few studs over a full season of running. This new Hakkapeliitta 01 tire, though, does something very different: hiding its studs altogether when not needed.

It’s not quite the James Bond-style magic trick that some more creative headlines might have made you think when the tech was announced a little over a month ago, but it is impressive just the same. Each of the hundreds of studs in the surface of the tire is backed by a temperature-sensitive material that softens when warm. Simply driving the tire on a dry surface generates enough friction and heat to allow the studs to be pushed back into the tread of the tire by the weight of the vehicle.

However, driving on snow and ice, the cold surface causes the backing material to harden and expand, keeping the stud extended even when crushed by the weight of your car.

I dig into the details quite a bit more over in my review for The Verge, but the net result is a tire that is substantially quieter on dry roads, which is what most people drive on most of the time, even in the dead of winter.

The noise reduction was immediately apparent, but the tires also promise a 30 percent reduction in road wear, which should also result in a corresponding reduction in suspended particulates. That’s the formal term for dust kicked up by tires like these, which is a genuine health concern.

So, even though they weren’t designed by Q Branch, the tech here genuinely impressed me, and it is a rare example of a new tire development actually getting the attention it deserves.

• These retractable studded tires might save our roads, ears, and lungs - The Verge

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Hello, dear readers. Writing from home at the moment, though much of this week was spent out in Pahrump, NV, a former desert wasteland and global conspiracy theory hotspot that’s increasingly turning into a motorsports paradise thanks to the remarkable success of Spring Mountain. I was out there playing with some Corvettes whilst also getting a little too much sunshine and heat. Upper 90s F in mid-March? No thanks.

It feels like just yesterday I was up on the ice in Sweden. That trip was to test out a bunch of different prototypes, the first being BMW’s i3, which I discussed a few weeks back. This week, I can finally tell you what else I was up to up there.

The only way to grow newsletters like this is through reader sharing, so if you like this, please pass it on. It means a lot!

Elaphe’s in-wheel motors could change everything

When it comes to suspension design, reducing weight at the wheels is key. Any pound out there counts double against you when it comes to handling prowess or ride quality. With that knowledge, it’s understandable why so many performance enthusiasts feel physically ill when they see big heavy electric motors hanging out with the brakes and knuckles and ball joints and everything else.

But talk to an in-wheel motor company like Donut Lab or Elaphe, and they’ll tell you such concerns are vastly overblown and easily outweighed by the potential benefits. I got a chance to sample that myself at the wheel of three different prototype cars created by Elpahe, the company that was to build the hub motors for the former Lordstown project.

Elaphe thankfully survived that sad debacle, now leaner and meaner and making a case for much more widespread adoption of its technology. I was incredibly impressed by what I saw and felt. A quad-motor Ioniq 5 was a blast, but even more remarkable was how a pair of motors bolted over the brakes on a certain large American performance car turned it into a real joy on ice, without reducing the sound or fury of its 5.0-liter V8.

Sadly, ice is not the best place to verify those aforementioned unsprung mass concerns. Still, the experience changed me from skeptic to believer, and Elaphe’s team tells me they’ve had equal success opening the eyes of engineers at multiple global OEMs. You can read all about the why at these fine outlets:

• A New World of EV Performance? Testing the Elaphe Hub-Motor Prototype on Ice in a Hyundai Ioniq 5 - MotorTrend

• In-hub motors make this humble Hyundai a monster on ice - The Verge

The smartest Corvette spec is back

Even though I’d generally prefer a light and nimble sports car to a big sledgehammer of a thing, I have a strange affinity for Corvettes. I think it’s somehow baked into my DNA. I don’t know how many of my relatives own or have owned the things, but it’s a lot, up to and including my dad, whose Roman Red C1 came and sadly went long before I did.

While the current-generation ZR1 is the edition that most set my world on fire, the previous-generation Grand Sport was the one that gave me the most smiles. It’s still something of a high-water mark for the breed in my eyes, attainable and quick and lacking in nothing. Now, there’s a new Grand Sport, and it’s got a lot more of everything, including hybrid power, thanks to the ZR1X’s electric motor at the front axle.

Personally, I feel like I’d still prefer the C7 Grand Sport, but we’ll have to wait until I get a go in this new one before I can say that for sure.

• The Corvette E-Ray is dead, long live the Grand Sport X - Ars Technica

Audi’s new Q3 is a step in the right direction

It wasn’t just Audi’s epic RS6 Avant that I was driving out in California a few weeks back. I was really out there sampling the new Q3, one of the most important models in the company’s lineup. The new Q3 predictably grows with this new generation but also makes a few key steps forward in interior design and other features that make me think that Audi is starting to find its mojo again.

• Audi Q3 review - Capital One

• Audi Q3 review - JD Power

RIP Afeela

Finally, this week came the news that the fruit of the Sony Honda Mobility mashup is dead. The Afeela 1 is no more. Despite my repeatedly calling this project misguided, I take no joy in this turn of events. I spoke with several engineers and other folks at SHM, all of whom were excited to be doing something different, and now we’ll never get to see whether it would have fared better on the open road than it did showing up on that same CES stage year after year.

That’s pretty much a clean sweep for Honda’s future American EV plans, a tabula rasa that seems short-sighted given the cost of gas right now. I’m still optimistic for the future of EVs here, though, a topic I delved into a bit with Tom Merritt and his DTNS crew this week.

• EV Boom But Not in USA - DTNS Live

• The Afeela 1 came too late and now is gone too soon - Engadget

And just like that, we’re all caught up. I’m here at home for two solid weeks, a fact that brings me no small amount of joy and might just mean I can finally find enough time to clean both my office and my inbox. But there’s still plenty of good stuff coming up online soon enough. More on that as it all goes live.

Until then, do good and be well.

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I’m no Snake Plissken. I’ve never been arrested, don’t have a single tattoo, and prefer my shirts with sleeves. I do have an eye patch, but I don’t wear it very often.

Where Mr. Plissken’s goal was getting in to and then back out of a dystopian, burning Los Angeles, I had already managed my escape. Now, it was time for the return. I’d just completed a day of wheeling in Audi’s newest and littlest (for America, anyway) SUV, the Q3. I was up in the scenic, quaint, and generally lovely town of San Luis Obispo, a place that surely felt a lot farther away from Los Angeles than 200 miles.

But that’s how far Google Maps said I had to traverse the morning of my return, back down to LAX to catch a noontime flight. It was to be a drive across some of California’s most lovely coastal scenery, a prospect clouded by LA’s ever-present traffic.

Plissken dodged gridlock with a glider in his first film, a submarine in the second. Me? I had something even more potent at my disposal: An Audi RS6.

For the uninitiated, the RS6 is a weapons-grade, 4.0-liter V8 making 621 horsepower and 627 pound-feet of torque, clad in a nondescript wagon shape. Looking with a bit more intent, though, reveals the 21-inch wheels wrapped in summer performance tires, plus the hulking fenders required to contain them.

The theme is definitely subtle muscle, further sold thanks to the Nardo Gray that this one had been sprayed. Pair that with black wheels and trim, and you have a vaguely ominous, thoroughly classy, and incredibly desirable means of escape. Or, in my case, reentry.

The prospect of spending three hours behind the wheel of this thing would normally be one of unmitigated joy, despite the traffic that I knew was in my future. This trip, though, was tempered with a bit of sadness. I figured this would be the last time I had a go in the car that is, to me, Audi’s most desirable still on offer.

But not for long. The last RS6s have rolled off the line in Germany, and so whatever’s left is whatever’s left. I’d better enjoy this, then.

To best mitigate the traffic situation, I planned to get up early, hitting the road around 5am to try and beat the worst of the sorry souls who drive into or through Los Angeles on an average morning. However, something woke me up at 2:30 and, after a few minutes of restless pondering, the promise of dark, open roads and 600-plus horsepower had me up and out of bed.

The car was waiting for me outside the hotel, staged to swallow my biggest suitcase with ease. (I’d brought along my full racing suit for my recent drive of Porsche’s 911 Cup.) 30 cubic feet of cargo space is the kind of practicality you won’t often find in a machine with this kind of potential velocity. Even BMW’s M5 Touring falls short, managing 27 cubic feet under the hatch.

That done, I grabbed a few murky photos in the valet area, then hit the road. First stop? Gas. The RS6 was at about a quarter tank, and that wouldn’t do. I swung by the closest Chevron, put in my card, started pumping, and immediately exclaimed something so profane I was glad that, at 3:55 am, there was nobody there to hear me. $6.19 a gallon was a bit of a shock coming from New York, where the same stuff costs about half that.

70-odd dollars later, I was back on the road and heading into the darkness. The route down from LA is sadly not the most exciting. You’d need to make a hell of a detour to make it truly enjoyable, and in my eagerness to get to the airport, I couldn’t wander ftoo far afield. That said, a route with long stretches on the highway punctuated by a few twisty bits felt just about ideal for an Avant that exists in the Germanic ideal of big speed on big roads.

The 101 and 154 are hardly the Autobahn, and the mélange of materials used to pave them drove some unpleasant noises and vibrations up through the stiffened chassis of the RS6. Its air suspension is actually quite compliant in Comfort mode, but those big wheels and low-profile tires with rock-hard sidewalls weren’t fitted to minimize NVH.

So I simply turned up the excellent Bang & Olufsen sound system and settled in. I started with some mellow tunes, a mix of mostly Kruder and Dorfmeister, an appropriately chill Germanic soundtrack for cruising down the California coast hours before sunrise.

On the highway, the RS6 is as effortless as any other Audi, with adaptive cruise control and active lane-keep, meaning I could sit here and ponder the interior. The dash with the carbon-look weave and satin aluminized trim looks classy, and while the dual-screen MMI system has always felt a bit discordant, the more I see of Audi’s current line of interiors, the more I miss this generation.

Everything looks and feels great, and while I could do with a lot less piano black plastic, I greatly miss the physical controls that Audi scattered across the steering wheel here. This generation of Virtual Cockpit, too, offers far more configurability and capability than what they’re slapping in current cars. So much for progress. Concept C and its complete interior re-think can’t come soon enough.

Few modern cars offer the feel and aggression of this thing, too. Tapping the RS button on the wheel (which really should have been red) turns this Avant into a far angrier animal. On the highway, it might as well be an EV, its V8 is so silent. But after you hit the button, it clears its throat and is suddenly the perfect accompaniment to your rowdier driving.

Despite its 5,000 pounds, the RS6 is still a joy through narrow, twisty canyon lanes. The steering is quick and eager, and the grip prodigious, even when encountering an unexpected spray of mid-corner gravel.

The brakes are likewise sharp, so much so that this thing is difficult to bring to a smooth stop. I had planned on mentioning that as a mark against, but at one point on the PCH, just coming out of Malibu, some indecisive soul couldn’t choose whether to stay on or get off. Instead, they simply stopped in traffic. The RS6’s too-quick brake pedal saved me an uncomfortable conversation with Audi’s fleet manager that morning.

More awake now, chasing the orange crescent moon on the horizon, I decided to go up-tempo on the soundtrack. I switched over to Spiral Staircases from Alchemist, Curren$y, and Larry June, which I’ve been listening to on repeat since its release. Solo Driver seemed perfectly apt, though I wasn’t driving either a Spyder or a vintage Rolls.

Over the course of the drive, I kept thinking about this car’s demise despite it still feeling ripe for action, and those thoughts carried me back to my own lot in life, a freelance writer adrift with no safety net in an industry made more turbulent by the moment. It’s a bad time to be a journalist, dear reader, and the amazing journey that has been my career feels less certain than ever before.

Whenever I start feeling fatalistic, I throw on something stoic to add a little apathy to my mood. This morning, it was Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, my favorite Stoic work. If you’ve never read it, it’s a thoughtful discourse written by the most powerful, most wealthy man in the world, a literal Roman emperor telling you that you should be happy with whatever miserable lot you’ve been dealt in life.

For that reason and more, I don’t agree with all that he wrote. In fact, I disagree quite heartily with a good chunk of it, but he asks plenty of questions that make me think. I like listening to philosophy on long drives because thinking is all too easy to stop doing when you’re stuck in traffic.

It was about then that I made a slight detour over to US 1 in Malibu to see some of the devastation from last year’s fires, which my good friend Elana Scherr had reminded me of at the previous night’s dinner. 14 months later, it was still a terrible sight, dozens of people’s dream homes brought down to bare concrete supports.

It was a sad, sobering sight, and that was about the time I ditched Marcus Aurelius and switched over to something a bit more motivational. I’ve been spinning Alfredo II plenty since its release, and while there are perhaps fewer lessons I can apply to my own life on there, few performers can drop a cultural reference and make it significant like Freddie Gibbs.

I’d left so early that the dreaded traffic was no problem at all, so early that I had plenty of time for breakfast before I had to return my ride. I stopped at The Coffee Company with the goal of getting a bowl of oatmeal and collecting my thoughts for this very piece. But between the ashes of homes I’d seen and the AI-fanned embers falling onto my own industry, I figured it was a good time to stop pondering the John Carpenter-style dystopia and splurge on something a bit more decadent.

As I sit in the driver’s seat of the RS6 now, stomach full of pancakes, typing out these last few sentences before handing over the keys, I’m still a bit melancholy. This’ll probably be my last time in an RS6 Avant, at least one like this. I’m sad I never got a chance to drive one in its element, on the Autobahn with enough speed to challenge its twin-turbo V8.

But most of all, I’m thankful that I ever had a go at all. And that’s probably the most important lesson: Enjoy what you can while you can. And when you no longer can, be only glad that you did.

This week, the American EV segment got some more bad news, with Honda’s surprise cancellation of its 0 Series EVs. This includes the 0 SUV and Saloon, a pair of cars that made a huge splash at their CES unveilings, and the Acura RSX as well, which was likewise turning heads at last year’s Monterey Car Week festivities.

That stirred up plenty of discussion this week about whether or not this move, which Honda itself says may cost upwards of $15 billion, is the right way to go. I don’t have a lot to add on that front, so I recommend checking out Mack Hogan’s take over at Inside EVs if you’re looking for some perspective.

Well, okay, I’ll just briefly say that it feels like a curious move to eviscerate your EV future in the face of an international conflict that’s set to spike oil costs to unforeseen levels. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today.

I’m here to say that Honda killed the wrong cars. Honda euthanized some of the freshest and compelling EV designs I’ve ever seen, yet the increasingly tepid Sony Honda Mobility joint venture is “operating as usual” per this Car and Driver report. So, Honda’s charming $50,000-ish EVs are dead, but the $100,000-ish Afeela 1 is, for now at least, still on target to enter production later this year at Honda’s Ohio factory.

I’ve been watching the Afeela 1 take shape for six years now, and each year its announced specifications just got less and less compelling. In 2025, I said it looked like “A PlayStation 4 in a PS5 era” and in 2026 it didn’t look much better.

I don’t like saying negative things about a product that many, many extremely talented people have worked extremely hard to develop. And indeed, there are some compelling ideas in the Afeela 1 that may have found success if we were to have sprung forth in the midst of a booming economy full of open-minded consumers.

Instead, we’re at war and still feeling the turbulence from the misguided political attacks on EVs during our last election, waves that are clearly still rattling a lot of executives. The best way to fight that is with right-priced, compelling cars. BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Volvo’s latest EVs are all hitting the right marks on that front, and Honda’s 0 Series looked set to do the same. That they were to be built right here in the U.S. of A. certainly didn’t hurt.

Meanwhile, the Afeela 1 not only targets the dying sedan segment, but is priced comparably to a Lucid Air despite offering none of the range or performance. I’m extremely skeptical that this niche, software-first, luxury sedan will find enough success to warrant its existence, and yet it lives on while Honda’s mass-market, right-priced EVs are dead.

That may change. While Honda can do whatever it likes to its own product portfolio, Afeela 1 is part of the 50/50 Sony Honda Mobility joint venture. Nixing that will require some higher-level negotiations and many more furrowed brows. I’m guessing there’s plenty of frowning going on in Japan right now.

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It’s hard to imagine terrain more different than the snowy middle wilds of Sweden and the desert expanses of Morocco. It’s those dizzying extremes that I’ve covered over the past few weeks, zipping from one to the next with a quick stopover at home to repack the suitcase and see the ones I love to remind myself why I’m doing all this to myself.

It’s been a lot the past few weeks, let me tell you. Here are some of the highlights.

Worth the Weight?

Meet Audi’s new RS5, which has followed BMW’s M5 bravely into the land of the performance PHEV. Yes, it’s got a plug and a big battery, which, as we’ve seen, causes two things to happen. First: The car’s weight increases dramatically (over 1,000 pounds here). Second: The masses on these great internets commence their whining about how Audi has ruined a car that few of them have ever driven or ever even aspired to own.

Here’s what I can tell you: I had zero interest in the previous RS5, but I really, really want one of the new ones. Audi’s last attempt at an RS just felt tame. It looked like an S5 from a distance, wasn’t much better differentiated from up close, and simply wasn’t aggressive enough from behind the wheel.

Literally within seconds of getting behind the wheel of the new RS5, I was drifting it through a tight slalom and giggling like a little boy. Much of the new drama is thanks to a curious electrified rear differential setup, which pairs with the car’s mechanical Torsen center diff to do some wonderful things. Wrap it all in a car that finally has the fenders an RS deserves, and you have a desirable package.

The only real bummer? That we’re not getting the long-roof Avant version pictured above. Maybe if more of you salty keyboard warriors had bought RS6 Avants, we wouldn’t be left pining. I’d do my part, but, well, sadly, neither of these things is exactly compatible with my budget.

• 2027 Audi RS 5 First Drive Review: Return to Form - Edmunds

• 2027 Audi RS5 first drive: Big thrills with a big battery - Engadget

• 2027 Audi RS5 First Drive: 630-HP Plug-In Hybrid Transforms the RS Formula - MotorTrend

i3 on Ice

From Morocco’s dry desolation to Sweden’s icy expanses, we also make the mental trip from Ingolstadt to Munich to sample BMW’s next great sedan, the i3. While the i4 is pretty great in many respects, the i3 gives us a first taste of how good an electric 3 Series can be when it’s designed from the ground up to be battery powered.

I drove it on ice and snow, my two favorite surfaces, got it well and truly sideways, and loved every minute of it. That’s despite this not being a particularly performance-oriented variant. I drove what will be the i3 50 xDrive, with no high-performance drivetrain or suspension upgrades.

If all goes according to plan and the bottom doesn’t completely drop out of the EV market, we’ll see a variety of amped up variants to come, including ones with three and even four motors. I’m excited, and you should be too.

Oh, and make sure you pour one out for the humble i3 hatchback, which never got the love it deserved and is now, thanks to this badge reshuffle, has been properly relegated to history.

• 2027 BMW i3: Prototype Drive - BimmerLife

• 2027 BMW i3 Prototype First Drive Review: Neue Klasse on Ice - Edmunds

• BMW’s i3 prototype conquers the ice with power and technology - Engadget

Intro to Ice Racing

It wasn’t all that long ago (May, to be exact) that I wrote an Ode to Ice Racing for Hagerty. My ice racing club hadn’t held an event in years, thanks to thin ice. Talk was that everything was going to be shut down… and then we got a wild cold snap and everything changed.

My club managed five events on three lakes this season, a fair number for even the glory days when I started racing two decades ago. One of my editors at Ars Technica was kind enough to express interest in a how-to piece of sorts, and I was more than happy to oblige with this explainer on my favorite form of racing.

• Zero grip, maximum fun: A practical guide to getting into amateur ice racing - Ars Technica

The CX-5’s Most-Needed Upgrade

No, it’s not all drifting priceless prototypes and overpowered hybrids. I drive regular cars too, people, cars like Mazda’s new CX-5. It’s bigger and better throughout, but the big update is in the dashboard. The company’s dated infotainment experience finally gets a big reboot, and it’s genuinely good, but I confess I will miss the rotary controller.

• 2026 Mazda CX-5 Review - Capital One

• 2026 Mazda CX-5 Review - JD Power

The World’s Largest Arcade -- Both of Them

Some stories are more fun than others to tell, but few are going to ever top this. Last year, I visited two amazing arcades, both of which proudly proclaim to be the World’s Largest. My mission: to find the truth. Is there a bitter rivalry here? Creative bookkeeping? Guinness recordkeepers paid off in shiny tokens?

Nah, it’s just a case of a couple of stellar places that are both well worth your business.

• Which of these two arcades is the “world largest”—and does it matter? - Ars Technica

That’s all from me this week, this entry written from 39,208 feet above northern Quebec. I’m headed home for one whole solitary day but, by the time this newsletter flies, I’ll already be back in the air myself, this time headed west to drive a few more special things. I’ll have details on that soon, plus full impressions of the other things I was driving up in Sweden, which in many ways were even more special than those priceless prototypes from BMW.

Hello, dear reader. Sorry for going quiet there for a few weeks, but thanks to an abundance of travel and some ill-timed embargoes, I frankly didn’t have a lot of time to check in or reason to do so.

The travel continues this week (writing this from seat 21C, 35,000 feet above Ola, Arkansas, to be specific), and the embargoes have been loosed, and there’s plenty to talk about that. So let’s not waste any time getting to business!

Apple Car Redux?

We never did get a look-see at Apple’s doomed Project Titan. That was the codename for the once fabled “Apple Car” that never drove anyone anywhere but surely did help a fair few Apple blogs reach new traffic milestones over the years. I still hope that someone breaks ranks someday and tells all, but for now, we have to look to another hemisphere entirely to get a clue for what might have been.

Italy, specifically, and Ferrari, where the first vehicle interior from Jony Ive’s LoveFrom design studio will be found. It’s the interior for the Ferrari Luce, formerly known as the Elettrica, a name that I’m glad to see nixed, if only because I always had a nagging doubt I’d spelled it wrong.

Luce (”light” in Italian) is not only nicer to say but easier to spell. It had better be easy on the eye, too, because you can be sure that Ferrari’s first-ever EV will face an inordinate amount of scrutiny when it’s unveiled later this summer. We still don’t know what it looks like, but we do know the interior.

I give the full rundown in my write-up for Engadget, but suffice to say it’s a really striking interface. It has a touchscreen, yes, but that’s decidedly secondary to the overall experience of controlling and piloting the machine.

The attention to detail is off the charts, from the tiny lens in the windshield wiper speed toggle to the immaculately sculpted and anodized seat rails. But, that said, it is all so extremely clinical that it feels like a departure from anything Ferrari has ever done before. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it certainly doesn’t scream “interior of a car that must be driven fast” in the same way that the interior of, say, the 12Cilindri does.

My other reservation is that it is so, so very Apple-like. I know, Ive had his hands in virtually every product Apple made for the past few decades, and so you’d expect to see some of that same vibe here. However, I’d hoped this would be an opportunity for LoveFrom to differentiate itself from what’s been done before and not continue down the same path paved in silver, space gray, and rose gold.

Maybe I just need to give it more time, and eventually this style will be known less as “Apple-like” and more as “LoveFrom-like.” Regardless, it’s immaculate and it’s tactile and it’s a fun stab in the eye of every other EV that thinks a big dumb touchscreen is enough.

• Inside Ferrari’s Luce EV: The Jony Ive interior is here - Engadget

Porsche’s latest GTS is electric, literally and figuratively

Welcome to the new Macan Electric GTS, the latest in Porsche’s increasing number of alphanumeric designations for its electric cars. We still have a long way to go until the company’s battery-powered machines reach the same level of alphanumeric excess as seen on the 911, but I feel like we’ll probably get there.

What’s the GTS? It looks to follow the same path as the pre-hybrid 911 GTSs, adding some fun go-fast bits and blacked-out trim to spice up the look and feel of the machine. It isn’t quite as quick as the Turbo, nor as expensive, but the $125,920 as-configured sticker on the Carmine Red machine you see here is certainly no small ask. Worth it? Head on over to Alloy to find out.

• G-T-S-U-V - Alloy

Audi’s bigger, bolder A6

Audi’s in the middle of what could be seen as a full lineup reshuffling, a process that hasn’t always been the cleanest, but is finally starting to make sense. A big part of that defragmentation process is the new A6, which, for 2026, gains power and handling. It had better, because there’s no S6 just yet. Is this good enough to tide you over?

• 2026 Audi A6 Review - Capital One

That’s it for now. There’s plenty more in the hopper, waiting for various embargoes to clear. I’ll circle back as those pop up online, but until then, if all goes well, you can catch me sliding sideways on Peck’s Late smack dab in the middle of New York State. Yes, despite my club basically throwing in the towel last year after season after season of bad ice, we’re back to racing this season, the first time in years, and it feels good.

Good morning from the past, writing this ahead of time as I wing my way back from Sweden. The sun’s just peeking up over the clouds to hit me in the eye through my plane’s icy little window, but I’ve already been on the go for hours, making the long journey home after just over a day in and around the lovely city of Stockholm. There, I got an early look at Volvo’s next and (hopefully) greatest EV yet, the EX60. More on that in just a moment.

It’s a brutally cold one back on the home front, temperatures hovering well below zero. This has been a proper winter, our first in a long time, and while I’m hearing more and more people say they’re already done with it. Personally, I’m loving it -- though I confess I am getting a mite bit sick of the heating bills.

Anyhow, it’s been an eventful week, and I have a few fun features to share with you. Let’s get to it.

Volvo’s EX60 is the latest revolutionary electric SUV

If you’re in the market for a mid-sized electric SUV later this year, hoo boy, did you time things just right. BMW’s iX3 has already dazzled me, and that’s not far off from dealers, while the Mercedes-Benz GLC also looks set to impress. Now, they’ve got some competition from Volvo in the form of the EX60.

As you can guess by the name, it’s meant to be the all-electric alternative to the XC60, Volvo kindly not throwing its entire nomenclature to the wind as the brand soldiers on through this EV transition. I spoke with freshly returned CEO Håkan Samuelsson before the event, whose enthusiasm for battery-powered vehicles is very nearly as strong as it was the last time he held that title.

That said, he now acknowledges that this EV transition is going to take a little longer than he’d initially hoped.

“We need probably now a bridge longer than we thought before for America and China,” he said the morning before unveiling the car. “Let’s wait for the customer.”

So, he’ll be patient, but he’s intent on proving that EVs can go toe-to-toe with internal combustion when they’re priced right, have enough range, and recharge quickly.

He says the EX60 has the right stuff, and a maximum range of 400 miles plus a whopping 670 horsepower certainly sounds impressive. But while Samuelsson repeatedly cited the Model Y as proof that there’s demand for electric SUVs, that thing can be had for as little as $40,000. The EX60, meanwhile, will be priced around $60,000. Worth that not insubstantial delta? I was impressed by what I saw in Sweden, but I’ll need to drive the thing to know for sure. Hopefully soon.

• Volvo EX60 Preview - Engadget

Health from above

I made quite a few trips down to the greater Dallas Fort Worth area for a number of filming opportunities in 2025. In my last journey to the Lone Star State, I made a little detour up to Rowlett, a town that features a curiously oversized red chair that looked all the world like an Adirondack chair to my Yankee eyes, but I figure they’ve got a different name for it down there.

Anyhow, I wasn’t there for the seating. I was there to get me a burrito delivered via drone. Yes, I got some decidedly low-glam Chipotle sent to me through the air. At first blush, this seems like a ridiculously and unnecessarily complicated way of delivering food -- until you consider that the alternative in a town like Rowlett is for someone to roll around in a 4,000-pound vehicle that’s motivated by the controlled explosion of a highly flammable liquid.

I understand why people’s first reaction to this tech would be negative. There are plenty of reasons to hate, but dig a little deeper, and you’ll see Zipline has not only proven itself safe and reliable but has also saved countless lives in the process of building its business. It’s a fascinating and rapidly exploding business segment, and yeah, the burrito was pretty good.

Well, as good as Chipotle can get, anyway.

• Burritos from Heaven - The Verge

That’s it from me for now. In the week ahead, I’m blissfully travel-free, and I can’t wait to see just how much snow Mother Nature can pile on. She’s been stingy of late. I’m also looking forward to getting my hands dirty in any number of personal projects that just didn’t happen over the holidays. But, I already have many, many exciting drives on the books for February and March. More on those soon. Until then, be well, do good, and keep warm.

Good morning, dear reader. I’ve been back from Las Vegas for a few days now, enough time to start the process of catching up on missed sleep and hydration, not to mention re-integrating myself into the peaceful solitude of my woods and away from the culture crush that is CES.

I’ve been going to the Consumer Electronics Show for getting on toward 20 years now, and while it’s always a marathon, it’s also interesting to watch the ebbs and flows of various segments of the industry. When I first started going, there was nary any automotive stuff there at all. Then we got a big rush thanks largely to Ford with Sync and, later, the Focus Electric.

This year was honestly a little quiet on the automotive front, as robotics and AI pretty well swept everything else off the many show floors. But, there was certainly plenty enough to keep me busy. Here are a few highlights.

Start of the solid state?

I’ve been pitched so many times by so many companies promising they’ve cracked the code on solid-state batteries that I confess I kind of tune them out at this point. The technology would replace traditional battery electrolytes with something more resilient. Removing the literal juice promises to dramatically increase the figurative juice that a given battery can store, meaning way more range for a battery of a given size and weight, plus huge increases in charging speed and overall thermal stability.

They would, then, completely change the game for EVs, creating cars that could go upwards of 500 or 1,000 miles on a single five-minute charge. It’s been promised so many times by so many companies over the years that, when Donut Lab said it had figured out how to make the things, I confess I kinda didn’t pay it much heed. It was only when my editors at The Verge asked me to go check it out for them that I took the time to look into it.

I went over to the Donut Lab booth (which grows every year), spoke with its co-founder and CEO Marko Lehtimaki, and was blown away. If the numbers Lehtimaki told me are true, then this could finally be the EV revolution that’s been promised for so many years. There’s reason for skepticism, because the company is being coy on many of the details. Patents are pending, as is third-party testing to verify all the company’s wild claims. However, unlike the various solid-state hucksters over the years promising results at some indeterminate future if they can raise enough funding, Lehtimaki says all will be revealed within weeks.

I’m cautiously optimistic, but suffice it to say you should stay tuned for lots more on this topic coming soon from yours truly.

• Is this the world’s first solid-state battery? - The Verge

Longbow’s lovely, lightweight EV

While I wasn’t paying the solid-state stuff much heed initially, I had a visit by the Donut Lab booth on my docket for CES this year. I wanted to run by and check out the Longbow Motors Speedster. This little, open-topped EV was compelling for a few reasons, primary among them being weight: It’s promised to weigh somewhere around 2,200 pounds, or more than 100 pounds less than a Mazda Miata.

Is that possible? Again, we won’t know for sure until the company builds a production-ready version and rolls the thing onto a scale. But it’s conceptually feasible when you’re talking a purpose-built machine with a very small battery. That battery isn’t solid state, at least not yet, but it is using Donut Lab in-wheel motors. I was skeptical about the inclusion of those, too, thanks to the dreaded unsprung mass concern. But Longbow’s founders were quite convincing on that topic, which you can read about at Engadget.

• Longbow Motors shows off its Speedster EV with Donut Lab’s in-wheel motors - Engadget

I’m still not feeling Afeela

Sony’s Afeela 1 got a sibling at this year’s CES, the cunningly titled Afeela Prototype 2026. It is, basically, an SUV version of the sedan that has, in one form or another, been kicking around CES since 2020. It’s safe to say everyone at the show is pretty sick of seeing the thing at this point, which hasn’t really changed substantially in those years and yet is still about a year away from extremely limited production.

The SUV? That’s even farther down the road, not entering production until 2028 at the earliest. The tech is moderately compelling, and the experience could be fun, but the fundamental range, power, and cost just don’t line up. The longer it takes for this $90,000-and-up EV to come to market, the less it makes sense.

• At CES 2026, Sony Honda Mobility’s latest Afeela 1 still feels woefully out of date - Engadget

AI on a boat

Finally from CES this week, I did my first boat reporting. Yes, AI was everywhere at CES, even at sea. I swung by the Brunswick booth to check out boats that not only have enough onboard compute power to run a large language model on the edge, but also offer onboard power distribution systems conceptually similar to what you’ll find in a smart home with solar generation. They’re even self-docking. It’s enough to make a kayaker like myself think about upgrading... at least, it was until I saw the prices.

• Brunswick’s latest boats at CES 2026 feature edge AI, self-docking capabilities and solar power - Engadget

Those are the highlights from CES for me. I have a few more pieces that’ll pop up in a in the weeks ahead, too, which I’ll share in due time. Until then, I’m looking forward to a week at home to recharge my own batteries before heading out on the road again. Volvo’s got a new SUV to launch in Sweden, and I’ll be there.

Until then, be well, do good, and stay warm.

Good morning, dear reader. Writing from a brutally cold, wonderfully snowy scene. My thermometer is reading four degrees Fahrenheit right now, and per the ruler we got just shy of eight inches of beautiful, fluffy snow yesterday morning. That’s a pretty good combo for winter hijinks in my book, but the forecast is calling for warming temperatures and even rain by this evening.

This is the sorry state of our Upstate NY climate these days, where such swings are the norm. Case in point, my ice racing club, which has been in operation for 70 years now, is having its final banquet next weekend, an unfortunate end to one of my favorite pastimes, one that I’ve been blathering on about online for over 15 years now, having written my first Intro to Ice Racing for Autoblog way back in 2010.

Alas, let’s not linger long on that topic. I’ve been sad enough lately. Let’s instead do the thing that one tends to do at the end of the year. Let’s look back. There’s plenty enough to shake one’s head at from the last 12 months, so I hope you don’t mind if I focus on the good things instead.

My favorite car I drove in 2025

I was lucky to share a car with my friend and former colleague Antuan Goodwin on the Mercedes-Benz CLA drive recently, and he asked me what my favorite car of 2025 was. It took me a fair few moments to ponder before I could even come up with a response, and even then, I couldn’t make up my mind.

It’s been another good year for yours truly, getting to drive some astonishing cars, like the Lamborghini Temerario, Mustang GTD, Corvette ZR1, and the Czinger 21C.

But my favorite of the lot this year is actually slightly more attainable and far more practical. It’s the Porsche Taycan GTS Sport Turismo. The Slate Grey Neo example that Porsche sent my way was equipped with Porsche’s new and insanely good Active Ride suspension, which was sublime on the terrible roads around here. If I had an extra $196,475 burning a hole in my pocket, I’d be bundling up and scampering down to my local Porsche dealer to place an order.

Sadly, my review for this one isn’t online yet, but without spoiling too much, it’s damned fine.

My most impressive car of 2025

I felt like I had to break this out a bit because it’s not fair to just pick some insanely expensive machine. The car that really impressed me the most was BMW’s iX3. While it may sound like just another EV from BMW, it’s a step-change in terms of everything from range to charging speed and even braking smoothness. I can’t wait to spend more time with one this year, and unlike the Porsche, this is one machine I might actually be able to take home for good.

It was so impressive, I wrote about it an awful lot:

• New Class - Alloy

• 2027 BMW iX3 50: First Drive - BimmerLife

• 2027 BMW iX3 Review - Capital One’s Auto Navigator

• 2027 BMW iX3 Review - JD Power

• BMW iX3 first drive: a ‘New Class’ is in session - The Verge

My favorite trip of 2025

As per usual, I spent a lot of time on planes and in hotels in 2025. Dear TripIt says I covered 201,891 miles, spent 143 days away from home, hitting 12 countries and 52 cities over 37 trips.

I, then, have a lot of incredible journeys to choose from for my favorite of the year, and my annual run to Tokyo always ranks at or near the top. This year’s trip was extra special as I got to turn it into a bit of a guide for would-be visitors.

But I have to say it was my trip to Austin, Texas, this year that really stands out. I was there for the launch of the Cadillac ZR1, the 1,064-horsepower monster that recently cleaned up at Hagerty’s Ultimate Lap Battle. I was there to drive on the Circuit of the Americas, a place I’ve driven before, but never like this.

• Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 first drive: hype meets hyperspeed - The Verge

My favorite tech product of 2025

Yes, I got to do a little bit of gadget reviewing in 2025 as well, a topic that many of you know is near and dear to my heart.

I was incredibly impressed by this year’s Samsung Galaxy Fold, the first smartphone I’ve held in over a decade that literally made me say “Wow.”

But it was the Analogue Pocket 3D that I had the most fun testing. No, it’s not perfect, but it’s a brilliant product and a big step up in most respects over the company’s former efforts.

• Analogue 3D review: Modern processing can’t fix vintage flaws - Engadget

My favorite feature of 2025

In 2025, I wrote just short of 240 assignments for dozens of amazing outlets, including my first placements for Alloy, Roundel Magazine, GreenCars, the Mastercard Newsroom, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. All told, I wrote just shy of 280,000 words this year, which is about half a War and Peace.

Tolstoy I ain’t, but I loved pulling all those features together, and so it’s impossible to pick a favorite. That said, I had a really good time chasing my pup Koopa around with a camera to work on this guide on the best eco-minded dog toys.

But the feature that really made me smile was this story for Japan’s Car Graphic Neo Classic, where I got to write about my car for once. In this industry, the cars that most of us never get enough time with are our own.

Wrap-up

That’s all from me this year. I am so very thankful to each of you out there for not only subscribing but taking the time to open and read these things. It means more than you know. I wish you the best in the new year ahead.

Thanks for reading Around the Next Bend! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Hello, dear reader. Writing you from a different sort of uncomfortable place this time. Usually, I’m stuffed in a tiny seat in a narrow tube hurtling through the air. This time I’m in a weird chair in an oppressively beige hospital room. I spent much of this week with my mother as she was moved from ER to ICU and elsewhere in a traumatic tour of a remarkably depressing place.

Things seem to be on the up and up now, all the important numbers and test results heading in the right direction, a fact for which I’m extremely thankful. But it’s been an extremely long week, and if I happen to owe you an email on something or another, I do hope you’ll be a bit patient. I’ve been doing my best to keep up on things, but it’s safe to say I haven’t quite had the stomach for CES planning this week.

Anyhow, I had a few things go live this week that I wanted to share, so let’s get on with it.

Mixing technology and tradition in automotive design

The modern car is, of course, a wildly complicated machine increasingly powered more by software and SoCs than cylinders and combustion. Engineering those cars requires cutting-edge technology, but when it comes to design, tradition has a much bigger role to play. That’s changing, though. For the Washington Post, I delved into the sometimes uncomfortable crossover between those two worlds, where both augmented reality and clay have a part to play.

• How to design a new car in 2026 - The Washington Post

Mercedes’ new CLA pushes the EV envelope

It was only a few weeks ago that BMW’s iX3 wowed me, really feeling like a generational shift for BMW, a brand that was extremely early to the global electric vehicle game. Mercedes-Benz came a little later to the world of EVs, but the term “fast-follower” doesn’t quite cover it. Mercedes is now ushering in its own generational shift forward, pushing big boosts in efficiency, range, and charging speed.

The CLA is the first implementation of that, wearing a design that’s perhaps not in the upper echelons of the various style icons that Benz has rolled out over the years, but is certainly much closer to the top than the company’s first generation of EQ sedans and SUVs. It’s a remarkably good machine, and its starting price well under $50,000 feels eminently fair.

• Mercedes-Benz CLA first drive: Head of the EV class - Engadget

Gifts for your budding DIY friends

Lastly this week, my latest piece for The Guardian. I was asked to pull together a list of things that would make great gifts for the aspirationally crafty and handy friends and family in your life. So, I rounded up the most prized and frequently used tools in my garage, and this is the result.

• The eight best gifts in the US for the DIYer in your life - The Guardian

And that’s it from me this week. Wishing everyone holidays full of cheer and sending best wishes to you and your loved ones.

Hello again, dear reader. Writing to you this time from the front of a 737-900. Well, not the very front, I haven’t flown quite enough miles for them to let me up there, but I’m at least in a seat more reasonably sized than usual.

It’s another week spent driving a car I can’t tell you about for a little while yet, and so I thought I’d pass the time with a few more tips for weary travelers. We are deep into the most terrible travel time of the year, and though we’re back to having a semi-functional government, the increasingly harsh winter weather just makes travel all the more difficult, even at the best of times.

All the more reasons to protect yourself as best you can. Continuing on from part one, here are a few more tips for staying sane while on the road in increasingly insane times.

Have your apps installed and customer service on speed dial

When travel disruptions occur, every second counts. It is vitally important that you be ahead of the crowd in finding another solution. If things are looking bad, if the captain just said that, surprise, you’re not taking off after all, you need to get yourself confirmed on the next flight right now.

Why? If there are only six open seats on that next flight and a half-dozen of your fellow frustrated travelers are quicker on the draw than you, congratulations, you just earned yourself a night at the most depressing airport-adjacent hotel you’ve ever seen.

As often as not, your best option when you’re going to miss a connection is to pull up your airline’s app and start tapping. If you already know your escape routes (you did read Part 1, right?), it should only take a minute or two to get yourself confirmed on another flight. That is assuming you have that app installed and you’re signed in.

But sometimes those apps won’t let you do that until you’ve officially missed your connection. In that case, you’re often better off calling and talking to a human being. Have the customer service number for the airlines you travel in your phone and ready, and make sure you’re calling from whatever number is associated with your frequent flier account so they know who you are before you start talking.

Again, every second counts if you want to spend a night at the Black Mold Suites.

Splurge a little

If there was ever a time to treat yo’self, it’s when you’re on the road. Don’t go too crazy, because if you indulge at every airport smoothie stand you stroll by you’ll soon find those already-slender airline seats getting even more restrictive. But if there was ever a time to enjoy yourself, it’s when you have nothing to look forward to except a tight layover followed by an uncomfortable flight toward a suitably anonymous hotel.

So, make sure what you take with you is worth carrying. I’ve already shared my thoughts on why I spend too much on the bags I carry, but everything you drag through the airport with you should be something you feel good about. Splurge on the good headphones. Spend a little extra to get a laptop charger that frees up your bag. Pack the good moisturizer that’ll make your hotel room smell of lavender or lemongrass before you settle in for the night. Oh, and make sure you take along your comfiest pajamas.

Download a movie you can’t wait to see before you hop across the pond. Subscribe to Audible so that you always have something to listen to when you’re resting your eyes. Go ahead and pick up whatever’s on the top of your Nintendo Switch wish list. Try to make every moment of your awful trip as pleasant as possible, and it’ll make the time spent waiting at the airport or sitting jetlagged in your hotel just that tiny bit less miserable.

Always take the stairs

In my last list of suggestions, I said to always take the earliest flight if you can. I do, and that often means a 4am wake-up call to get to the airport in time. That means no time for the gym before my flight.

Given that, I take every opportunity to add a little extra exercise into my life. That includes taking the stairs at every possible opportunity, even the big ones, like the awful flights up to the tram at DFW that just seem to go on and on.

We’re not talking a major calorie burn, but it’s enough to get the blood pumping again after I’ve been sitting on my ass munching on Biscoff cookies for a few hours.

Anti-RSI could literally save your life

Speaking of sitting on my ass, I have a tendency to snap into a sort of tunnel-vision when I’m on the plane, starting at my text editor for hours on end writing whatever it is I plan to publish next -- which, by the way, is precisely what I’m doing right now.

This isn’t great for your health, particularly your eyes. Ideally, give your eyes a chance to refocus on something every 5 or 10 minutes. To remind myself, I use a program called Workrave on my PC. It just pops up a little window every so many minutes telling me to stop whatever I’m doing, look away, stretch my neck, etc.

It is, without a doubt, the most annoying piece of software on the planet, but I’ve literally been using this application for decades, and I credit it with the fact that, despite those decades of starting at computer monitors, I still don’t wear glasses.

Stay fed and hydrated

Saving this for last because it’s perhaps the most straightforward, but also the easiest to forget. I try to always be within arm’s reach of a bottle of water when I’m traveling. Airplanes are tragically dry places, second only to Las Vegas hotel rooms in their potential to dehydrate your body and crush your soul. If you’re not proactively putting the water back in, you will start to shrivel up like a prune.

Drinking too much water on a long flight has the secondary benefit of making you get up to use the toilet all too often. This keeps the blood flowing to your legs, which can prevent blood clots. I do love killing two birds with one stone.

Happy traveling

That’s all I’ve got for now. If one of these tips saves you a minor inconvenience in your travels, then it’ll all be worth it. Wishing you the smoothest of flights, easiest of connections, and most comfortable of seats on your next journey. Me? I’m finally done flying for the year, but I’ll soon be winging my way down to Vegas for CES. I hope to see a few of you there.

Good morning, y’all, from a frigid, frosty wonderland in New York. We got our first significant snowfall this week, seven days that saw us below freezing more often than above. It’s an abrupt start to the winter, but after a few years of middling, tempered holiday seasons, I’m here for it.

On the publications side, it’s been a few quiet weeks waiting for embargoes to lift and publishing schedules to synchronize. Finally, though, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover this week, so let’s dive in.

Neue Klasse is finally here

After what seems like an eternity of teasing and waiting and me sitting through endless technical briefings and presentations about everything from cylindrical battery cells to advanced recuperation techniques, last month it was finally time to see how it all came together. And this week, it all hit the wire.

BMW’s iX3 is the first of the company’s next-generation of EVs, and while it isn’t exactly a reinvention for emissions-free motoring, it really is a massive step forward. Whether it’s outright range, charging speed, or even ride quality from conventional dampers, this thing is remarkably impressive.

Due to a little travel whoopsie on the way out, I wound up missing BMW’s well-defined event schedule. That made for little extra stress and a lot of extra time sitting around in airports, but had the secondary effect of meaning I got a day by myself to wheel an iX3 around however I wanted. It was great, I learned a lot, and I’m thrilled to finally share it all with you and myriad fine outlets.

• New Class - Alloy

• 2027 BMW iX3 50: First Drive - BimmerLife

• 2027 BMW iX3 Review - Capital One’s Auto Navigator

• 2027 BMW iX3 Review - JD Power

• BMW iX3 first drive: a ‘New Class’ is in session - The Verge

My favorite destination

By now, you probably know I travel a lot, something like a dozen countries and 200-odd thousand miles in an average year. I’m lucky to regularly visit the most amazing cities in the world, but Tokyo is the only one where I always, always add at least a few extra days every time I visit.

It’s my favorite destination, and I’m very glad to share some of my most frequent haunts, plus a few new ones, too.

• Dodging crowds and dining well: Shopping paradise in an increasingly packed Tokyo - Mastercard

Me in print

Speaking of Japan, I’ve been lucky to contribute to Car Graphic, Japan’s greatest car magazine, for a little over a year now. This month, the franchise turned the tables a bit, profiling me in CG Neo Classic, Car Graphic’s spin-off focused on modern classics like the 1998 Subaru STI coupe I imported. CG Neo Classic, featuring yours truly, is on newsstands now in Japan.

You can also find me in the current issue of Worth Magazine, the current issue of Excellence magazine, and yes, Car Graphic as well.

The end of the road for EVs?

The fine editors at Engadget asked me to write a bit of a retrospective of 2025 from an EV perspective, and I gotta say, it was a little hard. Despite some epic new models coming to market, has been a challenging 12 months for EV aficionados such as myself.

Over the next few months, you’re going to read piece after piece about how EVs are dead in America thanks to the current sales glut. But anyone who’s been watching the market knew this decline was coming after the big rush to beat the end of the federal tax incentive. The market will recover, and though there’s no guarantee of success for EVs in the US, there is reason for optimism, and I remain optimistic.

• A shaky year for American EVs could set the tone for 2026 - Engadget

Wrapping up WRC

Finally, is another piece I wrote for Alloy recently, a sort of hype post for the final round of the World Rally Championship. I’m a huge rally fan and really loved the opportunity to share that love for the sport in such an amazing new outlet. That final round has since come and gone, and I won’t spoil things here, except to say that I can’t wait for the first round of the next season, which at this point is only about a month away.

• Reckoning - Alloy

That’s it from me this week, and that seems like a lot. I’m back on the road in the week ahead to sample Mercedes-Benz’s next-gen electric sedan. I’m also making a stop on the way home to sample one of the world’s greatest arcades, but you’ll have to wait a little longer to read about that.

Until then, be good and do well.

Thanks for reading Around the Next Bend! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Hi there, I’m tapping away at my Lenovo from an uncomfortable chair outside of an airport lounge that doesn’t open for another 15 minutes or so. It’s painfully early, which is the time I typically find myself in these sorts of situations. So it goes in the pursuit of the sorts of stuff I bring to you every week.

Well, most weeks anyway.

This week saw me spending a few days in the greater Dallas area chasing delivery drones and running laps in crossover SUVs. No, the Corolla Cross isn’t an ideal track toy, but sometimes needs must. I also got to enjoy an emergency landing at DFW thanks to a dicky, depressurizing airplane door, but did eventually make it to the LA Auto Show, where I was lucky to catch up with a fair few friends.

Yep, it’s been a busy week. Here’s what’s new.

New-age N64, old-school games

I’m an unabashed fan of Analogue, a company that obsesses over reverse-engineering vintage videogame consoles, developing new-age machines that produce pixel-perfect renditions of games released decades ago. I own all their previous systems, and was quick to pre-order their newest, the Analogue 3D.

This one is an unabashed ode to the N64, doing everything Nintendo’s groundbreaking console could do and more. I was lucky to get an early look at the thing and found that while it makes vintage games look better than ever, sometimes that still isn’t good enough. My full review is at Engadget.

• Analogue 3D review: Modern processing can’t fix vintage flaws - Engadget

Make my Macan electric, please

I was lucky to drive an early pre-production prototype of the Porsche Macan Electric way back in 2023, back before they’d even show me what the thing looked like. Unfinished as it was, vinyl-wrapped and wholly obscured, I was impressed. Earlier this month, I finally got a chance to call one in for testing on my home roads, this time a legit production model without a single black decal applied.

As expected, it didn’t disappoint. It was the base, rear-drive version that came my way. While you’d think we reviewers would relish driving the top-shelf, fully loaded examples of cars (and, to be fair, we do), it’s a rare treat when companies send us base editions. I will admit that the base Macan Electric’s maximum fury is a bit humble compared to the quicker dual-motor editions. However, it was still plenty quick, and I loved the way it wagged its tail under hard acceleration on the wet, icy roads I mostly tested it on. Summer tires in November? Go on, then.

• 2025 Porsche Macan Electric review: The obvious choice when the budget allows - Engadget

Jigsaw puzzles at The Guardian

I’ve reviewed a lot of things over the years, everything from hypercars to hatchets, but jigsaw puzzles? That’s new territory for me. When my editor at The Guardian said they were looking for someone to do a jigsaw puzzle roundup, I knew exactly who to call: My better half. She’s acquired an impressively stout stockpile of puzzle boxes over the years, a stiff deterrent for the threat of any drizzly afternoon. She’s sampled all the major brands, plus a bunch of small ones, and was a wealth of knowledge for pulling this together.

Together, we tested dozens and dozens of puzzles to figure out which ones are best worth your money, either for yourself or as gifts for those you like, love, or must merely appease this holiday season.

• The six best US jigsaw puzzles for adults and kids to soothe your screen-addled brain - The Guardian

That’s all from me this week. I have some great stuff coming up, sitting under the cover of various embargoes that’ll be popping off in the weeks ahead, features I can’t wait to share. Until then, be good and do well.