After a slower start than its major rivals, Toyota has been making up for it with a flurry of new electric vehicles for the North American market. Its first attempt, the bZ4x, was an also-ran, but a new battery pack, more efficient motors, and a NACS charging port transformed the face-lifted bZ into an EV I happily recommend. Then, earlier this year, it followed up with some bZ-related variants. For those who miss the vibe of a station wagon, there is the bZ Woodland, and an all-electric Highlander is nearing the showroom, too. But today’s focus is the C-HR, and I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it.

It’s the smallest of the bunch, some 6.7 inches (170 mm) shorter than the bZ. But it’s still as wide and only a little more than an inch shorter. So if you’re put off by the bZ’s size, and are looking for something diminutive—and based on reader feedback, there are many of you out there—this small SUV will probably still fail to pass muster.

It’s not any cheaper than the bZ until you consider that the C-HR is only available with one choice of powertrain: a twin-motor AWD setup with a combined 338 hp (252 kW) powered by a 74.7 kWh battery pack. That same arrangement, with a 223 hp (167 kW), 198 lb-ft (268 Nm) front motor and 118 hp (88 kW), 125 lb-ft (169 Nm) rear unit, costs almost $3,000 more in a bZ than the $37,000 starting price of the C-HR.

Is it cheeky to think of the C-HR as a bZ SWB?

Toyota

Is it cheeky to think of the C-HR as a bZ SWB? Toyota

Like the last C-HR, the rear door handles are in the C pillar.

Toyota

Like the last C-HR, the rear door handles are in the C pillar. Toyota

Is it cheeky to think of the C-HR as a bZ SWB? Toyota

Like the last C-HR, the rear door handles are in the C pillar. Toyota

No, the C-HR is one of those frivolous vehicles, one that puts bold styling and a sporty character ahead of simple utility. After all, the bZ already exists if you want stolid.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/06/a-curious-crossover-the-toyota-c-hr-review/

Trump’s NHTSA more aligned with Musk

In 2023, Tesla recalled more than 2 million vehicles—every car with Autopilot—after regulators found the carmaker had not deployed the feature in a way that required drivers to remain attentive. That recall followed a 2021 NHTSA investigation into crashes and fatalities involving the technology.

Since then, Tesla CEO Elon Musk spearheaded the Department of Government Efficiency efforts that gutted NHTSA of staff with expertise in evaluating AV safety. Then, shortly after that team shrank, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system (FSD) got worse. Alarming reports of Tesla FSD failing sparked a new NHTSA probe last October, which Tesla delayed responding to.

It’s unclear if the Texas crash will get Tesla into more hot water. NHTSA did not respond to Ars’ request for comment, but the agency appears more aligned with Musk on deregulating AVs.

In January, NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison confirmed in a speech that the agency considers 2026 a “big” year for AV rulemaking. He said that NHTSA was moving fast to change the rules to pave the way for the future Tesla envisions, coming soon, where he expects human intervention won’t be needed “when they see things go weird.”

“I’m talking about vehicles that would never require human intervention—vehicles you can take a nap in,” Morrison said.

Morrison suggested the technology “is one of, if not the, most challenging engineering problems humanity has ever attempted” and acknowledged that it was “safety critical.” But he criticized the Biden administration for focusing too much on “enforcement against AV developers and safety research” and said that under the Trump administration, advancing American AVs would be a top priority.

“We’re not going to be shy when we see something that we believe presents a risk to the public,” Morrison said. “But the promise of this technology to society is far too great to ignore, or worse, discourage, or prohibit.”

According to Morrison, the “pathway” to this future requires prioritizing safety, while “moving with a sense of urgency” to remove “unnecessary regulatory barriers” and “enable the commercial deployment of AVs to enhance safety and mobility for the American public.”

“To be clear, this includes the commercial deployment of purpose-built AVs without traditional controls such as steering wheels or brake pedals,” Morrison said.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/woman-killed-when-tesla-driver-using-autopilot-crashed-into-her-home/

Just three months ago, Lucid Motors showed off a new midsize electric vehicle platform that it said would give rise to a number of new vehicles in the coming years. The Saudi-backed startup is now selling its Gravity SUV alongside the ever-improved Air sedan and plans to reach profitability with smaller and cheaper models sold in higher volumes. But things are far from rosy at Lucid; today, the automaker is laying off approximately 1,500 workers—18 percent of its workforce.

These aren’t the first layoffs of the year, either; In February, Lucid let go of 12 percent of its workforce.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Lucid wrote that the layoffs were “designed to advance the Company’s path toward profitability and positive cash flow generation by streamlining its organizational structure, optimizing operating expenses, and aligning production plans with anticipated demand.”

Lucid is also ending the second shift at its factory in Casa Grande, Arizona, and says that together, the measures will save it $158 million, albeit after paying out $32 million in “severance, employee benefits, and employee transition.”

Among those receiving severance will be Marc Winterhoff, Lucid’s COO and previously acting CEO, who took the helm in February after the original CEO, Peter Rawlinson, abruptly stepped down. Lucid named a new CEO—Silvio Napoli—in April, and with Winterhoff’s departure, the company is eliminating the COO role altogether.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/06/lucid-lays-off-1500-workers-in-second-big-cut-of-the-year/

The age of robotaxis, long the preserve of science fiction, is now a reality, at least in a handful of American cities. It took just over a decade to get from the DARPA Grand Challenges to the start of Waymo’s commercial service in California, albeit initially with a safety driver on board.

Proponents of the technology, which has attracted at least $100 billion in investment, say robotaxis will be safer than human-driven vehicles. And last year, Waymo’s data showed its cars were involved in many fewer crashes than human drivers, with much lower insurance claims, although recent issues with school buses and flooded roads show the technology isn’t perfect.

But safety isn’t the only selling point: Autonomous vehicles are said to cut traffic. But data from Waymo’s reports to the California Public Utilities Commission shows that, at least in that regard, robotaxis are no better than ride-hailing services like Lyft and Uber.

Is there anyone in there?

The study, published in Transport Findings by MIT Transit Lab Assistant Director of Research Awad Abdelhalim, analyzes data from August 2023 through December 2025, a roughly 1,000-day period. During that time, Waymo’s robotaxis completed 13.8 million trips for 19.3 million passengers over a total traveled distance of 86.3 million miles (138.8 million km), growing at a rate of around 15 percent a month. Abdelhalim wanted to see what proportion of those rides were made by empty robotaxis—known as “deadheading”—and how the number changed over time.

Initially, only 36 percent of Waymo’s miles were driven with a passenger onboard. But by the end of the study period, that had increased to around 56 percent and then plateaued, Abdelhalim found. So about 44 percent of Waymo’s driven miles are conducted with empty EVs.

I’m not entirely surprised; on each of my recent visits to San Francisco, the sensor-festooned Jaguar I-Paces have been thick on the ground, but rarely did I spot any humans riding in them.

In fact, there are two different kinds of deadheading: empty vehicles driving around waiting to be assigned a ride and empty vehicles driving to collect their passenger(s). And Waymo has been steadily reducing the number of miles driven empty en route to a pickup as it expands its fleet. The number of deadhead miles per trip has also been declining, in part due to Waymo’s introduction of freeway service, the author suggests.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/06/robotaxis-dont-cut-traffic-any-more-than-ride-hailing-study-finds/

When we met Sterling Anderson in 2024, he was the chief product officer of Aurora, the self-driving startup he cofounded in 2016 after several years at Tesla. Just over a year ago, though, Anderson decamped from the startup world for something a little more established, taking over as chief product officer at General Motors, the nation’s largest automaker. Since then, he’s had a good view of how GM is entering what he calls the third epoch of engineering and design.

“There was a time when humans looked at birds and were like, ‘OK, those wings seem to work pretty well. Let’s go and design something that looks like them.’” Anderson said, describing the first age of engineering. “And they just kind of iterated their way to something that was marginally feasible.”

The first few hundred years of inventing “was this era of highly empirical iterative design development and engineering,” he said. “And by that I mean humans largely started with what we know or had seen, built prototypes of something that kind of looked like it and maybe tweaked some things, hoping to make it perform better, tested it, iterated, and kind of went through this slow guess-and-check process until we got to something that marginally worked.”

The second age began as computers became powerful enough to do some of the early work. “We started to see virtual development tools, in functionally specific ways, improve the work that people did so they didn’t have to go to empirical prototypical development,” Anderson said.

“For instance, we started to see CFD [computational fluid dynamics] start to inform aero engineers,” he said. “We saw FEA [finite element analysis] inform structural engineers. We saw any number of other virtual tools… but the relay race that was development remained the same, which is to say design passed the baton to aero which passed the baton to structures, just always passed the baton back when they found something that the other guys had to fix.”

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/06/from-15-hours-to-one-minute-how-ai-ml-is-speeding-up-gms-development/

First off, apologies for the lack of a Canadian Grand Prix report at the beginning of this week; Ferrari chose last weekend to show us its new electric vehicle, and between that and Memorial Day, one thing led to another, and here we are.

Canada was yet another sprint weekend, meaning limited practice time for teams desperate for it to collect data on their various upgrade packages. The race, held on an artificial island built for Expo 67, is often one of the season’s highlights, and 2026 did not disappoint, with some excellent duals among the field.

The 19-year-old Italian sophomore Kimi Antonelli now leads his Mercedes teammate George Russell by 43 points in the championship after four straight wins in a row. With 25 points for a win, that means Russell could soon be two whole race wins behind his young in-house rival; never a comfortable spot when competing against someone with identical equipment.

Then again, one need only look at last year’s championship to realize it’s far too soon to be declarative; we’re only five races in. Last year, Oscar Piastri led Max Verstappen by more than 100 points at the Dutch Grand Prix—race 15 out of 24 that year—yet finished the year 11 points in arrears.

It’s not that Russell doesn’t have the measure of Antonelli; he’d been in control of the race—just barely—when his battery suffered a catastrophic failure, ending his day on lap 30. As the late, great British F1 commentator Murray Walker was fond of saying, “To finish first, first you have to finish,” which sounds obvious but contains an important point, as the best Murray quotes always do.

Reliability is historically unusual

The fragility of the current cars might strike some as odd, but if anything, it was the hyper-reliable hybrids that raced between 2017 and 2025 that are the real outliers. The last few seasons have been the most reliable in the sport’s history, and by some margin. Even in the 2000s, a driver went into each race knowing there was at least a 40 percent chance their car would fail before the checkered flag.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/05/f1-in-2026-to-finish-first-first-you-have-to-finish/

What’s the diff?

An actuator, overdrive gears, and a differential combine to intelligently transfer torque between the rear wheels. They do so almost fully variably depending on the driving situation and ensure Agility and Stability.

Audi

An actuator, overdrive gears, and a differential combine to intelligently transfer torque between the rear wheels. They do so almost fully variably depending on the driving situation and ensure Agility and Stability. Audi

A look at the assembled differential.

Audi

A look at the assembled differential. Audi

An illustration showing how torque is controlled across the rear axle.

Audi

An illustration showing how torque is controlled across the rear axle. Audi

A look at the assembled differential. Audi

An illustration showing how torque is controlled across the rear axle. Audi

Like all performance Audis, the RS5 uses Quattro all-wheel drive, here with a limited-slip center differential that splits power between 70/30 and 15/85 front to rear.

We have enjoyed torque-vectoring rear differentials on previous Audi RS models—the ability to send more power to individual rear wheels as necessary has played a big part in why people like cars like the RS3, TT-RS, R8, and so on. In those cars, the rear differential uses a clutch for each wheel to achieve that, but for the new RS5, Audi Sport decided to develop something new, internally.

It’s calling the new setup Dynamic Torque Control, and it does away with hydraulic clutches in favor of an 8 kW, 40 Nm electric motor (also powered by the 400 V traction battery) and some planetary gears. The electric motor lives on one side of the axle and applies torque to a powered sun gear at the other side. This sun gear acts on planetary gears, then a fixed sun gear connected to an open differential. It can add or subtract torque from the ring gear to the half shaft for an up to 1,475 lb-ft (2,000 Nm) split across the axle, or send it back to the open differential for a straight 50:50 split. Because it’s controlled by the electric motor, the diff will react in just 15 milliseconds, making the car neutral or allowing it to oversteer depending on the drive mode.

Split personalities

The handling can be neutral, or oversteer-y.

Tobias Sagmeister/Audi

The handling can be neutral, or oversteer-y. Tobias Sagmeister/Audi

It helps when you don’t have to pay for your own tires.

Tobias Sagmeister/Audi

It helps when you don’t have to pay for your own tires. Tobias Sagmeister/Audi

The RS5 was very easy to slide and catch.

Tobias Sagmeister/Audi

The RS5 was very easy to slide and catch. Tobias Sagmeister/Audi

It helps when you don’t have to pay for your own tires. Tobias Sagmeister/Audi

The RS5 was very easy to slide and catch. Tobias Sagmeister/Audi

Driven on the road in Balanced, Comfort, or even Dynamic, you might not ever notice how clever the torque distribution is at the rear. The weather was fairly atrocious for much of my road driving in the RS5, with a mix of rain and late May snow at altitude. Yet despite wearing wide summer tires on 21-inch wheels and all that power and torque, its behavior was never anything less than locked down and stable on the road. So this really is a true all-weather performance car, in the way the best fast Audis always are.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/05/2027-audi-rs5-first-drive-a-performance-phev-with-split-personalities/

MUNICH—Later this summer, Audi will unveil its new flagship model. In the past, that role had been filled by the A8, but that was before SUVs found so much favor; even in Europe, a majority of car buyers now swing that way. But forget Europe for a moment. The new Q9 is Audi’s first full-size SUV, underscoring the importance of the North American market. Late in development, the company even redesigned the cupholders to fit those giant insulated mugs that briefly became a retail obsession.

We can only show this exterior-camouflaged Q9 for now, but the photos show the production interior. Or at least that’s one of the possible trims; if you want the interior to evoke more of an Endor or Tatooine feel rather than Mustafar, there are beiges and browns, including an interesting open-grain olive wood alternative to the coarse carbon fiber you see here. The mix of different textures really helps elevate the Q9’s interior, which leaves glossy finishes behind in favor of matte wherever possible.

The view up front was inspired by the way the brand’s 2021 Grandsphere concept wrapped its dash around front seat occupants. The Grandsphere didn’t have to rely on actually available technology, and it didn’t bother with screens for the future it was imagined for. The Q9 doesn’t have that luxury, but it does have acres of digital real estate. The main instrument display and infotainment screens curve around the driver, but they aren’t particularly tall, so you have a clear view down the hood over the interaction light that runs along the base of the windshield and provides an additional visual cue when you use your turn signals or hazard lights.

“When you close the car… what we wanted to create is it’s calming you down in a way and giving this kind of luxury approach that everything is controlled, everything’s floating, everything is quiet and everything is in its place,” explained Audi designer Chris Koelle.

Here’s the Q9 from the driver’s seat.

Audi

Here’s the Q9 from the driver’s seat. Audi

This door card rivals the excellent Lexus LC in how interesting it is to touch.

Audi

This door card rivals the excellent Lexus LC in how interesting it is to touch. Audi

There are two wireless chargers, as well as 100 W USB-C ports. More USB-C ports are available for the second and third rows.

Audi

There are two wireless chargers, as well as 100 W USB-C ports. More USB-C ports are available for the second and third rows. Audi

This door card rivals the excellent Lexus LC in how interesting it is to touch. Audi

There are two wireless chargers, as well as 100 W USB-C ports. More USB-C ports are available for the second and third rows. Audi

Virtual Cockpit finds its mojo again

I was pleased to see that a moving map view is once again an option for the main instrument display. Audi pioneered this feature with its Virtual Cockpit, but it has been curiously missing from several recent models we’ve driven. Then again, it’s also present in the new Q3, which lives at the very other end of Audi’s SUV range. The Q3 and Q9 also share the same not-stalks that you use to turn on the turn signals and wipers (left side) and engage park/drive/reverse (right side). The action of using them to flick on the wipers or the lights is basically identical to a conventional stalk.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/05/take-a-look-inside-audis-new-big-three-row-q9-suv/

The electric motor can siphon power from the V6 to recharge the battery (a process called super clipping), but any power that goes that route can’t drive the rear wheels, which could create dangerous speed differentials on track, we were told.

Sadly, those warnings proved mostly correct, as was all too clear at the Japanese Grand Prix in March. Refreshingly, there appears to be no defensiveness on the part of the FIA or other stakeholders but rather a desire to respond to the complaints.

2027

The FIA, the teams, the power unit manufacturers, and F1 Management (which controls the commercial side) have agreed—although technically only on principle so far—that for next year, the V6 will become more powerful by 50 kW (67 hp) and the electric motor will be able to deploy 50 kW less, rebalancing the power split to 450 kW (603 hp) from the V6 and 300 kW (402 hp) from the motor-generator unit. The increase in V6 power will be achieved by increasing the engine’s fuel flow.

With less electrical power to deploy, the cars should maintain a higher state of charge throughout a lap. And if the power unit does require some super clipping, the additional V6 output leaves more power available to keep the car driving, reducing those speed differentials. Some other changes are apparently still in discussion. The amount that the electric motor can harvest from the V6 could increase above 350 kW, and the battery capacity could be increased from 4 MJ to 5 MJ.

There are still tradeoffs, though. Absent all of the synthetic fuel partners finding an extra 10 percent energy density in their fuels in the next few months, more powerful V6s with greater fuel flow will either need larger fuel tanks or shorter races. Larger fuel tanks would be preferable; if the races are shorter, everyone from F1TV subscribers to team sponsors might start wondering where their 10 percent refund is. But a larger fuel tank means a redesigned chassis that will now also be bigger and heavier—a trend the 2026 rules finally managed to reverse.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/05/f1-set-for-another-engine-tweak-in-2027-and-whats-this-about-v8s/

But the world looks quite different in 2026. Electrification might still be on for the masses in China and Europe, but the people who buy cars with price tags that look more like telephone numbers don’t want all-electric hypercars.

The good times aren’t rolling

Then there’s the parlous state of VW Group itself. Porsche is not having the best time of things after betting too heavily on EVs, which looks even worse in the vital US market thanks to Trump’s tariffs. Sales were down 15 percent in Q1 2026, the company reported earlier this month. At the VW Group level, CEO Oliver Blume (formerly Porsche’s CEO before his promotion) told Manager Magazin earlier this week that overall capacity across VW Group brands would be cut by a million of cars a year and that tens of thousands of job losses were forecast over the next few years.

So Porsche is selling its stake in Bugatti Rimac, as well as its stake in Rimac Group, to a consortium of investors led by HOF Capital.

“In setting up the joint venture Bugatti Rimac together with Rimac Group, we successfully laid the foundation for Bugatti’s future,” said Porsche CEO Dr. Michael Leiters. “And as an early-stage investor of Rimac Group, Porsche made a significant contribution to developing Rimac Technology into an established Tier-1 automotive technology company. Now, with the sale of our stake, we demonstrate that we will focus Porsche on the core business. We would like to thank Mate Rimac and his team for the constructive and trusting cooperation over the past years.”

“Porsche has been a crucial partner, and we are deeply grateful for their role in establishing Bugatti Rimac,” said Mate Rimac, CEO of Bugatti Rimac. “With the strong foundations their support has provided, we now have a structure that allows us to execute even faster on our long-term vision. We look forward to our collaboration with our new partners.”

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/04/as-electric-aspirations-fade-porsche-sells-its-stake-in-bugatti/