Motor News

Reuters reports that Apple will start producing an electric car, targeting 2024 to start production, citing unnamed “people familiar with the matter.”
This Apple EV would be powered by Apple’s monocell battery technology, which could yield more capacity in the same space as a traditional battery pack.
No news on if Apple will manufacture the vehicle itself or work with a third party.
Apple has long been rumored to be working on a car, even before everyone got excited about EVs. According to a new report from Reuters, that vehicle might finally be coming to fruition in 2024.
Reuters reported that the Apple car will start production in 2024 and will feature “next level” battery technology. The report doesn’t specify if Apple will build the vehicle itself or look to partners for the actual manufacturing of the EV, but it does say, citing “two people familiar with the effort,” that it’s going to be a personal, mass-market vehicle rather than a robotaxi or commercial vehicle.

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Apple’s car plan, under the code name Project Titan, has been an open secret in the automobile and tech world since its inception in 2014. The tech company snatched up vehicle engineers from Porsche, Tesla, and other automakers, including Alexander Hitzinger, who recently left the company and returned to the VW Group to head its own Project Artemis.
Now it seems the vehicle is back on track and will go into production, if Reuters’ unnamed sources are proved correct. Of course, the date may be pushed to 2025 due to coronavirus delays. Apple is rumored to be reaching out to sensor companies to help it add driver-assistance technology.
As for actual production, Apple was rumored to be speaking to Magna, which already has its own EV platform that it can use to build an electric vehicle for other companies. The result of those talks is unknown. One of Apple’s long-term manufacturing partners, Foxconn, recently unveiled its own plans for an EV platform.

Powering the yet-to-be-announced vehicle will be Apple’s “monocell” design for batteries, according to Reuters. The technology does away with pouches and modules and combines the individual cells in each battery. This could yield more capacity within the same space as a traditional battery-pack layout. The tech company could also be looking at different chemistries for its batteries.
With its ability to wield power in the manufacturing world thanks to the iPhone, Apple could potentially hit the ground running in a way other automotive startups might not be able to accomplish. Still, building cars is hard, and this would be Apple’s first. That’s if the company sticks with this plan. If not, it could be another couple of years of a rumored Apple Car without anything actually rolling down the street.
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A better look at the upcoming three-row version of the Grand Cherokee shows a Wagoneer-inspired front end and slim taillights. More

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Toyota built a one-off 2021 Supra Sport Top for the virtual SEMA show this year, based on the Heritage Edition from last year’s show.
A shop in Fort Worth, Texas, cut off the roof, and Toyota’s North America R&D center in Michigan provided 3D-printed roof panels.
The Supra Sport Top is powered by a 3.0-liter inline six with a modified factory turbo.
Toyota built a one-off 2021 Supra Sport Top, which is essentially a targa-top variant, for the virtual SEMA aftermarket trade show this year. The car pays homage to the open-roof A80 Supras of the 1990s. When asked if the build should get our hopes up for a coming open-top variant for the current-gen Supra, which is a 2021 10Best winner, Toyota told Car and Driver that it’s “just an awesome one-off concept. Nothing forward-looking to announce.”

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Toyota

The Supra Sport Top is based on the Heritage Edition that was shown at SEMA last year, huge wing and all, but KC’s Paint Shop in Fort Worth, Texas, chopped off the roof, while the two contoured roof panels, which can be stored in the trunk, were 3D printed at Toyota Motor North America R&D headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The team in Plano, Texas, added the latches and clamps and also reinforced the body to account for the roof loss. Additionally, the paint shop finished off the custom bodywork and coated the Supra in a paint mix to match the factory option Absolute Zero white. It’s equipped with round taillights, 19-inch HRE wheels wrapped in Toyo Proxes rubber, and Brembo brakes.

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A turbocharged 3.0-liter inline-six sourced from BMW powers the Supra, and for the 2021 model year it produces 382 horsepower and 368 pound-feet of torque, up 47 horsepower and 3 pound-feet from the 2020 model. The more powerful Supra 3.0 launched to 60 mph in 3.8 seconds in our testing and raced through the quarter-mile in 12.1 seconds at 117 mph. A Toyota spokesperson explained that the Sport Top “doesn’t go as extreme as the Heritage Edition,” for “the kind of customer that simply wants to bolt things on, in this case, a downpipe and a full exhaust.” It doesn’t have the Heritage Edition’s modified factory turbo, though it has a dual center-exit exhaust and a more efficient rear diffuser.

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Toyota

We hope that Toyota eventually adds a removable-roof option to the fifth-generation Supra, mostly because we want to amplify the cracks and pops of the exhaust without suffering from its buffeting with the windows down. That’s only one of our few gripes with the new Supra, though.
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The Polestar 2 electric sedan’s standard Launch Edition headlights use LED pixel technology that masks out oncoming vehicles when the high-beams are on.
The technology uses 84 individual LED pixels in each headlamp that can be individually controlled to adjust the light beams.
Unfortunately, the technology is not allowed on U.S. roadways, but the hardware is already on the electric sedans and can be turned on via an over-the-air update if the law changes.
Polestar announced that its Pixel LED headlamps will be standard on the Polestar 2 Launch Edition (it’s an optional feature on other trim levels). The setup includes a lighting welcome sequence when the vehicle is unlocked and will also feature high-beam technology that reduces glare for other drivers. Sadly, that technology isn’t available in the United States.

Polestar

The LED lighting uses 84 individual LED pixels to form a lighting matrix in each headlamp. Those individual pixels are controlled by the vehicle and switched on and off as needed. The benefit of this adaptive lighting technology is that the vehicle can reduce or increase the amount of light in a certain area as needed, letting a driver leave the high-beams on without worrying about switching back and forth when oncoming cars are present. The front fog lights also come on automatically based on steering or turn-signal use when the vehicle is traveling at low speeds.

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Typically, the driver of an oncoming vehicle will be blinded, but the Polestar system (like systems from Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and others) reduces the light hitting the oncoming vehicle by adjusting the brightness of individual LED pixels. The driver still has all the benefits of high-beams, and the drivers of other vehicles aren’t blinded, because the system has essentially masked out their car.

Polestar

Unfortunately, U.S. regulations don’t allow this type of lighting technology on our roads. Instead, vehicles on U.S. roads get high-beam, low-beam, or off. That’s it. For years, the federal government has been researching potentially allowing these types of lighting matrix systems that are smart enough to mask out areas with reduced illumination, but so far, no luck on that front.

Polestar

What we will get here in the U.S. is the 288-LED rear light bar that supports adaptive lighting so it can be brightened and dimmed as needed. If we are lucky enough for NHTSA to get around to changing the rules, Polestar says that the hardware that’s already on U.S. Polestar 2 sedans will get an over-the-air update to turn the rest of the features on.
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The move comes in the same week that a girl’s death in the U.K. was officially classified as caused by air pollution. More

Although COVID-19 was the driver behind much of the news this year, the auto industry made headlines in other ways as well, with electrification plans selling a lot of trucks. More

In the spring, insurance companies were happy to say they would be refunding some premiums due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And at first, things looked fine, with some issuing full-month or half-month refunds.
But now that we’re closer to a new spring than the old one, the consumer-protection advocacy group U.S. PIRG has studied the landscape and found that billions in profits were not returned.
The solution, U.S. PIRG said, is for state governments to mandate refunds for these overpayments, since driving was way down this year.
Drivers didn’t drive quite as much in 2020 as they did in 2019, for obvious, COVID-related reasons. When the pandemic hit the U.S. in a big way this spring, auto insurers made a lot of noise about how they would be refunding millions of dollars worth of their customers’ payments back to them. But as the pandemic has continued and continued, customers have not benefited as much as they should have, according to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Education Fund.

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This week, the U.S. PIRG Education Fund released the details of its state-by-state (and company by company) analysis, showing that insurance companies did not live up to their earlier promises. Jacob van Cleef, U.S PIRG’s consumer watchdog associate, told Car and Driver that the insurance companies have disappointed their customers.
“They had an opportunity to use a significant portion of their billions of dollars in profits to genuinely help their struggling customers,” he said. “Instead, most companies gave less than a month’s worth of premiums back while making a big public to-do about doing a great service for their customers. Americans making sacrifices and staying at home deserve better, and these insurers should do more.”
Those profits came from the dramatic reduction in payouts the insurance companies issued this year since there were fewer cars on the road and thus fewer crashes.
The way in which large insurance companies paid back premiums varied (the state-by-state details can be found on the U.S. PIRG website), but the gist is that most insurers “gave only a small fraction of the profits back to their customers” and most of those refunds were only for the March-May time frame, U.S. PIRG says. For example, when U.S. PIRG looked at the 10 largest insurers of personal vehicles in each state (for a total of 71 companies, since some companies were in the top 10 in more than one state), it found that only 18 of them returned at least 50 percent of one month’s premium to its customers. Just eight returned at least a full month’s premium payment.
U.S. PIRG believes that long-term rate cuts are the best solution for consumers in this difficult time, but only four insurers reduced their rates by a defined percentage and, while most insurers that did issue rebates or rate reductions did so automatically, at least one (DTRIC in Hawaii) required customers to ask for the rate reduction.
U.S. PIRG, which is an independent, nonpartisan consumer interest group and part of the Public Interest Network. is not the only organization that has identified the lack of substantial refunds. The Consumer Federation of America said in September that insurance commissioners in the U.S. are “asleep at the wheel” regarding efforts to get the “windfall” COVID profits back to consumers. The solution, U.S. PIRG’s van Cleef said, is for state governments to step up.
“State governments need to act now,” he said. “While the federal government controls stimulus bills, the states can help their inhabitants by doing things such as mandating refunds from insurance companies. That alone won’t fix anyone’s pandemic-based financial problems, but it can help customers in this time of dire need.”
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