Beleaguered electric trucking company Nikola has sold the Badger electric pickup truck assets it was once supposed to build with General Motors.
Embr now owns the intellectual property associated with the Badger pickup truck, as well as the assets related to Nikola’s abandoned off-road and personal water craft vehicles.
News of the deal to sell the Badger program comes at an odd time.
But it revealed the Badger pickup in February 2020, just a few months before it went public in a merger with a special purpose acquisition company.
Worthen said Nikola is clawing back 500,000 of those shares Milton gave Sparks as part of the deal.
Paris’ commercial court has accepted Cooltra’s offer to acquire Cityscoot.
These two companies provide shared electric mopeds that you can unlock and ride to go from one place to another.
At the same time, foreign micromobility companies also started to look at Paris as a potentially interesting market, including Cooltra and Yego.
Cityscoot, Cooltra and Yego won a tender process organized by the city of Paris to limit mopeds to three operating licenses.
Cooltra’s mopeds will also get new stickers to show that Cityscoot and Cooltra are now the same service to ease the transition.
Uber, along with partners Mitsubishi Electric and autonomous robotics startup Cartken, are launching a service in Japan that will use self-driving sidewalk robots to deliver food to customers.
Uber and Cartken, a startup founded in 2019 by former Google engineers behind the short-lived Bookbot, already operate a delivery service together in Fairfax, Virginia and Miami.
Cartken’s autonomous sidewalk robot, known as Model C, will be used for the delivery service.
Cartken’s teleoperations interface will be used by Mitsubishi Electric employees who are trained in Cartken’s remote guidance system, according to an Uber spokesperson.
“We hope that this newly announced initiative will serve as a catalyst for the spread of robot delivery services in Japan,” Tanaka said.
The future of bankrupt electric motorbike startup Cake is still uncertain, but the majority of its U.S. inventory is going to a guy in Florida.
Joyce says he didn’t buy any of the remaining Cake Kalk electric motorcycles, as those have been recalled for battery fire risk and steering column problems.
Buying the inventory gives him “six to 12” months of runway, which will give him time to finish negotiating with other companies to sell electric motorbikes.
Joyce is confident he can sell the Cake inventory after spending most of the last year honing in on a good sales and marketing strategy.
Joyce hopes to find enough success to build Emoto into a brand that becomes a one-stop-showroom for electric motorbikes, similar to some of the country’s biggest powersports dealers.
Ford is cutting prices of its all-electric 2023 Mustang Mach-E by has much as $8,100 as the automaker attempts to rid itself of inventory and compete with Tesla and its increasingly cheaper EVs.
Total market share of new EV sales has grown, reaching nearly 8% in U.S. in 2023.
Ford confirmed with TechCrunch the price cuts, which are only for model year 2023 Mustang Mach-E vehicles and range between $3,100 and $8,100.
“The Mustang Mach-E is America’s No.2 EV SUV in 2023 and Ford is America’s No.2 EV brand,” Ford spokesperson Marty Günsberg wrote in an emailed statement.
Tesla shipped a record number of electric vehicles in the fourth quarter, which helped it reach 1.81 million deliveries in 2023.
This week, read about Amazon, EV startup Fisker, electric boats, a bunch of new funding deals and my time driving the all-new Kia EV9.
Remember Lordstown Motors, the EV startup that went public via a SPAC and has since filed for bankruptcy protection?
Steve Burns, who founded and was then ousted from Lordstown Motors, is back with a new EV startup called LandX Motors.
Northvolt, the Swedish battery startup, secured a $5 billion debt deal to help pay for the expansion of its first gigafactory.
The Kia EV9 comes in five trims with the cheapest — the rear-wheel drive EV9 Light — starting at $54,900.
While other automakers are dialing back their electric vehicle plans, BMW is quietly going all in.
“The tipping point for the combustion engine was last year,” CFO Walter Mertl told journalists at a roundtable in Munich recently.
The German automaker has seen sales of its fossil fuel vehicles plateau and is expecting a slow decline, he said.
“Growth will come increasingly from electric vehicles.”BMW sold a record 2.5 million vehicles last year, 15% of which were all-electric.
This year, the company thinks it’ll sell 500,000 EVs, or 33% more than last year.
Cleveland-based electric motorcycle startup Land Moto is looking to diversify by powering up the battery design side of its tech, and has raised $3 million (on top of $7 million raised last summer) to do so in 2024.
But like many electric vehicle manufacturers, Land is finding that there is a lot of potential in having a giant battery present at someone’s home beyond simply transportation.
Just as some carmakers have flirted with the idea of having your electric car act as a home battery, why shouldn’t your electric bike do the same, to a lesser extent?
“Being able to make electric batteries in-house is a pivotal moment for the team.
As with other electric ecosystems, the new battery is designed to slot into the bike’s slot with minimal modification.
Electric boat startup Navier has landed the first official pilot program for its hydrofoiling watercraft, partnering with Stripe to bring passengers from San Francisco’s outskirts to the downtown area.
Stripe will pay Navier to shuttle employees from Larkspur, where a number of them are concentrated, to its office near Oyster Point.
But as a pilot program, the intent is not to operate at scale but to identify the means of and barriers to that scale.
Other coastal cities with commute problems may take notice if the pilot program goes well.
“We’re introducing a water shuttle service equipped with amenities that enhance on-the-go productivity, such as desks and Wi-Fi.
Another CES has come and gone and transportation was still one of the central actors on one of the world’s largest tech stages.
Here are some of the tech themes that stood out to us at CES 2024.
With so many electric vehicles, it might not surprise folks to learn that EV charging companies were also there en masse.
HydrogenHydrogen power isn’t new, however, it’s taken a bit of a backseat lately to more traditional battery electric vehicles.
In-cabin hardware meets softwareAutomakers, automotive suppliers and even some startups, showed off their respective vision for the inside of the car.
