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Enterprise, Startups, Transportation

Observing: Difficulties facing electric vehicle manufacturers, with Fisker in a particularly delicate situation.

Fisker’s finances are back in the news after the company warned back in February that it didn’t have enough cash to make it through its next year. The company said this week that it intends to halt production for six weeks to get its business back in order. Softening demand growth for EVs is making the normal challenges of scaling a company all the harder for Fisker and its peers. Not that we’re all doom and gloom here at TechCrunch — we’re actually rather bullish on the prospect for EVs in the near and far future. Let’s take a look at what’s going on under the hood here:

Ava Patel
March 19, 2024

Robotics & AI

“AI: Neither Evil Nor Intelligent Yet Undeniably Omnipresent”

Instead, it’s settling into a place where its use is already commonplace, even for purposes for which it’s frankly ill-suited. The doomerism vs. e/acc debate continues apace, with all the grounded, fact-based arguments on either side that you can expect from the famously down-to-earth Silicon Valley elites. Witness everything always, forever, but if you’re looking for specifics, self-driving is a very handy recent one, as is VR and the metaverse. Utopian vs. dystopian debates in tech always do what they’re actually intended to do, which is distract from having real conversations about the real, current-day impact of technology as it’s actually deployed and used. Use of generative AI, according to most recent studies, is fairly prevalent and growing, especially among younger users.