Month: January 2022

Enlarge / Yes, it has a light bar, just like pretty much every other EV concept. Still, the lit Chrysler badge is tastefully integrated. (credit: Stellantis)

Not much appeared to be happening at Chrysler in the past few years, though that’s about to change. Its parent company, Stellantis, announced yesterday that Chrysler will become its vanguard electric brand. By 2028, the 96-year-old automaker’s entire lineup will be all-electric.

That’s not too much of a stretch. Chrysler only sells two vehicles right now, the decade-old 300C sedan and the Pacifica minivan, which is available as a plug-in hybrid. Today, at the Consumer Electronics Show, the company shared more details on the Airflow, a concept crossover that appears to be close to ready for production—so close, in fact, that the announcement was probably a thinly veiled preview of the company’s first EV due in 2025. 

The Airflow is powered by two 150 kW (201 hp) electric motors, one for each axle, and while Chrysler hasn’t disclosed the size of the battery, it said it is targeting 350–400 miles of range. If the company can achieve that, it would be quite the coup, rivaling the best from Tesla. Good thing it has a few years before it has to deliver.

Enlarge (credit: Sahoglu et al. 2021)

Archaeologists working in what is now western Turkey recently unearthed the rubble left behind by a series of powerful tsunamis that slammed into a Bronze Age city. The giant waves were triggered by the eruption of the volcano Thera on the island of Santorini, hundreds of kilometers away—a cataclysm that toppled the Minoan civilization and shook the rest of the ancient Mediterranean world.

Among the ruins left by the event in Çeşme-Bağlararası, Ankara University archaeologist Vasıf Sahoglu and his colleagues found the skeleton of a young man and a dog; they’re the only victims of the disaster ever found by archaeologists.

Going out with a bang

From around 2000 BCE to around 1450 BCE, the Minoan civilization was the dominant force in the Mediterranean. Its power and wealth came from seafaring and trade, and its cultural and economic influence stretched from its home island of Crete all the way to Egypt. But sometime between 1600 and 1500 BCE, a volcano called Thera, on what is now the island of Santorini (about 200 km north of Crete in the Aegean Sea), erupted violently.

Enlarge / This is Chevrolet’s first electric pickup, the Silverado EV. When it goes on sale in 2023, there will be two versions at first, a work truck and this fully loaded RST First Edition. (credit: Chevrolet)

On Wednesday, during General Motors’ Consumer Electronics Show keynote, the company unveiled its next electric vehicle. We’ve already seen models from a newly revived Hummer and a forthcoming Cadillac SUV, but now it’s Chevrolet’s turn. And it’s an important vehicle for the brand, as this is its first battery-electric pickup truck—the 2024 Silverado EV.

It will be exclusively made in a crew cab configuration, and yes, there’s a big frunk up front where you would normally find an internal combustion engine.

As you might expect, the Silverado EV makes use of GM’s new family of Ultium Drive motors and Ultium batteries, which means it runs on an 800 V electrical architecture. The trucks can pack up to 24 modules of cells, which translates to a whopping 200 kWh of lithium-ion. As a result, Chevy will be able to offer trucks with 400 miles (644 km) of range between charges when equipped with the biggest battery pack.

Enlarge / A BrightDrop EV600 delivery van in Walmart’s livery. The retailer wants to buy 5,000 BrightDrop EVs in total. (credit: BrightDrop)

The electric delivery vehicle startup BrightDrop is on a roll. Set up by General Motors, BrightDrop leveraged the automaker’s investment in its new Ultium battery platform and Ultium Drive electric motors to bring the EV600 delivery van to market in just 20 months—faster than any other vehicle in GM history.

Last month, the company delivered the first five EV600 vans to FedEx, its first customer. Now, FedEx is increasing its order from 500 vans to 2,000 over “the next few years” and has plans to add up to 20,000 more in time.

Now, BrightDrop can add another marquee customer to its books. The retail giant Walmart has signed an agreement with BrightDrop for 5,000 vans, split between the bigger EV600 and smaller EV410 models. (The number indicates the van’s cargo storage in cubic feet.) Walmart will use the electric vans for its InHome delivery service.

Enlarge / Sony has followed 2020’s Vision-S 01 sedan with this, the Vision-S 02. It’s an electric SUV, and the company might well put it into production. (credit: Sony)

In 2020, Sony surprised the world by unveiling an electric concept car at CES. Called the Vision-S, it was designed to showcase technology from across the breadth of the Japanese technology firm. January 2021 saw CES go entirely virtual for obvious reasons, but that didn’t stop Sony from showing off the Vision-S again. This time, it was a fleet of them, including footage of on-road testing in Austria.

CES in 2022 is mostly virtual—there might be people on the ground in Las Vegas, but I’m certainly not one of them—and Sony’s EV is back once again. And it has brought a friend: an SUV called the Vision-S 02. (This means the sedan is known as the Vision-S 01.)

The Vision-S 01 (right) was first shown off at CES in 2020. Since then, it’s been in development in Germany, Austria, and Japan. (credit: Sony)

The Vision-S 02 uses the same EV powertrain as the sedan, which should still mean a pair of 200 kW (268 hp) electric motors, one for each axle. Yet again, Sony has made extensive use of its sensor know-how to endow the Vision-S 02 with a mix of lidar and high-resolution, wide-dynamic-range CMOS optical sensors that give the car a 360-degree view of the world around it. The Vision-S uses that fused sensor data to inform drivers about their driving environment, alerting them to the presence of emergency vehicles and so on.