Volkswagen says it signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) Friday with Ellia Group to explore V2G technology and how it can potentially help stabilize the energy grid while rewarding EV drivers.
Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology has immense potential as more electric vehicles hit the road. EV chargers and the technology behind connectors have evolved as automakers work with tech leaders, charging companies, and utility companies to allow their vehicles to be used for more than zero-emission driving.
For example, Ford, Hyundai, Porsche, Nissan, Tesla, and others have explored how drivers can utilize V2G technology to send energy back from their vehicles to the energy grid.
EV batteries have incredible storage ability, which is a significant advantage as countries move to renewable energy sources. Renewable energy sources like wind and solar hold incredible value, but they also come with hurdles.
For one thing, wind and solar cannot be produced on demand, making storage solutions essential. Although the transition will require more transmission capacity, electric vehicles offer a unique solution.
Elia is Belgium’s high voltage transmission operator, maintaining electricity supply and demand. The company believes electric vehicles can be a key asset for balancing the grid, referring to them as “batteries on wheels.”
Volkswagen is joining Elia’s mission as the automaker accelerates its transition to sustainable transportation and explores how V2G technology can help integrate EVs for a superior energy grid.
Volkswagen V2G promotion Source: V2G UK
Volkswagen, Elia agree on plans to integrate V2G into the grid
Over the next few years, Volkswagen, Elli (VW’s energy and charging division), Elia, and its startup re.alto will explore the benefits of V2G integration and the potential challenges that come along with it.
According to the press release, VW’s new partnership aims to show how electric vehicle drivers “will be able to charge their EVs when there are high amounts of renewable energy” available on the grid and “inject the electricity stored in the EVs back into the grid when it needs it most” with V2G technology.
Elli’s CEO, Elke Temme, talks of the benefits of using bi-directional power, stating:
An essential key to achieving climate neutrality lies in linking of the energy and mobility sectors. Using the electric vehicle battery as a mobile power bank delivers a triple benefit: Firstly, the climate benefits as renewable energy can be stored and therefore be used more efficiently; secondly, the electric grid benefits, as the car can contribute toward grid stability, and thirdly, the customer can earn additional revenue with vehicle-to-grid services. To explore the benefits of this consumer-centric approach, this cooperation with Elia Group is crucial for us.”
The technology, when deployed properly, can benefit all parties involved. With less stress on the energy grid, utility companies can offer lower rates to consumers. On top of this, for sending energy back when it’s needed most, EV drivers can earn incentives.
Volkswagen and its partners will focus on four critical areas that would lead to the successful integration of V2G, including:
Price signals (incentives) – Exploring ways to incentivize EV drivers to use their vehicles to store and send energy back to the grid.
Market design – Working to remove barriers preventing EV owners from being able to choose their energy supplier.
Trusted data – EVs must have some verification process to plug into the grid for security purposes.
Secure connectivity – Ensuring the connection is secure and any data transferred is safe.
For V2G to work on a wide scale, Volkswagen and its partners recognize these critical factors must be addressed first.
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Mercedes-Benz High-Power Charging and Starbucks have officially opened their first DC fast charging hub together, off the I-5 in Red Bluff, California.
The 400 kW Mercedes-Benz chargers are capable of adding up to 300 miles in 10 minutes, depending on the EV, and every stall has both NACS and CCS cables – they’re fully open DC fast chargers.
Mercedes-Benz HPC North America, a joint venture between subsidiaries of Mercedes-Benz Group and renewable energy producer MN8 Energy, first announced in July 2024 that it would install DC fast chargers at Starbucks stores along Interstate 5, the main 1,400-mile north-south interstate highway on the US West Coast from Canada to Mexico. Ultimately, Mercedes plans to install fast chargers at 100 Starbucks stores across the US.
Mercedes-Benz HPC opened its first North American charging site at Mercedes-Benz USA’s headquarters in Sandy Springs, Georgia, in November 2023 as part of an initial $1 billion charging network investment. As of the end of 2024, Mercedes had deployed over 150 operational fast chargers in the US, but it hasn’t disclosed an official number of how many chargers are currently online.
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Andrew Cornelia, CEO of Mercedes-Benz HPC North America, is leaving the company at the end of the month to become global head of electrification & sustainability at Uber.
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The race for autonomous driving has three fronts: software, hardware, and regulatory. For years, we’ve watched Tesla try to brute-force its way to “Full Self-Driving (FSD)” with its own custom hardware, while the rest of the automotive industry is increasingly lining up behind NVIDIA.
Here’s a table comparing the two chips with the best possible specs I could find. greentheonly’s teardown was particularly useful. If you find things you think are not accurate, please don’t hesitate to reach out:
Feature / Specification
Tesla AI4 (Hardware 4.0)
NVIDIA Drive Thor (AGX / Jetson)
Developer / Architect
Tesla (in-house)
NVIDIA
Manufacturing Process
Samsung 7nm (7LPP class)
TSMC 4N (custom 5nm class)
Release Status
In production (shipping since 2023)
In production since 2025
CPU Architecture
ARM Cortex-A72 (legacy)
ARM Neoverse V3AE (server-grade)
CPU Core Count
20 cores (5× clusters of 4 cores)
14 cores (Jetson T5000 configuration)
AI Performance (INT8)
~100–150 TOPS (dual-SoC system)
1,000 TOPS (per chip)
AI Performance (FP4)
Not supported / not disclosed
2,000 TFLOPS (per chip)
Neural Processing Unit
3× custom NPU cores per SoC
Blackwell Tensor Cores + Transformer Engine
Memory Type
GDDR6
LPDDR5X
Memory Bus Width
256-bit
256-bit
Memory Bandwidth
~384 GB/s
~273 GB/s
Memory Capacity
~16 GB typical system
Up to 128 GB (Jetson Thor)
Power Consumption
Est. 80–100 W (system)
40 W – 130 W (configurable)
Camera Support
5 MP proprietary Tesla cameras
Scalable, supports 8MP+ and GMSL3
Special Features
Dual-SoC redundancy on one board
Native Transformer Engine, NVLink-C2C
The most striking difference right off the bat is the manufacturing process. NVIDIA is throwing everything at Drive Thor, using TSMC’s cutting-edge 4N process (a custom 5nm-class node). This allows them to pack in the new Blackwell architecture, which is essentially the same tech powering the world’s most advanced AI data centers.
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Tesla, on the other hand, pulled a move that might surprise spec-sheet warriors. Teardowns confirm that AI4 is built on Samsung’s 7nm process. This is mature, reliable, and much cheaper than TSMC’s bleeding-edge nodes.
When you look at the compute power, NVIDIA claims a staggering 2,000 TFLOPS for Thor. But there’s a catch. That number uses FP4 (4-bit floating point) precision, a new format designed specifically for the Transformer models used in generative AI.
Tesla’s AI4 is estimated to hit around 100-150 TOPS (INT8) across its dual-SoC redundant system. On paper, it looks like a slaughter, but Tesla made a very specific engineering trade-off that tells us exactly what was bottling up their software: memory bandwidth.
Tesla switched from LPDDR4 in HW3 to GDDR6 in HW4, the same power-hungry memory you find in gaming graphics cards (GPUs). This gives AI4 a massive memory bandwidth of approximately 384 GB/s, compared to Thor’s 273 GB/s (on the single-chip Jetson config) using LPDDR5X.
This suggests Tesla’s vision-only approach, which ingests massive amounts of raw video from high-res cameras, was starving for data.
Based on Elon Musk’s comments that Tesla’s AI5 chip will have 5x the memory bandwidth, it sounds like it might still be Tesla’s bottleneck.
Here is where Tesla’s cost-cutting really shows. AI4 is still running on ARM Cortex-A72 cores, an architecture that is nearly a decade old. They bumped the core count to 20, but it’s still old tech.
NVIDIA Thor, meanwhile, uses the ARM Neoverse V3AE, a server-grade CPU explicitly designed for the modern software-defined vehicle. This allows Thor to run not just the autonomous driving stack, but the entire infotainment system, dashboard, and potentially even an in-car AI assistant, all on one chip.
Thor has found many takers, especially among Tesla EV competitors such as BYD, Zeekr, Lucid, Xiaomi, and many more.
Electrek’s Take
There’s one thing that is not in there: price. I would assume that Tesla wins on that front, and that’s a big part of the project. Tesla developed a chip that didn’t exist, and that it needed.
It was an impressive feat, but it doesn’t make Tesla an incredible leader in silicon for self-driving.
Tesla is maxing out AI4. It now uses both chips, making it less likely to achieve the redundancy levels you need to deliver level 4-5 autonomy.
Meanwhile, we don’t have a solution for HW3 yet and AI5 is apparently not coming to save the day until 2027.
By then, there will likely be millions of vehicles on the road with NVIDIA Thor processors.
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Velotric’s Black Friday Sale switches gears with up to $750 increased savings and new lows starting from $999
Velotric has switched its Black Friday Sale into a higher gear with increased savings, new low prices, and expanded bundle packages on its e-bike lineup for a short-term window through Cyber Monday – plus, the option to save 30% on three accessories. One notable expanded package is the Velotric T1 ST Plus Lightweight Urban e-bike, coming with a FREE range extender battery ($400 value) for $1,299 shipped. You’d have to pay $1,649 for the e-bike on its own without any discounts, with that extra battery running that price up to $2,049. The brand’s early Black Friday deal only offered $350 savings (with the bundle being a rear cargo rack), but for this short-term change-up, you’re getting $750 in total savings that returns the tag to the lowest price we have tracked in 2025. Head below to check out the full lineup of Velotric’s expanded Black Friday Sale savings.
One of my favorite options from Velotric’s lineup, the T1 ST Plus e-bike, is a lightweight commuter that weighs only 39 pounds, and if you’ve read any of my e-bike reviews, you know I often lean towards models that can be easily handled up and down my rather large stoop. It brings a more European-style minimalist elegance to your travels, though keep in mind this model doesn’t possess a throttle, so it’s all PAS action. The 350W rear hub motor (with a 600W peak) is paired with a 352.8Wh battery for up to 70 miles of assisted travel at up to 20/28 MPH top speeds, depending on your local laws. What’s more, with the range extender battery, which connects right to this bike’s frame, boosts your pedal-assisted travel up to 100 miles in total, giving you serious commuting power.
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It comes with a nice lineup of features, too, but of course, I have to shout out the Apple Find My inclusion for the added peace of mind. From there, you’ll also be getting double hydraulic disc brakes, puncture-resistant tires, an 8-speed Shimano derailleur, an integrated LED auto-on headlight, a 3.5-inch LCD screen for setting adjustments that also has a USB port to charge up devices, and more.
EcoFlow Black Friday flash sale drops DELTA 2 Max power station to new $799 low ($600 off) + other bundles from $698
As part of its phase 3 Black Friday Sale event, EcoFlow has launched a 24-hour flash sale that is taking up to 61% off four offers, with a notable deal on the DELTA 2 Max Portable Power Station at $799 shipped, which beats out Amazon’s pricing by $100. While it carries an $1,899 MSRP, you’ll more often find it going for $1,399 these days, with the discounts we’ve been seeing in the latter half of 2025 regularly dropping things lower between $999 and $899. Now, for only 24 hours, you can pick it up $100 lower than we’ve ever tracked, giving you a total $600 off the going rate ($1,100 off the MSRP) for the lowest new price we have tracked.
***Note: some of these flash sale offers might start at higher prices, but for this 24-hour period, they have been given automatic discounts to these rates that activate in your cart.
Upgrade off-road commutes and adventures with Lectric’s XPeak 2.0 e-bikes and up to $583 in FREE gear from $1,499
As part of its ongoing Black Friday Sale, which is starting to show models running out of stock from the offers of up to $893 in savings across e-bike bundles. During this sale, Lectric’s XPeak 2.0 Long-Range Off-Road e-bikes are seeing the largest bundles of the year with $583 in FREE gear joining your purchase at $1,699 shipped. You’ll also find Lectric’s standard XPeak 2.0 Off-Road e-bikes coming with $434 in FREE gear at $1,499 shipped. These packages would normally cost $2,282 and $1,933 in full if not for the discounts on the bundles, which are the largest we’ve seen for the long-range models. The standard e-bikes come with a rear cargo rack, fender set, Elite headlight upgrade, a suspension seat post, a bike lock, and a phone holder, while the long-range counterparts get those, as well as a 5A fast charger that “is 250% faster, allowing you to power up in approximately 4 hours or less.” Head below to more on these all-terrain e-mobility solutions.
Lectric XP4 Standard Folding Utility e-bikes with $326 bundle: $999 (Reg. $1,325)
Lectric XP Lite 2.0 Long-Range e-bikes with $449 bundles: $999 (Reg. $1,448)
Heybike Mars 2.0 Folding Fat-Tire e-bike with Black Friday gift: $999 (Reg. $1,499)
Heybike Ranger S Folding Fat-Tire e-bike with Black Friday gift: $999 (Reg. $1,499)
Best new Green Deals landing this week
The savings this week are also continuing to a collection of other markdowns. To the same tune as the offers above, these all help you take a more energy-conscious approach to your routine. Winter means you can lock in even better off-season price cuts on electric tools for the lawn while saving on EVs and tons of other gear.
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