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One thing I love about e-bikes is that you have to put them on bike racks less often. Since they propel you significantly faster and farther than an acoustic bike, you are more likely to just ride to the bike path rather than carry the bike there on your car.

That being said, there are definitely times when taking an e-bike on a car rack is needed, and the extra weight and different geometries of an e-bike make them impossible or dangerous to mount with traditional bike racks. That’s where a new breed of bike racks that blur the lines between bike carriers and motorcycle carriers come in. Today we are looking at the Hollywood Destination E-Bike Rack which comes in at a solid $699.99 price point.

First off, the Hollywood Destination E-Bike Rack comes almost completely assembled in the box and only requires a few minutes to tighten some screws and attach some belts. It fits into the 2-inch trailer hitch which I installed on my Tesla Model Y. While it doesn’t offer any pass-through lighting (nor is it legally obligated to) it does offer a myriad of safety features that will keep you from pinching off a finger.

The main thing I notice here is the quality, heavy duty parts, but it is also nice to see very eco-friendly packaging with only a few plastic zip-ties and baggies. With only a few parts to assemble, it becomes less daunting to put it together, and my teenage son and I had it attached to the car in 15 minutes.

You’ll really notice the extra heft vs. a traditional bike rack, even a four-slot acoustic bike rack. At 46lbs, it isn’t trivial to insert into the trailer hitch, but probably my favorite part about this hitch and the biggest upgrade vs. my previous bike rack is the patented “no wobble hitch system.” That is a fancy term for bolt tightener, and it made a big difference vs. my old bike rack, which would wobble when we drove.

The kit also includes an easily storable ramp for getting heavy e-bikes off and on the rack. Below, I am putting the Luna X-2 (which weighs about 42 lbs) on the rack.

To be honest, I’m not going to use the telescoping ramp because I’m able to lift most e-bikes the three feet off the ground onto and off of the rack, but I imagine smaller folks could find this useful. It would also be useful to me with something like a Sur Ron, though technically the rack is only rated for two 70lb bikes. I unofficially tried with two 100lb Juiced e-bikes, and everything seemed fine. But I’d stick to the specifications on medium to long trips.

The tie downs are super easy to affix, but it was extremely tight getting them around those 20-inch, 4-inch wide fat tire ebikes. I don’t think the small radius of these tires was considered in the design, and I hope to see a future bike rack with either closer clamps or longer belts.

While the tie downs would easily keep the bikes on the rack, the Hollywood Destination e-bike Rack comes with two pole clamps that really keep the whole thing still. I particularly like these because they really allow just about any shape and size of bike to work. However, if you have a carbon bike, like the Luna X-2, you’ll want to affix the clamps to the seat post or some other non-carbon part of the bike.

Hollywood Rack – 180 mile trip NYC to Vermont

Like I said before, the “no wobble hitch system” came in clutch here. Together with the clamps, it really made the ride smooth, and it was easy to forget we were hauling heavy e-bikes. Knowing we’d lose some mileage, we drove slower than usual and only incurred about a 10-ish% range hit vs. our normal trip up there.

Hollywood also offers keyed-alike locking frame and seat post clamps locks that give extra peace of mind when stopping at a restaurant on a trip. When bikes aren’t being driven, the rack folds flat agains the back of the car and also folds out easily for access to the back of the car.

Of course, the Hollywood Destination Rack also works great with acoustic bikes, even XL 29-inchers like the Trek Session 8 downhill bike we use in Vermont. It only takes a minute to pop this thing on there and you are ready to hit the mountains.

Electrek’s Take

I know there are some sleeker bike racks out there from Thule and Yakima which cost up to $1000. But the Hollywood Destination 2 E-Bike Rack really inspires confidence at $699 and features a very sturdy, foldable system and smooth travel with the “no wobble”. If that’s too rich for your blood, they offer $599 and $499 models as well.

Hollywood Destination 2 E-Bike Rack specs:

  • Capacity: Two bikes (Max. 70 lbs. per bike)
  • Hitch size: 2” only (Do not use a 1 ¼” – 2” hitch adapter)
  • Includes a 46″ long ramp.
  • Maximum bike wheelbase: 50”
  • Maximum tire width: 4.5”
  • Includes keyed-alike locking hitch pin and locking frame clamps
  • No-Wobble Hitch System” eliminates slack between the receiver and the rack without the use of tools.
  • Folds flat against car when not in use
  • Feature’s “Balanced Tilting” with the pivot point between the 2 bikes, making tilting down for cargo door access as easy as it gets
  • The frame grabbers on this rack can hold step through bikes by the seatpost, therefore Bike Adapters are not needed and should not be used.
  • Includes optional fixed Frame Grabber to use in place of quick release option
  • Space between bikes: 11″
  • Rack weight: 46 lbs.
  • Limited lifetime warranty
  • When using on a seat post requirements: Min. 1″ / Max 2″
  • For step-through bikes: Secure the bicycle by using the racks Frame Grabber around the bikes seat post.
  • 4″ Strap Extension Kits sold separately: STPEXT
  • Not to be used on front hitches
  • Not to be used with any 1-1/4″ – 2″ Adapter
  • Not to be used with any hitch extension longer than 8″
  • Not to be used on any trailer, fifth wheel, or towed vehicle
  • CLASS B RV APPROVED ONLY (NOT APPROVED FOR CLASS A OR CLASS C RVS)

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EVs and batteries power China’s $20B clean tech export surge

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EVs and batteries power China’s B clean tech export surge

China set a new record for clean tech exports in August 2025, hitting $20 billion, according to new data analyzed using Ember’s China Cleantech Exports Data Explorer. The country remains the world’s largest exporter of electrotech, with surging demand for EVs and batteries leading the charge.

EV exports jumped 26% from January through August compared to the same period in 2024, while battery exports rose 23%. Other sectors saw more modest growth – grid technology up 22%, wind up 16%, and heating and cooling systems up 4% – but those gains were offset by a 19% drop in solar PV export value. EVs and batteries are now worth more than double the value of China’s solar PV exports.

This milestone is remarkable because it comes even as technology prices have fallen sharply. Solar panel prices, for example, have plunged more than 80% over the past decade, making them more affordable and driving up global demand. In August alone, China exported 46 gigawatts (GW) of solar PV – more than Australia’s entire installed solar capacity – setting a record in capacity terms. However, their dollar value remains 47% below their March 2023 peak.

Falling prices have fueled growth in new regions. Over half of the increase in China’s EV exports this year came from outside the OECD, with the ASEAN region emerging as a major growth engine. EV exports to ASEAN surged 75% in the first eight months of 2025, mainly driven by Indonesia. The country saw the biggest rise in Chinese EV imports globally this year, becoming the world’s ninth-largest EV market. Battery electric vehicles made up 14% of new car sales in Indonesia in August 2025, up from 9% a year earlier.

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Africa is also rapidly adopting Chinese clean tech. From January to August, EV exports to the continent nearly tripled year-over-year (+287%), albeit from a very low base, with Morocco leading growth and Nigeria’s imports soaring sixfold. Latin America and the Caribbean saw an 11% rise, while the Middle East climbed 72%.

Domestically, China’s own adoption of clean tech is accelerating even faster. EVs accounted for 52% of new car sales in August, and in the first half of 2025, China installed more than twice as many solar panels as the rest of the world combined. Ember’s recent China Energy Transition Review attributes this momentum to consistent policy support that’s reshaping the country’s economy and energy system around electrified technologies.

“Demand for clean technologies continues to skyrocket as more and more countries seek their benefits, from low-cost power to cheaper vehicles,” said Ember analyst Euan Graham. “China’s electrotech is becoming the basis of the new energy system, with continued cost reductions driving faster growth than ever, especially in emerging economies.”

Read more: The era of cheap Chinese solar + storage is ending – here’s why


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This Meta alum has spent 10 months leading OpenAI’s nationwide hunt for its Stargate data centers

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This Meta alum has spent 10 months leading OpenAI's nationwide hunt for its Stargate data centers

Keith Heyde stands on site in Abilene, Texas, where OpenAI’s Stargate infrastructure buildout is underway. Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, is now leading OpenAI’s physical expansion push.

OpenAI

It wasn’t how Keith Heyde envisioned celebrating the holidays. Rather than hanging out with his wife back home in Oregon, Heyde spent late December visiting potential data center sites across the U.S.

Two months earlier, Heyde left Meta to join OpenAI as the head of infrastructure. His job was to turn CEO Sam Altman’s ambitious compute dreams into reality, seeking out vast swaths of land suitable for expansive facilities that will eventually be packed with powerful graphics processing units for building large language models.

“My in-between Christmas and New Year’s last year was actually mostly spent looking at sites,” Heyde, 36, told CNBC in an interview. “So my family loved that, trust me.”

His life in 2025 has only gotten more intense.

Since January, OpenAI has been quietly soliciting and reviewing proposals from around 800 applicants hoping to host the next wave of its Stargate data centers, AI supercomputing hubs designed to train increasingly powerful models.

Roughly 20 sites are now in advanced stages of diligence, with massive tracts of land under review across the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast. Heyde said tax incentives are “a relatively small part of the decision matrix.”

The most important factors are access to power, ability to scale, and buy-in from local communities.

“Can we build quickly, is the power ramp there fast, and is this something where it makes sense from a community perspective?” he said.

Heyde leads site development within OpenAI’s industrial compute team, a division that’s swiftly become one of the most important groups inside the company. Infrastructure, once a supporting function, has now been elevated to a strategic pillar on par with product and model development.

With traditional data centers nearly at max capacity, OpenAI is betting that owning the next generation of physical infrastructure is central to controlling the future of AI.

Inside OpenAI's data center site search

The energy needs are hard to fathom. A gigawatt data center requires the amount of power needed for some entire cities. Late last month, OpenAI announced plans for a 17-gigawatt buildout in partnership with OracleNvidia, and SoftBank.

New sites will have to include all sorts of energy options, including battery-backed solar installations, legacy gas turbine refurbishments and even small modular nuclear reactors, Heyde said. Each site looks different, but together they form the industrial backbone OpenAI needs to scale.

“We’ve done this wonderful piece of bottleneck analysis to see what types of energy sources actually allow us to unlock the journey that we want to be on,” Heyde said.

A good chunk of the capital is coming from Nvidia. The chipmaker agreed to invest up to $100 billion to fuel OpenAI’s expansion, which will involve purchasing millions of Nvidia’s GPUs.

‘Perfect wasn’t the goal’

Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, helped oversee the buildout of Meta’s first 100,000 GPU cluster.

In addition to power, OpenAI is assessing how quickly it can build on a site, the availability of labor and proximity to supportive local governments, according to Stargate’s request for proposal.

Heyde said the team has made around 100 site visits and has a short list of sites in late-stage review. Some will be brand new builds, and others will require conversions and refurbishments of existing facilities. Flexibility will be key.

“The perfect parcels are largely taken,” Heyde said. “But we knew that perfect wasn’t the goal — the goal for us was, number one, a compelling power ramp.”

Competition is fierce.

Meta is building what may be the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere — a $10 billion project in Northeast Louisiana, fueled by billions in state incentives. CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised the top end of the company’s annual capital expenditure spending range to $72 billion in July.

The steel frame of data centers under construction during a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.

Shelby Tauber | Reuters

Amazon and Anthropic are teaming up on a 1,200-acre AI campus in Indiana. And across the country, states are rolling out tax breaks, power guarantees, and expedited zoning approvals to attract the next big AI cluster.

OpenAI is a relative upstart, having been around for just a decade and only known to the mainstream since launching ChatGPT less than three years ago. But it’s raised mounds of cash from the likes of Microsoft and SoftBank, in addition to Nvidia, on its way to a $500 billion valuation.

And OpenAI is showing it’s not afraid to lead the way in AI. A self-built solar campus in Abiliene, Texas, is already live.

While OpenAI still leans on partners like Oracle, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC last week in Abilene that owning first-party infrastructure provides a differentiated approach. It curbs vendor markups, safeguards key intellectual property, and follows the same strategic logic that once drove Amazon to build Amazon Web Services rather than rely on existing infrastructure.

However, Heyde indicated that there’s no real playbook when it comes to AI, particularly as companies pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can potentially meet or exceed human capabilities.

OpenAI's stealth site search drew more than 800 bids since January 2025

“It’s a very different order of magnitude when we think about the type of delivery that has to happen at those locations,” he said.

Some applicants, including former bitcoin mining operators, offered existing power infrastructure, like substations and modular buildouts, but Heyde said those don’t always fit.

“Sometimes we found that it’s almost nice to be the first interaction in a community,” he said. “It’s a very nice narrative that we’re bringing the data center and the infrastructure there on behalf of OpenAI.”

The 20 finalist sites represent phase one of a much larger buildout. OpenAI ultimately plans to scale from single-gigawatt projects to massive campuses.

“Any place or any site we’re moving forward with, we’ve really considered the viability and our own belief that we can deliver the power story and the infrastructure story associated with those sites,” Heyde said.

He understands why many people are skeptical.

“It’s hard. There’s no doubt about it,” Heyde said. “The numbers we’re talking about are very challenging, but it’s certainly possible.”

WATCH: OpenAI’s $850 billion buildout contends with grid limits

OpenAI’s $850 billion buildout contends with grid limits

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Cadillac’s quiet coup: nearly HALF of all Caddies sold in Q3 were electric

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Cadillac's quiet coup: nearly HALF of all Caddies sold in Q3 were electric

There’s a quiet revolution underway in Cadillac showrooms across America. The brand’s renewed “Standard of the World” ambitions are now matched by sleek, statement-making electric vehicles. And, thanks to a little help from Federal tax credit FOMO, more than 40% of new Cadillacs sold in Q3 were 100% electric.

GM’s overall EV sales numbers were up 110% last quarter, climbing to 66,501 units in the US alone on the back of the affordable, 300+ mile Chevy Equinox and 1,000-mile capable (sort of) Silverado EV – but it was Cadillac dealers that saw the biggest growth in EV sales.

As buyers poured into Cadillac dealerships in the last days of the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit, GM’s luxury arm was ready with stylish, new-for-2025 electric vehicles like the Optiq, Vistiq, and Escalade IQ* waiting for them alongside the Lyriq. The result wasn’t just Cadillac’s best third quarter in more than a decade – Cadillac (and GM) is having one of its best sales year, period.

Here’s what the quarter looked like, by the recently-released GM sales numbers.

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EV MODEL   Q3 25/Q3 24   Q3 25 Q3 24  YTD 25/YTD 24   YTD 25 YTD 24
Chevrolet Equinox EV +156.70% 25,085 9,772 +389.88% 52,834 10,785
Chevrolet Blazer EV +1.14% 8,089 7,998 +36.72% 20,825 15,232
Chevrolet Silverado EV +97.49% 3,940 1,995 +78.58% 9,379 5,252
Chevrolet BrightDrop * 2,384 * * 3,976 0
GMC Hummer EV Pickup +21.86% 5,246 4,305 +48.65% 13,233 8,902
GMC Sierra EV +771.84% 3,374 387 +1,488.37% 6,147 387
Cadillac Optiq * 4,886 * * 9,826 0
Cadillac Lyriq +1.18% 7,309 7,224 -18.17% 16,626 20,318
Cadillac Vistiq * 3,924 * * 5,669 0
Cadillac Escalade IQ * 2,264 * * 6,030 0
Total +109.91% 66,501 31,681 +137.44% 144,545 60,876

Source: GM Authority / GM Q3 2025 sales report.

That asterisk up there next to the high-rolling Escalade IQ that sold more than 3,900 examples is because, at well over $80,000 even for the most basic model it never qualified for the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit to begin with (nor did the people destined to buy it, who almost certainly make too much to qualify).

It’ll be interesting to see if the loss of that tax credit will do much to negatively impact EV sales in Q4. And that’ll get doubly interesting thanks to the creative accounting team at GM that figured out how to extend that $7,500 tax credit for existing dealer inventory (for a few more months) and that its biggest EV rivals at Hyundai are slashing prices on popular IONIQ models.

You can check out our EIC Fred Lambert’s full review of the new electric Cadillac Escalade in the video, below, and use the following links to find great Cadillac deals near you while that cleverly extended tax credit is still a thing.

Cadillac Escalade IQ review


SOURCE | IMAGES: GM, via GM Authority.


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