Bespoke British sports car manufacturer RBW EV Cars breaks ground on new US facility
A relatively young, handcrafted British EV automaker, RBW EV Cars, is celebrating an $8 million milestone as it expands its vehicle production to North America to deliver its two flagship models to US consumers. These bespoke BEVs with British design heritage in mind look like they are extremely fun to zip around in. See more below.
RBW Electric Cars was founded in 2017 by Peter Swain, who spun the business out from his restoration company RBW Classic & Sports Cars after seeing the potential of EVs with modern technology designed within a classic car aesthetic.
Swain then established a cooperation with Continental Engineering Services (CES), which helped develop and build a “proof of concept” for BEV. One year later, RBW launched its first prototype, which was followed by a driving sampler in 2019 before the start of production of RBW’s first EV, the Roadster, in Britain in February 2020.
By January 2022, RBW had delivered its first Roadster EV to a UK client before securing an investment to scale its production processes in the summer of 2023. That following fall, RBW opened its new UK EV factory before officially launching its second model, the RBW GT, in December 2023.
Now, RBW Electric Cars is moving across the pond, making good on plans announced a year ago to establish a second hub to operate and build in the US to provide BEVs for consumers in North America.
RBW EVs breaks ground on US production site in Virginia
Per an update from RBW EV Cars today, it has officially broken ground on its new US production facility, lo9cated in Danville, Virginia. Today’s milestone follows an update in late 2024 that RBW had secured a deal with the state to build its new $8 million state-of-the-art production facility.
When complete, the 29,000-square-foot US hub in the rendering above will be home to RBW’s EV assembly, sales, and marketing operations. It will also be the new home to the entire team at Spirit EV, which developed and provides the turnkey EV powertrain solutions used in both the Roadster and GT models. Swain spoke about RBW’s latest milestone and its collaboration with Spirit EV:
RBW EV Cars has dedicated nearly a decade to developing bespoke electric vehicles that honor classic British design while delivering cutting-edge electrification. From the beginning of its operation, the company has been focused on bringing a global EV platform to market that could transcend how automakers design and engineer their own platforms. This is where Spirit EV comes in. We will now have R&D facilities in both the UK and US.
According to RBW EV Cars, its US operations will be led by former NASCAR driver and Danville native Peyton Sellers. Sellers will oversee the production of the UK automaker’s left-hand drive versions of the Roadster and GT EVs, both of which are currently scheduled to see only 50 US deliveries each in 2025.
Both RBW EV models deliver up to 150 miles of estimated range, a top (limited) speed of 90 mph, and can accelerate from 0-60 mph in 8 seconds. Brand new, built examples of the Roadster start at £108,000 ($143,00) in the UK. We don’t have US pricing yet, but RBW did share plans to unveil “additional product development initiatives and future vehicle lines” this coming fall.
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Elon Musk went on an all-day Tesla self-driving propaganda spree ahead of the company’s earnings, which are expected to be rough.
It’s well known these days that Musk doesn’t often comment on Tesla as he is busy with his government work, buying elections, and running several private companies.
Some Tesla shareholders argue that the CEO is neglecting the public company, which saw its stock tumble this year.
That wasn’t the case today.
Musk went on a tweeting spree about Tesla, specifically about Tesla’s self-driving effort.
Here are some of the highlights:
Tesla posted that “one day” its vehicles will drive themselves from the factory to new customers and Musk couldn’t stop himself and had to say that it will happen “this year”:
Like most of Musk’s self-driving comments, this one is hard to take seriously since he said the exact same thing in 2018 and claimed it would happen in 2019.
The tweet he was responding to has been deleted by the author, but it asked when Tesla vehicles would drive themselves to customers:
Spoiler alert: regulators are not the bottleneck here.
Musk then claimed that “Tesla self-driving will be far safer than human driving”:
The problem here is that Musk has claimed on many occasions that Tesla’s FSD is already safer than humans, like in 2023: “Supervised FSD is vastly safer than human driving.”
There’s no data that supports that. Tesla refuses to share any data regarding its self-driving program and instead, the company shares a very misleading quarterly “safety report.”
Considering Tesla’s FSD requires supervision from a driver at all times, the driver’s supervision and attention help reduce accidents that the self-driving system wouldn’t necessarily prevent.
Musk also shared positive experiences of a few Tesla owners, including a Tesla engineer and Joe Rogan:
As we often highlight, Tesla’s FSD can be impressive to use, but the problem is when you compare it to its promise, which is in the name: full self-driving.
Under its current form, FSD is still a level 2 advanced driver assist system, and not self-driving, but Musk said that it would become truly “unsupervised” self-driving every year for the last 8 years.
Therefore, it’s not what Musk has been promising buyers for years and as for when it is coming, he has been consistently wrong and has asked owners to rely on anecdotal experiences as Tesla refuses to release any data.
We previously reported that Musk has twice positively referred to a crowdsourced Tesla FSD dataset that shows Tesla’s FSD v13 on HW4 is achieving fewer than 500 miles between critical disengagements.
Tesla has previously stated that FSD must achieve 700,000 miles between critical disengagements to be safer than humans.
The spree of Tesla FSD tweets comes as Tesla is preparing to report its Q1 2025 earnings next week, which should be difficult after the automaker reported its lowest delivery results in three years.
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Texas is No. 1 in the US for wind and solar capacity, but the Texas Senate just passed a bill that aims to kneecap clean energy with an industry-killing review process. Will the Texas House pass it, too?
The Texas Senate today passed SB 819, which creates new restrictions on the development of wind and solar energy under the guise of “protecting” wildlife. The restrictions don’t apply to any other forms of energy.
Texas uses an extraordinary amount of power, and renewables play a big part in supplying that power. The Texas Tribune reported in March that “ERCOT [the Texas grid] predicts that Texas’ energy demand will nearly double by 2030, with power supply projected to fall short of peak demand in a worst-case scenario beginning in summer 2026.” That’s because of extreme weather, population growth, and crypto-mining facilities.
As of February, Texas increased its energy supply by 35% over the last four years, and 92% of that supply came from solar, wind, and battery storage.
Solar is the largest source of energy generating capacity that has been added to the Texas grid. That’s because it’s cost-effective and it can be deployed quickly. So if new solar projects are kneecapped, power demand will outstrip supply in the Lone Star State.
Daniel Giese, Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA)’s Texas director of state affairs, stated after the Senate’s vote, “With energy demand rising fast, Texas needs every megawatt it can generate to keep the lights on and our economy strong. We cannot afford to turn away from the pro-energy and pro-business policies that made the Lone Star State the energy capital, but that’s exactly what SB 819 does. We urge the Texas House to reject this bill.”
Less clean energy would also jack up electricity bills for Texans, and rural areas would lose billions in landowner revenue and tax payments. Every time a wind farm or solar farm is installed on rural land, it brings a lot of money to the community that surrounds it. A January report estimated that existing and planned solar, wind, and battery storage projects will contribute $20 billion in local tax revenue and $29.5 billion in landowner payments.
What’s especially baffling about this bill is that it flies in the face of a core Texas value – keeping the government out of private property decisions – yet it does precisely the opposite.
Environment Texas executive director Luke Metzger issued the following response: ‘By making it much more difficult to build wind and solar energy in Texas, this bill threatens to increase pollution, increase blackouts and increase our electric bills.
“Under the guise of helping land and wildlife, SB 819 would create a discriminatory and capricious permitting standard that could grind renewable energy development to a halt.
“We urge the House of Representatives to reject this bill and instead support policies that promote a cleaner, more sustainable energy future for all Texans.”
It will come as no surprise to regular readers that I find this bill ludicrously masochistic. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below, and please keep it civil.
Read more: A vast 600 MW Texas solar farm just hit a major milestone [update]
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