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Ford Chairman Bill Ford speaks May 19, 2021 during the unveiling of the electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck outside the automaker’s world headquarters in Dearborn, Mich.
Ford

DETROIT – A decade ago, Ford Motor was positioning itself to be a leader in electrified vehicles with new global models such as the C-Max and Focus Electric.

Those “green” cars were to lead the automaker’s efforts to potentially electrify 25% of its fleet by 2020, Ford Chairman Bill Ford wrote in a May 2011 article for Fortune Magazine. They didn’t and Ford watched as a start-up, Tesla, emerged as the industry’s benchmark for zero-emissions vehicles, and crosstown rival General Motors became Wall Street’s top legacy automaker for EVs.

Ford’s newest CEO Jim Farley, who took the helm Oct. 1, quickly announced a harder pivot to EVs as the automaker released an all-electric Mustang crossover and an upcoming F-150. While the new electric vehicles have been well received, Ford has to fight for a leadership position amid a litany of old and new competitors.

It’s something Bill Ford, great grandson of the company’s founder, is well aware of. A greener automotive industry has always been a mission of his. As an environmentalist and the longest running chairperson of any automaker, he has acted as a rare champion, or conscience, of green practices in the industry.

It’s something that was historically taboo, even discouraged, in a business reliant on fossil fuels to power its products and large trucks to drive its profits.

But that’s changing. The promise of electric vehicles and Wall Street’s support of more sustainable companies has Ford believing his decades-long vision of a greener automotive industry and company are finally achievable. And investors have taken notice, sending shares of Ford up by about 50% in 2021.

“When I joined the company in 1979, I joined as somebody who cared deeply about the environment, and I was absolutely appalled that that view was not only not shared, but it was frankly scorned within the company,” he told CNBC during a video interview. “That’s all changed now. And, yes, it makes me really excited.”

Bill Ford admits that the company’s early “green cars” may have not been as successful as he wanted at that time. But he believes the industry and consumer acceptance of electric vehicles is changing and that his push for a more sustainable industry was right all along.

“They may not have been the right time, they might not have been quite ready for primetime when they came out, but directionally, it was absolutely the right thing to do,” Ford said.

Ford vs. Trump

Doing the “right thing” hasn’t always been easy for the 64-year-old automotive heir. His support for both the environment and the industry have always been at odds with one another and drawn criticism from supporters of both sides.

Most recently, former President Donald Trump publicly condemned Bill Ford and the company last year for agreeing with California on stricter fuel economy and emissions standards.

Ford was the only American automaker to do so at the time. Ford’s largest crosstown rival – General Motors – backed the Trump administration before changing its stance to support California following Joe Biden, a supporter of EVs and stricter vehicle emissions regulations, defeating Trump.

President Donald Trump wears a mask during a private viewing of three Ford GTs from over the years at the Ford Rawsonville plant.
NBC News

“It’s important to stand for things. We’ve taken stances on the environment that haven’t always been popular, and in many cases have gone against what the rest of our industry has done,” Ford, whose career now spans seven American presidents, said. “And that’s OK because it gives you a sense of who you are.”

Farley, who joined Ford in 2007, earlier this year described that sense as being “absolutely” imperative to the automaker and its future plans. The company is soon expected to release more on its sustainability plans and how they relate to its new Ford+ turnaround plan.

Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said the company’s support of California’s emissions standards and the Paris Climate Agreement were two of the most recent examples of Bill Ford’s leadership in the industry.

“He’s been a leader,” Krupp, who has known Ford for 20 years, said during a phone interview. “I can’t think of another American auto executive that has done more to move the issue forward than Bill.”

EVs

Despite the chairman’s support for EVs and the environment, the automaker hasn’t said when it expects to convert its entire lineup to EVs, unlike rival GM which has said it plans to go all electric by 2035. Ford has said it expects 40% of its sales volume globally to be all-electric vehicle by 2030.

Bill Ford said it’s ultimately up to consumers to decide just how quickly EV adoption will occur, but more investment and new products will help. Ford’s current lineup includes plug-in hybrid electric vehicles with gasoline engines as well as the Mustang Mach-E crossover – its only EV.

“Our customers will really dictate how quickly it happens,” Ford said. “But I will tell you that we’ll be ready when that happens. We’re pushing incredibly hard. You’ll see more announcements from us in the near future.”

Ford Motor Executive Chairman Bill Ford, left, and actor Idris Elba next to Ford’s all-electric Mustang Mach-E GT SUV at Jet Center Los Angeles in Hawthorne, California on Sunday, Nov. 17, 2019. Elba, who previously worked at Ford Motor Co. in the 1980s, helped introduce the vehicle to the public.
Ford

Ford has at least two additional EVs coming by mid-next year – a commercial van later this year and an electric version of the F-150 pickup called Lightning. The new EVs are part of Ford’s plans to invest more than $30 billion in electric vehicles through 2025, about $7 billion of which had already been invested before February.

Ford said he’s “very confident” that the automaker can be a leader in electric vehicles. He also believes there will be some consolidation in the automotive industry, as a barrage of new competitors attempt to entire the space.

“We are clearly an industry in the middle of change and I believe that if we were too fast forward 10 years from now, there will be clear winners and losers in this new world of EVs, [autonomous vehicles] and software,” he said. “I think that the winners may not be all the familiar faces that people would have thought of.

“I mean clearly look at a company like Tesla, which is a very young company, and they’ve done incredibly well. There will be others like that.”

Aside from its own investments in EVs, Ford is a minority investor in EV truck start-up Rivian, which filed for an initial public offering last week. The company is reportedly seeking a valuation of $80 billion – giving the young company a higher valuation than Ford at $51 billion and GM at $71 billion.

RJ Scaringe, Rivian founder and CEO, and Ford Executive Chairman Bill Ford announce a $500 million Ford investment in Rivian.
Source: Ford Motor Co.

Achieving his vision

EVs aren’t the only part of Bill Ford’s vision for a greener future. He believes autonomous vehicles and reworking the industry’s manufacturing and supply chain need to happen as well.

He said more needs to be done regarding reducing the industry’s entire carbon footprint, including using more renewable energy to produce vehicles, as well as autonomous vehicles that can ease public transportation problems and global gridlock.

“We don’t have to be 100% in any one of those areas, but if I feel like we are well on our way in all of those areas, and I feel like it’s early days, but yes, we’re headed down all those roads. Yeah, then I’ll feel great,” he said.

While the shift to EVs is in its early days, Ford, 64, isn’t after a more than 40-year career with the automaker. However, he has no plans of stepping down from the company for the foreseeable future, even as a younger generation of Ford’s join the board. His daughter, Alexandra Ford English, and nephew, Henry Ford III, were both elected to the company’s board in May.

“I feel like I’m adding value to Ford today, maybe more than I ever have,” Ford said. “As long as I feel like I’m contributing and can work at the pace that the company needs me to work at, I’ll be here. Someday that won’t be the case and I think I’ll know when that happens.”

Ford Motor Company today announced that Alexandra Ford English and Henry Ford III have been nominated to stand for election to the company’s board of directors at its annual meeting of shareholders on May 13.
Source: Ford Motor Co.

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Tesla has yet to start testing its robotaxi service without driver weeks before launch

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May 15, 2025

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Tesla has yet to start testing its robotaxi service without driver weeks before launch

Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta Hero

Tesla has reportedly yet to start testing its robotaxi service in Austin without a safety driver behind the wheel – just weeks before the planned launch.

For months now, Tesla and CEO Elon Musk have been hyping the launch of “Tesla Robotaxi”, a Uber-like ride-hailing service powered by autonomous Tesla vehicles, starting with a launch in Austin, Texas in June.

We have extensively reported that this launch is disappointing compared to what Tesla promised for years: that all its consumer vehicles built since 2016 are capable of self-driving.

Instead, Tesla plans to build an internal fleet of “10-20” Model Ys and have them offer ride-hailing services in a geo-fenced area around Austin, Texas, helped by human teleoperations. This is very similar to what Waymo has been offering in other cities for years, specifically in Austin, for months now.

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Even with the significant downgrade in self-driving capabilities promised with this project, there are many doubts about Tesla’s ability to achieve the lesser goal.

That’s because the robotaxi service will be based on Tesla’s ‘Supervised Full Self-Driving’ program, which is currently achieving about 500 miles between critical disengagements fleet-wide, according to the latest crowdsourced data.

Tesla will be able to improve on that by optimizing a version for the geo-fenced area in Austin and it has been training its neural nets for that for months with vehicles going around Austin.

However, a new report now claims that Tesla has yet to start testing its service without safety drivers at the wheel – similar to Tesla’s public ‘Supervised FSD’. The Information wrote in a new report:

Elon Musk’s deadline for launching Tesla’s first robotaxi service, in Austin, Texas, is weeks away, but the company hadn’t started testing its cars without a human safety driver as of last month, according to an engineer close to the testing and a former employee. That’s a crucial step required before Tesla can launch the pilot service for customers.

For comparison, before launching its paid ride service in Austin, Waymo tested its vehicles with safety drivers in the area for 6 months and then without safety drivers for another 6 months.

Waymo has now taken over a significant market share of ride-hailing rides in the Texas capital, but it still has limitations; for example, it doesn’t drive on the interstate.

The report also mentions that Tesla has been working with local emergency services in Austin to develop intervention plans in order to avoid causing issues if its autonomous vehicles fail.

Electrek’s Take

This is the biggest softball goal. It’s a fraction of what was promised, it’s something that others have achieved before. It’s a punt created for Tesla to finally get a “win” in self-driving.

If they can’t even make it, it would be disastrous, but at least, I hope that it will finally open the eyes of many Tesla shareholders to the reality that Tesla is actually behind in autonomous driving and that Musk’s latest claims that Tesla will have “millions of robotaxi on the road” in 2026 are just the same as when he claimed it would happen in 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019: corporate puffery.

My main concern now is for public safety. I have little hope of US regulators being able to stop Tesla considering Trump is firing anyone who got in Musk’s way after he gave him over $250 million.

If Tesla brings its cowboy approach to this, it could get bad quickly.

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Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe shares more detailed images of the R2’s Maximus drive unit

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May 15, 2025

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Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe shares more detailed images of the R2's Maximus drive unit

Rivian Maximus

The development of Rivian’s R2 validation builds continues to progress. We know so because the American automaker’s founder and CEO, RJ Scaringe, continues to pepper us with welcome updates with plenty of fantastic images. The latest post features the inner workings of Rivian’s Maximus drive unit, which will propel the upcoming R2 EVs when they hit the market next year.

Another day, another exciting social media update from RJ Scaringe. Nine days ago, the Rivian CEO shared a peek at the company’s new Maximus drive unit, designed to be more compact and efficiently built to help reduce cost-per-unit production.

Our only look was from outside the drive unit’s casing at the time, but it was exciting news nonetheless. As an encore, Scaringe posted photos of the R2 validation builds on a pilot line at the automaker’s facility in Normal, Illinois.

This evening, Scaringe took to Instagram and X once again to share a better look at the inner workings of the Rivian Maximus drive unit. Check it out:

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Rivian Maximus
Source: @RJScaringe/X

RJ shares more images of Rivian’s Maximus development

Rivian’s CEO posted the three images above, which showcase some interesting perspectives of the developing drive unit. As previously shared by Rivian, Maximus uses a new continuous winding technique that reduces the total welds per stator and thus the total overall cost of building each one.

For comparison, Rivian’s current Enduro drive unit requires 264 stator welds, while Maximus only needs 24. You can see the stator windings in the image above to the left. Scaringe shared excitement in the progress of the Rivian team’s Maximus drive unit as well as some insight in his post:

I love the packaging on Maximus — the drive unit for R2. It has a side mounted inverter that utilizes flat area at the end of the motor to minimize the length of bus bars, keeping them light and efficient. The large planar shape also allows all processing and power electronics to exist on a single printed circuit board.

The inverter chassis closes out the oil cooled motor cavity and seamlessly routes coolant from the power modules to the drive unit’s heat exchanger with no extra parts.

Overall, the inverter part count is reduced by 41% relative to Enduro and structural inverter lid saves more parts and fasteners by also serving as the drive unit mount. I love this design efficiency. (heart emoji)

Looks fantastic, RJ. We can’t wait to see the visual progress of the R2 you share next!

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EV sales are up, Tesla sales are down, and new electric Toyota goodness

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May 14, 2025

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EV sales are up, Tesla sales are down, and new electric Toyota goodness

On today’s thrilling episode of Quick Charge, we’ve a huge spike in global EV sales and a huge dip in Tesla deliveries. Plus a whole bunch of news from Toyota, including an updated bZ that’s just a bit better than before … but is a bit better going to make a big difference?

We’re also on track for more than 1 in 4 new cars sold this year to be electric, with a whole lot more hybrids coming in to make up the difference and drive fuel demand down to a new yearly low. All this, plus the top 5 cheapest EVs to insure when you hit the play button.

Prefer listening to your podcasts? Audio-only versions of Quick Charge are now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn, and our RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

New episodes of Quick Charge are recorded, usually, Monday through Thursday (and sometimes Sunday). We’ll be posting bonus audio content from time to time as well, so be sure to follow and subscribe so you don’t miss a minute of Electrek’s high-voltage daily news.

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Got news? Let us know!
Drop us a line at tips@electrek.co. You can also rate us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or recommend us in Overcast to help more people discover the show.

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Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.

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