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Cruise’s license to operate autonomous vehicles in the state of California has been suspended effective immediately, announced the California Department of Motor Vehicles today.

GM’s Cruise subsidiary has been operating a driverless taxi service in San Francisco for the last few months, after the California Public Utilities Commission approved both GM’s Cruise and Google’s Waymo to expand operations of paid driverless “level 4” taxis in California.

Prior to that approval, Cruise had already been operating a paid driverless taxi service, but only at night. Its cars could operate at other times of day, but had to be either unpaid or have a safety driver present. Cruise actually beat Waymo to the punch on this one, offering a paid taxi service before its Google-based competitor did.

But now the tides have swung back into Waymo’s favor, as the California DMV has decided that Cruise vehicles are a threat to safety and must cease operations in the state immediately until the DMV is satisfied that Cruise has come into compliance with its requirements.

The announcement was made by the DMV today which laid out four violations, related to safety and misrepresentation of facts to the DMV.

These violations were related to an October 2nd incident wherein a human driver hit a pedestrian (and then fled the scene), which pushed the pedestrian into the path of a Cruise vehicle. The Cruise vehicle immediately started braking to a halt before hitting the pedestrian, who was then stuck underneath, and remained on the scene while emergency responders extricated the seriously injured pedestrian. Video confirming the facts of the incident was shared with regulators, and shared with and verified by journalists, but not released to the public.

…Or so the story went. In further investigations, the DMV found out that, in fact, the Cruise vehicle did not remain still after braking, and attempted to pull over to the side of the road, dragging the seriously injured pedestrian about 20 feet at a speed of around 7 miles per hour. While Cruise had video of this subsequent maneuver, it did not disclose the video to the DMV until after DMV learned of it “via discussion with another government agency.”

The DMV’s letter to Cruise chides the company for withholding information, and states that the vehicle’s “subsequent movement… increased the risk of, and may have caused, further injury to the pedestrian.” It also suggests that the vehicles may lack the decisionmaking capability of when it is safer to pull over or when it is safer to sit still after an accident.

So despite Cruise’s lack of responsibility for the initial strike, DMV has still laid responsibility on its decisions after the fact, both in terms of driving and organizational decisions.

The suspension is effective immediately, with Cruise no longer allowed to operate driverless taxis on California roads, though the company can still operate and test vehicles with human safety drivers. DMV states that it has provided Cruise with the steps necessary to reinstate its permits, so we’ll have to stay tuned to see how long it takes them to satisfy the DMV and be able to operate again.

Electrek’s Take

Cruise has been involved in several incidents recently, which have largely been widely reported. From traffic jams due to communication issues within the system, to getting hit by an emergency vehicle (Cruise had a green light – but failed to yield for a fire truck), to driving through wet concrete, there has been quite a bit of bad news.

In contrast, Google’s Waymo, which is often mentioned in the same breath as GM’s Cruise, hasn’t had as many problems. While we haven’t been able to compare both of them (I got a chance to test Waymo’s service in LA earlier this month, and came away impressed – read my way-too-detailed article about that ride here – but haven’t been in a Cruise car yet), anecdotally, we hear that the Waymo system works better than Cruise’s, and it also hasn’t had as many widely-reported issues.

Recently, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt stated that these incidents have been “sensationalized,” and frankly he’s not entirely wrong. We’ve known all along that people would be overly cautious of new technology, would accept far less dangerous driving from AVs than the run-of-the-mill (and increasing) chaos they happily accept from human drivers.

You could write volumes about the crazy things that humans have done on the road in the same time frame as Cruise has been operating in SF. I drove for just a few hours today and saw 13 police cars headed for a high-speed chase of a human driver who was going 100mph in the wrong direction, and then later saw a lowered SUV with a popped tire dragging its rear bumper down the freeway, throwing sparks behind it. That was just today, on one drive.

And look at the incident in question here – a human driver caused the accident and fled the scene so as not to be held accountable, and yet virtually all discussion of it has focused on the Cruise AV. Had the Cruise been in the place of the human driver, perhaps the incident would never have happened, and at the very least, at least the vehicle didn’t flee the scene so it could “accept the consequences.”

But that’s the rub – when the humans at Cruise got involved, they misled regulators in a way so as to not accept responsibility. They “hit-and-ran” in the same way as the human driver did.

And while it’s true that the public reacts irrationally to news of AVs behaving badly, Cruise should have known that the public, and regulators, react wholly rationally to public safety cover-ups. In short: they’re not fans.

So when the incident first happened, I thought: okay, this is silly, the main incident people are using to call AVs unsafe is one which was started by a human driver?

But given that there’s more to the story, then it is of course reasonable to suspend Cruise’s license for its mendaciousness in this matter. And hopefully, this will be addressable. Cruise should be able to program the cars to be smarter about what to do in a situation where a pedestrian is actively trapped underneath the vehicle, and hopefully they can program themselves to be a little smarter about transparency in government investigations.

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The Dodge Neon deserves a comeback – and Stellantis could do it tomorrow

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The Dodge Neon deserves a comeback – and Stellantis could do it tomorrow

The first all-new compact Mopar since the malaise-era K-Car, the Dodge Neon was a revelation. Its fun, approachable face, its “Hi.” marketing campaign, all of it was pitch-perfect for the uncertain times it was launched into. Now, a generation later, Stellantis faces similarly uncertain times – and a new Neon could go a long way towards helping the old Chrysler Co. do what it does best: come back from the brink.

If they wanted to, Stellantis could make it happen tomorrow.

Today, Stellantis is in trouble. Much like it was in the early 90s, the company is hemorrhaging cash, fighting with the unions, and struggling to sell higher-end cars. Today as then, what the company needs is an affordable, simple new car to get people in the showrooms – and in 1994, that new car was the Neon.

In the mid-late 1990s, the Dodge Neon was everywhere. It was affordable, fun to drive, and more or less reliable. It was also economical and fuel-efficient, but it wasn’t that way. It was sold as a fun, smiling face with funky round lights. In R/T and ACR spec, it was sold as an even more fun, smiling face, and offered serious performance chops that still get the grizzled Gen X guys at the SCCA/NASA track days excited.

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Stellantis is selling a car right now, today, that meets all that criteria. It’s the right size, it’s reasonably affordable, and it’s got the right tech – available as both a PHEV and a pure EV – for its time.

It’s even got some funky round lights!

Lancia Ypsilon HF


Spec SOHC Neon DOHC Neon Hybrid Y EV Y HF Y
Wheelbase (mm) 2642 2642 2675 2675 2675
Overall Length (mm) 4366 4366 4080 4080 4080
Engine Size (L) 2.0 2.0 1.2 NA NA
HP 132–136 150 100 156 280
TQ (lb-ft) 129–133 133 129 192 255
0–60 mph (s) 7.6–8.5 7.6 9.3 8.2 5.6
MPG (comb.)/EV range 28 28 ~50 425 km 370 km

As you can see from the specs, above, the first-gen Neon is pretty close in terms of size and performance, with the modern Ypsilon offering significantly improved emissions, technology, and safety upgrades compared to the OG Neon, which didn’t even offer anti-lock brakes (ABS) as standard on its base or Highline models (it was standard on the Sport and, later, R/T trims).

There’s even a modern allegory for the ultra track-focused ACR version of the Neon, which shipped with its adjustable suspension, anti-sway bars, disc brakes, and close-ratio transmission. That’s the Lancia Ypsilon HF, a 280 HP sporty compact EV that made its debut last week and originally inspired this article.

Check out the original launch ad for the 1995 Plymouth Neon, below, and tell me they couldn’t do a shot-for-shot remake with a rebadged Ypsilon and make it immediately relevant to car buyers in 1995 in the comments.

Plymouth Neon launch commercial from 1994


Original content from Electrek.


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Does Faraday’s FX Super One show us how Chinese EVs will get into the US?

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Does Faraday's FX Super One show us how Chinese EVs will get into the US?

Faraday Future unveiled its upcoming FX Super One MPV on Thursday, which appears to be a rebadged Great Wall Motors Way Gaoshan.

Which brings us to the question: is this how we might see more Chinese EVs make their way to the US?

The EV market in China has grown rapidly in recent years, not just in terms of total sales and revenues for its largest companies, but also in terms of the hundreds of EV companies vying to survive the current highly competitive market there.

But despite massively rising EV sales in the country, EV production is still scaling even faster. This has led to a price war within China due to this glut of cars, and also to Chinese companies seeking more buyers overseas.

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These affordable EVs have been shipped around the globe, leading to rapidly rising EV sales in Europe and in the “rest of the world” – though, as of yet, not really in the US. Due to excessive tariffs, the US has made itself into an island where few Chinese EVs are allowed.

The ones that have made their way into the US are those built by Western brands that were bought up by a Chinese conglomerate, like Volvo and Polestar under parent company Geely. Some of their models are assembled in Chinese factories, but most of the ones making their way to the US are built in European or US factories (largely due to the domestic sourcing efforts in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, creating millions of US jobs which republicans are currently doing their best to send back to China).

BYD has also put out feelers about building a factory in Mexico, but those plans are on pause, ironically because BYD doesn’t want its technology to be stolen by the US (put that one on for some perspective about how far we have fallen behind on EVs, fellow Americans).

But we haven’t yet seen the kind of Chinese EV that the rest of the world is getting – one of those many eye-openingly cheap numbers that could finally bring true affordability to the US market (or bring it back, that is).

That’s due to tariffs, and it’s intentional. There are various arguments given for tariffs’ existence, but they boil down to: the US can’t make cars as cheap as China, and wants to protect its auto industry, and therefore making Chinese EVs more expensive will forestall their entry into the US while we try to get better at making them. I personally find these explanations wanting and consider these tariffs unwise (and they have only gotten more unwise).

But in a world where these tariffs exist, and depending highly on what final form they take, companies will look for ways to minimize their exposure to them and to still bring cars into the US. Much of the EV industry is sourced through China (again, one of the issues the Inflation Reduction Act tried to remedy), so parts will have tariffs on them, in various amounts.

This is where I speculate that the Faraday Future FX Super One could come in. At last night’s unveiling event, it became quite clear that the car is strikingly similar to the Great Wall Motors Wey Gaoshan.

This similarity is not coincidental – Faraday told us that it is working with “a Tier 1 Chinese automotive supplier,” one that we have heard of, to build the FX Super One. That supplier will send stamped bodies to Faraday’s US factory in Hanford, CA, where Faraday will take care of the final assembly.

Faraday didn’t let us take pictures of the interior, even from the outside, but what we saw of the interior on a short ride around the parking lot looked quite similar to the interior of a Wey Gaoshan, just with different controls (for example, the the pull-out fridge in the bottom of this photo is identical to the one I saw in the FX Super One).

Faraday said the interior hasn’t been finalized yet, but also said that it thinks it can have 100-150 cars built by the end of the year. Which is less than half a year away, for a company that has to date built 16 cars (though those it built on its own). So there’s not a lot of time for further changes at this rate.

So, here we have a company that intends to sell a car in the US, much of which originated in China. This seems like it would run afoul of tariffs.

But, depending on how (or if…) these tariffs get edited or finalized, they might be much lower for parts and/or for vehicles that undergo final assembly in the US. So Faraday might be able to get away with importing something very similar to a GWM, doing enough to it here to qualify its way past tariffs, and getting it on the market at a price that doesn’t incorporate the however-many-hundred-percent the US has ridiculously decided to tack on this week.

Faraday also mentioned during its presentations about the FX Super One that it has a US-based software team, which has been at work for some time.

The software in Faraday’s previous vehicle, the FF91, is pretty good, despite being such a low volume vehicle. And it’s gotten much better between the first time I sat in it and when I had a short demo this month of Faraday’s newly-upgraded voice recognition system (now supporting 50+ languages) and swipe gestures for setting volume and HVAC.

We didn’t get to interact with the software on the FX Super One at all, but we would be cautiously optimistic about it based on prior showings.

But more importantly for the purposes of this article, Faraday’s software team is based in the US. And given current US threats to ban any and all Chinese software from vehicles, this too would allow Faraday to swap out some chips and memory cards and make a car perfectly legal from a US perspective.

So it’s possible that Faraday is on to something here, and has found a reasonable way to get Chinese EVs into America, while complying with US law, and while giving the company a much easier way to increase its scale than trying to get numbers up for the slow-growing FF91 project. Faraday does not have the resources to build out mass market manufacturing currently, so this is another option.

Now… this is no $11k Dolphin Seagull, the Wey Gaoshan starts in the mid-$40k range in China, and is considered a luxury model. And here in the US, Faraday is positioning the car as a premium model as well, though hasn’t yet announced pricing or really gotten its messaging straight on whether it’s a mass market vehicle or a VIP/Cadillac Escalade competitor.

But if this is Faraday’s plan, and if the plan works, it could give the US a taste of the EVs that the rest of the world is getting access to, and could show a potential way of getting those cars across the border. There are both pros (competition good, cheaper prices good) and cons (race to the bottom for manufacturing, loss of important American industry) for the US auto market here, so you’ll have to decide which side of that equation you land on, but this could be a harbinger of one way cars from the now-biggest auto exporting country in the world could make their way out into markets that have exhibited hostility to that idea.


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Review: The tech-forward Meepo Go electric skateboard is a smooth, speedy ride for all [Video]

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Review: The tech-forward Meepo Go electric skateboard is a smooth, speedy ride for all [Video]

Scooter here, back with another electric mobility review. This time, I tested out the Meepo Go electric skateboard. It is a sturdy, smooth deck designed for riders of all sizes, with some unique tech I had never encountered before. Be sure to check out my full video review below.

The Meepo Go is a versatile skateboard built for everyone

The Go electric skateboard from Meepo comes in one standard design. It usually has an MSRP of $699, but it is currently on sale for $569, so now is an excellent time to buy.

Features at a glance:

  • Bamboo and fiberglass deck provides durability, flexibility, and stability, suitable for heavier riders over 200 lbs.
  • Impact-resistant plates and a scratch-resistant underside.
  • Dual belt drive 1500 watt stator 4230 motors
  • 12s2p 345.6WH/8AH battery with flame-retardant and water-resistant protection
  • JK-FOC24B Electronic Speed Controller (ESC)
    • Offers smooth, jerk-free acceleration with customizable speed and braking settings
  • Four-speed modes:
    • L: 12 mph (20 km/h)
    • E: 20 mph (32 km/h)
    • S/S+: 28 mph (45 km/h) (S+ adds faster acceleration)
  • Adjustable braking intensity
  • Top Speed 28 mph (45 km/h)
  • Range: Up to 20 miles (32 km)
  • Incline capabilities: 30%
  • 2-year warranty

Electrek‘s take

Meepo is an exciting electric skateboard manufacturer whose goal is to make this particular form of travel accessible to anyone and help reduce carbon emissions. You know we love that.

The company has built hundreds of thousands of electric boards, all of which are rigorously tested and constantly revamped for better quality and efficiency. For my first-ever encounter with Meepo, I was sent its Go electric skateboard – a sort of all-in-one deck designed to support heavier riders.

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I didn’t realize this was a heavy rider board until I read its description on the website. I don’t think that was the reason Meepo recommended this one, but it’s nice to know I wouldn’t have to worry about breaking the Go for being too heavy (I’m only 200 pounds right now, okay?).

The unboxing was incredibly simple. You first unwrap your shiny new, assembled Meepo Go deck, complete with wheels, trucks, motors, and battery. Below that is some instructions, a charger with cables, a couple of adjustment tools, plus two extra motor belts.

Last but not least is Meepo’s J6S ergonomic remote. According to Meepo, the remote’s upgraded control logic allows riders to double-click to change speed modes, reducing accidental toggles, and can stay connected to the board at a max range of 46 meters.

My full haul is pictured above and in the video below. Zero assembly is required; simply plug and play. The Meepo Go electric skateboard can recharge when fully drained in four hours.

Aside from its sturdy design, thanks to a Bamboo and fiberglass deck, I found the Meepo Go quite aesthetically pleasing. I liked its unique grip tape design and carved-out handle for easier carrying (see below).

Meepo skateboard

Once the Meepo skateboard was fully charged, it was time to power up and take it out for a first spin. My initial impression was just how smooth a ride the Go is, thanks in part to its wheels, which Meepo recently revamped to enable better wet-weather traction and anti-slip capabilities.

The trucks initially took some getting used to as they are 45-degree as opposed to 50-degree on traditional configurations, but once I got used to the difference, I felt much more stable at high speeds and making sharp turns. Meepo also provided a truck tool to tighten or loosen your configuration to your preferences.

The Meepo Go’s dual 4230 brushless motors combine for a total output of 3,000 watts, offering a top speed of up to 28 mph or 45 km/h. While that’s pretty damn fast for an electric skateboard, Meepo said “not so fast” to new riders for their own safety.

Go riders must travel 10 km (6.2 miles) in the lower two “L” and “E” speed modes to unlock the S and S+ modes, which allow the 28 mph top speed and higher acceleration. S mode was honestly too fast for my liking, but it was nice to know I had those speed capabilities whenever I’m feeling saucy. The truth is, at my age and skill level, I’m beyond satisfied cruising and carving around 20 mph.

Luckily, the Meepo Go electric skateboard delivers both speed options and then some.

The Meepo Go also allows you to customize its braking intensity from 0% to 100%. This is a feature I had never personally seen on an electric skateboard that genuinely impressed me. It just adds to the overall smoothness this deck provides on all levels.

As mentioned in the key features above, the Go’s dual motors are powered by an eight-amp-hour battery, which enables an all-electric range of up to 20 miles or 32 km.

Aside from speeds nearing 30 mph, you really feel the Meepo Go’s capability on hills. It was configured to tackle 15-degree (30%) inclines with ease, and having tested it, it’s true.

What may be most impressive about this particular Meepo skateboard is its advanced JKFOC-24B electronic skate controller (ESC), which is essentially the brain of the entire powertrain. 

The ESC delivers smooth acceleration with no jerking or lag. It also enables full user customization of acceleration, top speed, and braking sensitivity, so once you get comfortable, you can tailor every aspect of your riding experience to your liking. This is another super cool feature that was new to me personally.

Meepo skateboard

Overall, the Meepo Go is smooth, powerful, and very tech-forward. With more than enough speed, I truly enjoyed the lag-free cruising and carving of the 45-degree trucks and the ease of use of its ergonomic remote.

I was genuinely impressed by the tech used to customize this skateboard, enabling anyone to customize their ride. As such, I’d highly recommend the Meepo Go because of its feel, utility, and universal rideability for virtually everyone, not to mention its competitive pricing.

If you’d like to try out the Meepo Go electric skateboard for yourself, click here. Be sure to check out my full video review below.

Buy a Meepo Go Electric Skateboard

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