Welcome back to Critical Materials, your daily roundup of EV and automotive tech news that actually matters. Today, we're still discovering new details from this year's CES 2024 event in Las Vegas, and the automakers who are here have a lot to announce. Today we dive into Ford's potential future modular BEV platform, examine…

Electric vans are one of the keys to Kia’s future. Bosch looks at automatically charging EVs while they’re parked. And Hyundai is setting the bar high for hydrogen. This and more, here at Green Car Reports.  At CES in Las Vegas, Hyundai outlined its work to establish a “hydrogen value chain,” with a hydrogen vision…

Cruise, General Motors’ troubled self-driving taxi division, is looking to buy itself out of a court action that was initiated by California regulators after one of the company’s robotaxis was involved in a pedestrian crash in October of last year. According to Reuters, Cruise is offering $75,000 to settle the crash probe and potentially…

Tesla is working on some tweaks that are designed to claw back some of the advertised driving range that was lost after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) imposed new rules for testing and certifying an electric vehicle’s range and energy efficiency. The news comes from well-known Tesla hacker and reverse-engineering expert @greentheonly, who found…

Automotive supplier Bosch and Volkswagen Group subsidiary Cariad are demonstrating tech that allows EVs to park and charge themselves. Announced at CES 2024, Bosch is combining a previously-shown automated parking system with a charging robot that automatically plugs into the vehicle once it's positioned in a parking space. Once it's finished charging, the vehicle will…

Electric bicycles of today come in a variety of shapes and sizes. On the one hand, we have traditional e-bikes that take the form of standard bicycles, albeit with a motor strapped on to provide extra assistance. On the other hand, we have e-bikes that take on a life of their own – machines like…

Plug-in electric car sales growth in China continued in November, which translated into another monthly record (the fourth one in a row). According to EV Volumes' data, shared by researcher Jose Pontes, 872,415 new passenger plug-in electric cars were registered in China in November, which is 39% more than a year ago. …

Car companies love to talk about “mobility solutions” and “last-mile delivery systems,” but with a few notable exceptions, the commercial vehicle space feels like a pretty stagnant one. Even if they happen to be electric, most efforts in that arena are just delivery vans or maybe pickup truck. Where’s the innovation? Well, Kia—the Korean automaker…

One thing that's fun about this software-focused transformation of the car industry is that automakers are throwing a lot of different things at the wall to see what sticks. Think Toyota's simulated manual gearbox for electric vehicles, or Hyundai's forthcoming sports team-themed "skins" for your infotainment system. Maybe some of these ideas will be discarded;…

Is 270 miles enough of a rated range in a new electric vehicle? As the Department of Energy pointed out this past week, 270 miles was the median rated range for new 2023-model-year EVs, meaning just as many EV nameplates had less than 270 miles of range as had more. Meanwhile, the top EV range…