Japan’s kei car segment has long been an impenetrable automotive fortress. Suzuki, Daihatsu, Honda, and Nissan have guarded this hyper-regulated, quirky micro-universe like a Holy Grail. Foreign auto execs looked at Japan’s strict dimension rules, and walked away – it simply wasn’t worth the effort of building a specialized box to navigate Tokyo’s tightest back alleys. But BYD never saw… Read more…

Standing under the blazing Austin sun outside Gigafactory Texas, a gold-painted Tesla Cybercab caught my eye in a set of newly released photos, its butterfly door propped skyward beside the Lone Star flag. At first glance, it looks like a sleek, futuristically minimalist coupe – until you glance at the roof panel and notice a flat, low-profile Starlink antenna neatly… Read more…

Ever since electric cars stepped out of the golf-cart realm, we’ve been promised that the miracle battery was just around the corner. You know the pitch – the power pack that weighs next to nothing, charges before you can finish a sandwich, and never, ever catches fire. Solid-state tech has been promised for years – and somehow it always is… Read more…

When a company’s CEO personally hands over the keys to the 20,000th unit of an executive flagship SUV only 73 days after launching it, you know something unusual is happening. That is what William Li did in Fujian, delivering a fresh ES9 to tea tycoon Xiao Wenhua – with basketball icon Yao Ming having to wait over two months just… Read more…

The pace of the Chinese electric vehicle arms race is relentless. The moment a brand has settled into its rhythm, it pulls out the drafting paper and drops a fresh design directly onto the showroom floor. Case in point: Avatr. The joint effort between Changan Automobile, tech powerhouse Huawei, and battery titan CATL isn’t letting rival tech-darlings steal all the… Read more…

How times change in Wolfsburg and Shanghai. A decade ago, the idea that Volkswagen – pretty much the king of global automotive engineering – would turn to a young Chinese tech startup to co-develop its core electric vehicle architectures was unthinkable. Yet here we are staring at filings from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, admiring the newly revealed… Read more…

The Smart #2 was recently spotted undergoing testing ahead of its launch at the Paris Motor Show in October. In case you’re not aware, this is an EV that’s very much inspired by the original Smart ForTwo city car. It has a very similar shape and size, but of course it’s electric. The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology… Read more…

There is something wonderfully absurd about a 3,009 kg wedge of cold-rolled stainless steel tearing up the black stuff with up to 845 ponies going wild. Yes, it does look like it was drawn on a napkin during a late-night sci-fi marathon and engineered by folks who take subtlety as a personal insult. But for all its angular bravado and… Read more…

Back in my day, car camping was all about pitching a soggy tent next to a rusty hatchback, eating cold beans, and praying a raccoon wouldn’t steal my boots or leave a nasty surprise in the said tent. And for a very long time, things haven’t changed much. But in China It turns out China has a completely different idea… Read more…

Smart used to mean one thing: a plastic-bodied, two-seat egg that you could park facing the curb just to prove a point. Those funky little city buggies were special in a weird, urban-chaos sort of way. Fast forward to today, and the union between Mercedes-Benz styling and Geely hardware has completely rewritten that playbook. The Smart #1 crossover arrived a… Read more…

Every time an automaker promises a holy grail technology that will magically vanish range anxiety, my cynical petrolhead instincts take the better of me. We have been hearing about solid-state batteries for what feels like a lifetime – hyped as the mythical energy density revolution that will give us 2,000 km road trips without making our cars weigh as much… Read more…

Dongfeng Nissan has a fresh teaser poster that says it is not ready yet to surrender the Chinese EV market to local titans. We have watched legacy brands stumble through the global EV transition for some time now, some even trying (and many failing) to sell cars in a market crazy about hyper-connected, high-tech electric rockets. Yet Nissan’s Chinese joint… Read more…

Today, Ford has decided to finally unveil the name of its next electric truck. It will be called Fathom. Ford says it comes from “a deep understanding of the person who would drive it”. “Deep”, because a fathom is a unit of measurement equal to six feet, used in measuring the depth of water. Ford says the person who’ll buy… Read more…

There is something eerie about watching a vehicle pull up to the curb, pop its indicator, and smoothly join the traffic without human hands on the wheel. No matter how many times you try it, there’s a moment of awe. Sure, the ride is nothing like a science fiction novel and more like an overly polite machine nailing the morning… Read more…

BMW today announced that it’s starting to produce the i3 series at its plant in Munich, Germany. The company began taking orders for the new i3 in June. BMW says that high demand has led to “a steep ramp-up curve at the plant”. The plant has made more than nine million BMW 3 series vehicles since 1975. The i3 is… Read more…

The Mercedes AMG GT 4-Door Coupe broke cover in May and was introduced in only two configurations – the top-tier GT 63 and the mid-tier GT 55. The former boasts 1,153 hp with a 696 km range, while the latter boasts 805 hp and a 700 km range. Now, the automaker is bringing the base GT 53 model to the… Read more…

It has only been five years since Xiaomi decided to go into the auto business, and when a smartphone titan said it wanted to build cars, legacy carmakers offered a patronizing smile. But when Xiaomi rolled out the SU7 sedan and followed it up with the YU7 crossover, those smiles faded fast. Now, the tech giant is pulling off its… Read more…

All EV startups seem to be focused on a wild, breakneck timeline. Every fresh Silicon Valley outfit promises to reinvent personal transport, build a gigafactory from scratch, and deliver a world-beating crossover to your driveway by next Tuesday. Lucid Motors used to be no stranger to that heady optimism when it first teased its sleek lineup. But as anyone who… Read more…

BYD’s sub-brand Denza opened up the Z9S pre-orders in China starting at CNY 319,800 (~$47,000) and promises record-breaking cruise range on a single charge – 1,100 km. But that’s the top-tier model with a huge 102.3 kWh battery, and the range estimates are on the generous CLTC cycle. BYD Denza Z9S BYD equipped the Denza Z9S with its second-generation LFP… Read more…

Remember the big declarations made when Tesla broke ground on the muddy outskirts of Lingang back in 2019? Elon Musk stood before local dignitaries and promised that Gigafactory Shanghai would exist purely to build electric cars for Chinese drivers. Fast forward to the first half of 2026, and that original promise has aged poorly – like many others. Look closely… Read more…