Tech Brew keeps business leaders up-to-date on the latest innovations, automation advances, policy shifts, and more, so they can make informed decisions about tech.

Tech Brew

Jordyn Grzelewski

techbrew.com

Image of a man and a woman charging red and green electric vehicles.

What’s driving women buyers away from EVs?

“It’s a collective effort to get more women driving [EVs],” Kate Harrison, the co-founder of EV transition startup MoveEV, told Tech Brew.

Image of a plug going into an electric vehicle

New research explains why US is ‘in the slow lane’ on EV adoption

The report points to “culture of ICE dependence” and charging concerns to explain why the US lags behind China and Europe on EV adoption.

Illustration of a car’s exhaust pipe with smoke in the shape of a lightning bolt

In unveiling new vehicle emissions rule, Biden administration emphasizes power of choice 

“Our autoworkers are making cars and trucks that give American drivers a choice,” Biden’s national climate advisor said.

Future of Travel

That’s the latest development from autonomous trucking company Aurora, which announced July 30 that it’s adding nighttime driving to its driverless route between Dallas and Houston, among other expansions of its service.

“Efficiency, uptime, and reliability are important for our customers, and Aurora is showing we can deliver,” Chris Urmson, Aurora’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “Just three months after launch, we’re running driverless operations day and night and we’ve expanded our terminal network to Phoenix. Our rapid progress is beginning to unlock the full value of self-driving trucks for our customers, which has the potential to transform the trillion-dollar trucking industry.”

In a news release, the company said that adding nighttime driving “more than doubles truck utilization potential, significantly shortening delivery times on long-haul routes and creating a path to profitability for autonomous trucking.”

Aurora’s proprietary light detection and ranging tech, FirstLight Lidar, “can detect objects in the dark more than 450 meters away” and identify “pedestrians, vehicles, and debris up to 11 seconds sooner than a traditional driver,” according to the company.

, Aurora leaders hope to validate the ability of their trucks to drive in the rain. Since 

debuting commercial driverless operations

 earlier this year, Aurora says it’s logged more than 20,000 driverless miles.

In other AV expansion news, Alphabet-owned robotaxi service Waymo announced July 28 that it’s launching in Dallas next year.

The announcement included “a new strategic, multi-year partnership” between Waymo and mobility solutions provider Avis Budget Group, which will manage Waymo’s fleet in Dallas and potentially in other cities in the future, according to a blog post.

Waymo currently offers paid robotaxi rides in five cities: Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, and Atlanta. It’s slated to debut its service in Miami and Washington, DC, next year.

On July 25, Lyft announced that autonomous shuttles will debut on its ride-hailing platform late next year. Lyft is partnering with mobility-as-a-service provider Benteler Mobility on the initiative, which will start in the US with the launch of Holon GmbH autonomous shuttles equipped with Mobileye’s AV tech. The deployments initially would start “in partnership with airports and cities,” with plans to expand, per a news release.

“With May Mobility bringing AVs to Atlanta this summer, plans for Mobileye to enable ‘Lyft-ready’ vehicles across our network, and now Benteler Mobility’s plans to expand our ecosystem with purpose-built shuttles and international capabilities,” Lyft said in a news release, “we’ll be creating even 

 to serve our customers and build a more connected world, with transportation for everyone.”

Uber announced on July 17 that it would add at least 20,000 Lucid Gravity EVs equipped with AV startup Nuro’s Level 4 autonomy system over six years in “dozens of markets around the world.” The first launch is slated to take place “in a major US city next year,” according to a news release.

The agreement involves Uber making “multi-hundred-million-dollar investments in both Nuro and Lucid.”

 have enormous potential to transform our cities for the better,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement. “We’re thrilled to partner with Nuro and Lucid on this new robotaxi program, purpose-built just for the Uber platform, to safely bring the magic of autonomous driving to more people across the world.”

Autonomous trucking company Aurora adds nighttime driving capability

And other AV news from July.

That’s the idea behind mixed reality testing, or MRT, a method AV trucking startup Waabi is employing as it works to launch fully driverless operations later this year.

MRT pairs AI-generated simulations with testing on a closed-course track. The strategy, according to Waabi CEO and founder Raquel Urtasun, is akin to outfitting a self-driving truck with augmented reality goggles.

“MRT is one of the coolest technologies ever, and it’s actually an extremely important technology as it relates to safety,” she told Tech Brew.

Urtasun explained that over the last century, closed-course testing has been the primary way companies test new vehicles, whether they’re human-operated or autonomous. She likened the process to doing movie stunts; it involves lots of time, resources, and coordination.

It’s also difficult to precisely repeat such physical tests, and there’s a limited diversity of scenarios you can recreate in such an environment, Urtasun wrote in a 

Although equipment like dummy props addresses some of these challenges, “they are expensive and fundamentally unrealistic,” she wrote. And some scenarios—like crashes or impaired driving—aren’t safe, ethical, or practical to test in the real world.

Urtasun cited the example of construction: Although it’s a frequent roadway scenario, it’s one that varies quite a bit. An AV company could try to account for every real-world construction possibility out there and then test its tech on a closed course.

“Suddenly you can…train the system to do things that otherwise would take you billions or trillions of miles to even see once,” Urtasun said. “How many times have you seen somebody on the highway [driving] in the opposite direction?”

Simulation has become a common tool AV companies use to test their tech. Waabi previously introduced a 

 showing that its simulator, Waabi World, is 99.7% accurate. Waabi World uses GenAI to come up with new scenarios, including some “that may have never happened in the real world,” Tech Brew previously reported.

“If we were able to bring the simulator to the physical world, then we would have the ability to really test all the safety-critical situations, be reproducible, be at scale, with no consequences,” Urtasun said. “Suddenly you open the possibilities to really test anything that you can think of.”

Enter MRT, which Waabi started using about two years ago and which has enabled it to run thousands of closed-course tests per day.

Using MRT, Urtasun said, was crucial to Waabi achieving the milestone of becoming “feature complete,” meaning its AV system is capable of going driverless.

As Waabi’s simulation system generates scenarios, Urtasun explained in her blog post, “the real physical sensor readings are modified instantaneously so the Waabi driver can react to the blend of real and virtual elements while driving in the physical world.”

“Traffic jams can materialize instantly, motorcycles can weave between lanes, crowds of pedestrians can jaywalk unpredictably, and children can dart into the street from behind parked cars,” she wrote.

 operate on public roads in Texas with human safety drivers on board, has partnerships with Uber Freight and Volvo Autonomous Solutions.

Waabi leaders view MRT as a way to build trust with customers and 

, and to improve its capital efficiency, according to Urtasun. And she noted that the tech could be applied to other forms of physical AI, like robots.

“We definitely plan to do more than just self-driving trucks in the future,” she told us. “But right now we are very, very focused on launching the product, which is end of year, and then many more things will follow.”

How Waabi is combining reality and simulations to test AVs ahead of driverless launch

Waabi started using mixed reality testing about two years ago.

Like countless other side projects (remember all that sourdough?), the inspiration for electric RV startup Grounded came out of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

CEO and founder Sam Shapiro was living in New York at the time.

“Everything shut down in March,” he recalled. “I ended up building a camper van that was gas-powered. It was a 20-year-old Chevy Express cargo van. I lived in it for six months and traveled all over the country, which was awesome.”

Less awesome? A broken engine that required him to put the van—aka, his home—in a repair shop for days.

“Also, when you’re at a campground, you’re inevitably running the engine or the generator to power all this stuff inside,” he added. “So you’re at the campsite and all the RVs are making a bunch of noise, they’re blowing exhaust. There’s this contradiction, almost, with spending time in nature.”

Shapiro recalled this experience while giving Tech Brew a tour of the G3, Grounded’s newest electric RV. The van was parked outside of Newlab at Michigan Central, the startup incubator that’s helped Grounded sprout into a team of 20 with its own factory, and ambitions to expand further in the next year.

Shapiro, a former SpaceX engineer, started Grounded in 2022 amid a 

 in RVs and road trips, and moved to Detroit later that year.

The startup team’s early days were spent in the Newlab facility, which over 100 startups call home and where members have access to shared prototyping and fabrication equipment, among other benefits.

Newlab is part of the broader Michigan Central ecosystem, a 30-acre mobility campus anchored by a historic former train station that reopened last year after 

 nearly $1 billion to restore it. The campus hosts myriad initiatives, from teaching students to code to testing 

Newlab was helpful, Shapiro said, not only because it provided space and fabrication resources, but also for the broader network it offers. Newlab also became an investor in Grounded (which raised a $3.5 million pre-seed round last year), something it does selectively for member companies.

The facility hosts prototyping work as companies figure out how to get to the point of larger-scale manufacturing—a transition the incubator increasingly is assisting with, Garrett Winther, Newlab’s chief product officer, told Tech Brew. The facility has 3D printing equipment, a robotic arm, an electronics shop, and a whole host of other resources.

Startups at Newlab, which began in Brooklyn and recently opened a location in New Orleans, have benefited from the abundance of design and engineering know-how in the Detroit area, Winther said.

“Basically anything you need to build stuff—especially in this quick, engineering-oriented way—this is the place to do it,” he said.

The Grounded team built its first three vehicles at Newlab before expanding into the company’s own 13,000-square-foot factory on Michigan Central’s campus.

The team can build four vehicles a month in its current space, according to Shapiro. In the next 12 months, he said, the startup could exceed that capacity and require more space.

Grounded unveiled the G3, which is built on General Motors’ BrightDrop EV platform, in July. The vehicle has an estimated range of 286 miles, and features a modular design that allows customers to customize their vehicles. Changes from the second-gen version include replacing wood cabinetry with aluminum frames and 100% recycled materials, the addition of a motorized lift bed, a new insulated rear door, and a reengineered electrical system.

The G3 features a rooftop HVAC system, 1,000 watts of solar, and the ability to access Starlink satellite internet. It’s compatible with CCS fast chargers and comes with a 

. Various configurations of the vehicle range from $165,000 to $200,000.

Grounded recently expanded beyond recreational customers to offer its vehicles for commercial applications like mobile health, municipal services, and food and beverage businesses.

 and parts, as well as rollbacks of policies supporting electrification and clean-energy projects (Grounded’s vehicles didn’t qualify for tax credits on EV purchases because they’re too expensive).

“The consensus in the industry is that nobody’s quite sure what will be the case six months from now, policywise. This is especially true on tariffs,” he said. “From that perspective, it’s favorable that we are sourcing a lot of components in the United States,” but “it’s impossible to do 100% today.”

Electric camper parked outside of a warehouse

How an incubator helped an electric RV startup set up camp in Detroit

Grounded recently launched the G3, its third-gen electric RV.

The No. 1 US EV maker on Wednesday released a Q2 earnings report that 

 showed significant financial impacts amid 

 and backlash to CEO Elon Musk’s foray into right-wing politics.

The EV maker reported $1.2 billion in net income, down 16% YoY. Automotive revenues fell 16%, as well, while overall revenue was down 12%.

In an update for investors, the company attributed its falling profits to lower revenue from regulatory credits Tesla sells to other automakers, an increase in operating expenses, and a decline in vehicle deliveries, among other factors. Tesla’s vehicle deliveries fell 13% YoY in Q2.

, Tesla is likely to see its revenue from regulatory credit sales largely go away, thanks to a Trump administration plan to cancel fines for automakers that exceed fuel-efficiency goals.

Investment research firm CFRA lowered its 12-month price target for Tesla shares by $20 to $300, and maintained its hold opinion.

Tesla’s earnings call “confirmed many of the concerns we had raised regarding the Tesla story, with management stating that the recently passed tax bill is going to have a material impact on its business,” Garrett Nelson, VP and senior equity analyst at CFRA, wrote in a research note. “We continue to view the near-term challenges facing the company as underappreciated by investors.”

Tesla executives shared updates on plans to start volume production of a new, much-anticipated affordable EV model in the second half of this year, as well as on the planned expansion of its robotaxi service.

Musk has put Tesla’s robotaxi business and humanoid robots at the center of the company’s growth plans. Tesla 

 a limited robotaxi service with human safety operators in the vehicles in Austin last month, and is working to expand it in other markets in the near future.

“We are expecting to greatly increase the service area to well in excess of what competitors are doing, hopefully in a week or two,” Musk said on Tesla’s earnings call. “We are getting the regulatory permission to launch in the Bay Area, Nevada, Arizona, Florida, and a number of other places.”

He predicted that Tesla will offer robotaxi services “in probably half the population of the US by the end of the year.”

In a statement, Will Rhind, founder and CEO of investment firm GraniteShares, said that Tesla’s “slow progress on the low-cost EV model and the robotaxi business is a little surprising.”

“The company indicating that it will ramp up production starting later this year is encouraging, but the lack of structure and detail around what these initiatives will look like makes me cautious,” he added.

 of EV tax credits that has analysts widely predicting 

, acknowledged that Tesla could be in for “a few rough quarters” ahead.

Meanwhile, General Motors on Tuesday reported Q2 net income of $1.9 billion on revenue of $47.1 billion, down 35.4% and 1.8% YoY, respectively. The automaker maintained its full-year guidance.

 GM took as a result of tariffs. GM executives expect the impact to be even greater in Q3, Reuters reported.

Amid the changes in trade policy, GM in June announced $4 billion in investments in its US assembly plants. “This will help us satisfy unmet customer demand, greatly reduce our tariff exposure, and capture upside opportunities as we launch new models,” CEO Mary Barra wrote in a letter to shareholders.

Though Barra said that GM now sees a “longer runway” for internal combustion engine vehicles, she reiterated the automaker’s plans to push ahead on electrification.

“Despite slower EV industry growth, we believe the long-term future is profitable electric vehicle production, and this continues to be our north star,” Barra said.

Tesla charger with a red chart going down

Tesla profits fall again as Musk acknowledges ‘a few rough quarters’ could lie ahead

Tesla reported $1.2 billion in net income in Q2, down 16% YoY.

Starting later this summer, some Lyft rides in Atlanta will have empty driver’s seats as the rideshare network begins rolling out autonomous vehicles.

Still, Jeremy Bird, Lyft’s EVP of driver experience, told Tech Brew that the company expects humans to occupy a critical role in the rideshare industry for many years to come, especially if hopes that AVs spur industry growth pan out. To help its drivers navigate the introduction of this technology into Lyft’s fleet, the company recently kicked off a series of forums inviting drivers to share input.

“I think the No. 1 pitfall would be to ignore it,” Bird said. “To say, ‘Oh, this is something that’s gonna happen 10 years down the road. No need to look over here.’ Meanwhile, to be signing deals with autonomous vehicle companies. I don’t think that is fair to drivers.”

Lyft plans to team up with self-driving tech companies and other partners to bring AVs into the fold amid 

The rideshare network is, for example, planning to 

 in Atlanta later this summer, using AV tech company 

“Our world-class fleet management, sophisticated marketplace engine, and large-scale demand represent the best way for AV companies, OEM manufacturers, and fleet owners to commercialize their assets,” Lyft CEO David Risher wrote in a blog post earlier this year. “We partner with those companies to bring exceptional autonomous transportation experiences to riders at scale.”

Lyft executives expect to see AVs integrated into rideshare networks in phases, starting with a slow ramp-up in which they claim driver earnings will not be significantly affected. Eventually, they envision a “hybrid” network in which robotaxis and human-driven vehicles share a larger market, and one day for drivers to perhaps even buy their own AVs and put them to work. As evidence that AVs can create incremental business, they point to markets like San Francisco and Phoenix, where the rideshare business has grown alongside robotaxi deployments.

“We want to grow,” Bird said. “The way that autonomous will help Lyft grow is by providing more options for riders at all times of the day, and being able to serve riders with more diversified supply will mean faster ETAs, will mean overall better experience for riders and will grow the number of people that don’t need to rely on other forms of transportation.”

The company hosted its first Lyft Driver Autonomous Forum in Atlanta in July and will host its next one in San Francisco in August.

“The No. 1 thing we heard from people is they want to be involved in the conversation,” Bird said. “They don’t want this to be something that they’re only reading about from headlines in the press or they’re seeing on the local news.

Company leaders also heard concerns “about what it might mean for the future of rideshare for them as a driver,” Bird said. “There’s a lot of questions.”

He acknowledged that executives don’t yet know what the long-term impact will be on drivers, but emphasized that Lyft sees humans continuing to play an important role, especially given the limitations of technology. Some riders, for example, will continue to want help with their luggage or insights from a human on the local dining scene.

The aim of the forums, according to the company, is to allow drivers the opportunity to contribute to discussions about AVs. In a blog post, Lyft said that participants “will meet regularly to discuss how AVs impact drivers, providing strategic input that will help contribute to Lyft’s policies and plans.”

Each forum will include six to 10 drivers, who will be recruited based on “qualitative data” like driver ratings and loyalty status. “Members for each meeting will be selected based on the topic at hand, representing specific regions or areas of expertise,” according to Lyft. “To ensure continuity, select drivers will participate in multiple meetings.”

Bird said he also believes it’s important to have conversations with drivers everywhere, not just in cities that have robotaxis on the road today, and for the discussion to be the same as the ones company leaders have with other stakeholders like investors. Company leaders will also continue to get driver feedback on AVs and other topics via a quarterly sentiment tracker, Bird noted.

“I think drivers are going to be essential to any rideshare network moving forward,” he said, “and to not have that conversation with them I think is pretty disingenuous.”

Lyft recently kicked off a series of driver forums focused on autonomous vehicles.

Lyft exec in charge of driver experience on why ignoring AVs would be ‘No. 1 pitfall’

Making US roads welcoming and safe for cyclists has been an uphill climb in a country that loves cars.

 from PeopleForBikes, an organization dedicated to making the US a better place for cycling, highlights progress in cities across the country in the last several years. The ranking uses a scale of zero to 100 to score thousands of cities on “the ease in which people can safely get from where they live to where they want to go via low-stress bike routes.”

This year’s report found that 234 US cities scored at least 50—what PeopleForBikes considers a “tipping point”—up from 33 cities in 2019.

“It was great to see the shift, which has been driven both by people’s mindsets in wanting to live a healthier life, but also the improvements that have been made to things like cycling infrastructure in those cities,” Juliet Scott-Croxford, president of North America for UK bike maker Brompton, told Tech Brew.

PeopleForBikes’ 2025 analysis—which takes into account factors like protected bike lanes and safe speeds—included more than 2,500 cities.

Brooklyn became the best large US city for biking, with a score of 73, after PeopleForBikes started ranking New York City’s boroughs separately.

Minneapolis, which ranked first last year, came in second, with at 72, followed by Seattle at 66.

Washington, DC, saw the most improvement, jumping from a score of 46 in 2024 to 52.

Davis, California, ranked first among medium-sized cities, with a score of 81.

Among small cities, Mackinac Island, Michigan, which forbids cars, scored 100.

PeopleForBikes noted that seven of the top 10 small cities are in heartland states, “indicating increasing momentum toward bike-friendly communities in the middle of the country.”

Since 2020, four-fifths of US cities have improved their scores.

All of the top 10 large US cities scored above 50.

The results “continue to show positive trends towards better biking across the US,” the report concluded, “but a continued focus on bike-friendly policies and infrastructure investment will go a long way toward safer streets and more connected bike networks,” the report concluded.

Brompton, which specializes in foldable bikes, aims to take advantage of trends like the rising popularity of e-bikes and more bike-friendly urban environments in the US.

The brand is using an omnichannel strategy to expand its US distribution footprint, including two retail stores, in New York City and Washington, DC. Brompton organizes more than 200 meetups across the country every year to help foster a stronger cycling community.

In October, the company is slated to introduce the electric version of its G-line bike series, which features larger wheels, in the US.

“We’ve seen a huge growth in popularity for electric,” Scott-Croxford said. 

“Whilst it’s fantastic to see the improvements from the PeopleForBikes data, there is still a long way to go,” she added. “And I think there are a lot of international markets that have demonstrated the cost benefit of improving active transportation infrastructure, and the health and economic returns that you see on that.”

And though the demonstrated mental and physical health benefits seemingly would align with US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, Scott-Croxford noted “contradictions” like the 

 of a bicycle commuting incentive in the tax and budget bill Trump just signed into law.

“I think sometimes we get caught up in cycling being this green, hippie-dippie way of traveling, whereas actually there are some really clear economic benefits and health benefits to it,” she said, “which I think speak directly to some of the goals of making America healthy again.”

How UK bike maker Brompton is riding the wave of more cyclist-friendly US cities

Biking advocacy org PeopleForBikes recently reported bikeability improvements in cities across the US, with e-bikes growing in popularity.

That’s the message Ford is pitching amid a bevy of EV deals industrywide ahead of the Sept. 30 expiration of tax credits on EV purchases and leases.

The automaker recently extended through the end of September its Ford Power Promise, which aims to promote at-home charging by providing EV buyers with complimentary home chargers and installation.

“With everything that’s happening in the marketplace, not only the incentives that we have…and the fact that tax credits are still out there for some of these makes and models, now is the time to really double down and get as much as you can as a consumer,” Stacey Ferreira, Ford’s director of US sales strategy, told Tech Brew.

President Donald Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” into law on July 4, nixing EV tax credits from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

Those include a $7,500 tax credit for qualified new EV purchases, a $4,000 credit for qualified used EVs, and a “leasing loophole” that allows automakers to pass on incentives for some models that don’t qualify for the other credits.

EV deals were already plentiful. In June, average EV incentives hit an “all-time high”—14.8% of the average transaction price, according to Cox Automotive.

, analysts expect to see a Q3 surge as buyers interested in going electric look to lock in savings.

“With government-backed incentives set to end in September and economic pressures mounting, the second half of the year will be a critical test of EV demand,” Stephanie Valdez Streaty, senior analyst at Cox, said in a statement. “Q3 will likely be a record, followed by a collapse in Q4, as the electric vehicle market adjusts to its new reality.”

July’s EV lease deals include the Hyundai Kona EV for a monthly payment of $189, according to 

. Lexus is offering 0% financing on its electric RZ, consumers can get a 2025 Kia Nero EV lease for $129 per month for 24 months, and GM is offering 0% interest for 60 months to buy the Chevy Equinox EV, per the outlet.

“There is no better deal than leasing an EV,” Ivan Drury, director of insights at Edmunds, told us. “You can easily get a vehicle that has an MSRP of $15,000–$20,000 more than its ICE equivalent, yet the payments might be the same or lower.”

Though he hasn’t seen many automakers using the looming tax credit expiration to advertise incentives, Drury expects a bigger push closer to September. But consumers shouldn’t wait, he said: “If you were looking at this like, ‘Wow, I want to scoop up a $150-a-month Equinox EV,’ you better get to it.”

The Ford Power Promise is available to retail customers who buy or lease a new 2024/2025 Mustang Mach-E, 2025 F-150 Lightning, or 2024/2025 E-Transit cargo van from a participating Ford dealer.

“The idea was, how can we make that barrier to entry extremely simple for our customers?” Ferreira said. Since debuting the program in October, Ford has installed more than 10,000 home chargers.

Ford didn’t extend the program specifically to align with the 

, Ferreira said, but she expects to see higher sales in Q3 and for some EV fence-sitters to take the leap before Oct. 1.

“There [are] going to be folks that want to get into the vehicles before the tax credit goes away,” she said. “So we’re excited for Q3. We think it’s going to be strong.”