Tesla has a new battery cell supplier. Although the automaker is vertically integrated to a degree not seen in the automotive industry for decades, when it comes to battery cells it’s mostly dependent upon suppliers. Panasonic cells can be found in many Teslas, with the cheaper, sturdier lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells being supplied by CATL. Now Tesla has a new source of LFP cells thanks to a deal just signed with LG Energy Solutions.

According to The Korea Economic Daily, the contract between Tesla and LGES is worth $4.3 billion. LGES will begin supplying Tesla with cells next August through until at least the end of July 2030, with provisions to extend the contract if necessary.

The LFP cells probably aren’t destined for life on the road, however. Instead, they’ll likely be used in Tesla’s energy storage products, which both Tesla and LGES hope will soak up demand now that EV sales prospects look so weak in North America.

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Earlier this month, Ars took a look at Volvo’s latest electric vehicle. The EX90 proved to be a rather thoughtful Swedish take on the luxury SUV, albeit one that remains a rare sight on the road. But the EX90 is not the only recipe one can cook with the underlying ingredients. The ingredients in this case are from a platform called SPA2, and to extend the metaphor a bit, the kitchen is the Volvo factory in Ridgeville, South Carolina, which in addition to making a variety of midsize and larger Volvo cars for the US and European markets also produces the Polestar 3.

What’s fascinating is how different the end products are. Intentionally, Polestar and Volvo wisely seek different customers rather than cannibalize each other's sales. As a new brand, Polestar comes with many fewer preconceptions other than the usual arguments that will rage in the comment section over just how much is Swedish versus Chinese, and perhaps the occasional student of history who remembers the touring car racing team that then developed some bright blue special edition Volvo road cars that for a while held a production car lap record around the Nürburgring Nordschliefe.

That historical link is important. Polestar might now mentally slot into the space that Saab used to occupy in the last century as a refuge for customers with eclectic tastes thanks to its clean exterior designs and techwear-inspired interiors. Once past the necessity of basic transportation, aesthetics are as good a reason as most when it comes to picking a particular car. Just thinking of a Polestar as a brand that exemplifies modern Scandinavian design would be to sell it short, though. The driving dynamics are just too good.

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Tesla posted its financial results for the second quarter of 2025 this afternoon. The numbers show yet another bad three months for the automaker. As competition in the EV marketplace has exploded, Tesla has increasingly been left behind, with a small and aging model lineup, before we even contemplate how CEO Elon Musk has tarnished what was once the hottest brand in the car world. Earlier this month, we learned that sales dropped by 13 percent year over year in Q2 2025; today, the financials show that automotive revenues fell even more, dropping 16 percent year over year to $16.7 billion.

Tesla’s battery business has been feeling the pain, too. For a while, this was a growth area for the company, albeit one with a relatively minor contribution to the bottom line. During Q2 2025, Tesla’s energy generation and storage division brought in $2.8 billion in revenue, a 7 percent decline from the same period in 2024.

Sales of Carbon credits—those government-issued permits that other automakers buy in order to pollute—shrank by more than half, to $490 million. Those other automakers are now selling EVs, at least most of them, and have less need to buy credits from Tesla. It’s likely this subsidy, which has kept the company out of the red in the past, will be even less of a contributor in the coming years as the US strips away environmental protections.

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This week, a federal court in Miami started hearing a wrongful death case involving Tesla's crash-prone Autopilot driver assistance system. It's not the first time that Tesla Autopilot has been implicated in fatal traffic crashes, but it is the first time that a federal court has heard such a case.

Until now, the most high-profile court case involving Tesla Autopilot was probably the California trial over the death of Walter Huang, who was killed in 2018 when his Tesla Model X steered itself into a concrete highway divider. Huang's family took Tesla to court in April 2024 but quickly settled with the automaker under terms that have been kept secret.

And earlier this week, Tesla settled another Autopilot lawsuit concerning the death of Jeremy Banner in 2019. In that case, the Tesla's sensors failed to recognize a tractor-trailer crossing the highway and collided with it, shearing the top off the car and killing Banner.

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Automakers selling cars in the United States now have even less incentive to care about fuel economy. As Ars has noted before, the current administration and its Republican allies in Congress have been working hard to undermine federal regulations meant to make our vehicle fleet more efficient.

Some measures have been aimed at decreasing adoption of electric vehicles—for example the IRS clean vehicle tax credit will be eliminated at the end of September. Others have targeted federal fuel economy regulations that require automakers to meet specific fleet efficiency averages or face punishing fines for polluting too much. At least, they used to.

According to a letter seen by Reuters, sent to automakers by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal government has decided it will not levy any fines on companies that have exceeded the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) limits dating back to model year 2022.

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More and more, we're seeing imaging technologies and machine learning showing up in automotive applications. It's usually to diagnose some kind of problem like quality control, although not always—the camera-based system by UVeye that we wrote about a few years ago made news recently after Hertz started using it to charge renters for things like scuffs on hubcaps. I have fewer concerns about customer abuse with General Motors' use of CT scanning, which simply seems like a clever adaptation of medical technology into another industry.

Ignore, if you can, GM's business decisions. Maybe you're upset because it killed your favorite brand,  changed the shape of the Corvette headlights, or abandoned Apple CarPlay. There are many valid reasons, but none change the fact that the company's engineers are quite creative. (That's probably why it stings so much when the company starts hacking things up.)

GM first turned to X-rays as a way of doing two-dimensional quality control on castings during the development process, according to Ed Duby, manufacturing engineering executive director at GM. "Much like the application to people, when you think about X-ray and CT scan, it's really trying to diagnose something without having to go into surgery. We kind of want to do the same thing with our castings," Duby told me.

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The Goodwood Festival of Speed is currently taking place in the UK; the event is part garden party, part hill climb, and plenty of auto show as car makers small and large unveil their vehicle du jour. Among those whipping satin covers off new machinery was Lamborghini. It's replacing the venerable Huracan and its howling naturally aspirated V10 engine with the plug-in hybrid Temerario, another wedge-shaped all-wheel drive mid-engined supercar, now with even more power. The road-going car has been public for some time now, but today it was the turn of the Temerario GT3, which is coming to race tracks in 2026.

Critics and badge snobs sometimes look down on Lamborghini because, unlike the other Italian sports car builders, it didn't start life as a race team. That's not to say the company hasn't had racing success, but it's all happened this century, thanks to a category called GT3, for racing versions of performance coupes ranging from Ford Mustangs to Porsche 911s. GT3 cars are designed to be driven by amateurs, so they feature driver assists like antilock brakes and traction control. They're "performance balanced" so that they're all fairly equivalent in terms of lap times.

That's not to say they're slow: In the hands of a top-level professional driver, GT3 cars based on road cars are now as fast as the mighty Group C prototypes of the 1980s. Lamborghini's current car is old, but it's still notching up wins—two weekends ago, Grasser Racing took victory at the 24 Hours of Space with its Huracan GT3. Some of the same drivers had the potential to do well the weekend before at the Nürburgring until one of them chose to ignore multiple red flags during a practice session that rightfully earned that car a grid penalty.

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A new version of Mazda's popular CX-5 SUV is on the way. Earlier today, the Japanese automaker revealed details about the third-generation CX-5, which goes on sale in Europe later this year before coming here in 2026.

The current CX-5, first introduced in 2017, marked Mazda's move upmarket, with a renewed focus on elegant interiors and keen handling without luxury automaker prices. Mazda remains committed to its core principle of "Jinba Ittai"—the horse and rider being at one—and the cars remain popular with enthusiasts, but it's fair to say that the available powertrains often leave something to be desired in terms of fuel efficiency.

At one time, Mazda readied a new diesel engine to try to improve its fleet average, although that option disappeared within a couple of years due to minimal demand. And for a while, we were teased with the clever "Skyactiv-X" compression ignition engine, which promised diesel-like efficiency on regular pump gasoline. It seems the odds of that one actually going on sale in the US are now remote, though.

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Volvo was among the very first of the global automakers to declare plans to build an all-electrified future. Note the choice of word—electrified, not electric, as it includes hybrids, both plug-in and mild. When it comes to pure electric vehicles, the Swedish automaker has something of a two-pronged strategy. At the low end, there's the diminutive EX30 and EX30 Cross Country, a pair of stripped-down crossovers whose value proposition might be entirely different in light of tariffs and the end of the clean vehicle tax credit. At the other end of the spectrum is the EX90, a big battery electric SUV with tech so cutting-edge that some of it wasn't even ready when we had our first drive last fall.

The idea of a high-end Volvo is not a new one; for decades, the company has offered a low-key luxury alternative to the flashier German brands. It's just that back then, your family doctor probably drove a Volvo station wagon, whereas these days, most people want something with a little more height. Unlike the little EX30s, the EX90 should be largely unaffected by the recent chaos—it's built in South Carolina, so it isn't subject to import tariffs (beyond any imported parts used to build it) and with a starting price of $81,290, it's just too expensive to qualify for the IRS 30D tax credit, which now goes away at the end of September.

Do Volvo's impeccable safety credentials and the EX90's emissions-free powertrain purchase it any credit in the war on cars? Probably not, but there's something wonderfully incongruous about the slab sides and beige paint (actually a solid metallic called Sand Dune) accented by the bright jewelry of the daylight running lights, although the lidar hump on the roof continues to scream "London taxi cab" at me. (Did you know that Volvo's corporate parent also owns a company that builds those?) As you approach the car and it unlocks, the "Thor's Hammer" headlights do a neat little mechanical "blink"—think that one alien that Will Smith chased around the Guggenheim in Men in Black.

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If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have told you that the review you're about to read would be one of the most-read car reviews of the year. For a while—quite a long while, in fact—the Volkswagen ID Buzz was the hottest electric vehicle you couldn't buy. Starting in 2001, VW began teasing concept after concept that called back to its various Transporters and Kombis, classic microbuses reimagined as modern minivans. When the electric Buzz was greenlit for production after wowing crowds in 2017, it caught the attention of the kind of people who don't normally care about such things. Early coverage of the Buzz showed plenty of interest, and it looked like VW might have a real hit on its hands.

At least, that's how things looked for the first couple of years. It actually took seven years for a version of the ID Buzz to go on sale in North America, two years after Europe. Much of the optimism about EV adoption has now gone. Rather than reaching price parity with regular cars as battery prices dropped, everything just got more expensive during the pandemic. Add in recent worries about import tariffs and clean vehicle tax credits (available if you lease), and you start to understand why they remain a rare sight on the roads. Expect stares, glances, and even people taking out their phones as you drive past.

Some of the wait was for VW's more powerful rear drive unit, which provides this 2025 ID Buzz Pro S Plus with 282 hp (210 kW) and 413 lb-ft (560 Nm), paired with a 91 kWh battery pack. The official EPA range is 234 miles, which sounds disappointingly low, but it's correct. It does seem like a very conservative estimate based on a week with the Buzz. 3.1 miles/kWh (20 kWh 100/km) was possible if I drove carefully, with high-twos possible when I didn't, and with 89 percent state of charge in the battery, the Buzz's onboard brain figured we had 255 miles (410 km) of range.

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It may not have escaped your attention that there's a new film about motorsport called F1: The Movie. It's a return-to-racing story with elements you'll have seen before, just maybe with other sports. A driver has been looking to slay his personal demons. There's a wise veteran, an impatient rookie, and an underdog team with its back to the wall. Except this time, the backdrop is the multicolored circus of Formula 1, seen close up at 200 mph.

Backed by Apple and made by people responsible for high-energy productions like the recent Top Gun: Maverick, the film takes advantage of some of those same ingredients. For one, the filmmakers got an all-access pass from the powers that be, filming on the actual Formula 1 grid during 2023 and some of 2024. Having seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton as a producer helped with that. And the filmmakers were able to capture remarkable footage in the process thanks to powerful cameras that are now much smaller than the versions they strapped to some US Navy fighter jets.

The movie comes with a prebuilt audience, one that's grown enormously in recent years. The Drive to Survive effect is real: Motorsport, particularly F1, hasn't been this popular in decades. More and more young people follow the sport, and it's not just among the guys, either.

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Tesla sold 384,122 electric vehicles during the months of April, May, and June of this year. That's a double-digit decline compared to the same three months of last year—itself no peach of a quarter for a car company with a stratospheric valuation based on the supposition of eternal sales growth.

The automaker faces a number of problems that are getting in the way of that perpetual growth. In some regions, CEO Elon Musk's right-wing politics have driven away customers in droves. Another issue is the company's small, infrequently updated model lineup, which is a problem even in parts of the world that care little about US politics.

Most Tesla sales are of the Model 3 midsize electric sedan and the Model Y, its electric crossover. For Q2 2025, Tesla sold 373,728 of the Models 3 and Y across North America, Europe, China, and its other markets. But that's an 11.5 percent decrease compared to the 422,405 Models 3 and Y that Tesla sold in Q2 2024, a quarter that itself saw a year-on-year decline.

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ASPEN, Colo.—The SUV might be the dominant design in the American automobile market, but it hasn't completely taken over. At Audi, there is still life in the sedan. The old A4 four-door is no more—at least for a while or until Audi redoes its nomenclature yet again. If you want a small Audi four-door, you need to step down to the A3. Five doors is where it's at, with the 2025 A5.

Like the new Q5 SUV, which you may have read about last week, the new A5 uses an all-new vehicle architecture from Audi called PPC (for premium platform combustion). PPC will give rise to a wide range of new vehicles from Audi, Porsche, and the other premium VW Group stablemates, and it takes a meaningful step into the future with advanced new electronics, making this a true software-defined vehicle.

Under the hood

There will be two versions at launch. The regular A5 features a 2.0 L four-cylinder turbocharged, direct-injection engine driving all four wheels via a seven-speed dual-clutch transmission, and generates 268 hp (200 kW) and 295 lb-ft (400 Nm). That's a pretty large power and torque bump compared to the outgoing A5 Sportback, in part thanks to a new variable geometry turbocharger that replaces the old twin-scroll blower.

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Do you remember the Pirelli Cyber Tire? No, it's not an angular nightmare clad in stainless steel. Rather, it's a sensor-equipped tire that can inform the car it's fitted to what's happening, both with the tire itself and the road it's passing over. The technology has slowly been making its way into the real world, starting with rarified stuff like the McLaren Artura. Now, Pirelli is going to put some Cyber Tires to work for everybody, not just supercar drivers, in a new pilot program with the regional government of Apulia in Italy.

The Cyber Tire has a sensor to monitor temperature and pressure, using Bluetooth Low Energy to communicate with the car. The electronics are able to withstand more than 3,500 G as part of life on the road, and a 0.3-oz (10 g) battery keeps everything running for the life of the tire.

The idea was to develop a better tire pressure monitoring system, one that could tell the car exactly what kind of tire—summer, winter, all-season, and so on—was fitted, and even its state of wear, allowing the car to adapt its settings appropriately. But other applications suggested themselves—at a recent CES, Pirelli showed how a Cyber Tire could warn other road users about aquaplaning. Then again, we've been waiting more than a decade for vehicle-to-vehicle communication to make a difference in daily driving to no avail.

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The robotaxi company Waymo has suspended service in some parts of Los Angeles after some of its vehicles were summoned and then vandalized by protesters angry with ongoing raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Five of Waymo's autonomous Jaguar I-Pace electric vehicles were summoned downtown to the site of anti-ICE protests, at which point they were vandalized with slashed tires and spray-painted messages. Three were set on fire.

The Los Angeles Police Department warned people to avoid the area due to risks from toxic gases given off by burning EVs. And Waymo told Ars that it is "in touch with law enforcement" regarding the matter.

The protesters in Los Angeles were outraged after ICE, using brutal tactics, began detaining people in raids across the city. Thousands of Angelenos took to the streets over the weekend to confront the masked federal enforcers and, in some cases, forced them away.

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This week, Republicans in Congress and the executive branch stepped up their efforts to roll back clean vehicle legislation and regulations. Antipathy toward environmental protections was a hallmark of the first Trump administration, but in his second term, the president and his congressional allies are redoubling their efforts to allow cars to pollute more and limit the adoption of electric vehicles.

Congressional republicans have been working on a budget bill that would radically transform many aspects of American life. Among the environmental protections being stripped away in the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" (yes, that's what it's called) is a repeal of the US Environmental Protection Agency's rules on "greenhouse gas and multi-pollutant emissions standards."

These regulations are meant to limit the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the US vehicle fleet, a major driver of climate change, as well as the noxious pollutants containing sulfur and nitrogen compounds that have more immediate and deleterious effects on human health. And if the budget bill is sent to Trump to sign, the existing Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) rules, implemented in 2022, and the future rules meant to take effect next year will be no more.

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As you might imagine, a steady stream of cars to review comes and goes from my parking spot. Some weeks, they stand out, like the bright green Aston Martin, the murdered-out Bentley, or the VW ID. Buzz you can read about soon; these cars usually spark conversations with neighbors, particularly those who don't know why there's a different vehicle in that spot each week.

At other times, the vehicles are more anonymous, and I'm not sure this ADX sparked any community discussions. Compact crossovers are a popular breed and blend into the background—particularly when they're painted an unobtrusive shade.

Which is not to say the ADX is not handsome; the Urban Gray Pearl paint looked good even in the near-constant rain (which explains the Acura-supplied images rather than my own) that coincided with our time with the tester. And from the driver's seat, the view down the hood, along those creases, is a lot more interesting than most comparable crossovers, considering the ADX's $35,000 starting price.

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Formula 1 held its annual Spanish Grand Prix this past weekend at the Catalunya circuit near Barcelona. It's a good place to test a modern F1 car, as you need great aerodynamics to be fast around here, especially now that the awkward chicanes are gone. You also need good mechanical grip. Races used to be processional here, but the re-profiled turn 10 and the flat-out nature of the last turn have changed all that.

This was to be the weekend of new front wings, the result of a "technical directive" meant to stop excessive flexing as part of the sport's ongoing antipathy toward creatively movable aerodynamics outside a tightly described domain. The competitive order would be reset, some hoped, as their rivals would be forced to give up unfair advantages. In fact, the new wings turned out to be a nothingburger. McLaren's advantage remains, and that was clear on a circuit that tests every aspect of a racing car.

But there's only one story that anyone really cares about after Spain, and it's the one about Red Bull's Max Verstappen. For much of the race, Verstappen held onto third place, behind the too-fast McLarens. This required using one more set of tires than they did, and for his last stint, all that was left for the Red Bull driver was a set of the too-hard compound, giving him little in the way of grip.

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Automaker Stellantis and retail and web services behemoth Amazon have decided to put an end to a collaboration on new in-car software. The partnership dates back to 2022, part of a wide-ranging agreement that also saw Stellantis pick Amazon Web Services as its cloud platform for new vehicles and Amazon sign on as the first customer for Ram's fully electric ProMaster EV van.

A key aspect of the Amazon-Stellantis partnership was to be a software platform for new Stellantis vehicles called STLA SmartCockpit. Meant to debut last year, SmartCockpit was supposed to "seamlessly integrate with customers’ digital lives to create personalized, intuitive in-vehicle experiences," using Alexa and other AI agents to provide better in-car entertainment but also navigation, vehicle maintenance, and in-car payments as well.

But 2024 came and went without the launch of SmartCockpit, and now the joint work has wound down, according to Reuters, although not for any particular reason the news organization could discern. Rather, the companies said in a statement that they "will allow each team to focus on solutions that provide value to our shared customers and better align with our evolving strategies."

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The extent of Tesla's meteoric decline in popularity is on vivid display in the latest new car registration numbers coming out of Europe. New car sales were essentially flat in the region last month, with just under 1,400 more cars sold this year than last. But the market is far from static; plug-in sales are booming, with battery electric vehicle registrations up by 28 percent according to the analysts at JATO Dynamics, and plug-in hybrid EV sales increased by 31 percent. Almost every automaker has capitalized on this growth, with a few exceptions—Tesla being the most significant.

As the first mainstream BEV-only brand, Tesla led the way in European EV sales and made much of the fact that its Model Y crossover was the best-selling car in Europe for some time. Those days are long gone. Model Y registrations fell by 53 percent last month to just 4,495 units, dropping it to 9th on the list of most-registered BEVs. First place went to the Skoda Elroq, followed by VW's ID.3, ID.7, ID.4, and the new Kia EV3.

When you look at sales at the brand level, things get a little worse for the American automaker. Volkswagen sold more EVs than anyone else in Europe last month, increasing by 61 percent to 23,514 units. As for Tesla? It fell to 11th place, with just 7,165 sales in total, a 49 percent decrease year on year.

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