An EV culling is coming, here's your survival guide
Also, please pity me, as I cannot get home.
Hello from an unfortunately turbulent Amsterdam. Yes, a lovely city indeed, one that I'm quite fond of. Unfortunately, I’m stuck way out by Schiphol Airport. If you'll forgive my French, today was the biggest travel shitshow I've seen in decades. And trust me, I've seen some things.
My flight to Detroit was about just a few minutes from takeoff when we got the word that there was some sort of system outage fouling the works. It wasn't until another few hours that we realized just how bad it was all going to be.
Cue massive lines everywhere, interminable times on hold, and just a lot of chaos. I've never seen so many canceled flights on a departure board as I did today. Nor sad faces.
I'm stuck here until at least tomorrow, and that assumes that everyone gets their servers out of their BSOD boot loops. As a former software engineer, I have genuine sympathy for the engineers who caused this, as I can only imagine how they're feeling. If any good comes of this, I hope that we all get a little more redundancy in our global virtualization systems.
But enough about my current travel headaches. Let's move on to what I've been up to lately.
A Survival Guide for EV Makers
It's clear from this week's political rhetoric, plus the past few months of anti-EV hysteria, that the next generation of electric vehicles will be launching into an incredibly hostile market. There's only one way new models will survive: They have to be better. Yeah, okay, there's a lot more to it than that, and you can read my thoughts on that in my latest piece for MotorTrend.
A Factory in a Box on the Hill
I was at Goodwood last week and saw some lovely people and cars there. I also spoke with the founder of Helixx, a startup that wants to make cool little $6,000 delivery vans and produce them in pop-up factories globally. Destined for success?
Octa
What really brought me to Goodwood was the biggest, baddest Defender ever: Octa. I sadly didn't get to drive, but I did get a wild ride through the woods in the 626-horsepower off-roader.
My BMW iX Pet Peeves
Don't get me wrong, I'm still a big fan of our iX, but I have some pain points, one of which is quite literal. If I don't remember to open the doors a certain way, it actually hurts my fingers. To be fair, a lot of things hurt my fingers these days, but the BMW could do better.
Have great weekends, everyone, and wish me luck getting home...