General Motors ditched its plans to acquire an equity stake in troubled electric truck startup Nikola. GM will also no longer help engineer and manufacture Nikola’s battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, including the Badger pickup truck.

It won’t come as a total shock to anyone who’s been following Nikola over the last several months. Less than a week after GM announced its plan to acquire an 11 percent stake in the buzzy company, short-selling firm Hindenburg Research published a bombshell report accusing Nikola of fraud in showcasing its electric vehicle technology. Nikola founder Trevor Milton stepped down as board chairman on September 21st in the wake of the report.

GM IS SHIFTING FROM PARTNER TO CUSTOMER

On Monday, the two companies announced a much-diminished agreement that retains the fuel cell partnership. Under the terms of the memorandum of understanding, Nikola and GM will “work together to integrate GM’s Hydrotec fuel-cell technology into Nikola’s Class 7 and Class 8 zero-emission semi-trucks for the medium- and long-haul trucking sectors,” Nikola announced.

“The previous agreements, which included a stock component, were all terminated,” a GM spokesperson said in an email.

Essentially, GM is shifting from partner to customer, which reflects the auto giant’s diminished faith in Nikola, said iSeeCars executive analyst Karl Brauer. “Nikola reflects the somewhat frantic demand for electric and hybrid vehicle evolution, and the potential pitfalls when a company overstates its claims for how rapidly that evolution is occurring,” Brauer said.

The future of Nikola’s Badger pickup truck appears in doubt. The company first announced the fuel cell truck in February 2020, claiming it would have 600 miles of range, would generate over 900 horsepower, and go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 2.9 seconds.

But the development of the truck was wholly “dependent” on a partnership with an automaker. Without that partnership, the Badger is officially in limbo. Nikola said it would refund “all previously submitted order deposits for the Nikola Badger.”

Nikola, which went public through a “reverse merger” with a special acquisition company earlier this year, saw its share price plummet as much as 26.5 percent on the news of the deal with GM. Founded in 2015, Nikola staked out a unique position in the buzzy EV space by claiming it would make zero-emission big rigs using hydrogen fuel cell technology.

While a number of companies like Tesla, Daimler, Freightliner, and other established players and startups are working on all-electric trucks, Nikola was one of the few pursuing hydrogen-powered big rigs. Hydrogen-powered vehicles have never really caught on in the passenger car space because there’s been very little investment in the necessary infrastructure. Only a handful of hydrogen filling stations exist to date.

Meanwhile, GM is in the midst of a multibillion-dollar pivot to an “all-electric future” that includes spending $2.2 billion to retrofit its first “fully-dedicated” electric vehicle assembly plant and the development of its modular battery-electric platform, Ultium. Last week, the automaker said it was upping its investment in electrification to $27 billion through 2025.

Source: theverge

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General Motors Co GM.N said it has sold out the first year's worth of its hulking GMC Hummer EV electric pickup truck after a splashy video reveal on Tuesday.

The GMC website showed a “reservations full” banner over the Hummer EV “Edition 1,” due to start production in the fall of 2021. The next version of the truck, the $99,995 Hummer EV 3X, is not scheduled to begin production until the fall of 2022.

The least expensive Hummer EV, starting at $79,995, is scheduled to go into production in the spring of 2024, GM said.

The Hummer EV was designed and engineered in 18 months, General Motors officials said during a presentation on Wednesday. The brawny truck can “crab walk” sideways on rough terrain using its four-wheel steering system, and has a “Watts to Freedom” mode that accelerates the truck to 60 miles per hour (97 kph) in 3 seconds.

The Hummer EV is in part a response to Tesla Inc's TSLA.O Cybertruck, which has a very different but equally eye-grabbing design and a bevy of extreme performance features. The Cybertruck's starting price is $39,900, though a model with 500 miles of range starts at $69,900.

Tesla has begun building a factory in Austin, Texas to build the Cybertruck starting in late 2021.

The head of GM’s GMC division, Duncan Aldred, said about half the brand’s dealers have agreed to sell the Hummer EV lineup. GM is taking orders on its website, and Aldred said the company’s intent is to offer no-haggle prices. Online reservations and firm pricing are similar to the Tesla approach.

High-performance electric pickup trucks could be a crowded niche in the U.S. market, with eight companies promising to launch models by the end of 2021.

Ford Motor Co F.N is promising an electric version of its F-series pickup, though Ford has said its electric pickup will be aimed at customers who want to use the truck for work. GM has Chevrolet versions of its electric truck in the works.

Startups Rivian, Nikola Corp NKLA.O, and Lordstown Motors are among other companies that have electric pickups in development.

Source: reuters

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Google recently rolled out an automatic delete feature for new users, the feature deletes user data every eighteen months unless users change the settings as per their preference. This data will include the user's location history, web, and app activity. Now, Google is rolling out new controls for smart features that will give the ability to users to turn them off. Smart features in Gmail include automatic email filtering, tabbed inbox, summary cards above emails, Smart Compose, and Smart Reply that essentially give suggestions to users before they type out the entire message.

All these features are aimed at the convenience of users but they use significant amounts of data. Google will roll out a toggle that users can turn off if they do not rely on the features. They can also turn it back on anytime.
With Google capping storage data for Google Photos at 15GB from June 21, 2021, users will want to opt to turn off smart features and the toggle will make it easier. Google will roll out the feature soon and when it does it will notify the users. Google noted that the ability to turn off the smart features is not new and users can separately turn off the smart feature control for Gmail, Google Meet, and Chat.

"The ability to turn on (or not) some of these individual smart features is not new. What’s new is a clearer choice over the data processing that makes them possible. This new setting is designed to reduce the work of understanding and managing that process, in view of what we’ve learned from user experience research and regulators’ emphasis on comprehensible, actionable user choices over data," Google in a blog post said.
Turning off the toggle will also limit the user’s access to personalized data on Gmail, Chat, and Meet. If a user personalizes this data, they get reminders from Google Assistant for bills, the option to view restaurant reservations in Maps, and loyalty cards & tickets for Google Pay.

Earlier this week Google announced that starting June 21, 2021, Google will no longer offer unlimited free photo backup June 2021. However, any high-quality picture or video that will be uploaded before June 21, 2021, will not be counted towards your 15GB of free storage. The photos that are backed up before June 21 will be considered free and will be exempted from the storage limit.

Source: indiatoday

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General Motors announced Thursday that it was dumping more money into its electrification plans and would also be accelerating its production to release more electric vehicles sooner than expected.

Speaking at a conference hosted by the British bank Barclays, GM CEO Mary Barra said the company would spend $27 billion on electric and autonomous vehicles through 2025 — up from the $20 billion it announced before the COVID-19 pandemic. Also by 2025, GM will launch 30 new electric vehicles around the world, more than two-thirds of which will be available in North America. The vehicles will span GM’s entire brand portfolio, including Cadillac, Buick, GMC, and Chevrolet, and will come in a range of prices.

 

Previously, the company said it would release 20 new EVs by 2023, though most of those were expected to launch in China, where demand for electric vehicles is much higher thanks to strict emissions rules.

GM has unveiled two new EVs in the last few months: the Cadillac Lyriq SUV, expected to go into production in late 2022, and the GMC Hummer EV, slated for late 2021. But the auto giant has been criticized for bringing vehicles to market too late, while other automakers are racing to get their EVs to customers much sooner.

“Climate change is real, and we want to be part of the solution by putting everyone in an electric vehicle,” Barra said in a statement. “We are transitioning to an all-electric portfolio from a position of strength and we’re focused on growth. We can accelerate our EV plans because we are rapidly building a competitive advantage in batteries, software, vehicle integration, manufacturing, and customer experience.”

The news is meant to convince those investors on Wall Street who have been jittery about GM’s ability to catch up to Tesla, which has been the only automaker to successfully build an EV business over the last few years. Meanwhile, legacy automakers are stepping up their own EV plans, with Ford expecting to begin delivering its Mustang Mach-E SUV to customers by the end of the year and Volkswagen going into production on its electric ID 4 SUV early next year.

GM also said it was bolstering its estimates about its scalable Ultium battery architecture thanks to “engineering advances.” The automaker now says it anticipates getting 450 miles of range out of its Ultium batteries on a full charge, up from the previously estimated range of 400 miles.

The company said it was already working on the second-generation version of Ultium, which is projected to deliver “twice the energy density at less than half the cost of today’s chemistry.” GM said that this next-gen version of Ultium will cost “60 percent less” than batteries in use today. The company is prototype testing this next-generation battery technology, which is expected to be available mid-decade.
 

Source: indiatoday

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