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BUDAPEST, Hungary — Formula One champion Max Verstappen overcame a spin and his worst starting spot of the season to win the Hungarian Grand Prix on Sunday. His eighth win of the season pushed Verstappen’s lead to 80 points over Charles Leclerc as F1 heads into its midseason break.

Even though his advantage keeps increasing, Verstappen is not thinking ahead.

“It’s of course a great lead,” he said. “But if you want to fight for championships, you can’t afford many mistakes.”

Mercedes placed both its cars on the podium for the second straight race; seven-time F1 champion Lewis Hamilton carved his way from seventh to a second-place finish, teammate and pole-sitter George Russell was third.

Carlos Sainz Jr. finished fourth in another disastrous day for Ferrari. Leclerc was sixth, one spot behind Sergio Perez of Red Bull.

Verstappen’s eighth win of the season was the 28th of the Dutchman’s career.

“Who would have thought when we woke up today we’d get this result? Amazing,” Verstappen told his team, letting out a laugh. “I was battling a lot of guys and it was a lot of fun out there. That was a crazy race but (we) stayed calm and we won.”

He qualified a season-worst 10th because of a loss of power on Saturday, then in Sunday’s race Verstappen did a 360-degree spin.

“Unbelievable Max, that is right up there with your best,” Red Bull team principal Christian Horner replied. “Fantastic.”

Russell, who started from the pole for the first time in his career, led 30 laps until Leclerc passed him on the outside as dark clouds rolled over the Hungaroring circuit and a light rain began to fall.

With Leclerc leading, Verstappen undercut for quicker tires. Ferrari made a mistake in choosing the more durable hard tires for Leclerc.

“These tires are (expletive),” Leclerc said.

He later explained that he thought it was the wrong call.

“I made it clear that I wanted to keep (the medium tire) as long as possible, but we pitted very early for the hard, which we need to understand why. I think stopping for the hard was the turning point,” Leclerc said. “Before thinking about the championship, to be honest, as a team we need to understand what we need to do to get better. Because otherwise it’s going to be really difficult.”

Moments later, Verstappen lost grip and spun on track, allowing Sainz to take the lead from Hamilton. Leclerc passed Verstappen, only to lose position soon after because Verstappen had faster tires.

“It was very tricky conditions out there but we had a really good strategy,” Verstappen said. “We were really reactive, always pitting at the right time. Even with the 360 we still won.”

Recalling the spin, Verstappen said: “I went on throttle and completely lost the rear, it caught me out.”

Ferrari’s strategy woes just won’t go away. Leclerc has seen two nailed-on wins disappear — at the Monaco GP and the British GP — after team calls dropped him down from a dominant position into fourth place.

Ferrari botched Sainz’s next tire stop on Lap 47, taking too long to fit his rear left tire.

“It always feels like there’s always something going on, reliability, mistakes, whatever,” a clearly frustrated Leclerc said.

Hamilton stayed out but was losing time to Verstappen as the rain increased.

Leclerc, who crashed when leading the French Grand Prix last week, came in for a third tire change on Lap 55.

Ferrari’s strategy calls even confused Verstappen.

“I think Ferrari chose their wrong tires in their final stint before they pitted again,” Verstappen said. “Ferrari was very fast, they just made the wrong call with the hard tire (for Leclerc).”

Lando Norris finished seventh for McLaren, Fernando Alonso was eighth and his Alpine teammate Esteban Ocon was ninth. Sebastian Vettel of Aston Martin was 10th.

Vettel, who won his four F1 titles with Red Bull from 2010-13, is retiring at the end of the season, by which point Verstappen may well have beaten his F1 record of 13 wins in a season from 2013.

After a month-long break the season resumes with a triple header in Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy.

“For both cars to be on the podium is really special for us. The other guys have an edge but we’re clearly closing the gap,” Hamilton said. “Hopefully we’ll bring more into the second half of the season and start fighting with the guys at the front.”

Russell pointed out how, not so long ago, Mercedes was lagging way behind Red Bull.

“We were finishing one minute behind, and now we’re 10 seconds back,” he said.

Verstappen also has good reason to welcome the resurgence of Mercedes.

“It’s good they’re competitive,” he quipped. “It means they can steal more points off Ferrari.”

AlphaTauri’s Pierre Gasly started from the pit lane after being penalized for multiple engine-part changes and finished 12th.

McLaren’s Daniel Ricciardo showed some of his old form with a great double overtake on Ocon and Alonso approaching midway through the race, celebrating with an exuberant expletive.

But Ricciardo wasn’t laughing later on as the Australian driver got a five-second time penalty for clipping Lance Stroll’s Aston Martin and sending him off track. Ricciardo placed a lowly 15th.

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Harley-Davidson shares rose the most in five months after second-quarter profit and revenue beat estimates, a sign that Chief Executive Officer Jochen Zeitz’s turnaround plan is helping the motorcycle maker overcome supply-chain headaches and a temporary production shutdown.

The Milwaukee-based company posted earnings of $1.46 a share, well over the $1.02 average of analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Revenue from motorcycles and related products rose to $1.27 billion, compared with the $1.25 billion forecast by analysts. Harley shares rose 6.7% at 10:10 a.m. in New York and earlier gained 10%, the most on an intraday basis since early February.

Zeitz, a former Puma SE executive who took the helm of the troubled manufacturer in February 2020, has slashed costs, exited unprofitable markets and tightened inventory to raise motorcycle prices as part of his “Hardwire” turnaround plan. While he’s successfully introduced new models and mopped up excess bike inventory, shipping bottlenecks and parts shortages have constrained sales growth coming out of the pandemic.

The profit beat came even as global sales of motorcycles fell to 50,500, down 23% from the year-earlier quarter. Sales by that measure were down 28%, to 34,900, in North America, Harley’s largest market. Europe fell 15%, Latin America dropped 8%, and sales in Asia rose about 1%.

“Demand was strong across the board, but the available bikes in the dealership were the concern,” Zeitz said on a call with analysts. Harley struggled to ship what it had to dealers, he said.

Harley was forced to halt production and shipments for two weeks in May and June because of a “regulatory compliance matter” with a part from one of its suppliers. At the time, Harley told investors it would be able to make up for lost production in the second half of 2022.

Zeitz also is culling dealerships in the U.S. and clawed back a portion of dealer profits on certain models earlier this year, a move that could help shore up profit margins, according to UBS AG.

Harley maintained its forecast of 5% to 10% revenue growth in 2022, and operating income margin of 11% to 12%.

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It is almost five years since GM made its big declaration, yet the numbers still aren’t in GM’s favor — at least not for the moment. Tesla still has a dominant 66% of the small but rapidly growing U.S. electric vehicle market, according to LMC Automotive, while GM has just 6%, as production has been slow to ramp up. It’s also being outsold by Ford and Hyundai Motor.

Overall, only 8% of GM’s sales are estimated to be electric vehicles. That’s including vehicles produced with Chinese joint ventures such as SAIC-GM-Wuling, which produces a small car that was the best-selling electric vehicle last year in China.

But Barra, who in 2014 became the first woman to lead a Detroit automaker, remains convinced that’s set to change, and her legacy will arguably hinge on whether she can transform the automaker into an electric leader.

The market hasn’t agreed so far. Following a runup to more than $65 a share early this year, GM’s stock has been nearly cut in half to under $35 a share. The price once again marks a 14% decline under Barra’s tenure.

LMC expects GM to be the first Detroit automaker to top Tesla in electric vehicle sales, in part because of the company’s scale and Ultium platform. But it doesn’t forecast that to happen until 2029.

Full article at the link

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It’s always been about the data. It’s just that back in the day, we didn’t have the resources at our fingertips to extract it — and thus there was less of an expectation to do anything. Those days are over. If you’re not on a continual quest as a fleet manager to use data to hone your processes, create efficiencies, and conserve your fleet budget, you’re not doing your job.

The changes were incremental: Analyzing data from fuel card reporting helped mitigate fraud and lessened fuel spend. Then came the rise of the fleet management information systems (FMIS) that track and automate everything from fuel, maintenance, technicians, driver logs, and timecards, to tax, title, and licensing. You eventually got into telematics to monitor driver location and performance, routing, and vehicle diagnostics. You may have integrated dashboard from your fleet management company to monitor data and many of these processes.

You figured out how to manage well enough through automated rules and exception reporting. But there was always the promise that these systems could talk to each other and that the information would flow through a single pane of glass, though that never quite happened. And that was okay, because the benefits those individual systems delivered are more than enough to offset the extra management hassle.

Now, the electric vehicles cometh. EVs are more than just an internal combustion engine (ICE) swapped for a battery. They’re computers on wheels — and they bring new and heightened requirements around connectivity, software management, and data mining along with them.

Here’s how their operation adds to fleet managers’ (and drivers’) roles, particularly as it relates to data, though this isn’t a complete picture. It starts with managed EV charging and extends to managing data from both the vehicles and drivers.

Monitoring EV Charging

Unlike fueling an ICE engine, EVs can take eight hours or more to reach 80% capacity on a Level 2 charger. This dictates remote monitoring of home or depot chargers, often after work hours, to make sure they are in fact plugged in and receiving juice. An EV that fails to charge will really screw up your next day.

Understanding Battery State-of-Charge

With EVs’ limited ranges and the lack of public infrastructure, fleet managers need to know how much juice their EVs have left to strategize on how not to get stranded.  

Managing Electricity Rate Fluctuation

As much as we abhor unpredictable gas prices, electricity demand and rates fluctuate by the hour and peak load times. To avoid expensive demand charges, fleets must remotely activate chargers Again, this task is often performed after hours. With many virtual tasks, the goal is to automate them by establishing rules and exception alerts based on how soon the vehicle is needed, rate curve, and present state of charge.

Accessing Public EV Charging

While most charging should be done at home or the depot, public charging should be worked into the plan as a backup when necessary. Public chargers are run on multiple networks. You’ll need to subscribe to a network with the best coverage for you. Each network comes with a proprietary app to locate its charge points. You’ll then need to monitor costs by kWh, dwell time, and type of charging (Level 2 or more expensive Level 3 DC fast charging). To expand charger accessibility, one method is to subscribe to multiple networks — but that requires another set of apps for both you and your drivers.

Reimbursing for Home EV Charging

Another aspect of home charge management for fleets involves separating utility bills by personal and work expense for fleet vehicle charging, and then reimbursing the employee accurately.

Managing EVSE

The chargers themselves (also known as EVSE, or electric vehicle supply equipment), whether at employees’ home or the depot, need to be maintained to minimize the potential for maintenance issues. Again, an EV that fails to charge because of faulty equipment will really screw up your next day.

Managing Vehicle, Driver Data

Managing vehicle and driver data are still important in the ICE world but take on even greater importance with EVs. These data sets are needed to understand battery efficiency (the costliest component of an EV by far) and how range is affected by factors such as driving style and payload, stops, road grade, and external temperature.

Ways to Integrate EV Data

A major issue today is that there are no communications standards or protocols regarding how data from EVs is communicated, which creates difficulties in gathering data across makes and models. As a result, there isn’t one set way to access and analyze all this data.

Entities that can access data include aftermarket-installed telematics, new data services platforms, fleet card providers, EV charging network provider apps, and automakers’ EV management systems. Each of these systems takes on specific roles in the EV ecosphere, and many provide multiple solutions, but none do them all.

That leaves fleets to integrate EV data from multiple sources. This is only a sample of the hypotheticals:

Automakers’ EV management systems connect their fleet customers with their electric vehicles. Those systems are essential to monitor EVs’ status in the charging queue, identify battery state of charge, precondition cabins, locate chargers, measure energy consumption, and offer other metrics on vehicle performance. A select few of these systems have robust functionality, while some electric OEMs don’t have any system or app at all. If you’re running EVs from multiple OEMs, you’re again faced with juggling multiple apps, like finding chargers. If you acquire new electric models, are you prepared to manage a new system and have your drivers download and learn a new app?

Some proprietary OEM systems are marketing the fact that they integrate with other electric makes and models. This is worth vetting — but normalizing data from other OEMs isn’t just a digital handshake. But we’re still at the infancy of cross-brand compatibility and making data flow back and forth in easily digestible formats.

Your existing telematics system is inherently cross-brand compatible for measuring driver and vehicle performance data. Though as EVs don’t have OBD-II ports, data is instead pulled from the vehicle’s onboard computer. This brings up other data normalization issues that aren’t insurmountable, but the solutions aren’t off the shelf. Further, telematics may handle other functions that the OEM systems offer around EV batteries, chargers, and expense management.

Growing EV Resources

For EV fleet integrations of any size and of different makes and models, integration of multiple systems is essential. There is no one set answer on which combination is best, as each situation is different. How do you minimize the number of applications to manage, making sure those applications connect and deliver the right data reliably? That depends on the functionality offered by your providers and your fleet situation.

The good news is that there is an industry coalescing around holistic solutions to get your fleet on the right path. Those stakeholders include fleet management companies, telematics providers, utilities, EV software companies, third-party consultancies, and the manufacturers themselves. For a fee, they’ll manage a lot of the hard stuff for you.

In the Valhalla of EV fleets, vehicles receive over-the-air repairs and updates; they automatically charge an account when they’re plugged in, and they have myriad charging options on an app within close range. As well, other parts of their support system run on a standardized open platform, like Android, for third parties to invent new solutions. (On the charging front, consolidation of network providers is happening, where fleets can access a growing list of charging providers through a single app.)

The industry is overcoming these challenges incrementally. If you’re about to embark on your EV pilot, it’s better to be prepared for them before you start.

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What started as a pet project to electrify food trucks in the San Francisco Bay area — an enterprise inspired by the cacophony of generators that greeted Ben Parker every day during his lunch break at Tesla — has evolved into a much larger, complex and potentially more lucrative undertaking.

Parker and partner Toby Kraus have set their sights well beyond food trucks and are aiming instead to build an all-electric RV company that will upend the industry.

“Every time that I would tell people about the food truck project, RVs would come up in conversation because these (vehicles) have similar needs for onboard power,” said Parker, a Tesla veteran who worked on the battery for the Model 3.

He soon discovered that the RV market, and specifically the towable travel trailer sector, was much larger than he realized. It was also badly in need of a switch to electric. A three-month, 6,000-mile RV road trip designed to give Parker firsthand experience as well as an understanding of the customer and market provided the final proof points.

Lightship Energy, the startup the pair co-founded in May 2021, was soon charging forward with a high-flying goal.

Lightship is not only trying to design and produce an electric travel trailer that ditches the propane tanks and generators that creates a “bummer RV camping experience” as Parker describes it, the company is also trying to remove a barrier for owners of all-electric SUVs and trucks who want to haul a travel trailer on long road trips. 

An EV truck with a 300-mile range traveling at 65 miles an hour with a traditional travel trailer in tow becomes a 100-mile truck, explained Parker, who is CEO. The team at Lightship, which now numbers 20 people, experienced the range loss first hand.

“We pulled the most aerodynamic trailer we could rent behind a Tesla Model X and we actually had to drop the trailer in the middle of an off ramp on an interstate because we couldn’t pull it to the next Supercharger,” said Kraus, who is chief operating officer at Lightship. “It was miserable.”

The effort promises to be complex, but the pair contend the market size and opportunity are simply too large to ignore.

In 2021, 600,240 recreational vehicles were sold in North America, up from 430,412 units the year before, according to Thor Industries, the RV giant that owns brands Airstream, CrossRoads, Cruiser RV, Dutchmen, Jayco, Keystone, Tiffin and Erwin Hymer Group.

“Ninety percent of the market is towable travel trailers,” Kraus said, who is an alum of Tesla and Proterra. “The market is huge.”

Lightship is still creeping out of stealth and not yet ready to show its electric travel trailer to the world. But the company’s idea and its progress has attracted investors and fresh capital.

Lightship, which previously raised $1 million in pre-seed and $3 million in seed funding, recently closed a $23 million Series A round led by Victoria Beasley of Prelude Ventures. Existing and new investors include Obvious Ventures, Congruent Ventures, My Climate Journey, HyperGuap and Alumni Ventures.

Beasley, who has also joined the board, said the combination of market opportunity, the team, which includes former Tesla, Proterra, Apple and Rivian employees, along with Lightship’s aim to create a delightful customer experience led her to invest in the startup.

The funds will be used to double the team by the end of the year and develop an alpha prototype of Lightship.

“Our goal is definitely to create a super satisfying long-range, EV roadtripping experience,” Parker said. “As any good Tesla alum would work, we started with going back to the fundamentals and asking, ‘what should a travel trailer be?'” The team identified that efficiency was an absolute necessity for it to exist in the future.

But the project extends beyond designing a sleek-looking, aerodynamic trailer. Lightship is also developing the underlying EV skateboard architecture.

The final ingredient to Lightship’s secret sauce is the powertrain, which includes a battery pack comparable to one in a Tesla Model 3, that will propel the trailer as it is being towed. Lightship is also exploring the integration of solar cells on the roof for passive charging.

“I think the gravity of the problem around towing and towing range is just starting to hit home with people as more EV trucks are hitting the market,” Parker said. “With an EV powertrain on board you can use that additional energy for the trailer to propel itself, reduce all of the load on the tow vehicle and get back to a range loss zero experience — now you have a 300-mile trailer and a 300-mile truck.”

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Rivian is reportedly planning to lay off hundreds of workers. While the company hasn’t made a firm decision on mass job cuts, according to Bloomberg, it may shed around 5% of the workforce. With a headcount of more than 14,000, that equates to around 700 employees. Layoffs may be announced in the coming weeks, the report suggests. Rivian declined to comment to Engadget.

The job cuts would primarily be for non-manufacturing positions in areas where Rivian has expanded too quickly. Teams with duplicate functions are said to be among those the company has targeted. The total number of employees at Rivian has more or less doubled over the last year as the automaker increased production.

The automotive industry has been hit hard by supply chain issues and the economic climate, and it seems Rivian is no exception. It may even have been hit worse. The company still expects to build 25,000 EVs this year despite production difficulties. Rivian eventually aims to manufacture 600,000 vehicles per year between its existing plant in Normal, Illinois, and a second planned factory in Georgia that’s expected to open in 2024.

The company has a backlog of tens of thousands of EV orders. It will have to juggle those with the 100,000 delivery vehicles it will build for Amazon by the end of the decade. As such, bolstering production while streamlining operations elsewhere seems a logical move.

The news follows a recent report noting that Rivian hired dozens of former Tesla employees in recent months, according to LinkedIn data. It was reported in late June that Tesla cut around 200 people from its Autopilot team after CEO Elon Musk announced plans to reduce the company’s salaried workforce by 10%. Musk told employees earlier that month he had a “super bad feeling” about the state of the economy and for them to expect layoffs.

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Malia Obama was spotted enjoying a meal at Chick-fil-A on Thursday, despite the fast food chain – which is run by a conservative and devout Christian who has publicly bashed same sex marriage – donating millions of dollars to anti-gay groups in the past.

The eldest daughter of Former President Barack Obama, 24, hit up one of the chicken restaurant’s drive-throughs in Los Angeles, California, before dropping off her younger sister, Sasha’s boyfriend, Clifton Powell Jr., at the airport.

And while her father has helped bring LGTBQ+ rights to the forefront, Malia didn’t seem to mind that Chick-fil-A’s right-wing owner has spoken out against the community numerous times in the past.

We’re also kind of surprised she’s not driving a Tesla….Didn’t see her as a VW girl.

Also, cool she does what she wants and isn’t worried about the repercussions from the Woke mob. But we’re sure she’ll take heat for this visit. Get the popcorn…

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