ISSUE 01
THIS WEEK IN EVS & ENERGY
Somewhere this week, a designer in Munich stayed late to get the curve of a door handle exactly right. On a line in Normal, Illinois, someone showed up and built something people will still be driving ten years from now. Across a boardroom table, two companies shook hands on a billion-dollar bet that a car not yet built will one day drive itself. In Europe, a Hyundai made a Porsche engineer pull out a notebook. And in a research lab, a person looked at a chart the whole industry had been reading for decades and said: we have this wrong. These are the kinds of things that are easy to miss in the noise. We think they are worth looking into.
THE WEEK'S BEST STORIES
Rivian shares surged as much as 10% on news of a landmark deal with Uber: up to $1.25 billion for 10,000 fully autonomous R2s starting in 2028, with an option to expand to 40,000 more by 2030. It is a big bet on a car that has not been built yet. But if Rivian pulls it off, they will be sitting at the same autonomous table as Waymo.
Hyundai's most ambitious performance car yet delivers 650 horsepower, an 800-volt platform, and a software-driven sound and shift emulation that was reportedly convincing enough for Porsche to study and borrow. Thomas drives it hard in the wet and breaks down everything: launch control, the N Grin overboost button, the full interior. The question it leaves behind: what exactly is the Taycan offering for considerably more money?
The Neue Klasse nameplate arrives in production form and BMW's design team walks through it all: the shark nose carried forward, a new panoramic cockpit, and a vegan material called Veganza that lets light through in a way you genuinely have to see. Fifty years of the 3 Series, rebuilt from the ground up. The platform will underpin more than 40 upcoming BMW models.
The fossil fuel dominance shown in most global energy charts comes down to a flawed measurement system, not a stalled transition. Traditional accounting treats one unit of coal the same as one unit of wind electricity, even though roughly two-thirds of coal's energy never reaches anyone as useful power. It disappears as waste heat before it ever leaves the power station. When you measure what energy systems actually deliver, renewables look dramatically more competitive than the headline numbers suggest. Pair this one with the opinion piece below.
Kyle goes deep on the Rivian R2 with three of the people who made it real: design chief Jeff Hammoud on the exterior and interior choices, software lead Wassym Bensaid on platform capabilities, and CEO RJ Scaringe tying it together with the broader Rivian story. One of the most substantive R2 conversations out there right now.
OPINION
About 80 percent of the energy in a full tank of gas never actually moves your car. It leaves as heat before it ever turns a wheel. Story four explains why that same measurement problem makes the energy transition look stalled at the global scale. This piece brings it down to the size of your driveway: exactly where the money goes, what it actually costs you, and why the "but what about coal plants?" argument is not the slam dunk most people assume. The math is more interesting than the debate.
The week is yours. See you next Monday.
Jacob Hunka, Founder
nexusEVnews
P.S. A warm welcome to the Stranieri sul Lago d'Orta, who apparently decided that between the lake, the mountains, the pizza, and the sheer beauty of being alive in this corner of Italy, they still had enough bandwidth left to care about battery degradation curves. We respect it deeply. And to my Mom, hi Mom. She signed up. She now knows more about the BMW Neue Klasse architecture than most people at automotive trade shows. She is handling it with tremendous grace.