Ninety-four percent of American homes are framed in wood, and a guy who used to build rockets thinks that's a problem he can fix with grass. That's where we're starting this week. From there it's ocean waves, rooftop solar, a Polestar that ran from Sweden to the Sahara to prove a point, and the most unhinged track car on earth. Let's get into it.
THE WEEK'S BEST STORIES
The Hustle traveled to North Carolina to look at Plantd, a startup making structural building panels from fast-growing grass instead of trees. The product replaces oriented strand board, the OSB sheets that wrap the walls, floors, and roofs of most American homes. Around 94 percent of single-family US homes are framed in wood, and that lumber swings in price with trade disputes and storms. Plantd's grass is a perennial the company says grows about six inches a day and can be harvested twice a year, where pine takes 40 years. The interesting part is not the grass but the factory model: a full-size OSB mill is the size of a neighborhood, costs around $500 million, takes five years to build, and is so expensive to idle that operators avoid shutting it down even during a supply shock. Plantd is building a miniaturized, fully electric production line it says can sit near the fields that feed it, which matters when Canada supplies about 85 percent of US softwood lumber imports and leaves builders exposed to tariffs. The co-founders are former SpaceX engineers, and they borrow that playbook by building most of their hardware in-house. CEO Nathan says the plan is to build at least 18 more machines in farm-adjacent factories by 2030, each line costing around $5 million. The company says its panels are independently certified as code-compliant in all 50 states. The scale problem is stark: the largest US homebuilder's order grew to 10 million panels, but at the current pace of 250,000 a year it would take 40 years to fill. A transplanting robot the company says moves about 1,770 plants an hour, roughly 15 times faster than a person, is its answer. Founded in 2021, Plantd has raised about $47.5 million. The grass is not the risk. Scaling factories without running out of money is.
CorPower's Wave Machines Aim for a 10x Jump in Efficiency
Europe's Foundry
Wave power has spent decades as the renewable that never quite arrived, and Stockholm's CorPower believes it has finally made the math work. The company builds point-absorber buoys that ride ocean swell and turn that motion into grid electricity. The framing is blunt: wave energy has to get roughly ten times more efficient to compete, and CorPower says a lightweight composite hull, a heart-inspired pre-tensioning system, and a negative spring it calls a wave spring add up to that jump. The economics, not the ocean, were always the missing piece. Devices that survived storms tended to be too heavy and expensive; devices that were cheap did not survive. The video positions wave as a complement to wind and solar rather than a rival, filling the hours when neither is producing because swell keeps rolling in after the wind drops. On the numbers, the C5 uses about half the parts and roughly half the cost of the earlier C4, with each converter rated at 330 kW. Thirty of them plus a collection hub form a 10 megawatt cluster the company calls a CorPack. The hulls are woven from glass fiber on an automated line that produces about one every two days, on a mobile factory that can be trucked to a customer's site. The device runs autonomously, making around 100 control decisions a second, then shifts into a detuned storm mode that changes its stiffness so big waves pass by, which the host compares to feathering a wind turbine blade. CorPower says units off Portugal rode out close to 20 meter waves while moving only a couple of decimeters, and points to a cost path of roughly 40 to 50 per megawatt hour. Treat that cost number as a target, not a receipt, until a real farm is selling power. The thing to watch is a C5 actually metered in the water, not the renderings.
Polestar Drove Its 870 HP Flagship From Gothenburg to the Sahara to Settle the Range Question
Polestar
Polestar took its new flagship on a 6,500 kilometer drive from Gothenburg, Sweden to Ouarzazate, Morocco, and turned the trip into the car's official press launch. The company calls the Polestar 5 a halo car, a grand tourer built to cross countries at speed without drama. Published specs put the dual-motor version at around 650 kW, roughly 870 horsepower, drawing on a 103 kWh battery running an 800-volt system. The route climbed through the Pyrenees, the French Alps, and the High Atlas Mountains before finishing in the Sahara dunes, and Polestar says the car still had charge to spare for the journey back, which was the point of choosing a destination that far from the nearest fast charger. A full-size luxury liftback aimed at the Porsche Taycan and BMW i7 is a real jump for a brand built on the 2 and the 3. Reports tied to the car's debut at the 2025 Munich Motor Show put the starting price at roughly 120,000 euros in Germany, close to double the entry price of the Polestar 4. Reuters reported the car will skip both the United States and China, with Europe as its first market. That detail matters because a halo EV is rarely built to sell in big numbers; its job is to pull people into showrooms toward the cheaper models that pay the bills. Published figures also quote about 1,015 Nm of torque, a battery supplied by SK On, assembly in China, and a bonded aluminum body. This is a manufacturer's own launch film, so take the romance with a pinch of sand. The interesting signal is that Polestar felt confident enough to make range the headline of a 6,500 kilometer drive rather than something to quietly manage. Wait for independent range tests before you believe the dunes.
A Year With McMurtry's Spéirling, the Fan Car That Makes Its Own Grip
Chris Harris on Cars
Chris Harris spent the better part of a year getting to know McMurtry, the small British firm behind the Spéirling, a single-seat electric track car that does not behave like anything else on a circuit. He drives the latest prototype and comes away visibly rattled, struggling on camera to describe what he just felt. The numbers hint at why: roughly 1,000 horsepower in a car weighing under 1,000kg, paired with underbody fans the company says produce about 2,000kg of downforce at any speed, including a standstill. Harris describes cornering and braking loads closer to a fighter jet than a road car. The Spéirling is already in the record books. At the 2022 Goodwood Festival of Speed, Max Chilton drove one up the 1.16-mile hillclimb in 39.08 seconds, beating the Volkswagen ID.R's 2019 time and making it the first fan car to win sanctioned competition since the Brabham BT46B took the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix. In April 2025, McMurtry says one of its cars set an outright lap record at the Top Gear test track. The fan layout matters because it generates downforce that does not depend on speed, so the car is devastating through slow corners where a conventional wing does little. There is a real catch: this is a track-only machine, not a road car, which keeps the buyer pool to collectors and committed track-day drivers. Managing director Thomas Yates says the production car has been almost completely redesigned around reliability and comfort rather than a chase for more outright pace. Harris drives fast cars for a living and plainly could not stop thinking about it. That reaction is the entire pitch.
Solar Is Now the Cheapest Power in History, and an Oil Scare Is Speeding It Up
Everything Electric TECH
In a long interview with Everything Electric, Sonia Dunlop, chief executive of the Global Solar Council, argues that solar has quietly become the fastest growing and cheapest source of electricity ever built. The Council is the worldwide industry body for solar and battery storage, and Dunlop says the cost of panels and batteries has fallen by roughly 90 percent over the last 15 to 20 years. Her headline number is that about 75 percent of new electricity capacity added to grids worldwide each year is now solar paired with storage. She frames the shift as largely bottom-up, driven by households and businesses doing the math rather than government mandates, and accelerating as the recent Gulf oil scare reminds countries how exposed fossil fuel supply really is. What makes solar different, she argues, is that it is a manufactured technology rather than a fuel, so its price keeps falling as production scales. Spain is her counter-example: after a heavy solar and wind rollout, the video says it now has close to the cheapest power on the continent and has been partly shielded from gas price spikes, to the point that energy-hungry industries are relocating there. The most striking case is Pakistan, where Dunlop says roughly six in ten homes now have rooftop solar, creating about half a million jobs and saving an estimated $12 billion in fossil fuel imports, with the surge coming from ordinary people investing their own money rather than any state program. These are her figures and the Council's, presented in the video. She runs the global trade body for solar, so this is an advocate making the strongest possible case, and it should be read that way. Even so, the core claim is hard to argue with: when the cheapest new power is also the one you can bolt to your own roof, adoption stops needing a subsidy to make sense.
FRESH FROM THE SITE
The Self-Driving Story Nobody Is Telling
Opinion · Jacob Hunka
This week's opinion piece steps away from the autonomy horse race, the timelines and the sensor wars, to look at what a car that drives itself actually means for the millions of Americans who cannot drive. For a blind rider, someone with MS or ALS, or anyone the transportation system was never built around, going somewhere is not a motion but a project: a phone call, a favor, a van booked days ahead, a rideshare that slows and rolls on. The National Federation of the Blind, which has partnered with Waymo on accessibility, calls it the first time in history a blind person can travel long distances on their own. The timeline matters here more than the headlines suggest. RJ Scaringe has laid out three stages, with point-to-point driving shipping this year, eyes-off in 2027, and Level 4 in 2028, and only that last stage opens the door for someone who cannot drive. The argument is that the hands-off system shipping now is not a consolation prize but the foundation, because every Rivian on the road feeds the data that gets the fleet to Level 4 faster. The honest caveat is wheelchair accessibility: a standard R2 does nothing for someone who cannot transfer into a seat unless Rivian and Uber commit to accessible versions. That is a design choice, not a technology problem. Full disclosure runs through the piece: Jacob owned a Rivian R1T for two years and is open about not being neutral on the brand.
The week is yours. See you next Monday.
Jacob Hunka, Founder nexusEVnews.com
P.S. Know someone who follows the auto industry and ignores the electric side of it? Now is a good time to fix that.