The Defender

If you’re a Tesla owner planning a cross-country trip for next year, you’re in luck. The company is planning to install the next-generation version of its Superchargers — the charging stations that allow drivers to fill up their vehicles with a fresh charge and stay on the road — in the early part of 2019. Word of the upgrades to the Supercharger stations came from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who took to Twitter to announce the rollout. The third version of the charging station will apparently offer a “much faster” charge than previous generations,  according to Musk . He didn’t disclose the details as to how fast it would be able to provide a full charge. Current Supercharger stations can recharge a Tesla in 30 minutes, according to the company. They deliver up to 120 kilowatts of charging power to vehicles. Musk also took a second to note that Tesla has  significantly expanded the Supercharger network . He said in a tweet that he expects to double the current Supercharg...

The search is over. Tesla has appointed Robyn Denholm to replace Elon Musk as the chair of its board of directors. Denholm’s name isn’t as well-known as Musk’s but she’s familiar with how Tesla operates. Though she currently works as the chief financial officer of Telstra, one of Australia’s largest telecommunications companies, she has served on the Tesla board as an independent director since 2014, and she is also the chair of the company’s audit committee. Her new position at Tesla starts immediately, though she will continue to work for Telstra until May 2019. She will step down from her role on the audit committee until then. The 55-year-old Denholm brings decades of experience in finance to Tesla. The Australian native spent most of her career working in tech firms, including 11 years at Sun Microsystems and nine years at Juniper Networks, but she held various positions at Toyota’s Australian division for seven years. “Robyn has extensive experience in both the tech and ...

The minute-long television commercial Ford released to mark the start of its new marketing campaign left us with more questions than answers. It’s not Bryan Cranston’s starring role that we’re curious about. We want to know more about the enigmatic, electric-looking, Mustang-like car shown 37 seconds into the video. The ad briefly shows footage of a  2019 Mustang  roaring down a desert road before cutting to an animation of its 5.0-liter V8 engine in action. The next scene introduces a car we’ve never seen before. It looks like a Mustang, but a body-colored panel with a back-lit emblem replaces the grille. These styling cues fall in line with the design language that nearly every car company — from Volkswagen to Mercedes-Benz — has adopted to characterize future electrified models. This could be our first look at the gasoline-electric hybrid Mustang tentatively scheduled to make its debut in 2020. We know precious little about the car because Ford won’t release technica...

Tesla pledged its entry-level Model 3 sedan would cost $35,000 before federal incentives, but every example it has delivered to date has sold for at least $54,000. The company is keeping its promise of making the car more affordable over time by releasing a new variant of it priced under the $50,000 mark. Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk made the announcement on his personal Twitter account — where else? He posted a link to the Model 3’s  ordering page , which includes the new model with the midrange battery pack. The specifications sheet lists rear-wheel drive (instead of dual-motor all-wheel drive) and up to 260 miles of driving range according to estimations made by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It takes 5.6 seconds to reach 60 mph from a stop and maxes out at 125 mph. To put those figures into context, the range-topping  Model 3 Performance boasts 310 mile of range and a 3.3-second zero-to-60-mph time thanks to a dual-motor, all-wheel drive conf...

Traffic accidents are an unfortunate reality, and what may be most frustrating about these sometimes fatal incidents is that they can often be avoided. Honda has a plan to help cut down on accidents in one specific and common road feature: intersections. The Japanese auto manufacturer is introducing, in a limited capacity, its  “Smart Intersection” technology , that could help cut down on accidents that take place where roads cross paths. The company is launching a test run of the technology in partnership with the city of Marysville, Ohio, as part of its 33 Smart Mobility Corridor project. Honda’s “Smart Intersection” tech primarily address shortcomings in existing sensors found in most cars. It adds a significant amount of vision to a vehicle by utilizing proprietary object recognition software and intersection-mounted cameras that provide a 360-degree image of action on the street up to 300 feet away. The cameras can communicate that information directly to the vehicles. ...

BMW Group BMW’s  world-renowned and iconic  3 Series  sedan is approaching the end of its average generational lifespan, having reached the age of seven this year. Despite getting a bit old, it’s aging gracefully, especially after a bunch of mid-cycle revisions. Nonetheless, a new seventh generation 3 Series is in the works and the crew at BMW just released some teasers to give us a little taste. Due for a worldwide reveal at the 2018  Paris Motor Show  next month, the next-gen BMW 3 Series takes on the internal designation, “G20,” leaving the previous car’s “ F30 ” behind. Not much is known about the next-gen 3 Series. But from the various  spy photo shots  available on the Internet and the teasers shared by BMW themselves, the new 3 Series looks to adopt a lot of design cues and similarities as the current generation “ G30 ” 5 Series — unsurprising, since the 3 Series has a habit of taking inspiration from its more expensive brethren. For ...

Cars that talk to each other are coming soon, and could save thousands of lives Qualcomm Panasonic’s Network Operations Center in Denver looks ripped straight from the pages of a Tom Clancy novel: Rows of computer workstations encircled by monitors, a wall of high-definition TVs, plush rolling chairs, call-center headsets, and urgently blinking LEDs, all soaked in surreal blue light. But they’re not tracking Soviet spies in here. Instead, the kind of guys who wear shirts patterned like graph paper are watching four colorful dots creep their way around the grid of a city map, like sedated Pac-Man ghosts. Each dot represents a real car, some of the first in the world that will talk to each other, to traffic lights, to pedestrians, and yes, even to the government. Cars that talk to one another, and the world around them, are almost here. The industry calls it  V2X communication — vehicle-to-anything . Today, there are four dots, but that number will become hundreds, thousands...