Once upon a time, I had a truck. I loved that truck! I didn’t actually use the truck as a truck all that often, so eventually I sold it and bought something more in tune with my daily needs. Something more “practical,” I suppose. I still miss that truck.

Now the few times a year I do need to use a truck as a truck, I’ve gotta convince a buddy to let me borrow theirs for the 34th time or try to nab a rental at the big box hardware store. Hope one is available by the time I get there, wait in line, fill out the paper work, run out to my car because I forgot my insurance card, get back in line, yadda yadda.

Fetch, a company we first wrote about a few years ago, makes the process a bit easier: find a truck (or van!) nearby, reserve it through the app, walk up and unlock it from your phone, and be on your way. This week the team is announcing that it has raised $3.5 million to help expand their team and operations. To make Fetch happen, you could say.

Fetch is up and running in a handful of cities for now, but that list is starting to rapidly grow. They first rolled things out in their hometown of Atlanta, recently expanding operations to Baltimore, Philadelphia, Dallas and Washington, D.C. Fetch co-founder Adam Steinberg tells me they plan to be in “another 12 cities” by the end of this year.

The company’s business model has expanded quite a bit since the last time we wrote, as well. Previously, all trucks available on Fetch were owned by Fetch; these days, it’s a marketplace where anybody with an available truck (be it companies with fleets or individuals with a spare vehicle, as long it can be available for rental seven days a week) can rent it out.

Once onboarded, truck owners plug in Fetch’s hardware to allow approved renters to unlock the vehicle and get moving. Renters need to have their own insurance, though Fetch also provides secondary insurance to help augment those policies.

Pricing for rentals varies a bit depending on what you’re looking for — the vehicle size, how many miles you’ll drive and, as trucks can be rented by the hour or day, how long you need it. For example, a 6′ pickup in Atlanta is currently on the site for $19 an hour, or $70 per day with 50 miles included.

Why build something like this when other on-demand car rental services exist? It’s all about the target audience. It’d feel a bit weird to hop on a vacation car rental app when you just want something to move a thousand pounds of wood, or get that old desk out of the office. “Our ideal customer is a small business owner,” says Steinberg. “Caterers, event planners, small businesses that need trucks on a recurring basis.”

Steinberg tells me the company has also “achieved profitability on a per rental basis,” and that they now have “hundreds of trucks live on the marketplace” — with about half of their vehicles currently in the Atlanta area. They’ve also partnered with Home Depot to power the retailer’s rental process in select areas.

Next up? Grow the team. The company is currently made up of 12 people, with plans to double that in the next three months or so.

This round was led by NextView Ventures, and backed by Knoll Ventures, Zeno Ventures, Nassau Street Ventures and a number of angels.

Sony’s current favorite big tease is playing at being a carmaker, and today it announced that it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with real automaker Honda to discuss and develop that idea further. The two companies jointly announced that they would officially be exploring their intent to build a joint venture sometime this year, which would be focused on development and sales of new electric vehicles, as well as develop and launch a new “mobility service platform” for use with the new vehicle.

Under the current design of what the new joint venture would look like, Sony would bring to bear its chops in “imaging, sensing, telecommunication, network, and entertainment technologies,” while Honda would provide… well the car stuff really. The “New Company” formed by the two would be behind everything from design and development to sales of the resulting new EVs, but Honda would manufacture the cars on their behalf. Sony will supply the new entity with a mobility service product for its use.

If all goes to plan (which is almost certainly subject to change given the early stage of these discussions) then the joint venture would start selling its first cars beginning in 2025.

Sony has now had at least three different splashy moments to show off its flirtations with being an automaker, each at the annual CES tech show. It surprised everyone by bringing a concept car called the Vision-S to the show in 2020, then it shared additional details in 2021 including videos of a working prototype driving on both track and public roads. Most recently, it unveiled a Vision-S SUV concept in addition to the original sedan, and said it would be launching a new company called Sony Mobility Inc. to focus on “exploring” commercialization of its own EVs.

The ‘mobility service’ piece of this is perhaps most interesting in the context of what Sony’s focus has been on with its own EV concepts. These feature dashboards festooned with display and emphasizing connectivity and entertainment for passengers on board. Sony obviously has success in these fields, but it’s also not known for its user and software interfaces (Sony camera and phone users will know what I’m talking about) so how that pans out is a big question mark.

Three successive splashy concept reveals at CES does not a car company make — particularly at a show known for being the biggest showcase of vaporware essentially ever. Similarly, an MOU is often little more than a formalized agreement for two big companies to think creatively together in earnest. But there’s an awful lot of smoke accumulating here, and at least this MOU has some defined timelines in the mix to watch out for in terms of when it could become more concrete.

Volvo will put a wireless EV charging system through its paces as part of a program to test alternative charging options. A small fleet of electric Volvo XC40 Recharge cars will be used as taxis in Gothenburg, Sweden in a three-year pilot.

The cars are equipped with a wireless charging system from Momentum Dynamics. Charging pads will be embedded in the ground at two taxi ranks. Volvo will use 360-degree cameras to help drivers put the cars in the correct position and when they’re in the right spot, the taxis’ batteries will automatically topped up. An image shared by Momentum Dynamics showed an EV charging at a rate of 41kW.

The concept of building charging tech into roads is hardly new, but it hasn’t exactly taken off yet. Still, researchers and engineers are working on other ways to charge EVs as they drive, so at some point in the future, drivers may never need to visit a typical charging station.

Momentum Dynamics Corporation’

Rivian surprised many of its pre-order customers on March 1 with the announcement of a significant price increase for its R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV. On Thursday, the company issued a press release authored by CEO RJ Scaringe that modified the planned price increase, promising customers who placed their pre-order for either vehicle prior to March 1 that their original price will be honored, and offering to restore any pre-orders from customers who cancelled as a result of the planned change.

Rivian’s price change means that the base model of the R1T pickup went from $67,500 to just under $79,000, while the R1S base model had a similar jump from $70,000 to $84,000. The plan as announced was that all pre-order customers who weren’t in the final stages of actually paying for and taking delivery of their vehicles would have to pay for the difference in order to have their pre-order honored.

In his public note today, Scaringe reiterated that the price increases are a result of challenges in the supply chain and the resulting hike in costs for components including “[e]verything from semiconductors to sheet metal to seats.” However, he also owned that the company went about implementing the price changes in the wrong way, and communicated them poorly:

As we worked to update pricing to reflect these cost increases, we wrongly decided to make these changes apply to all future deliveries, including pre-existing configured preorders. We failed to appreciate how you viewed your configuration as price locked, and we wrongly assumed the announced Dual-Motor and Standard battery pack would provide configurations that would deliver price points similar to your original configuration. While this was the logic, it was wrong and we broke your trust in Rivian.

We also didn’t manage communications well. We didn’t give you enough insight into what was driving these decisions. The most important aspect of what we are building is our relationship with all of you. As we demonstrated earlier this week, trust is hard to build and easy to break. In speaking with many of you over the last two days, I fully realize and acknowledge how upset many of you felt. I have made a lot of mistakes since starting Rivian more than 12 years ago, but this one has been the most painful. I am truly sorry and committed to rebuilding your trust.

As mentioned, Rivian has partially reversed its planned course of action, promising that “for anyone with a Rivian preorder as of the March 1 pricing announcement, [the] original configured price will be honored” and further offering the option to any customers who cancelled a full reinstatement of their preorder, including all promised pricing and delivery timeframes.

The business realities and industry pressures that Rivian faces haven’t changed, but it’s actually refreshing to see a business react so quickly and decisively to negative customer feedback and reverse aspects of a decision that harmed some of their earliest supporters.

Elon Musk says Tesla will do nothing to stop United Auto Workers (UAW) from holding a union vote at the company’s Fremont, California factory. In a tweet, the company chief said Tesla’s real challenge in the Bay Area is negative unemployment, so it treats and compensates its “(awesome) people well” or they’d just leave otherwise.

Musk posted the tweet in response to Kiss co-lead singer Gene Simmons who sided with the executive when he called out the President for not mentioning Tesla in his State of the Union Address. The President only praised Ford and General Motors for investing billions of dollars in their efforts to release electric vehicles, thereby generating thousands of jobs in the process. As Bloombergnotes, Biden is a labor union supporter and often snubs Tesla, which has a non-unionized workforce, in his speeches and interviews.

In a follow-up tweet, Musk claimed that Tesla factory workers have the highest compensation in the auto industry, posting an interview of GM CEO Mary Barra as his source. In the interview, news anchor and journalist Andrew Sorkin said Tesla’s non-unionized workers were earning more than their unionized counterparts. Barra said she’d have to see more information, since one must also take benefits and not just wages into account, but that what Sorkin said wasn’t the case last time she checked.

The UAW has been working to unionize Tesla for years, and Musk has criticized those efforts from the start. When a Fremont production worker claimed poor working conditions and low pay in 2017, Musk reportedly sent out a letter to employees with a point-by-point takedown while also slamming UAW. He said the union’s true allegiance is to the “giant car companies, where the money they take from employees in dues is vastly more than they could ever make from Tesla.”

In the same year, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against the automaker after investigating complaints of unfair labor practices. According to the NLRB, workers said Tesla “coerces and intimidates” them with a confidentiality agreement that prevents them from discussing unionization. In 2018, the NLRB found that the company violated labor laws when it fired union activist Richard Ortiz and ordered it to compensate him for loss of earnings and benefits.

The labor board also ordered Musk to delete a tweet that might sound like a threat to employees. In the tweet, Musk similarly invited efforts to unionize. “Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so [tomorrow] if they wanted,” he wrote. However, he also said: “But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?” NLRB chair Wilma Liebman explained at the time that to an employee, that may sound like they’ll no longer have stock options if they vote to unionize. Tesla offers its stock compensation program to most of its employees, as Electrek notes, and the company’s rising stock prices make it a very valuable benefit.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Engadget.

With the Polestar 2 already in production, Polestars 3 and 4 on the horizon and the Precept concept slated to become the Polestar 5 in 2024, Polestar the company has just unveiled its latest electrified vehicle idea: the Polestar O2 convertible concept.

Polestar

“Polestar O2 is our vision of a new era for sports cars,” Polestar’s Head of Design, Maximilian Missoni, said in a Tuesday press statement. “By mixing the joy of open top driving with the purity of electric mobility, it unlocks a new mix of emotions in a car.”

The O2 will reportedly be built upon the same “bespoke” bonded aluminum unibody platform that the company is using for the Polestar 5, and generally resemble the Precept concept design it is derived from which, according to Polestar PR, “shows how Polestar’s evolving design language can be adapted to different body styles with a strong family resemblance.” That is, while the Polestar 5 will be a high-performance four-door grand touring vehicle, the O2 will offer a more compact, 2+2 sportscar feel, despite both being built on the same basic underpinnings.

Polestar

Now, you might be wondering how a convertible EV would even work given that traditional convertibles are rather inefficient — their frames are thicker and heavier to offset the structural strength lost by cutting off the roof and their aerodynamics are a mess because, again, no roof — and that is an excellent question. The company doesn’t yet have drag coefficient data to share, but it did assert that “disguised design features like integrated ducts that improve laminar air flow over the wheels and body sides, and rear lights that function as air blades to reduce turbulence behind the car,” are being investigated to maximize the vehicle’s range.

With a shorter wheelbase and only an afterthought of rear seats, the O2 offers a sportier, more aggressive stance than the Polestar 2. And those wheels! The exterior is a study of sharp lines with a low-slung cabin seated between angular fender flares and an acutely angled glass-top roof that retracts back into a broad trunk. It looks like if you mashed up a Ford F40 with a Porsche 718 Spyder and then flattened out all the curves. It looks like a roadster you’d see on the streets of Los Santos. I am a fan.

Polestar

The interior sounds equally supple, featuring a “thermoplastic mono-material” throughout for the hard bits, paired with recycled polyester as “the sole material used for all the soft components.” Because nothing beats the seat-squelching experience of sitting on polyester and plastic in full sun with the roof down.

Polestar

Drivers will also be able to film their top-down adventures thanks to the O2’s integrated cinematography drone. Developed in collaboration with Hoco Flow, this autonomous camera drone rides in an area of negative pressure generated from an airfoil deployed behind the rear seats. The drone can follow along at speeds up to 56 MPH and the captured footage can subsequently be edited and shared from the central infotainment system once the vehicle is parked. I mean, personally, I’d prefer an eATV or even an electric skateboard if automakers are going to bundle in secondary transports with their vehicle offerings, but sure, a camera drone will definitely remain cool and novel and useful after the first couple flights. I mean, just look at how well they turned out for the Renault KWID or the Lexus LF-30 Electric Concept.

Polestar

Like the Precept, we won’t likely see street legal O2 as it is now. Instead, Polestar plans to launch three new cars over the coming three years, “each of which has potential to gradually realize some of the ideas presented by these concept cars,” so keep an eye out for low-flying drones.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Engadget.

Panasonic aims to start mass production of a higher-capacity battery for Tesla by March 2024. The company is building a production facility for the battery at its Wakayama Factory, where it will create two more production lines and make structural improvements.

Development is continuing on the 4,680 lithium-ion battery. It’s expected to be around twice the size of current batteries and have a fivefold increase in energy capacity. While fewer of them would be required for each car (which will reduce costs and potentially lower EV prices), the batteries could boost the range of an EV by over 15 percent.

Panasonic’s announcement lines up with previous reports suggesting it could start making the battery next year. The company was said to be investing approximately 80 billion yen (around $694 million) into production equipment. It started working on the battery following a request from Tesla, though it may sell the 4,680 to other automakers.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Engadget.

Some consolidation is afoot in the world of moving and storage startups: Clutter and MakeSpace, two erstwhile rivals in the market, are merging to form a single company, which will operate under the Clutter brand, serving some 6,500 towns in the U.S. that together cover about 60% of the total population in the country, with operations also in Canada, covering services like on-demand moving, storage, self-storage, and disposal.

Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, Clutter founder and CEO Art Mir told me in an interview, but he confirmed that the company combined will be clearing close to $200 million in revenue annually, that it will break even this year, and that it’s planning for an IPO in 2023. Mir will continue with his role and will also be CEO of the merged business, while MakeSpace’s CEO Rahul Gandhi will become president.

The combined, enlarged Clutter does not have any plans to raise any more funding before then, Mir said. It’s unclear how many employees will be at the combined company. Clutter has around 1,000 and Mir said they made offers to some but not all MakeSpace employees to join the merged firm. Both companies operated on a model of employing all of their delivery drivers, rather than employing gig workers.

“It was a natural culture fit for us,” Mir said.

I have confirmed that Clutter was valued at around $580 million when it last raised money, back in 2019, a $200 million round led by SoftBank. MakeSpace last raised in 2021, a $55 million round when the pandemic was well under way, with its investors including strategic backer IronSource and a number of others. MakeSpace has never disclosed its valuation. Both companies have grown since then.

Mir said that the deal caps off a long-held ambition of his to make Clutter a consolidator in the space and he’d been eyeing up MakeSpace for a while now.

“I’ve always been a big fan of building relationships and have been working on the relationship with MakeSpace for years now,” he said in an interview. He said he’d periodically reached out “once or twice a year” before the latter company finally bit. Indeed, I heard about this deal going down several months ago, although both companies declined to comment on the situation at the time.

The deal underscores a couple of bring trends that are moving the market, one that is estimated at $38 billion for storage alone annually.

One of these is the effects of the pandemic.

Covid-19 has been a period of social distancing and staying put, but not for everyone: a lot of us took the moment to pause, think about how and where we are living, and in many cases take action by relocating, downsizing or simply rethinking our living spaces. All of that has had a big impact on companies like Clutter and MakeSpace, both of which saw business continue to grow in the last two years. Clutter, Mir told me, was designated an essential service and continued all operations as normal, while MakeSpace’s Gandhi told me last year that it was outpacing its growth forecasts for the period by 30%.

The other is economy of scale.

As with any logistics-based business — the wider category of e-commerce being one prime other example — ultimately the most successful players are those that have grown to a big enough size that they are maximizing their network of operations with as many customers and orders as possible for the best margins on that model.

That is very much the case here, too. Clutter, Mir told me, was profitable in its bigger markets but not everywhere; this merger will give it, and MakeSpace, the ability to aim for positive unit economics and better margins in more places. And, it will also cut out one more competitor in places where they overlapped, meaning less money to spend on marketing and promotions.

This is not Clutter’s first acquisition and consolidation move. It acquired The Storage Fox in 2019 for $152 million also as part of that strategy. It also bought assets from failed storage startup Omni in the same year, and has also picked up assets from Handy, Livible, Shed, and Callbox. MakeSpace has also been doing some consolidating, acquiring Stashable from Iron Mountain when it raised its Series D led by the business storage giant.

Virgin Hyperloop has fired 111 of its employees as it abandons the idea of making its system ready for passenger use. The Financial Times is reporting that the company is exclusively focusing on moving cargo, and has slashed almost half of its total workforce. A spokesperson confirmed to the paper that the shift in business was taking place, with supply chain issues and COVID contributing to the change.

Since its inception, the company has been developing its vacuum-tube system to carry both passengers and freight. One of the earliest concepts VH floated was an “inland port,” in which cargo vessels would put containers onto capsules that are shot inland before they’re processed. That way, the main logistics hub wouldn’t need to be beside the sea, and could instead be at the heart of a transit hub closer to customers.

It’s something that encouraged DP World, the Dubai-owned ports and logistics giant, to invest in the technology. It currently holds a majority stake in Virgin Hyperloop and in 2018 launched “Cargospeed,” as a sub-brand dedicated to moving cargo. VH has, however, been in something of a spin for the last few months after former head Josh Giegel, one of two people to actually travel in a pod, quit the company.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Engadget.

Volta Trucks — the Swedish electric vehicle startup that believes it can build better urban delivery vehicles and other trucks that are safer and take up a smaller carbon footprint than their gas-guzzling, more clumsy, existing counterparts — has closed a big round of funding to help it through that last mile of work before its Volta Zero trucks go into commercial production later this year.

The company has raised €230 million (around $260 million), a Series C round of funding that appears to value the company at just over $490 million (€433 million). Volta will be using the money to fund engineering and business operations ahead of its first trucks rolling off the assembly line, on the back of what looks like a healthy list of customers: Volta said that its pre-order book for its all-electric Volta Zero — said to be the first fully electric, purpose-built commercial freight vehicle designed for urban freight distribution — is currently totaling over €1.2 billion, covering more than 5,000 vehicles. Volta’s wider business strategy will be based both on selling trucks as well as offering its vehicles on a trucking-as-a-service model.

New York-based Luxor Capital, which led the company’s €37 million Series B in September 2021, is also leading this round. Real estate investment firm Byggmästare Anders J Ahlström (like Volta, based in Stockholm), supply chain services giant Agility, and B-FLEXION (formerly Waypoint Capital) also participated. While Volta has not disclosed its valuation, Pitchbook data notes that it is now just over $490 million — a figure that we have now confirmed also with sources close to the company.

Volta’s growth, and the large amount of capital it has now raised — over $325 million to date — are part of a bigger sea change in the automotive world. Startups, tapping into new manufacturing techniques, new batter technology, and new energy infrastructure, see a ripe opportunity to build new vehicles to disrupt the current status quo with safer and cleaner alternatives. Investors — likely wowed by the success of electric efforts like Tesla’s with smaller cars — are putting their money behind these ventures to give them more firepower, and more credibility with would-be customers. These are all essential building blocks for catapulting cars into the next wave of technological innovation, where trucks like Volta’s become hardware platforms capable of gathering and working with massive data sets to help the vehicles and the businesses using them operate at new levels of productivity.

That is the theory, at least. The process of getting there inevitably ends up being slower, and more costly, than initial rosy projects, which is another reason why it’s important for companies in the space to raise large rounds and corral together groups of strategic backers to help them get to market.

Volta’s roadmap this year will include investing in its engineering and production operations to build prototypes to verify its designs for the Volta Zero.

These in turn will be rolled out to early customers for pilots in London and Paris, cities where delivery trucks are commonplace but also dangerous, given traffic congestion, narrow streets and the proliferation of cyclists and other micromobility users, making them ideal markets for Volta’s trucks, which claim not only to produce less emissions — the first trucks will have a pure-electric range of 150 – 200 kms (95 – 125 miles) and eliminate an estimated 1.2M tonnes of CO2 by 2025, the company claims — but have significantly better visibility (220 degrees, with the driver sitting in the center of the front seat) for its drivers. Initially, what they will not have, it seems, are self-driving capabilities.

“We are investigating autonomy / self-driving for the future but as a vehicle that’s specifically designed as a city centre distribution and delivery vehicle, the goods within the vehicle will need delivering from the vehicle to their end destination. As a result, the purpose of the vehicle will always need a person involved, making self-driving less relevant for this type of vehicle,” said a spokesperson.

Volta said it will also use some of the funding to continue developing smaller 7.5- and 12-tonne full-electric Volta Zero derivatives (the first model will be 16 tonnes), and eventually a larger 18-tonne model.

The company is building a production facility in Austria, with plans to produce 5,000 vehicles in 2023; 14,000 trucks in 2024; and up to 27,000 trucks in 2025.

“The successful and oversubscribed conclusion of our Series C funding round gives us a positive external validation of our journey,” said Essa Al-Saleh, CEO of Volta Trucks, in a statement. “As an innovator and disruptor in commercial vehicles, we are working at industry-leading pace and have significant ambitions. Today’s closing of the Series C funding round, bringing €230 million into the company, gives us the financial runway to be able to deliver on all our goals as we transition from a start-up to a manufacturer of full-electric trucks. The confirmation of our orderbook of over 5,000 vehicles with an orderbook value exceeding €1.2 billion, gives us and our investors, confidence that our pioneering product and service offering is both wanted and needed by our customers.”

An off-road racing series that uses hydrogen cars is expected to debut in 2024. Extreme H will be a companion championship to Extreme E, an off-road motorsport with electric vehicles that held its first race last year. The two series will hold races in the same locations on the same days using the same format. According to Alejandro Agag, who also founded Formula E, organizers are looking at two options for hydrogen integration: combined racing or full transition.

Development on the Extreme H car is underway and there are plans to have a prototype ready by early 2023. The vehicle will have the same powertrain and chassis that’s used in Extreme E. The main difference is that the central power source will be a hydrogen fuel cell instead of a battery.

Extreme H organizers say that the fuel cells will be powered by green hydrogen, which combines water and solar energy. Extreme E uses the same process to power EV batteries, while the paddock runs on a combination of batteries and green hydrogen.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Engadget.