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Summary List Placement Tesla will be added to the S&P 500 later this year, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced Monday.  Tesla will join the exclusive club of companies prior to the open of trading on Monday, December 21. Shares of the electric-vehicle manufacturer jumped more than 13% on the news in after-hours trading.  The S&P 500, an index of 500 large US companies, is...

Summary List Placement Cadillac has been on its heels for a few years. The 2018 launch of a completely redesigned Lincoln Navigator was a smash for Cadillac's rival in the luxury full-size SUV market. At one point, Lincoln was struggling to meet dealer demand, the reviews were rapturous, and it was clear that Cadillac needed to up its game with the hotly anticipated Escalade,...

Summary List PlacementWith electric pickups from GMC, Rivian, Tesla, and others set to flood the market over the next few years, each company is looking to show why buyers should take a gamble on its unproven trucks instead of going with the best-selling vehicle in the US, the Ford F-150.  Ohio-based Lordstown Motors, for its part, released a video on Wednesday showing a preproduction...

Summary List PlacementJust a week after announcing that its Tuatara had become the world's fastest production car, boutique automaker SSC North America is defending its prize. Not from another car or automaker, mind. From the internet.  On October 19, news broke that the new SSC Tuatara had averaged a speed of 316 mph on two runs and achieving a maximum speed of 331 mph after...

Summary List Placement The current COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in some millions of US jobs lost, sending shockwaves through the economy. It's touched all aspects of life, including how frequently people drive and how insurance companies have responded. Kacie Saxer-Taulbee, a data scientist at insurance comparison shopping website Insurify, told Business Insider that the company's analysis of the car insurance industry's response to the...

Summary List Placement Ever since Tesla's volatile profitability (or lack thereof) settled down a year ago, CEO Elon Musk has been able to spend more time talking about what he's really interested in. It isn't cars. It's factories. This preoccupation crept into Musk's comments on an earnings call with analysts and investors on Wednesday night after Tesla reported a fifth consecutive profitable quarter, with...

Summary List Placement Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Waymo has taken a number of steps to promote rider safety, like requiring anyone who cleans its vehicles to wear a mask and submit to a temperature check, stocking vehicles with hand sanitizer, and flushing out old air between rides. Daniel Chu, Waymo's chief product officer, told Business Insider during its IGNITION: Transportation event on Tuesday that...

Summary List Placement After years of consolidation, many of the autonomous-vehicle industry's most highly regarded companies are either divisions of large firms or closely tied to one: Cruise with GM, Argo with Ford and VW, Zoox with Amazon, and so on.   Aurora Innovation has been an exception to the trend, staying independent while developing an automated-driving system it hopes to one day sell to...

Summary List Placement The iconic blue-and-white Boeing 747 that's supposed to keep President Donald Trump safe in the air may have been where he contracted COVID-19. Trump most recently flew on Air Force One on Wednesday, returning to Washington from a celebratory rally in Duluth, Minnesota, following a contentious debate with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden the day before. Also aboard was Hope Hicks,...

Summary List Placement The story with the Nikola One, zero-emissions brand Nikola's hydrogen-electric semitruck, was that embattled company founder Trevor Milton designed it in his basement. But a new report from the Financial Times suggests otherwise.  Two sources with knowledge on the matter, who were not named by the Financial Times, said Milton bought the original design for the Nikola One from a designer...

Summary List Placement Hopscotch Air isn't your typical airline. Andrew Schmertz started the air taxi firm in 2009 armed with a fleet of piston-powered Cirrus SR-20/22 series aircraft. The air taxi concept sought to make regional travel easier at a fraction of the cost for a private aircraft charter thanks to the cheaper economics of the aircraft compared to larger competitors.  Unlike the futuristic...

Summary List Placement Tesla's predictions tend to follow a pattern: The electric-car maker says it's super close to hitting an ambitious milestone, falls short of its aggressive timeline, eventually makes meaningful progress toward its goal, and is cheered on by investors and fans alike. To take one recent example, Tesla CEO Elon Musk long promised the company's Model 3 sedan would come with a...

Summary List Placement   Once the details of General Motor's $2 billion deal with electric and fuel-cell vehicle startup Nikola came to light, it was clear that the largest US automaker wasn't taking any big risks. GM's 11% equity stake in Nikola was wrapped up with a $700 million payment to GM, to effectively make it a contract manufacturer for Nikola's Badger pickup. The...

Summary List Placement Volkswagen has unveiled the new Caddy California, a modular camper van with a a bed, kitchen, and tent. The German automaker has long been a player in the camper van industry. The new Caddy California is the fifth iteration in the Caddy family and the third California camper model in the line that already includes the Grand California and T6.1 California....

Summary List Placement Here's how the sequence usually goes for me when it comes to reviewing full-size pickup trucks. First, I sample the regular gas-powered version, and because I like big pickups, I often end up a happy guy. But then I spend some time with the diesel-engined model, and I forget all about the gas-burner. Diesel and pickups! Two great tastes that go...

Summary List Placement Many RV, camper van, and travel trailer makers have started catering their road travel builds to accommodate the rising popularity of digital nomads and "work from anywhere" crowd amid the pandemic. A study by MBO Partners found that 4.8 million Americans called themselves "digital nomads" in 2018. And now that the pandemic has forced 42% percent of US workers to work from...

Summary List Placement The biggest mistake that auto-industry analysts and observers have made in the relatively short history of the modern electric car is to assume the consumer is all that matters. Demand, the flawed argument went, would bring buyers into the market and enable EV sales to explode. Competition would follow, and Tesla's first-mover advantage would erode. That hasn't happened. EV sales remain...

Summary List Placement A scathing report from a short-seller firm may have sent Nikola's stock price tumbling, but for three financial analysts, the report hasn't fundamentally changed how they think about the electric-truck startup. "While we look forward to management addressing some of these issues, we continue to believe seeing the forest through the trees," WedBush Securities said in a September 14 note. On...