It was one of the companies that made a commitment to President Biden that half of the cars and light trucks sold in the US by 2030 will be EVs. By 2025, Ford plans to build two battery factories in Kentucky and a third in Tennessee located alongside a new factory dedicated to electric pickups. Ford expects to spend $7 billion on the project—it’s the largest manufacturing investment in its history.

A new generation of carmakers are racing to corner the electric vehicle market in China, and Nio is one major player that galvanizes customer loyalty with an ecosystem of social networking, ecommerce, and other services on its app.

It’s part of a push to be seen as “much more than an electric car company,” per TechCrunch. How we got here: Tesla announced it was building a supercomputer to train its AV neural networks in June this year. The elephant in the room: Tesla’s commitment to computer vision-based autonomous driving occured under the shadow of mounting regulatory and legal pressure.

Just last week, Elon Musk announced Tesla would suspend Bitcoin payments and later implied the electric car firm may sell its $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin holdings. The most popular cryptos have a significant environmental impact that clashes with investor demand for sustainability. More crypto trading means more energy consumption.

Auto insurance customers shopped around more than ever amid the pandemic, causing a 3% increase in their migration to the five biggest US insurers—here are two ways insurtechs can fight back.

The San Francisco-based startup operates a fleet of electric self-driving cars. Walmart began working with Cruise in November when it launched a delivery pilot in Scottsdale, Arizona. The retail giant says its investment in Cruise will help it develop a “fast, low-cost, and scalable” delivery ecosystem. The pandemic placed greater emphasis on fulfillment and delivery as consumers lean into ecommerce.

The news: Pickup trucks outsold passenger cars for the first time in 2020, per Kelley Blue Book, marking not only a shift in consumer preference, but also a promising opening for electric vehicles (EVs). Americans bought 2,934,706 pickup trucks in 2020, while 2,831,053 non-luxury passenger cars were sold in the same period.

The package includes $7.5 billion to build half a million electric vehicle chargers across the country to help increase EV adoption and entice car manufacturers to continue investing in EVs. This circles back to the Biden administration seeking the commitment of carmakers for 40% of vehicles sold in the US by 2030 to be electric. What’s next?

Auto Industry Works Toward Electric Vehicles. These themes continued at CES, where many companies talked up their plans to make the world cleaner and safer. Automakers and their partner companies used the show as a platform for futuristic visions of electric, solar, connected and shared mobility.