One of the most hotly anticipated electric vehicles makes its formal debut next week. It's the Blank Slate, a refreshingly simple pickup truck EV designed by Slate Auto, which is trying to take some of the soaring cost out of a new car with a back-to-basics approach that means even electric windows are an optional extra. Of course, a crucial aspect of this pared-back approach is pricing.

Plenty of people are attracted to the idea of a truck with a compact footprint, no infotainment system or embedded modem, and the option to upconvert it later into an SUV or fastback. In the abstract, at least, people aren't going to jump at the prospect of a truck with 150 miles (241 km) of range if it costs too much.

When Slate broke cover in 2025, it was targeting a price of around $20,000, assuming the $7,500 IRS clean vehicle tax credit would remain in effect, but it was abolished later that year.

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Has the allure of the Porsche Taycan waned? The four-door electric sedan that thinks it's a GT sold well for the first few years after its introduction in 2020, but sales began to slip even before the brand added the smaller, more affordable Macan SUV to its electric lineup. The EV underwent its midlife refresh a couple of years ago, but it seems Stuttgart wasn't done yet; Porsche has some more tweaks for model year 2027, at least for the US market.

For one thing, the 105 kWh performance battery is standard across the Taycan range now—which starts at $111,900—and can charge at up to 320 kW with an 800 V DC fast charger.

And as long as you're not ordering the stripped-out Turbo GT with the Weissach Pack, there's a new plug for that—the CCS1 port that usually lives on the passenger side has been replaced by a NACS port. So no adapter is needed to charge at any of those thousands of Tesla superchargers, but only a small percentage of them operate at sufficient voltage to charge near the Taycan's limit. But IONNA has native NACS chargers capable of 400 kW, and Porsche will provide a CCS1 adapter to use with Electrify America and other 800 V chargers.

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The driving technology company Mobileye plans to launch a robotaxi service in an as-yet-unnamed US city in 2027, it said earlier today. The service will be vertically integrated, using Mobileye's Moovit mobility platform to interact with customers booking rides, coordinate drivers, and so on. The Israeli company, which was bought by Intel in 2017 before going public again in 2022, says it will start with around 100 robotaxis early next year.

"Mobileye has spent more than two decades building the technologies required for autonomous driving," said Amnon Shashua, founder and CEO of Mobileye. "Today we are taking the next step: combining those technologies with operational ownership to create a financially and geographically scalable robotaxi business designed from the ground up for global deployment."

The company first rose to prominence in the mid-2010s, when Tesla began using Mobileye's advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) as part of Autopilot. That relationship lasted until 2016, when Mobileye dropped Tesla as a customer after being alarmed that a driver assistance system was being sold to end users as driverless technology. Since then, Mobileye has continued to work with other partners on ADAS and autonomous vehicles.

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